Month: June 2024

Friday, 9.10pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing. – Marjane Satrapi

What is the point of a blog?

I started thinking of it as a place to showcase my work – to display what I knew , to prove to others that I did know something.

I learned, as I wrote, that I had more to learn, and what I knew I began to question.

I wrote in paragraphs, then in sentences, and later in paragraphs again.

I wrote ponderous prose, then simple words, then elaborate constructions once again.

I whined about writing in some posts, and crafted reasonably complete essays in others.

I imagined that what I wrote would be the way the world saw me. I later realised that everyone is busy and no one is looking.

I learned that your blog is a place where you can work on what interests you. It’s a place to learn. It’s a place to practice. It’s like working in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the biggest coffee shop on Earth. You’re surrounded by people, but you can also be alone and focus on your work.

And I do need to get on with work.

I have to produce a thesis in a couple of years, and there is lots of reading and thinking I need to do.

John McPhee writes about the difficulty of getting started with writing. Say you need to write about a bear. You start by writing to your mother. First, you write about how hard it is to write. You complain about the topic. You ask why you chose bears in the first place. You mention the bear has a 30 inch neck and could keep pace with a horse. And then you delete all the whining and leave the bit about the bear.

If you are reading these words, or the next few hundred thousand, I apologize now. They will follow McPhee’s advice, although with the unnecessary stuff left in until I get around to the edit.

I need to work out ideas, and the way to work out ideas is to talk about those ideas and to think about what other people have said. This blog is my place to work out those ideas. And sometimes, those ideas will be half done and I will run out of time and have to stop.

So where am I right now in the production of this thesis?

The topic I’m working on seems laughably general and terribly important at the same time.

I’m interested in how to make better choices. It’s one thing doing that as an individual, and a whole other thing doing it as a group. The research question that I’ve backed into is how to work better in groups.

A rabbit hole that I’ve gone down recently is the phenomenon of a “writer’s room”. This is a thing in Hollywood. And it’s something that I need to understand.

The writer’s room is a workplace tradition that creates a space in which a group of writers collectively author television scripts (Henderson, 2011).

Okay, so I’m out of time. One of the things about this phase of the blog is that when I need to stop, I will, and carry on another day.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 7.27pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. – Lao Tzu

I am, by nature, quite frugal. I am also, by training, not very materialistic. This is a good and a bad thing.

I remember reading a comment written a few hundred years ago by a colonist in India that talked of the danger of buying into the ascetic mindset that is part of that country’s history. It leads to a passive acceptance of the present, the writer railed, and it is through consumption and the purchase of goods that the economy is lifted and growth happens.

This, I fear, happens to be true.

The wealthiest countries are the ones that have the most trade, where money changes hands and people create products and services in exchange for money. People who don’t need or don’t want many products and services are like grit in the machine, slowing down the engine of commerce and wealth creation.

At the same time the amount of resources we process to meet the needs of those who do want those products and services keeps growing. As people become wealthier, they consumer more resources.

One solution I see out there is called degrowth. I don’t know the details, but I know I like the idea. If I were a betting person, however, I would not bet on it becoming reality.

Why is that?

Because. People.

What happens when a population stops developing? Stops changing?

It stagnates. Isolated tribes may have complex social structures, beautiful ceremonies, stories passed down through generations, and have lived in peace on the land for centuries.

It still doesn’t stop powerful modern tribes with modern weapons taking over their land and driving them out.

I find it hard to imagine a peaceful Earth where all the people live together in peace and security.

I find it much easier to imagine a constant state of tension, where power is a constant threat, and being prepared with balancing power is the only way to ensure one’s security.

And to be prepared you need resources. To gain resources you need money. And to get money you need to have individual productive capability harnessed in a group economy. A society of monks can function very well. Until a Henry VIII comes along.

Society needs people who care about stuff and want stuff to move the economic machine every day. Society also needs people who build the systems that make that stuff. Society also needs people who think about how to make that system better, and move to products that meet people’s needs while reducing the impact they have on the environment through better and more thoughtful design. Society even needs people who sit on the sidelines and simply enjoy living.

I don’t really know where this train of thought is going. I think we need to make more thoughtful choices about what we do and what we buy. It’s probably sensible to learn how to live with less. Jobs in the future may be hard to come by. And I know what I’m talking about here because my work often ends up creating jobs. 20 years ago, it might have been thirty new jobs. 10 years ago, it was four. Now, well… you don’t really need employees if you’re starting a business. Things are changing fast.

For us, I think asking what is the least we need to do our thing is a useful way to check the value we can add in this changing society.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 8.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality. – Orson Bean

I’ve just paid for my next year of study and realised, with some surprise, that I’m in the fourth year of working towards a PhD. This level of study isn’t like previous levels, where there are set courses and requirements. I’m doing this because I want to, and the value is in what happens over time, not the degree itself.

A strange thing happens when you look at a thing over a number of years. At first it seems simple. Then it gets more and more complex the more you look at it. And then, it gets simple again, but in a different way. In a more fundamental, visceral way.

Let me try and explain this.

I used to think I was a good writer. I could write better than the people around me. I could create words quickly. I used to write a lot of proposals for business – 20, 30,000 words of material, fat 70-page documents. People seemed pleased. Clearly this stuff was valuable. Half an inch of paper – clearly we were solid, experienced people.

A few years later we met some lawyers. They talked to us and then sent us a four page proposal. The first page was a letter thanking us for asking for a proposal. The second page was a bulleted list of what they would do. The third and fourth pages had prices and some terms and conditions. And that was it.

Here I was decimating a small forest each time I had to write something and here were these lawyers sending in a four-page note. Clearly one of us was more efficient, and I decided from that day on to write short-form proposals all the time.

Of course, not everyone around you will think that is a good idea. If they happen to be your boss, then you will be told it’s a bad idea and that you need to get on and write the big proposal. So you will.

Now, you spend time doing big proposals and feeling resentful, and doing short ones and winning business, and overall you’ve still got a lot of work to do. But over time you realise that winning feels good, and winning gets noticed, and people see the connection between the time spent on a short, focused proposal versus a rambling one that doesn’t get the business and then after a few years, you’re exclusively doing what works.

So the journey goes from learning how to get good at writing words to learning how to get good at selling with words. The same thing, but different.

Research is something like that. I watched the final lecture by Peter Checkland, the academic giant in my research field, and I was struck by the simplicity of his message. He spent his career working in that area of real-world situations that people consider problematical, and thought about ways in which people could work together to improve that situation. It’s hard to think of a more common use case in daily life, or a more important one. Given the challenges we face in society, what could be more relevant than coming up with better ways to work together to address them? This is more than product development, more than selling, more than capital allocation. It is about making good choices.

When I started my programme of research, I was interested in making good choices.

I still am.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 9.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. – Abraham Lincoln

Doug Lisle is a psychologist that I like listening to, first because he uses cartoons to illustrate his talks rather than boring slides, and second because what he says is interesting.

Lisle’s position on psychology appears to be that it’s all biology. I don’t think he seems to think much about the whole ego and id sort of thing. I really don’t know enough to have an opinion on the field, but for someone with an engineering background, a lot the old psychology stuff seems – well – made up. I remember reading some books in the field years ago and it was all, “well he said this” and then “she said this about what he said”, and my logical positivist engineering brain was going “why are people doing so much talking rather than just looking at the data?”

At the time, you didn’t have the data because you couldn’t look in people’s brains. And now that you can, it’s still not entirely clear why we think the way we do. For example, what can neurons firing in the brain tell us about poetry? Can you find a poetry circuit? Or a painting one? Probably. It’s like Pirsig writes about a novel and a computer – where, when you examine the circuits – is the novel.

Right, let’s back up. The thing about Lisle is that he doesn’t need the psychology to explain why we act the way we do. It’s biology. And a bit of economics. We make decisions to act for three reasons: to gain pleasure; to avoid pain; and to minimise effort. These are the reasons to act that kept us alive. And they’re also the reason why we’re in trouble these days because the easiest thing to do is often the worst thing to do in a world of abundance. Think TV and chocolate. A steady diet of those two is going to end badly.

Let’s look at the pleasure motivation in a little more detail. The obvious reason to pursue pleasure is the payoff in a relationship. But as social animals, pleasure is more than just that. One quite important type of pleasure comes from esteem. Lyle says we all have little esteem meters in our heads. We’re constantly making decisions based on whether the choice we make will increase or lower our esteem in the eyes of those around us.

How does this apply to the world we live in. Well, if you’re someone that wants to build a business, then you need people to pay attention to you. One way of doing that is to demonstrate how clever you are. You can do that by going on LinkedIn and putting out posts that show how knowledgable you are. You can call people out who are wrong, and tell them why they’re stupid. And if you do that consistently you’ll find that people respect you and look up to you and start following you.

Or will they? My reaction is more on the lines of … what a p****.

I know a few people like this, and they don’t come across as wise and helpful. They come across as cantankerous grumps. And not the kind of lovable grump that really has a heart of gold. This is the kind of grump that your kids are scared of asking for their ball back. The kind you cross the road to avoid, or pretend you don’t see because you don’t really want another conversation on why the world is going to hell in a shopping bag.

A more reliable way to get people to like you is to look for ways to raise their esteem levels. You can do this by sharing what they do, or commenting about what you liked about what they did. Lincoln may have thought that he was alone in desiring esteem, but as social animals that desire is hardwired into us. Esteem matters.

It’s not hard really. If you want to work with someone, figure out how what you do will raise their esteem levels.

Or, as Zig Ziglar (what a name!) said much more succinctly than this post, “you can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. – Peter Drucker

I am not an academic. Yes I’m working on a PhD, but I’m not sure I’m doing a great job at that. Or perhaps I’m doing it the way I do things, by bumbling around and following things that are interesting. When I’ve done that in the past, something happens next. And sometimes that something is unexpected.

Here’s the thing. I am spending a huge amount of time – and I mean really quite huge – trying to understand what happens when people talk in a group about a situation they find problematic.

I watched a talk by Robert Pirsig recently where he said that everyone’s situation is different and the problems they have are unique. But in another way, everyone’s situation is the same and we all have the same problems. It all depends on how much we know about the situation we’re in right now.

I see this all the time. I don’t know what your particular situation is and what you’re finding problematic. If I listen to you and take notes I’ll learn about how you see that situation and understand the constraints and challenges you’re facing. As we talk, I’ll learn about what you’re already tried, what worked and what didn’t, and we’ll figure out what to try next. This is always going to be something unique to you.

At the same time this is a process that I’ve done hundreds of times now. Your situation has a history, now is because of what happened before. The current moment has actors and relationships and beliefs. And there are possible futures, which will be activated by agreements between all of us. A past, present and future. That’s always going to be the same.

This activity is a kind of research. A research based in action. The idea is that we think about what to do. Then we take action. Then we reflect on what’s happened, learn from it, and then plan and take new action.

Some people think this isn’t research, it isn’t science. Come on now. So you do something. Then you write about it. Then you do something else. And you say it’s science? No. This thing you’re doing isn’t replicable. Once you’ve done it, it’s done. No one else can do it again. You can’t step in the same river twice.

Ah, I say. You’re right, you can’t step in the same river twice. But you can get wet. You can get washed away, or make it safely to the other side.

Is this too abstract? Let’s make it concrete. The tools of “real” science are quantitative – numbers, figures, calculations. Go into any situation, any real situation, and use numbers to calculate what you think people should do. Then tell them and see how they react.

They will react with feelings. They will not react with cold, rational responses. They will instead, using the language of transactional analysis, have warm fuzzies or cold pricklies. Your maths will not carry the day. Your audience’s feelings will.

This has been a hard thing to learn. We imagine we can control things through logic. But that part of our brain is quite recent and requires a lot of training. A few people can respond that way. Most people use that other part of the brain, the deeper one, the one that responds to a tiger by running away rather than counting its stripes. Any method you use to work with people has to work with their feelings rather than trying to eliminate them.

Perhaps the real value in a meeting is to get people to tap into their feelings about the situation and possible courses of action, using those feelings as a guide to come to an agreement on the next thing to do. And this is not hard to do – just get people talking and those feelings will come out in their chatter.

All you have to do is listen, ask questions and take notes.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding – Leonardo da Vinci

In the last few posts I talked around this idea of getting people in a virtual room and having a conversation, and how I take notes to help record and structure what we talk about.

What’s the point of doing that? How does it help?

Three reasons come to mind.

Sunday, 8.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising. – Matthew Stewart

Next month I’m presenting at a conference and this current series of posts is me working out my talk.

I’ve spent three days thinking about the question, “So what is it you do exactly?”

This is the heart of it – what is my practice?

Let’s start at the beginning. I’m a consultant.

Some people get into consultancy because they join a big firm that trains them to be a consultant.

I became a consultant because I couldn’t get a job. I ended up creating a job for myself, finding out what tasks needed doing and then doing those tasks in exchange for money.

This tiny distinction between figuring out what to do and being told what to do is the difference between being a consultant and having a job.

But let’s focus on a specific aspect of my consulting practice. I invite people to a web conference, we talk, I share my screen and take handwritten notes with a lot of words and some pictures and it seems to help the group with figuring out what to do.

For the last few years my collaborators and I have been trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Is there some magic here? Is it different? And I think I have an answer, helped by the magic of television.

I recently saw a program on Disney Plus called “Reboot” which features a writer’s room. This is a room where all the writers go when they need to work on the story together and come up with a script. This activity seemed similar to the thing I do. I have a virtual room. I use the equivalent of a big whiteboard. We have a chat. I run the room. We don’t have a “workshop”, I don’t “facilitate”, but something happens in there – a collaborative exploration of a problem situation to get something done, like a shooting script or project.

Could this metaphor of a writing room explain what’s going on? I think we should find out. There are four things I think are relevant.

Tuesday, 9.29pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. – Carl Jung

19 November 2025 UPDATE – the post below is from 2024. If you are looking for an updated introduction to Rich Notes, this video may help.

Enjoy the rest of the post…

In 2018 I started to do a thing that changed the way I practiced consulting. I shared my screen in meetings and took handwritten notes using drawing software, writing on a graphics tablet with a stylus. This is what I am going to talk about at the EURO conference.

I call this thing Rich Notes and it describes nonlinear digital notes that I take during meetings to record and structure conversations. You can see an example in the picture and there are quite a few distinctive features that I won’t go into right now.

I have been obsessed with writing for as long as I can remember. I collected pens, pencils and paper. I tried different handwriting styles and experimented with calligraphy. I studied graphology. And I wrote, pages and pages. Study notes, journals, meeting notes. I kept logbooks, looseleaf notes, project notes. Writing has been the most useful method I’ve found to deal with life.

The act of getting words down has let me grapple with ideas. Stapling words to the page lets me chase other ideas down and wrestle them to the floor. Our brains are meant, as David Allen writes, for having ideas, not holding them. My philosophy for years has been that if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist.

Writing things down during meetings shows you’re paying attention. Or doodling. I once sat through a meeting where all I wrote down “I’m bored. So bored. I’m so bored.” in shorthand again and again. Luckily that doesn’t happen too often.

How we write is affected by the medium we use. I first wrote these words on an Amazon basics yellow legal pad with a Montblanc Mozart fountain pen using black ink, after passing over a Bic ballpoint and a Parker. Some people like such details. For others, it’s just strange. On the page my writing marches, like a line of drunk ants, to the right and down, line after line.

Taking digital notes is different. Writing on a computer screen with an infinite page is like throwing pasta at the wall and seeing where it sticks. It could go anywhere. Paper encourages linear writing, a wall encourages non-linear writing. The latter can hold many points of view while the former is better suited to one person working on their own. But that’s not a rule, you could do things the other way too – but it’s just easier to lean into whatever is easiest in the medium you’re working in. I focus on sharing my screen and taking notes to structure the conversation so we can have a productive discussion.

In this age of generative AI and SaaS why would writing by hand have any use? One reason is that it’s different – it’s still a uniquely human thing to do. The instrument being used is another human and I think we just connect instantly with handmade marks. When I pick my stylus and take notes on a digital screen I tap into thousands of years of human society, reaching back to a flickering fire in a Lascaux cave scratching a story on a wall with a burnt stick, or a Walbiri group in Australia scratching a story in the sand.

Rich Notes are an ancient art, as old as they come, and perhaps that’s why they work for me.

What I’m trying to do with my colleagues is understand more about them, what they are, and how they might work for others.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation – a force for construction and destruction. – Jonathan Haidt

I’m spending a few posts working through the content of a paper I’m presenting at the EURO conference for Operational Researchers.

I’m making the argument that visible, shared, constructed Rich Notes lead to better meetings.

I’m not going to spend time comparing my approach with others. I saw a recent post by David Heinemeier Hansson where he talks about introducing Ruby on Rails and how it took off because he just showed what you could do with it. In the same vein I’m going to talk about what I do and the pros and cons, and you can do your own A/B comparisons and decide how this performs compared to what you do now or what else you could be doing.

Why a discussion needs to be visible

Meetings where people just talk are a waste of time.

We just aren’t designed to listen by default. Our brains hold a tiny amount of information so we zone out quickly and only focus when we’re surprised or entertained. Most meetings don’t do this.

I can often only stay interested if I take notes. For me, note taking is a way to listen closely. When you can see me taking notes I really have to stay focused. If I’m interrupted or distracted and stop taking notes you can see that happening. When the notes are visible people can see that their points have been noted – that I’m listening to what they’re saying and acknowledging their contributions.

The technology needs to allow for sharing

I make the discussion visible by sharing my screen when I’m taking notes. I take notes by hand using a digital drawing pad and stylus. This approach works best during a web conference call when everyone has joined and can see the screen. It does not work as well when some people join using a phone or if they’re in a room with a big screen and poor audio. It’s best when everyone is on the call, the audio and video works, and the screen can be shared easily – we can then get on and have a good discussion.

The notes have to be constructed in real time

Presentations are hard to follow because the thinking has been done in advance. The presenter is totally familiar with the content but the audience is trying to keep up, reacting to the small portion that we understand.

Building up notes from a blank page, filling in details by hand as people talk is very different. The notes build at a speed that is cognitively accessible – you can think and talk faster than I can write, so the process becomes slow enough to understand and rich enough to capture the complexity of the situation.

Being too prepared does not help. If I come into a meeting with preconceived ideas or frameworks then I talk too much. The point is to understand how the participants see the situation and starting with a blank page and asking them to talk about how they see things is more useful.

We all know people who sit in meetings waiting for others to stop so they can jump in and do their thing. I’ve seen this happen in online meetings as well when everyone can do stuff in a shared space – someone will always move around, dropping in content and waiting for a moment when they can tell others what they’ve done. That’s not listening – it’s just activity rather than understanding or really engaging with someone else’s ideas.

I keep it simple. Start with a blank page. Have a discussion. Take notes.

In my next few posts I will talk about three elements. What are rich notes? How do I use them in practice? And how do they help?

I didn’t create this approach for others. It emerged when others interests of mine worked well together – well enough to form a method that I could use. But does it have value more generally? Well, that depends on what another practitioner brings to it, so I’ll spend some time thinking about that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh