less code, more software

From Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies

On most development projects, time is a scarcer resource than money.

From Consilience

Consilience among the biological sciences is based on a thorough understanding of scale in time and space.

From Nudge

Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time.

From The Principles of Product Development flow

Opportunities get smaller with time, and obstacles get larger.

From Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take.

From Kluge

What can evolve at any given point in time is heavily constrained by what has evolved before.

People are more likely to accept falsehoods if they are distracted or put under time pressure.

Organisms tend to value the present far more than the future.

From The End of Certainty

There is a necessary trade off between certainty at a given time for continuity through time.

From How Buildings Learn: Chapter 2 - Shearing Layers

Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees slow, and whole redwood forests even slower. Most interaction is within the same pace level.

The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along. Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.

Quick feedback should be the first thing you introduce.

From Beating the System

Time is our only absolutely nonrenewable and, thus, most highly valued resource. To place a low value on another's time is to show a lack of respect for that person.

From Hackers and Painters

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly.

mind and nature

is an excellent book by Gregory Bateson (isbn 1-57273-434-5). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

If you want to understand mental processes, look at biological evolution and conversely if you want to understand biological evolution, go look at mental processes.

How is the world of logic, which eschews "circular argument," related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the exception?

Perception operates only on difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception is necessarily limited by threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable.

The universe is characterized by an uneven distribution of causal and other types of linkage between its parts; that is, there are regions of dense linkage separated from each other by regions of less dense linkage.

We should define "stability" always by reference to the ongoing truth of some descriptive proposition.

Notoriously it is very difficult to detect gradual change because along with our high sensitivity to rapid change goes also the phenomenon of accommodation. Organisms become habituated. To distinguish between slow change and the (imperceptible) unchanging, we require information of a different sort; we need a clock.

Stability may be acheived either by rigidity or by continual repetition of some cycle of smaller changes, which cycle will return to a status quo ante after every disturbance.

Every given system embodies relations to time, that is, was characterized by time constants determined by the given whole. These constants were not determined by the equations of relationship between successive parts but were emergent properties of the system.

The shape of what it deposits is determined by the shape of the previous growth.

What characterizes those adaptations that turn out to be disasterous, and how do these differ from those that seem to be benign and, like the crab's claw, remain benign through geological ages?

Above all, in sexual reproduction, the matching up of chromosomes in fertilization enforces a process of comparison. What is new in either ovum or spermatozoon must meet with what is old in the other, and the test will favour conformity and conservation. The more grossly new will be eliminated on grounds of incompatibility.

It is very easy to fall into the notion that if the new is viable, then there must have been something wrong with the old. This view, to which organisms already suffering the pathologies of over rapid, frantic social change are inevitably prone, is, of course, mostly nonsense. What is always important is to be sure that the new is not worse than the old.

fun with feedback frequency

I'm currently reading Brain of the Firm, by Stafford Beer. On page 36 he writes:

The outcome is startling ... ... the total system is dominated, not by the forward network, but by the feedback network ... The output signals will be of greater 'purity' than we had any right to expect.

The word feedback caught my eye.
Feedback is a key principle of complex adaptive systems.
Feedback is also one of the 4 values of eXtreme Programming.
Feedback also gets several mentions in the official Scrum Guide.
So I've been playing around with Feller's walk (named after William Feller) some more...

Feller's Walk

Each Feller's walk is 1000 steps long, and at each step I flip a fair coin.
As I walk I keep a running total (starting at zero):

adding one each time I flip a head
subtracting one each time I flip a tail

What will the total look like as the walk progresses?
Here's the plot of the step (x-axis) against the total (y-axis) during one simulated walk.

It starts at a total of zero on the far left and wanders along, edging upwards when a head is thrown, edging downwards when a tail is thrown, and ending at about -26 indicating that overall there were 487 heads and 513 tails (487-513=-26, 487+513==1000).

Apparently, most people's intuition is that the total will hover around zero.
But it doesn't.
You cannot rely on randomness to correct the problems that randomness creates.
Without constraints variance will accumulate.
If the total happens to be +24 the coin isn't going to throw more tails for a while to try to balance things up.
Without feedback the coin has no memory.

To help see this I simulated 5000 walks and plotted the frequency of the total (y-axis) against the total (x-axis) at various points along the walks:

after 10 steps in gold
after 100 steps in blue
after 1000 steps in red
I chop the x-axis to +- 2 standard deviations

step	freq[0]	max abs(total)	std.dev
10	1204	-10	3.19
100	405	36	10.15
1000	121	140	31.71

Over all the walks, at the 10th step:

the total was zero 1204 times (5 heads, 5 tails, 5-5=0, 5+5=10)
the total farthest from zero was -10 (0 heads, 10 tails, 0-10=-10, 0+10=10)
the standard deviation of the total was 3.19

Over all the walks, at the 100th step:

the total was zero 405 times (50 heads, 50 tails, 50-50=0, 50+50=100)
the total farthest from zero was 36 (68 heads, 32 tails, 68-32=36, 68+32=100)
the standard deviation of the total was 10.15

Over all the walks, at the 1000th step:

the total was zero 121 times (500 heads, 500 tails, 500-500=0, 500+500=1000)
the total farthest from zero was 140 (570 heads, 430 tails, 570-430=140, 570+430=1000)
the standard deviation of the total was 31.71

The further along the walk I progress, the less likely my total is to be zero.
Without constraints variance will accumulate.

Once again, with feedback

Every Nth step, instead of flipping the coin, I look at the total and:

if the total is negative (more tails than heads) I pretend I've flipped a head, and add one to the total.
if the total is positive (more heads than tails) I pretend I've flipped a tail, and subtract one from the total.

This feedback increases the likelihood of the total staying nearer to zero.
The smaller the value of N, the greater the effect.

Estimating feedback effectiveness

Using the simulation I can measure how good (or bad) people's estimates are of how effective feedback is. For example, I can:

run the simulation with some feedback (N==10 say) and display the results
gather estimates with no feedback (N==never) of, eg
- freq[0], or
- max abs(total), or
- std.dev, etc
run the simulation with no feedback and see how the actual results compare.

run the simulation with no feedback and display the results
gather estimates of the least feedback needed to, eg
- triple freq[0], or
- quadruple max abs(total), or
- half std.dev, etc
run the simulation with various amounts of feedback and see how the actual results compare.

I've put the simulation source up on https://github.com/JonJagger/Fellers-1000-coin-tosses.
The simulation runs directly from this URL https://rawgithub.com/JonJagger/Fellers-1000-coin-tosses/master/fellers.html so you can try out various values of N if you want to before reading on...

A little feedback goes a long way

Here's 5000 simulations of a 1000 step walk with N==25.
That means, that every 25th step instead of flipping the coin, the simulation nudges the total towards zero as described above.

step	freq[0]	max abs(total)	std.dev
10	1379	-10	2.97
100	553	32	8.04
1000	387	84	15.18

The effectiveness of one feedback nudge every 25 steps amazes me.

freq[0] tripled from 121 to 387
max abs(total) shrank from 140 to 84
std.dev halved from 31.71 to 15.18

Startling! Just as Stafford Beer said.
Let's hear it for feedback!

observing

If egoless programming is used, everyone in the group will have the opportunity to examine the work of everyone else at some time, thereby tending to prevent the establishment of strong hierarchy.

From Toyota Production System

Sometimes I would spend all day watching the grandmother next door weaving. I came to understand the way the weaving machine worked. [Toyoda Sakichi]

Stand on the production floor all day and watch - you will eventually discover what has to be done. I cannot emphasize this point too much.

From The Way of the Leader

Listen carefully. Observe closely.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By far the greatest part of his [the mechanic's] work is careful observation and precise thinking.

From Non Violent Communcation

Observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.

From Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanac

Observe all men; thyself most.

From The Mind of War

He observed very carefully.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 2. First-Order Measurement

In the end, it's not the observation that counts, it's the response to the observation. That's why Zen masters teach patience in response.

What power corrupts most thoroughly is the ability to make meaning of observations.

No other observational skill may be more important to software engineering than precision listening.

The switch from cost observation to value observation is the strongest indication that an organization has made the transition from Pattern 2 [Routine] to Pattern 3 [Steering].

A fact becomes a feeling as soon as you observe it.

From An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

We drive more slowly at night to give us more time to observe potentially dangerous situations.

From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

From The Book of Five Rings

You should observe reflectively, with overall awareness of the large picture a well as precise attention to small details.

From Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Much of perception is based on prediction.

From General Principles of Systems Design

Complexity is a relationship between system and observer.

what should all tests passing look like?

I was fixing a fault in cyber-dojo the other day and I happened to be looking at the starting test code for C++. I'd written it using an array of function pointers. At the end of a practice the array might look like this (in main I simply iterate through the array and call each of the functions):

typedef void test();

static test * tests[ ] =
{
    a_recently_used_list_is_initially_empty,
    the_most_recently_added_item_is_always_first,
    items_can_be_looked_up_by_index_which_counts_from_zero,
    items_in_the_list_are_unique,
};

I imagined it written like this instead:

int main()
{
    a_recently_used_list_is_initially_empty();
    the_most_recently_added_item_is_always_first();
    items_can_be_looked_up_by_index_which_counts_from_zero();
    items_in_the_list_are_unique();
}

I wondered why I was putting the function pointers into an array at all. The most obvious thing I lose by not using an array is that I can no longer print out the number of tests that have passed. I thought about that a bit. I started to wonder what benefits I actually get by being told how many tests had run. It's a 100% quantity and 0% quality measurement.

The most obvious benefit I can think of is that, after writing a new test, I can verify it has run by seeing the number of tests increase by one. The problem is I don't think that's a benefit at all. I think that interaction could easily encourage me to not start with a failing test.

If all tests passing produces any output I will look at the output and start to rely on it. That doesn't feel right for a supposedly automated test.

If each passing test introduces any new output, even if it's just a single dot, then I'm in danger of falling into a composition trap. Those dots don't make a difference individually, but sooner or later they will collectively.

If the code I'm testing doesn't produce any output when it runs (which is very likely for unit-tests) then is it right for my tests to introduce any output?

If I want to time how long the tests take to run shouldn't that be part of the script that runs the tests?

I think there is something to be said for all tests passing producing no output at all. None. Red means a test failed and the output should be as helpful as possible in identifiying the failure. No output means green. Green means no output.

Thoughts?

visibility

From The Secrets of Consulting

Most of what a plant is doing is out of sight.

From The Toyota Way

Extra inventory hides problems... Ohno considered the fundamental waste to be overproduction, since it causes most of the other wastes… big buffers (inventory between processes) lead to other suboptimal behaviour, like reducing your motivation to continuously improve your operation.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 4. Anticipating Change

Without action things will only get less visible over time.

A measurement system helps makes the software product visible.

Software is invisible only when we have not developed the correct engineering measurements. A hundred years ago electricity was considered invisible. We only knew of its existence when it shocked us.

From Leverage Points

They [feedback loops] may not be very visible. But their presence is critical to the long-term welfare of the system. One of the big mistakes we make is to strip away these "emergency" response mechanisms because they aren't used often and they appear to be costly.

From Situated learning - Legitimate peripheral participation

A window's invisibility is what makes it a window, that is, an object through which the outside world becomes visible.

From Implementing Lean Software Development

The behaviours that ranking systems encourage are competition, hiding information so as to look good, and hiding problems so as not to look bad.

From Toyota production system

The vicious cycle of waste generating waste hides everywhere in production.

From The Silent Language

Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

From Brain Rules

Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources.

From Mending a bike puncture

Air, like software, is invisible. To get the hole to reveal itself I switched to a different medium, from air to water.

From What Did You Say?

We structure our world so we will not receive feedback that threatens our view.

From General Principles of Systems Design

Regulation is invisible - when it works.

From the DevOps Handbook

The principle of small batch sizes also applies to code reviews.

kanban push-me pull-you

This is the slide-deck for the presentation I gave at the Lean Kanban UK conference. Many thanks to David for giving me the opportunity and impetus to put some of my thoughts together on this.

adapting

From The Aesthetics of Change

In the [predator/prey] example, the battle over food and territory between two species is only one half of the story. The larger cybernetic picture is that the battle is a means or process of generating, maintaining, and stablizing an ecosystem.

From Surfing the Edge of Chaos

The defining feature of a complex adaptive system is its ability to learn.

Recent study of evolution, both in the natural world and in computer based complex systems, has demonstrated the surprising result that the presence of parasites in a system accelerates evolution dramatically.

From Growing a Business

Businesses that grow too fast or in the wrong way overwhelm the adaptive capacity of the people who work there.

From Sense and Respond

Adaptiveness… cannot just be added on to an organisation's existing capabilities: the organisation itself must become adaptive.

From Adapt - why success always starts with failure

Tight coupling means the unintended consequences proliferate so quickly that it is impossible to adapt to the failure or to try something different.

From The Gift of Time

Jerry warns us that when a system that continues to change or that is in a changing environment is subjected to a fixed set of tests, it will inevitably over-adapt to those tests, leading to a higher probability of severe or surprising failures in the field. [James Bach]

From The Art of War

Victory in war is not repetitious, but adapts its form endlessly.

From How Buildings Learn: Chapter 5 - Magazine Architecture: No Road

The specious old-box is old because it is profoundly adaptive.

From The Silent Language

Theodosius Dobzhansky, the great human geneticist, once observed that life was the result of neither design nor chance but the dynamic interaction of living substance with itself. He meant that life, in a changing environment, places such strains on the organism to adapt that, if this does not take place constantly, the organism as a species dies out. ... Different cultures are analogous to different species in the sense that some of them survive whilst others perish. Some are more adaptive than others. The study of change, therefore, is the study of survival.

From How to use Conscious Purpose Without Wrecking Everything

What is involved is not simply survival of the fittest, but survival of the fitting-in-est.

Evolution always means Co-evolution.

From Brain Rules

Charles Darwin noted… the brains in wild animals were 15 to 30 percent larger than those of their tame, domestic counterparts.

It is important that instead of the process being adopted it is adapted.

From Leverage Points

The most stunning things living systems and social systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviours. In biological systems that power is called evolution. In human society it's called technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo, it's called self-organization.

From Obliquity

Evolution is smarter than you are.

teams

From Quality Software Management: Vol 3. Congruent Action

In all Steering (Pattern 3) organisations, the team is the fundamental unit of production.

In the end though, it's their method of learning that distinguishes teams from groups… team members always have a common goal, regardless of the product - the goal of helping each other learn to perform better.

From Pair Programming Illuminated

Widespread use of pair programming involves a cultural shift in values of the organization - away from individual and toward team recognition and goals.

From Wooden on Leadership

I rarely assigned one player to a basket. Basketball is a team sport, and I felt it was unwise to allow players to practice by themselves. Always I wanted them to be interacting with their teammates.

From Situated Learning - Legitimate Peripheral Participation

The fact that the work was done in an interaction between members opened it up to other members of the team.

From The Fifth Discipline

The total absence of meaningful practice or rehearsal is probably the predominant factor that keeps most management teams from being effective learning units.

In great teams conflict becomes productive.

From Peopleware

Most organizations don't set out consciously to kill teams. They just act that way.

The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy.

From The Deming Route to Quality

Time and again I see the benefits of using a team.

Teamwork characteristics ... cannot be determined if you interview ... one at a time.

From The Mythical Man Month

The Mythical Man Month is only incidentally about software but primarily about how people in teams make things.

From Toyota Production System - Beyond Large Scale

In modern industry, harmony among people in a group, as in teamwork, is in greater demand than the art of the individual craftsman.

From The Starfish and the Spider

The Toyota assembly line... if an employee stopped the line a pleasant "ding-dong" would sound and teams would carefully study what was going on.

learning

In the end though, it's their method of learning that distinguishes teams from groups… team members always have a common goal, regardless of the product - the goal of helping each other learn to perform better.

From The Fifth Discipline

The total absence of meaningful practice or rehearsal is probably the predominant factor that keeps most management teams from being effective learning units.
Learning is eventually always about action.

From The Deming Route To Quality

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. [Henry Ford]

From Mindset

Speed and difficulty are the enemy of learning.

From Surfing the Edge of Chaos

The defining feature of a complex adaptive system is its ability to learn.

Learning and change processes are part of each other. Change is a learning process and learning is a change process.

From The Aesthetics of Change

All simple and complex regulation as well as learning involve feedback. Contexts of learning and change are therefore principally concerned with altering or establishing feedback.

From The Lean Startup

I've come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.

Qualitative learning is a necessary companion to quantitative testing.

From Managing the Design Factory

In life, we design most processes for repetitive activities because a process is a way of preserving learning that occurs when doing an activity. … We need to find some way to preserve what we have learned without discouraging people from doing new things.

From Situated learning - Legitimate Peripheral Participation

A learning curriculum is thus characteristic of a community.

From Ackoff's Best

Development of individuals and corporations is more a matter of learning than earning.

From Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman

They didn't even know what they "knew". I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile.

From Management of the Absurd

Ex-convicts are better able to rehabilitate prison inmates than is the prison staff. Ex-drug addicts are more successful in getting other addicts off drugs than are psychiatrists. Students learn more from each other than they do from their professors.

From Experiential Learning: Beginning

If there is no provocation, there is no learning.

From What Did You Say?

Learning is what feedback is all about.

From Brain Rules

Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far apart on the page or screen.
Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.
Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning.

From Measuring and managing performance in organizations

When outcomes are revealed so slowly, learning is difficult.

systems

From Smart Swarm

Unlike our systems, which are tuned for efficiency, the termites' systems have been tuned for robustness, which they demonstrate by building mounds that are constantly self-healing.

We should think of it [the termite mound] as a dynamic system that balances forces both inside and outside its walls to create the right environment for the termites.

From The Fifth Discipline

In systems thinking it is an axiom that every influence is both a cause and an effect. Nothing is ever influenced in just one direction.

From The Mind of War

…in order to determine the consistency of any new system we must construct or uncover another system beyond it… One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.

From Becoming a Technical Leader

From working with systems, I have learned that the process of change is always organic.

From How To Use Conscious Purpose Without Wrecking Everything

If I design a system with no regard for the universe that surrounds it, I will have scanty knowledge of what can impact it. That is not a formula for success. To fit my system in to the larger system of systems around it, I must go to the next higher level of recursion, which is a frame of reference that encompasses my system and its environment—that is, the systems around it. What is involved is not simply survival of the fittest, but survival of the fitting-in-est, of that which fits in best.

Ignoring feedback merely means that the system will eventually experience a massive unpleasant surprise rather than a small unpleasant surprise.

From Surfing the Edge of Chaos

The defining feature of a complex adaptive system is its ability to learn.

From Managing the Design Factory

Whenever we see an intense need for communications it is typically a sign that the system has been incorrectly partitioned.

From Management 3.0

The Red Queen's Race is an evolutionary hypothesis describing that a complex system needs continuous improvement to simply maintain its current fitness, relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. Some scientists claim that the Red Queen's Race, or the principle of co-evolving species, is an even more important driver of evolution that any other kind of environmental change.

From Adapt - why success always starts with failure

Complexity is a problem only in tightly coupled systems.

From Thinking in Systems - A Primer

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behaviour.

This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization.

Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms.

From The End of Certainty

A nonequilibrium system may evolve spontaneously to a state of increased complexity.

From The Deming Route To Quality

Management works on the system, people work in the system.

From The Gift of Time

Jerry warns us that when a system that continues to change or that is in a changing environment is subjected to a fixed set of tests, it will inevitably over-adapt to those tests, leading to a higher probability of severe or surprising failures in the field. [James Bach]

I have become enormously skeptical of simple cause-and-effect explanations of any system behavior. [Tim Lister]

From Quality Software Management. Vol 4. Anticipating Change

Human systems don't change unless the individuals change, one at a time.

From Ackoff's Best

The essential properties of a system taken as a whole derive from the interactions of its parts, not their actions taken separately. Therefore, when a system is taken apart it loses its essential properties. Because of this - and this is the critical point - a system is a whole that cannot be understood by analysis.

An organisation is a system whose major deficiencies arise from the ways its parts interact, not from their actions taken separately.

From The Lean Startup

That which optimizes one part of the system necessarily undermines the system as a whole.

From Certain to Win

The insidious thing about entropy is that within a closed system, it always increases. In other words, closed systems run down.

From Consilience

In a system containing perfect internal order, such as a crystal, there can be no further change.

From An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

A "boundary" may not be infinitely thin, precisely so it can partake of both system and environment. Rather than separating, such a boundary connects.

From General Principles of Systems Design

The system responds more slowly in order to respond more surely.

From The Systems Bible

Systems don't appreciate being fiddled and diddled with. They will react to protect themselves.

Systems tend to oppose their own proper functions.

From The Road Less Travelled and Beyond

Systems inherently resist change.

From How Buildings Learn: Chapter 2 - Shearing Layers

The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along. Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.

From Dr Deming

Lowering the number of defects in a stable system can only be achieved by working on the system.

Overadjustment of a stable system invariably makes things worse. This deserves a special name - tampering.

practising

From Not Always So

When we practice together, we forget our own practice… When you practice your own practice together with others, the true ego-lessness happens.

From The Aesthetics of Change

Occidentals ... practice in order to get a skill, which is then a tool - in which I, unchanged, now have a new tool, that's all. The Oriental view is that you practice in order to change yourself.

From The Fifth Discipline

The total absence of meaningful practice or rehearsal is probably the predominant factor that keeps most management teams from being effective learning units.

From Wooden on Leadership

I rarely assigned one player to a basket. Basketball is a team sport, and I felt it was unwise to allow players to practice by themselves. Always I wanted them to be interacting with their teammates.

From The Mind of War

Boyd also came to appreciate the routine practice and repetition that was required to become really good at something and to overcome the boredom by focusing on minute improvements.

From Talent is Overrated

Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can work on technique all you like, but if you can't see the effects, two things will happen: You won't get any better, and you'll stop caring.

From Stuka Pilot

Another confirmation of the truth of our old Stuka maxim: "Nothing comes off - except what you have practised."

We have long since ceased to develop practice from theory; we do just the opposite.

From Thinking Fast and Slow

An important principle of skills training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.

The accurate intuition of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics.

From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Right practice, right attitude, right understanding.

From Bounce

Nobody who had reached the elite group without copious practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off but failed to excel.

From Mindset

Babe Ruth loved to practice. In fact when he joined the Boston Red Sox… he wasn't just a rookie. He was a rookie pitcher.

From Zen in the Art of Archery

If I tried to give you a clue at the cost of your own experience, I should be the worst of teachers and deserve to be sacked! So let's stop talking about it and go on practising.

From Zen Bow, Zen Arrow

Human beings always cling to things. Practice begins when you stop clinging.

From Thinking Fast and Slow

It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other.

From Mozart a biography

From earliest childhood he practiced for thousands of hours every year.

patterns of connection

When I read a good book I highlight passages that catch my attention. I copy a few of the highlights into a book-snippet.

This photo is of page 75 of my battered copy of The Secrets of Consulting. The yellow highlights are from the first time I read the book, the pink ones from the second time, the blue ones the fourth time. At the bottom right is one sentence outlined in pen and marked with an eight. That tells me I marked that sentence on my eighth re-read. (I've run out of new colours.)

I find it better to re-read a really good book 10 times rather than read 10 average books once each. It's the really good books that provide new insights each time I re-read them. Marking highlights in this way allows me to go back in time. What topics caught my attention in early readings? What topics in later readings? I can explore the differences. Of course, part of that newness is that I'm a different person each time I re-read. I'm older. A sentence triggers a new thought based an experience I've had since my last read. Also, I remember more of the book each time. For example I can see on my seventh re-read I marked this

The toughest problems don't come in neatly labeled packages. Or they come in packages with the wrong labels.

and I underlined the words labeled and labels because I'd consciously connected them to The Label Law (on page 64).

The name of the thing is not the thing.

Underneath that I can see I've written "The Dread Pirate Roberts". That's a connection to a scene from one of my favourite films, The Princess Bride. Westley is in the fire swamp explaining to Princess Buttercup how he has become the Dread Pirate Roberts...

Westley: I, as you know, am Roberts.

Buttercup: But how is that possible, since he's been marauding twenty years and you only left me five years ago?

Westley: I myself am often surprised at life's little quirks...

Westley: Well, Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me to his cabin and told me his secret. "I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts," he said. "My name is Ryan. I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts, either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia." Then he explained the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westely.

John Gall (who was born in 1925), recently gave a fabulous talk called how to use conscious purpose without wrecking everything. He said:

As the years go by, the brain begins to put the dots together, to make conscious links between one experience and another, between one historical fact and another. A person begins to experience one’s entire life history as an integrated narrative.

This integrating capacity of the human brain is perhaps its most marvelous achievement. And you have to be old—usually fifty or sixty years old—to reach that point where it dawns on your conscious mind that that’s what’s going on. Unless you are already in your coffin, your mind is always a work in progress, an ongoing process of continual growth and greater differentiation, richer and more far-reaching correlations.

He chatted about how much his mind had changed during the first 40 years of his life compared to the most recent 40 years of his life. He said the latter change was far greater.
Isn't that amazing. Fantastic.
I'm looking forward to getting older!
I'm looking forward to seeing more and more patterns of connection.

courage

From The Importance of Living

The courage to be one's own natural self is quite a rare thing.

From eXtreme Programming explained

Communication supports courage because it opens the possibility for more high-risk, high-reward experiments...

Simplicity supports courage because you can afford to be much more courageous with a simple system.

Concrete feedback supports courage because you feel much safer trying radical surgery on the code if you can push a button and see tests turn green at the end (or not, in which case you can throw the code away).

From The Road Less Travelled and Beyond

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how relatively few people understand what courage is. The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of fear, or in spite of pain.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 4. Anticipating Change

Ultimately what helps you most in managing system size is courage and realism.

From The Tao of Pooh

From caring comes courage.

From The Alchemist

"I had to test your courage," the stranger said. "Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the Language of the World."

From We Seven

Looking back on it now, it sounds a bit silly. But it takes little moments like that to build up a person's tolerance of fear and his ability to face the unknown. [Malcomn Scott Carpenter]

From The Teachings of Don Juan

There is nothing wrong with being afraid. When you fear, you see things in a different way.

Fear is the first natural enemy a man must overcome on his path to knowledge.

From The Conquest of Happiness

Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.

From Mastery

The courage of a master is measured by his or her willingness to surrender. This means surrendering to your teacher and to the demands of your discipline. It also means surrendering your own hard-won proficiency from time to time in order to reach a higher or different level of proficiency.

From Stuka Pilot

Little by little I discover all the tricks. Skill is often the result of getting hurt.

From Existentialism and humanism

What produces cowardice is the act of giving up.

From Zen Bow, Zen Arrow

Gratitude will make you brave.

communicating

From The Systems Bible

The meaning of a communication is the behaviour that results.

Information theory is a mathematical treatment of what is left after the meanings have been removed from a Communication.

From Managing the Design Factory

Whenever we see an intense need for communications it is typically a sign that the system has been incorrectly partitioned.

From The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believe it to be true, indicating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.

From Management of the Absurd

It is only when the balance of power is relatively equal that truly candid communication can and should take place.

From eXtreme Programming explained

XP is a communal software development discipline.

From The Road Less Travelled and Beyond

Community has to do with communication.

From Situated learning - Legitimate peripheral participation

A learning curriculum is thus characteristic of a community.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 1. Systems Thinking

The quickest and surest way to classify organisations into similar patterns is by the way people think and communicate.

From The Mind of War

Oral, not written, communication and conviction, not accuracy, still rule in military culture.

The tendency is for entropy to increase in a system that is closed or cannot communicate with the external systems or environments.

From The Starfish and the Spider

I taught them that communication is to be upward if it is to work at all.

From An Ecology of Mind

Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true of all communication.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 2. First-Order Measurement

Large projects always fail when their communication systems fail.

The greatest challenge, then, is not creative thinking, but creative communicating: representing our thoughts in a way that other persons - each with a unique style - can understand.

From how to use conscious purpose without wrecking everything

Once you get above that first level, the level of material things and forces, you are dealing with abstractions. In place of physical forces, you have communication—messages, signals. And in place of material things, you have relationships—which are abstractions.

From Wisdom of the idiots

Words alone do not communicate: there must be something prepared, of which the words are a hint.

feedback

From The Secrets of Consulting

People can take any amount of water from any stream to use for any purpose desired. People must return an equal amount of water upstream from the point from which they took it.

It is a well-known psychological principle that in order to maximize the rate of learning, the subject must be fed back information on how well or poorly he is doing.

From An Ecology of Mind

A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.

From Leverage Points

Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction.

From How to Use Conscious Purpose Without Wrecking Everything

Ignoring feedback merely means that the system will eventually experience a massive unpleasant surprise rather than a small unpleasant surprise.

The amount of feedback that is built into living organisms differs by many orders of magnitude from the amount that we build into manmade systems.

Flexibility means the willingness to act in response to the feedback message by actually changing how the system works.

From The Principles of Product Development Flow

The speed of feedback is at least two orders of magnitude more important to product developers than manufacturers...

The human effect of fast feedback loops are regenerative. Fast feedback gives people a sense of control; they use it, see results, and this further reinforces their sense of control.

Fast local feedback loops prevent the accumulation of variance.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 1. Systems Thinking

The feedback model says you can't successfully control anything for very long without information.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 2. First-Order Measurement

Software development is not primarily a manufacturing operation for we (ideally) never develop the same software twice. This uniqueness of product means that Deming's "statistical signal" - though necessary - is not sufficient for feedback control, because there often isn't enough repetition - enough stability - to generate meaningful statistics.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 3. Congruent Action

Information about past behaviour, delivered in the present, which may or may not influence future behaviour.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 4. Anticipating Change

In a feedback control system it's only our perception that determines which is controller and which is controllee.

From What Did You Say?

In other words, it's not so much the feedback that counts, but the struggle to get it - not the feedback, but the feeding-back.

We structure our world so we will not receive feedback that threatens our view.

We don't even wait to ignore feedback, but actively take steps to prevent such feedback from ever happening in the first place.

Don't concentrate on giving feedback; concentrate on being congruent - responding to the other person, to yourself, and to the here-and-now situation...

From Management 3.0

Feedback is only feedback when there is a purpose behind it.

From Talent is Overrated

Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can work on technique all you like, but if you can't see the effects, two things will happen: You won't get any better, and you'll stop caring.

Feedback? At most companies this is a travesty, consisting of an annual performance review dreaded by the person delivering it and the one receiving it. Even if it's well done, it cannot be effective. Telling someone what he did well or poorly on a task he completed eleven months ago is just not helpful.