Category: Writing

Wednesday, 9.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. – Zora Neale Hurston

When you first try learning something new everything slows down, you know nothing and each element seems to take forever to learn. I think that’s what stops most of us from even bothering to try – that initial learning curve that’s so steep it seems like we’ll never master it. Or even get decent at it. Or better.

At the moment, for example, I’m trying to figure out what the purpose of the research that I’m planning on doing might be. So that’s one question – how do I articulate this in a way that’s going to make sense when I don’t really know how to do research yet.

What I do know is that I’m interested in this space where drawings and text and speech bump into each other. The idea of bumping into things was something that I picked up from the YouTube videos of Christina Merkley. She has an approach to classifying work as studio work – which is the kind of thing you do in the privacy of your studio with time to get it right and live work which you do in real time. I think you could overlay this with another axis that’s about doing the work either as an individual or in a group setting, which has a resonance with the work of Brandy Agerbeck whose books The Graphic Facilitator’s Guide and The Idea Shapers I’m currently going through.

The thing that happens when you read something new is that you want to experiment with different methods and that creates a challenge – because you want to be good but the chances are that you’re going to be more than a little rubbish. For example, I’ve been quite relaxed about drawing on the computer because it’s a bit different and people don’t really notice it because most of what I’m trying to think through is in the words. The graphic helps me to think about what I’m going to write but it doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting of its own.

I’m shifting my interest this year, however, to seeing if the graphics can carry more of the load – rebalancing the text and image usage. So then the pictures I draw have to make sense, they have to stand alone in their frames and make something of themselves. And that gets hard quickly. For example, do you draw and colour something entirely in analog or do you sketch it on paper, get the lines right, then scan it and do the colouring on the computer? What’s the right workflow?

Well, the obvious answer is that there isn’t a “right” workflow – there is the right one for you and what you’re trying to do and the best feedback you’ll get is how your customers respond to you when you put your new thing in front of them. If you are your own customer then fine – there’s nothing to worry about but if you’re putting something into the world that you’re hoping other people will use then you have to get this working well.

The good news is that it comes down to time. If you spend enough time working on the problem you’ll start to figure out what to do. If you give up too early that’s okay too – it just means that this thing didn’t matter enough to you. It’s okay to want something but not to want to do the work to get it. There’s plenty of other work to do as well.

The reality is that there is only so much energy you have that you can give to your projects. So focus that energy on the projects that mean the most to you. Even better, choose your projects so that they all support each other and make it easier for you to build on the things you’re doing.

Here’s the thing. Learning anything is hard. If it’s new – that’s even harder. And the first time you have a go is the hardest it’s going to be – except for the next hardest bit. Anything (sensible) that makes your life easier is worth trying out.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 8.21pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Every movement, to stay alive – a very difficult thing to do historically – has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going. – George Packer

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a member of a group – of a community or a business or of people that practise a hobby. It’s probably not something that many people have thought about since university but we do go through life being a part of circles and changing circles over time. As someone who went to boarding school I learned early about how groups form and how you can be inside or outside them. Ever since then I’ve seen the value of participating in groups but also been wary of them and their ability to draw you in and then keep you in, restricting your ability to move out again.

When you think about it those kinds of groups are everywhere. Religions use the methods of marking you as in or out. So do companies. Your country gets you to feel that way by stoking up feelings of nationalism. Sometimes these are good, as when people volunteer their time or donate their money to help the needy. Often they are bad as one community takes up a position and argues or fights against another.

I’ve been through a few groups in my time and I can think of quite a few that had a range of interesting problems. Perhaps you had a founder or leader who took everything personally. Perhaps you had differences of opinion and no way to resolve it other than the exercise of power, which you didn’t have. In such situations one group might leave and set up a competing group. I remember there being a cultural difference between people who preferred dancing in lines and those that danced in circles in one particular group. And now, of course, with online groups, you have a huge range of options – but what marks out the ones that seem to have a large and growing membership from the ones that struggle to get interest?

If we ignore the ones that are based around a celebrity – where the members are really there to follow what one or a few people do – then the thing that makes the biggest difference is how the group helps you to engage and participate in what’s going on. Most of us are lurkers and we just want to wait and watch and consume content. Some will create content. Others will engage with content, and perhaps curate it. I think curation is perhaps the hardest skill to develop – being able to critically but considerately bring together useful material that may help someone else.

In the olden days – when we used to meet face to face – what was important was having someone who would take on the responsibility for new members. These days it’s probably about content. We tend to follow individuals – either for their own work or for their community based work for a while before we try engage with them. Some of that content is going to be organic – the stuff you put out as you’re making everything else. But it probably makes sense for some of it to be meta content – stuff about you and what you do and guidance to how to get started interacting with your work.

The models of community that I think are important in this post-modern world are ones where communities can simply just get along – whether it’s a community of thousands or a community of one. We’re going to bump into each other and the question is whether that leads to conflict or not. Throughout history the default reaction has been one of conflict. What are the chances that things could be different now?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 8.16pm

Sheffield, U.K.

To know the right means of getting something done is virtually to have done it. – Mark Caine

Do you ever wonder what you would do if you weren’t able to do the things you take for granted that you can do? If you lost the use of your dominant hand, or couldn’t see – do you ever wonder how you would respond and what you would do?

We know from books like Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on happiness that people generally overestimate how much of an effect this will have on them in the long term. Human beings are surprisingly resilient at coping with the things an indifferent fate throws at them. But what it would be like if you were proactive – if you thought through what you might do if the worst came to be?

I don’t think this can be dismissed as morbidity or pessimism. The idea of facing one’s own fears can help put things in perspective and show you what is important and what is not. Some thing as simple as being concerned about repetitive strain injury, something that I, as someone who tries to write every day, am starting to experience myself. What should I do, stop writing – take a break? Go on medication, surgery even? Perhaps the answer is in strength training. But what if that doesn’t help – what if I can’t write at all?

I find that when you think such thoughts it’s worth starting to consider what the worst case might be and what you might do. And you might find inspiration in the life of John Callahan who was paralyzed after an accident at age 21 but eventually created a career as a cartoonist and was the subject of the film Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot. And if you’ve ever come across the application Dasher it’s a very good example of what technology can do to support people that have special needs.

The challenge, for most of us, is finding the right balance between the effort it takes to learn how to do something, the amount we have to do every day to keep the momentum going and what we’re trying to produce as a result of the work that we do. It’s easy to end up wishing we could do what someone else does. I watched a YouTube video today of an artist painstakingly crafting a Chinese bow using mostly hand tools – and while it’s beautifully made and the artist is elegantly pictured throughout – there must have been some sweat and swearing involved as well. We like the results that we see – but not all of us are prepared to put in the work needed to replicate someone else’s results.

That’s why it’s important that we find the thing that works for us – the particular way in which we can contribute. It takes time and patience to do that but you have to put in the time to find your way. You can’t do it all so you do have to try and select and work and stick at something and eventually you’ll work it out. It probably helps to have the chance to do an apprenticeship or craft your own apprentice journey. But when you do find it you’ll find that it asks a lot of you – especially of your body. There’s a scene in the series Mozart in the jungle where musicians talk about how they devote years to their art, pushing their bodies to the limit, and how much strength it takes to do that day after day.

But sometimes just being strong isn’t enough and if you can’t keep doing what you love to do in the way you love to do it what options do you have left? There’s always teaching – help others to learn how to do the thing that you care about – create an apprenticeship, a learning experience for others.

When it comes down to it – working out the options is really not that hard. It’s the fear of the unknown that stops us. Once the thing has happened we deal with it – that’s what our brains evolved to do – to help us survive. To carry on. It’s not over until it’s over.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Slow parents understand that childrearing should not be a cross between a competitive sport and product-development. It is not a project; it’s a journey. Slow parenting is about giving kids lots of love and attention with no conditions attached. – Carl Honore

One of the best images I’ve seen about product design is the one about the skateboard, created by Henrik Kniberg. It’s a simple picture that gets across the idea of a minimum viable product really rather clearly. In essence, the idea is that a product is not about delivering a wheel or a chassis but delivering an experience to your customer. I’m not sure I agree entirely with Kniberg’s use of the metaphor but rather than critique his description I think I’ll focus on the what I take away from it, which really is about the idea of the whole.

The “whole” is a concept from systems thinking which relates to the idea of emergence. If you have a wheel, you can’t do very much. If you have four wheels attached to a board then you’ve created a skateboard and you can do something that you can’t do with just any one of those elements. You can stand on it and travel. That’s a product right there and it makes people who like skateboarding quite happy and you can develop it and make it better and faster. I had a classmate at university who built longboards and ordered light kits and had a nice business going. Then, if you add elements, like steering or an engine, or a chassis and seats you end up with different products that help you travel when you’re younger, travel faster, safer and so on.

This idea of product design as something more than a thing is really quite important to internalise. Your product is ready when someone finds that they can do something useful with it – the useful bit emerges as a result of the product existing but it’s not found in it. And sometimes people don’t really get this. They see their job as doing one bit and doing that really well. But what matters is getting the whole thing done and that is where customers find that they get let down. Everyone you talk to probably has stories of poor products and service – from hassles with building an extension to returning items ordered from a website. At the same time, people are getting much better at doing this well, and many market sectors will be changed by entrants and incumbents who change with the process.

I remember the first time we needed professional carpet cleaners. One was in the Yellow pages and I rang up, got through to his wife and was told he would ring back. The other had a website with prices on there and you could book it in then and there. Who do you think got the work? And these days, with the pandemic, who gets your business? Probably Amazon.

When I think about this in the context of writing I am constantly reminded just how efficient a product writing is. It’s easy to create and fast to read. But a word isn’t enough to create a product, and a sentence usually isn’t enough either. You need enough sentences to capture an idea, an idea that you can then send on to someone else. But just because a medium is efficient that doesn’t mean it’s used efficiently. Many books, for example, are really one idea stretched out as far as it can go and then some – but it’s something you can summarise in a few words. On the other hand, some academic papers pack in so many ideas that you could spend an age unpacking them.

As you try and increase the number of elements in your product you run across the challenge of creating useful wholes. Take cartooning, for example. I draw simple images for my blog posts and for the last few years it’s something that’s done in a few minutes – a few lines that help to add some colour to the post. But when you try and create a cartoon you realize just how complicated a task it is to marry ink and paper when you’re trying to create more than words. What professional cartoonists do is make their lives easy – they create a few characters that live out a story. The characters often wear the same clothes and there are a limited number of backgrounds that are used again and again. Then again, you have cartoonists that create stunningly complex pieces like the work of graphic novelist Lars Martinson. It really depends on what you want to emerge from your creation.

What I’ve found challenging is finding a form of creation that words within the time that I have to work on stuff like this. Like most people that have a blog project this is not about followers or money or fame. It’s a place to practice an art – and for me that’s the art of letters and the art of sense-making with pictures. There are lots of things that I am naturally not – I’m not a natural artist or a writer or funny or insightful. What I’m good at is working on something day after day for a set amount of time and doing it without really caring too much about getting anything as a result of the doing. But there isn’t enough time so anything that uses the time better is helpful. With drawings, the fewer lines you need the better – and so cartoon like images are more achievable that realistic scenes. But cartoons are much harder to do than diagrams – which only need labels and not characters and dialogue and pacing.

And I’m not sure you start by knowing the shape and size of these pieces. You kind of have to start and then things start to make sense as you go about working on them. Going back to Kniberg’s skateboard – the point of his metaphor is to say that if you want to build a car you start with a skateboard as a minimum viable product and then you iterate towards the car. But the flaw is that quite often no one knows they need a car. When you had horse-drawn carriages, for example, do you think there were customers out there that knew they wanted an automobile? No, and they still don’t. Car, as you clearly know, is short for carriage and for a passenger it really doesn’t enter their heads that the horse in front could be replaced with a gas engine or a electric motor or a pack of huskies. It carries them and that’s the outcome. But, you build the horse-drawn one and then worry about the amount of dung and discover oil and things change. It’s the designer that makes the change possible.

Anyway, I do find cartooning hard and that’s why I think I’ll keep trying my hand at it and hopefully you will bear with me. Maybe we’ll both learn something.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 8.50pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You never know whether the subject matter will click with the audience at that particular time. I wish there was a formula, you know, ‘That plus that equals success.’ – Michelle Yeoh

One of the words you learn when you go back to university is the word “contingent”. Contingent means something that depends on something else – the success or failure of an approach depends on what else is going on and the situation in which you happen to find yourself. This is a useful word to keep in mind when you try and reach for a simple answer to a complex situation. It’s possible that your simple answer will work if the situation is the right one for it. But what’s more likely is that you have to figure out what your situation is first and then the possibilities for what you can do start to present themselves.

Perhaps the most useful application of this word is to help us realise that what we can do depends on what is around us, the resources we have and the skills and capabilities we possess. And even if we have everything we also need a little bit of luck. We can’t control the luck but we can work on everything else.

The challenge we face, however, is getting the balance right between the elements we’re trying to master. I was reading a book called “Webcomics” and one of the artists, Shaenon K. Garrity talked about her “journeyman piece” called Narbonic. In 2004, this was supposed to be a six year project and it ran from 2000 to 2006. The point of the Webcomics book was to share the process that the artists featured had found effective in doing their own work – but there’s no suggestion that there is any perfect kind of work. What you can’t get away from, unfortunately, is the actual work of doing the work.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you want to get better at writing, you have to write. At drawing? You have to draw. At coming up with scripts? You have to come up with ideas. They are going to be bad in the beginning but as long as you keep going you’ll get better and that’s the only fact there is. You won’t get better thinking about it or reading about it or hoping something is going to happen. You have to get on and do the work day after day and eventually, you’ll find it starts to become easier. Perhaps it even gets better. And one day, maybe it’s useful to other people and that’s really when you’ve discovered a way to contribute that works for you.

This whole question bothers me, I think, because surely the point of living is to find some way to be useful, to help, to contribute, to do something good. We know that taking and having don’t really lead to happiness. We don’t need that much, really, and the more we have the more we need, and faster, to feel the way we did the first time. We’ve just gone past a holiday season and I remember, really quite vividly, the very first Christmas we had with our one-year old. He opened his first present and was totally delighted by it. He wanted to play with it straight away. And he was surprised when he was given another one to open. By the end of the pile, however, he had learned that more turn up and the next day we wrapped them up in newspaper so he could open them again. And the year after that, well, things kept being opened but that wide-eyed wonder and delight of that very first present – a Postman Pat red van – never really happened again. Not in the same way.

For me, anyway, I think happiness comes from doing something, learning something, creating something. And, if possible, doing that every day. And even if it’s really bad and you want to apologise for the poor quality of your work you have to do it – you need to just sit down or stand up or do whatever you need to do to get another day’s work done.

And I think I should point out that when I talk about work I don’t mean your job – what you are paid to do. I think your work is what you want to do, what you would do every day whether you were paid or not, whether there was any reward or not. And if you don’t have work to do like that, then it would be a wise move to take some time and find that thing. Because there is a very good chance that it’s what your society and community need most from you.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I. – Louis L’Amour

If you haven’t come across the idea of post-modernism it’s worth looking up. I was first exposed to it relatively late in life – when I did a management degree and it pretty much turned everything I thought was true upside down. And it’s affecting me to this day.

For example, you’ve read about SMART goals and why you should plan things and have a strategy. But that’s an approach from the fifties and these days there’s an understanding that things are not quite that simple.

I was reading a paper on conflict and reconciliation by David Bloomfield called “On good terms: Clarifying reconciliation”, trying to understand if there is something that we can draw on to resolve conflicts in daily life, at home, in business and in communities. My starting point was to wonder if there was a formula, something we could follow to sort it out. And that sort of thinking runs straight into the issues raised by a post-modern world.

The essence of post-modernism is that you have many ideas, many practices, many perspectives. These may arise from different roots, some may be rational but others, especially in the aftermath of violent conflict, can be confused and irrational. How do you treat all these views? Do you treat revenge with the same respect as a search for justice? This is important in the context of many political transitions – do you now seek justice when the powerful are fallen or do you seek reconciliation – and what does that mean anyway.

Well, the term is hard to define, says Bloomfield and doesn’t go on to define it. You can see it as a process, something that you work through rather than an end result you reach. In this context the post-modern approach adds real value as you try and work out an approach that works in the situation rather than trying to apply something universal and general. That’s going to cause all kinds of problems as people resist being pushed down a particular approach, especially if there is any suggestion that they have to give up on any hope of getting justice.

Bloomfield argues that you need four things to made a reconciliation process work. Justice has to be seen to be done. People have to be able to speak about their experience and have it documented. They need the time and space to heal. And there should be reparations for the injured parties. Without these elements you can still move through the process but your outcomes will be different. With them, they may be better.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 8.40pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired – you quit when the gorilla is tired. – Robert Strauss

I won’t lie to you – it’s been a hard and tiring week. Like millions of others we’ve been trying to balance work and home schooling, helped by a side of winter weather.

I’ve written a lot about management and strategies and all that sort of stuff over the years but these days we’re going through are the ones that make theory – the experiences that eventually show you what you’re really like, as a person, as a family, as a community. Even as a nation. It’s all very well talking about what you should do but we all should be documenting what we’re going through now, what happened and how we acted because it’s going to tell you more about how you react when things are hard than all the reading in the world.

And we don’t have it hard – not compared to the millions out there who either don’t have enough or are giving much more than the rest of us to keep things going.

But today, at the end of the week, it was nice to find an unexpected bag of chocolate at the back of the store cupboard, something that had been forgotten.

And it was just what we needed.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 8.46pm

Sheffield, U.K.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. – Thomas Paine

Today seems the kind of day to talk about conflict and how it works – from between siblings at home to the highest institutions of government taking in social media on the way.

I’m not a big social media user but what I see on my feeds patterns of activity – some promotional, some attention getting and quite a lot that’s criticism. The promotional stuff I don’t have much of a problem with. People should talk about what they do and what they’re interested in because that’s how we learn about their point of view and the contribution they might make. The attention getting stuff is sometimes entertaining but mostly uninteresting. And then there is the criticism – an approach that is really quite counterproductive.

You probably know about the four signals that tell you that a marriage is breaking down – the four horsemen of relationship Armageddon. These are criticism, contempt, stonewalling and defensiveness. If you see those happening in a relationship you know things are going to end poorly. And I see a lot of that online – open contempt and criticism. Of course, when you’re trying to appear strong and appeal to your fan base then these are the tools you use to attack your enemy – which works great when you seem invincible. But when you’re wounded then everyone piles in, eager to get rid of you as soon as they can.

What can you actually do if you want to look at conflict resolution? I wanted to point to a paper but can’t find it right away but the essential idea is simple and you can set it out using a logic table. If you have two parties then the outcomes that can happen are: win-win; win-lose; lose-win and lose-lose. We talk about win-win being the ideal outcome but in many cases a win-lose or lose-win is the only outcome. You don’t get an equitable solution in a boxing match and you don’t get to share being the top person.

In addition to the list above though, you have a few other options. You can avoid the issue, flatter people and change the subject or just not turn up when it’s being debated. There are many ways to play the game and when you do that the point is just to stay in the game rather than a win or lose being declared. The one who wins is the one that doesn’t lose.

What’s my point here?

I suppose it’s that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to believe that there is an ideal solution and there is always a win-win. That’s naive. A win-win is more likely to be a special case when you aren’t playing a zero-sum game, one where one person’s loss is the other’s gain and vice versa. At the same time we play win-lose games when the situation isn’t a zero-sum one at all – when we’re supposed to be on the same side.

For example, what should you think when a community of practice tears into other ideas? Is it important that you contradict everyone that has the wrong idea (as far as you’re concerned) on social media? Well, for some people it might give them a sense of satisfaction but in the end I suppose what matters is the peer review process. I’ve just realized, as I’ve written this, that peer review exists all over the place. It’s not just for scientific papers and Google. The ideas that float up and persist over time are the ones that are probably worth holding on to. In most economies what you should probably be is some kind of conservative democrat – someone who believes in individual freedoms while helping society as a whole be better. You don’t have to rail against “wrong” ideas – you just have to talk about the right ones. And if they are right and people agree with you you’ll outlast the ones that are wrong.

I suppose what it all comes down to is that engaging in conflict is easy. It’s easy to fight. It’s easy to pick a battle with your sibling, your parents, your co-workers. What’s hard is having self-control, restraint, the ability to compromise. And when we’re stressed or overwhelmed we do what’s easy. But it’s doing the hard stuff that makes a society work or a community hang together.

What we have to believe is that we need to try and resolve conflict through dialogue and debate in our communities. And we have to hope that bad ideas may hold sway for a while but that the rot in them will eventually hollow out the bad ideas and leave a space where new, better ones can take root again.

That leads to the question of how do you contribute good ideas, what sort of responsibility do you have to help out? Let’s look at that in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

p.s. After a few weeks of angstiness I have restarted the Community book project and I’ll try and work through that over the next month or so.