Category: Mental Models

Wednesday, 9.56pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. – Thomas Paine

We are going into a difficult few years.

War is raging on two continents. It may spread.

The tightening of power and control, with a nod towards dictatorship, is taking hold around the world, even in countries that have a history of freedom.

Freedom is not a birthright. It is never given. It has always been something to fight for.

Institutions protect freedoms. They are a bulwark against those that would take yours away.

So which freedoms do you value?

You can tell if you look at what you support. And I can tell you what I value by looking at where I give.

The first freedom, the one that I have supported the longest, is the freedom to have clean water.

Wateraid provides clean water and decent toilets for people.

You didn’t think that was an important part of freedom did you?

There’s a programme about the holocaust – I can’t remember the name – where there’s a scene where the Jewish prisoners are talking about how the camp they are living in has only one toilet.

That wasn’t a mistake, they note.

If there’s only one toilet, it’s because the engineers only decided to put a single one in.

The intention was to deliberately reduce the inmates to a lower condition, one where their most basic needs were unmet.

And that’s not right.

The next freedom I support is the freedom to learn, to have knowledge.

The Open Library and Wikipedia get my support here.

Everyone needs access to knowledge, to have the opportunity to learn and develop.

In a world where knowledge makes the difference between a good life and a trapped life, these resources matter.

After that we come to a world which few people know about but almost everyone is affected by.

Our world runs not on resources or capital but on information, which in turn relies on software.

Control the software people use and you have control over them.

And that’s why Free software is important.

Free as in Freedom, not Free as in beer.

I wouldn’t be able to do what I do now, have the career I have, the work I do, or even have you read these words if there wasn’t a quiet movement of determined people building and maintaining an ecosystem of Free Software at the Free Software Foundation.

The tools that they maintain give us the ability to publish, to write and create and reach others.

To communicate and compute and design and act.

These are the tools that protect freedoms.

I was taught civics growing up – lectured about the importance of multiple centres of power – parliament, the judiciary, the military, the civil service – and how these institutions worked to safeguard liberty.

Freedom is maintained by good institutions, not by high hopes and speeches.

And these days those institutions include organisations that protect your freedom to drink clean water, to read, to learn and to write, compute and publish without fear.

We need to support them.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 10.23pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction. – Sam Walton

One of the good things that happened last year was getting an academic paper published.

This taught me a great deal about the process of writing, in addition to statistics, peer review and research design.

It was also one of the hardest things I’ve had to do – not because it was difficult but because it required time on task.

When writing a blog post I can write 500 words in 20 minutes.

I might only get out 100 in a 2 hour session working on a paper.

That’s because each sentence in a paper is critically read by a reviewer.

And I do mean every sentence.

That kind of scrutiny is invaluable – it helps you work and rework your ideas until they are as clear as possible.

I can see the difference between my first draft and the later versions of the work – and the hundreds of hours that went into it.

But those hundreds of hours are where the learning is.

I am trying to work out how to communicate this idea on platforms such as LinkedIn where there are a number of people who talk about their products and services and how it will make things easier for us.

For example, just buy a set of templates And you’ll get better at writing.

Or buy a software product and it will take care of all your problems.

The key selling point here is ease of use – this will make it easy to do something.

But if something is easy to do it also has very little value per unit.

In essence it’s a commodity and its value will tend towards the marginal cost of production.

If writing can be done by a machine it will cost pennies – and make pennies for the owner of the machine.

Many pennies, perhaps – but the writing you buy from the owner of the machine can only be resold for nothing.

The point I’m making is that if something is easy to do it’s often not worth doing.

For you and me anyway.

If we want the time we spend on learning a skill to have value we need to focus on skills that are hard to do.

That’s when we have a moat, an advantage, something that confers a competitive edge.

No edge lasts forever, of course, so we need to keep learning.

And this is where the problem of selection comes in.

We have a finite amount of time so we have to invest our hours in skills that are rare and valuable that give us a competitive advantage.

And that means getting focused, niching down, really getting clear on where you add value with what you do best.

The other advantage of finding a niche is that it’s easier to partner with others.

If you try and do everything then you don’t need anyone else and they’re unlikely to be happy working with you.

Partnerships are based on having complementary capabilities.

And with the headwinds we’re facing in the economy right now good partners can be the most valuable people you can find.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H.L. Mencken

It’s the time of year when we set goals and resolutions and get ready to go.

The momentum will last days, maybe weeks, and then our energy runs out and we go back to doing whatever it is we were doing before.

That’s because change is hard.

And complicated.

And it doesn’t happen in a straight line.

Let’s take weight loss – that problem of abundance.

We can lose weight by cutting calories and increasing exercise, but the relationship is nonlinear.

Cut too many calories and your body goes into starvation mode, conserving what you have and slowing down weight loss.

Exercise too much and your body becomes more efficient, doing more with less.

There’s a place where we get stuck – a sort of plateau or local optimum.

Getting away from this requires a tremendous amount of energy and an understanding of multiple interrelated and conflicting factors.

For example, in many cases the best type of anything is the type you don’t use.

The cheapest energy is the unit you don’t use.

The best code is the one you don’t write – it can’t have a bug.

The best food has the least added to it – it’s closest to being natural.

Once we get stuck in a loop of using energy, say fuel for commuting, then it’s very hard to get away from burning what you need to get to work.

The pandemic showed us there is a different way.

We can remove the miles embedded in the delivery of products and services.

We can serve clients without burning fuel and going to where they are.

We can create products without transporting them – at least those that can be 3d-printed at home.

We can reuse and share and buy old rather than new.

Perhaps a good resolution for the year ahead is to do less – and see what kind of impact that has on the quality of everything we do.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 8pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Climate change must be approached as an opportunity to transition our economy to a zero carbon future. Business understands this even when governments don’t. – Barry Gardiner

The 7C Decarb Model lists seven elements that have turned up again and again in my last 20 years of working with organizations on energy and sustainability projects.

This is a simple and easy framework to use and understanding how the elements work together is the key to gaining traction and finding the opportunities in the net zero transition.

Tuesday, 8.53pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. – W. Somerset Maugham

I have too many books to fit on my bookshelves so I have been boxing them up to give away and keeping just the ones I think are important. This has resulted in a shelf just full of books on writing. These include:

1. “On Writing” by Stephen King
2. “Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes”
3. “Stylish Academic Writing” by Helen Sword
4. “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser
5. “Draft No. 4” by John McPhee
6. “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott
7. “A Slip of the Keyboard” by Terry Pratchett

and many more….

I am probably not alone in being curious about the act of writing, this thing that many of us are compelled to do. Many people want to have written, as I read somewhere, but few want to actually write. To sit at their desk, propelling a pencil or tapping at the keyboard to make the words come out and make some kind of sense.

Although I have not been posting on this blog I have been writing. I’ve been working on papers and multiple revisions of a thesis, writing and rewriting and then throwing away and starting again.

I’ve written a first draft in pen, and in pencil. I’ve written on index cards and in notebooks. I’ve written in text files and LibreOffice documents. I’ve tried writing in pieces which are then stitched together and writing in one go.

I don’t think any one way is going to work for the long term and I flip flop between approaches. Perhaps a change is good because it lets you come at the same material in a different way. If you’re stuck at the computer try writing on paper and vice versa.

The most recent advice I’ve gotten has helped me with my writing right now. There are two parts to this.

First, start writing in one document and write from start to finish.

I have been working on different sections of my thesis with a small amount of content in each one. That’s made it difficult to find a flow or be clear on the narrative.

So I’ve started again, right at the beginning and I’m now working forwards a sentence at a time and trying to get ideas to line up in order.

It’s like someone else said – doing this kind of work is a bit like driving in the dark. All you can see is the bit of road ahead illuminated by your headlights but if you keep going you can get the whole journey done that way.

The second this is about managing your research. Use Zotero – it’s great as a way to integrate your references and it works with LibreOffice, markdown and Lyx (for when you’re using Latex). But the actual point is to have your research in one text file – all the notes, jottings, points from papers – all that stuff – keep it in one file. That’s because you can search for keywords and find related content more easily than if it’s locked away in a notebook or in multiple documents.

It’s possible that someone at this point will suggest tools to use like Notion or some other Zettelkasten type thing.

The benefit of keeping things simple – a text file for your notes and the document tool of your choice to write the actual thesis or book or whatever – is that you aren’t distracted by the features and possibilities of the tools. The point is to get the word count up day after day. That’s what matters and what you get marked on. Anything that gets in the way is not helping.

And now I had better get back to writing.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 6.20 am

Sheffield, U.K.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. – Epictetus

Imagine it’s ten years from now.

What would you go back and tell yourself ten years ago to do – what advice would you have for the you that you are now?

Or, if it’s easier, what would you tell your kids they should do now so that they’ll be ready for the world that will be in ten years?

I think there are four shifts that are happening today that will unbalance and unsettle the way we do things.

It’s either going to be a fun ride or very worrying, depending on how you see what’s coming.

Let’s go through the four shifts that could be coming.

1. Work anywhere

How will the work you do change?

Is there anything that requires you to be in a particular place at a particular time that you don’t have control over?

As a doctor, for example, is there anything really stopping you from having consultations on the phone, or on a video call?

If you’re a cleaner perhaps you go to different buildings at times that suit you to get your job done.

Working from a fixed location is not a function of the kind of work but a function of the power relationships between two people.

If you need the money and the person employing you wants to control your time then that leads to an unbalanced relationship based on power and coercion.

These exist. And they suck.

But if you’re lucky enough to find people who want to work with you that are willing to negotiate then you could work from anywhere.

That doesn’t suck.

Over time people tend to choose options that don’t suck or suck less over those that do.

As a result the shift towards working from anywhere is going to be a hard one to stop because people will drift in directions they like.

2. Digital intertwining

There is a line in the film “Men in Black” about how the employees of the agency only wear and use approved things.

That seems a waste of resources now, when we all have digital devices capable of doing work.

There is a noticeable shift as large corporations try and control information and how you use it.

Part of this is down to security and those kinds of worries.

But these kinds of controls also stifle innovation and collaborative working, which is then picked up by startups and independent operators.

The opportunity for innovation comes in the digital intertwining of capabilities rather than in the control of them.

You can lock people in a room and give them computers that restrict what they do.

Don’t be surprised if they do their jobs but create little new value.

Let people work on what machines they want in what way they want.

Have an agreement with them on what needs to be done and trust them to deliver.

And if it doesn’t work out don’t work with them in the future – drift towards reliable trustworthy people.

That’s the way it’s always worked.

3. Smart integration

Everyone is figuring out what this AI thing means for them.

And one thing it means is that you can supercharge the way you work.

Or you can go down a rabbit hole.

You need to decide how AI can help you do what you need to do.

It’s like having a good research assistant that charges pennies per hour.

I did some research recently, testing out a range of queries, and it cost around 30 cents.

There is an argument that many tasks that you currently hire people for will be better done by people that also know how to use this technology.

Team sizes will be smaller, output will be greater.

And that’s the definition of productivity.

It’s not something we’re going to roll back.

4. Service design

The first three changes mean that it’s going to be much harder to assign a value to the time of the person you work with.

They can do the hours they want where they want, and you don’t need to control that or pay for it.

They can use their own tools and integrate with yours to get things done.

They use AI to help them get more done faster and better.

They what exactly are you paying for?

It’s not 8 hours a day is it?

And if you’re that person you need to switch from thinking that you provide a set number of hours to thinking that you provide a series of benefits – a set of services.

That means you need to understand what service you provide and design it so that it works around you and what you have and can do.

Instead of applying to a job that tells you what to do you should try and be in a position to offer a service to someone that has jobs that need to be done.

That’s a different way of thinking but it’s a way to keep yourself relevant in a world where the alternative is competing with a machine that does what you do for pennies.

5. The push back

The speed at which any shift happens depends on the rate of adoption and the rate of pushback from vested interests – those who stand to lose if things change.

You can see that happening as CEO’s try and change what’s happening to fit their mental models of how things should be happening.

Leaders are not always right.

And sometimes they persist in trying to hold back the tide.

We should be a little more thoughtful about the decisions we make for ourselves.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh