Category: Strategy

Progress daily in your own uncertainty. Live in awareness of the questions. – Bremer Acosta, Stoic Practice

Some people are very sure of their place in the world and what they are here to do.

Some of us are less certain.

Certainty is a form of faith – a belief that needs no proof and is just accepted as true.

Which makes it hard to tell whether that faith really is true or if it’s misplaced.

And that makes it uncertain.

You may experience a similar problem when you try and think about how to describe yourself.

Are you where you are right now?

Or are you where you are going?

For example, if you work in an office doing analytical work but you really want to be a musician and spend all your evenings and weekends working on that, are you an analyst or a musician?

The Uncertainty Principle talks about two things – where you are and where you’re going.

And the more you know about one the less you can be certain of the other.

In a quantum world anyway – in a physical sense.

In the real world, the physics stops being an issue but that doesn’t stop us moving the principle into our mental worlds.

I copied the picture above from a cartoon because it expresses the uncertainty in life pretty well.

We spend most of our days being uncertain.

Uncertain of what customers want, what our partners want and what our pets want.

In business, especially, a lot of work goes into trying to remove uncertainty by making work transactional.

Something transactional can be reduced to the simple act of exchanging something well defined for money – a commodity trade.

And there are good arguments for going that way.

Many markets are opaque, hard to understand and don’t have good information – making it possible for people to take fees for helping you out.

Any market like that is an opportunity for someone who has the ability to open things up by using information.

Of course, that doesn’t remove uncertainty – it just reduces it or, more importantly, reduces the impact it has on you.

Take shopping on Amazon or Ebay for example.

Do you expect to get the best price always?

Or do you stop looking when it appears that what you have is cheap looking at the other options on the screen in front of you?

So what does this mean for you and me – how can you use uncertainty strategically?

First, here’s the bad way.

Many people believe that the way to get ahead is to project an aura of certainty.

That’s a salesperson’s training.

Believe in the product, believe in yourself and the self-talk will make the world bend to your will.

If you’re pitching and someone finds a flaw in your argument plough on regardless – your certainty and determination will get people to buy into you.

The second approach, and perhaps the more strategic one, is to look at the future as a distribution of possibilities.

You are – you have to be uncertain of the outcome.

There’s no other way to exist and be honest about the way things are.

But what you can do is reduce uncertainty – and you do that by combining distributions.

If you’re not into the math that probably doesn’t make any sense but remember what Scott Adams said about why Dilbert, his cartoon series, took off.

He was an average writer, an average artist and knew an average amount about engineering.

A career in each of those fields has a fairly wide probability distribution and his chances of wild success would have been low.

But, when you combined the three, you ended up with a much narrower distribution – how many people write and draw a cartoon strip about engineers?

What he didn’t do was create a niche in writing – for example focusing on science fiction.

He created a category all to himself by combining three normally unrelated things.

And the mathematical term for what this results in is confidence – something that in the real world also works very well.

In a nutshell, making your pitch on your certainty is asking people to believe in you.

Making your pitch on confidence is showing people how you have narrowed the range of possible outcomes.

Which do you think has a better chance of succeeding?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 9.09pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. – Rumi

Management has to be one of the most pointless activities out there.

Who would willingly become a manager?

Become someone who has to watch others doing work and try and get the best out of them?

After all, managing oneself is hard enough without being responsible for other people.

One of the worst ideas in management is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Think of something – anything that is good in the world.

How many of them were “managed” into existence?

Trees? Animals? Your family? Art? Books? Jeans?

A seed doesn’t need to be managed into existence.

You don’t need to measure and report key performance indicators.

Given the right conditions it just grows.

Wouldn’t you rather find the right person that wants to do work you need to get done and let them get on with doing a good job?

Wouldn’t that be preferable to managing them?

Thinking of life or business like gardening rather than managing may be a good idea.

Your job becomes one of planting seeds and nurturing them, protecting them and letting them grow.

Or, if you’re trying to change, your job is to find the right seed – the right behaviour, approach or strategy that will make a difference.

Then you need to make it ridiculously easy to do – you need to think small.

Big things are too big to keep in your head – too big to fight.

It’s too easy to give up when you have a big challenge.

Like running a marathon when you haven’t jogged in twenty years.

You need to start with something smaller – like walking every day.

And when you change you’re going to fail or not see results as fast as you want.

You could say, “I’ve been training for two weeks but I’m not getting any faster.”

Using the word but stops you in your tracks.

There’s nowhere to go from there.

Or you could say, “I’ve been training for two weeks and I’m not getting any faster.”

Using the word “and” seems unfinished. It feels like the word “yet” is missing from the end of that sentence.

You aren’t faster yet.

But you will be.

As long as you keep showing up.

Thinking is hard work – if you want to change something you have to make it automatic, something you do without thinking.

And the easiest way to do that is put it on a schedule.

If you want to get fit, get your exercise times in the diary.

If you want to create art or write – set time aside every day to do it whether you feel like it or not.

Deadlines are just pressure – they don’t help.

Showing up is what matters.

And then, if you’re trying to change something there is always the risk of sliding back to your old ways.

And it’s easy to do this when you come across an old trigger – something that prompts you to do what you used to do.

For example, if you go shopping hungry you know you’re going to buy some chocolate.

So, watch out – and avoid being in that situation.

Then there are bright line rules – things that are very clear, where there is a yes or no answer.

These are good.

The classic here is dry January – where people decide not to drink all month after the merriment of the month before.

It might not last – but it’s a pretty clear rule.

The thing with change is it’s hard – really hard.

And there isn’t a way to do it without some pain and effort.

But there are ways to make it easier to change something – whether it’s a habit or a process.

But to make it last you need to do it in a way so it doesn’t need ongoing management – so it manages itself.

Because anything that needs to be managed will stop working as soon as that manager stops paying attention.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes. – Richard Bach

You should never ask someone what they want.

It’s a question you shouldn’t even ask yourself.

Why, you ask?

There are three reasons, wrote Watts S. Humphrey in one of his essays:

First, people find it hard to visualise a solution to their problems, especially if they aren’t professionals in building those kinds of solutions.

Second, they often know how to do their job but not why. So, all they can show you are their existing, often manual, ways of working.

And third, if you do have a solution it could change everything about how they work and mean thinking again about what problem they have.

That’s why most approaches that focus on problem solving end up solving the wrong problem.

It takes multiple attempts to get to something that actually works for you.

As a professional, you come at things from a different point of view.

You’ve seen people experience problems that you’ve solved before, so you know what they need – a very different thing from trying to make what they want.

But that only works when you’ve been there and done it before.

When its something new you’re at the same place as everyone else.

And that’s a place filled with insecurity and angst.

Angst because, if you’re like most people, you worry that this time you won’t succeed – you won’t get it right.

And that’s ok – it’s just something that you have to get past.

But you can only do that if you have a way – a strategy ready for when that happens.

One approach that has had almost no traction is called Literate Programming.

It’s not the easiest thing to explain – but in essence its inventor, the legendary Donald Knuth, said you should first think about what you’re trying to do in plain language and then express it in code.

From that point the whole concept starts going downhill rapidly.

In an attempt to avoid that particular section of slippery slope we should talk about bread.

How would you make a mechanical breadmaker?

You might start by learning how to make bread.

The first time I tried doing that, we were in Italy and I was bored, and making bread seemed like a good idea.

So, I had a go.

It was a fairly angst inducing experience, given that I was guessing that flour and water was involved and had no books or Internet.

I’d forgotten about yeast and a few other ingredients, and the resulting block in the oven felt and tasted like a house brick.

So, I did some research, got a little focused and ended up with an edible loaf.

And it seems to me that any creative endeavour and, let’s face it, everything we do can be creative, needs an approach that lets us explore problems rather than trying to solve them.

If you’re writing a book or a program it makes sense to start by thinking and writing about your hopes and fears and expectations of what the thing will do.

Then you can come back and refine your thoughts, focus your attention and come up with a plan.

The book or program should then almost write itself – the result emerging from the cocoon of thought you’ve built up around it.

It feels sometimes that people are too eager to get to the end – without checking if the end they get to is the one they need to reach.

A little thinking might help – but it’s hard work.

Mainly because we need to admit that we’re unsure and need to look around, ask questions and experience things before coming up with a solution.

But if we do that maybe the result we get will be the one we need.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 8.45pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it. – Clint Eastwood

I came across a piece of writing by a writer that I hadn’t read for a number of years titled Why Every Business Is A Software Business.

That writer was Watts S. Humphrey, who died in 2010, and was called The father of software quality,

I read his book on the Personal Software Process when on a work placement during my degree and the ideas in there stuck with me.

In particular the concept that you could catch more bugs by reading your code before trying to run it.

But in other ways his approach was hard to use.

But before we get to that it’s interesting to look at the idea of all businesses being software businesses and why that creates new problems as well.

The first thing is that everyone uses software to some extent.

Increasingly the thing that sets you apart is how you use the software you have.

Two companies, for example, could have Microsoft Excel but use them in very different ways.

What you’re trying to do is be unique in some way – be the only fish in your pond rather than a small one in a crowded one.

But that unique thing comes from having an asset – an oil well, a gold mine or, increasingly, software.

But what if you can’t develop that yourself – you haven’t got the skills or the team you need?

Should you outsource your requirements?

Humphrey argues that you shouldn’t – because you’ll lose control of what makes you unique – you hand your future over to someone else.

And that’s something that I’ve seen happen in a number of cases.

And that’s also what stops many people from investing in software – the fear that they’ll lose control over the core bit of their business – the thing that makes them unique in the first place.

Now, if you have money the answer is to hire someone and keep at the problem until you have something that works.

It may be rubbish to start with but eventually you’ll have something that works for you and maybe even something that you can sell to others.

So one of the issues to deal with is control.

The big thing for Humphrey, however, was quality.

And quality, in his view, was something that came from measurements and statistics and studying how you were doing.

And this is where I have some difficulty.

And that’s because while the output from software development might be lines of code the question for us is which lines matter.

We know that the more we write the more mistakes we make.

So it makes sense to write programs that are as short as possible.

Which means choosing higher level languages and writing programs that create programs – removing the possibility of error.

There’s also all that work that goes into intellectual effort – the angst, the self-doubt, the stuff that we might not want to measure precisely.

Plus measuring everything is very boring.

Maybe it needs automating.

None of that, of course, invalidates Humphrey’s views on how to create software – it’s just that making it too mechanistic doesn’t work for me.

But the control point has a very simple answer.

If you can write your own software then you’re in control anyway.

If you can’t and need to hire someone and you have the money then you’re fine as well.

But for all the people out there who need applications developing but can’t afford to get it wrong they should ask and developers should offer open source solutions.

That way, I pay you to write code and if we decide not to work together I can still take that code and develop it further.

Even better, if you can take something that’s already open sourced and use it you reduce risk even more.

It may seem paradoxical but in today’s world the way to be in control may come from being completely open.

Which seems contradictory – how can you be unique when everyone has access to what you have?

But thinking that way may be to confuse being unique and being in control.

When you’re in control the customer has to work with you because you control their future.

When you’re unique the customer wants to work with you because of who you are.

Because they can see a future where you two work together.

And that seems a nicer way to be.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The thing that makes the thing is more interesting than the thing. – Casey Reas

I’ve been reminded today just why I dislike Microsoft tools quite so much.

I was trying to make something quite dry more interesting.

Let’s see what you think.

Say you want to buy something – oil, gold, bitcoin, shares – you’ll probably want to know what the prospects are for that thing.

So, you’ll look at its price history – that’s the blue line.

That tells you that prices sometimes go up and sometimes they go down – and most people stop there.

But you could, if you were so inclined, work out what prices could do after a particular day if they carried on acting the way they had so far.

What’s the high case and what’s the low case – within a certain level of confidence, of course, say 95%.

Still with me?

Now when the price actually starts moving past the day on which you did your analysis you could spot the point at which prices went below what was a normal range – suggesting that perhaps you should jump into the market and buy some of that thing.

Or not if it went the other way.

Anyway, like I said, not the most interesting thing in the world – forecasting financial time series.

So – perhaps animating this would make it more interesting.

After a couple of hours on Powerpoint – I was starting to regret the whole idea.

The problem is that most of the world runs on Microsoft tools – and while they help lots of people get things done they’re just not interesting.

What they give you is a pencil – but not a good one.

The kind of pencil you get in kids’ birthday bags, all colourful and smiley but with a harsh and gritty line.

But they’re cheap and so everyone gets one and gets on with using it.

And that’s what happens – millions of people using Excel and Powerpoint in business – and that’s just the way it is.

And if you want to fit in you need to do that as well.

It’s the lowest common denominator problem – the thing that unites everyone but it’s also not where excellence or greatness or anything interesting happens to be.

For that you need to look elsewhere.

Which led me to the work of Ben Fry and Casey Reas who have created a language for drawing things.

Things much cooler than a line chart.

Like simulating flocking, something quite interesting when you think about how complex behaviour emerges from simple rules.

There’s no real point in asking why we don’t use tools like this in the workplace.

It’s because there is a learning curve – and even small learning curves can stop things being used.

And that’s why so much effort goes into making things simple to use.

The fact is that Excel and Powerpoint and Apple rule because they make things simple to do.

And sometimes you can even do complex things.

But we’re also starting to see the emergence of a new art form – one that’s moving away from the tyranny of the simple to something more interesting.

Take McKinsey’s Global Energy Perspective 2019, for example.

I look to McKinsey as the reference on using Powerpoint in business.

Their ideas on structure and communication through decks has permeated the consulting industry.

But they’re now moving to interactive charts and javascript and css.

And that’s engaging and interesting and dynamic.

The challenge for us in the world of work is trying to take the labour out of what we do, giving that to computers and spending our time being creative.

And we’re very fortunate to live in a world that has people working to share knowledge openly and make things more inclusive.

And taking that opportunity to learn and develop our skills is the only way we’ll escape that lowest common denominator trap.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh