Tip: Take small steps and get feedback to check direction
After chatting with a sniper and coming up with an idea about how the fire control problem could help reach uncertain goals I decided to write a book about it.
The book had sections on uncertainty and why the world we live in is increasingly uncertain. It set the scene for why the approach of The Fire Control Problem was needed to hit a moving target.
Why would waste time writing a book about uncertain goals? Writing an entire book is too big a thing to do without getting feedback on whether a book would take me in the right direction. I hadn’t applied the ideas of The Fire Control Problem. I stopped writing and started thinking about the target space I wanted to aim at.
How to hit a moving target🚀
Learn how to achieve things when you don’t really know what you want to achieve.
Tip: The faster you move towards the target the fewer course corrections you need to make.
It all started with a chat with an ex-army sniper. We were talking about how to achieve goals. And snipers know a thing or two about hitting targets.
How do you achieve goals, meet objectives, hit targets when you don’t know what they are? Everything you read about goal-setting tells you to make SMART goals first, that you can’t achieve anything if you don’t have a clear understanding of the goal.
There must be a way, I said. A way of working towards an uncertain goal and defining it more the closer you get.
He mentioned a ballistics problem known as the fire control problem. It describes how if you fire a missile at a plane by aiming at where the plane is now, the missile will miss because the plane will have moved by the time the missile gets there. So how do you shoot down the plane? How do you hit a moving target?
We began drawing out the elements of the problem. We drew the missile station on the ground and the plane moving through the sky. We called the area the plane was in the Target Space. We made notes as we drew and talked.
“Being able to course correct as the target moves is important, but you need feedback on where the target is now.”
“The faster you move towards the target the fewer course corrections you need to make.”
Those lessons from ballistic science give us the principles of The Fire Control Problem. They became the metaphor that we used to describe how to hit a moving target.
How to hit a moving target🚀
Learn how to achieve things when you don’t really know what you want to achieve.
I went to the beach, swam in sea, rode the fastest zip line in the world, jumped on underground trampolines.
I can tell you what or when, but not both
We talked about project plans. I made the point I’ve made before about it being impossible to deliver a scope that is fixed upfront in a timescale that is also fixed. You can either have fixed scope and flexible schedule, or flexible scope and fixed schedule. I can tell you what you’ll get but not when you’ll get it, or I can tell you when you’ll get it but not what it’ll be. Everyone agreed that we have to take a stance in order to make delivery more realistic. And then everyone moved on to talk about the next fixed scoped piece of work and it’s delivery deadline. I think this is another small example of the difference between an industrial mindest, where work is conceived of like manufacturing the same thing repeatedly, and a digital mindset that conceives of work as uncovering uncertainty and learning in order to create something new.
A stigmergy for the transformation of the third sector
I wrote a blog post about using a stigmergy for transforming the third sector so that it leads the shaping of society away from individualism and towards collectivism. A stigmergy is a bit like a strategy but rather than requiring centralised control it allows a self-organising system to emerge based on the responding to actions taken. It seems like a much better approach to achieving change in something as diverse and uncoordinated as an entire sector. The post also goes into the idea of the third sector leading a shift in society away from individualism and towards collectivism. (The problem of changing how we think about things rather than just the things we do is a whole other problem).
And I thought about:
Post-humanist philanthropy
I’ve read a few things about the origins and historic connections between Humanism and Philanthropy. And also how some of the issues we face in modern society can be traced back through the humanist thinking of humans as the dominant species (but not all humans, actually just white European males) and how that belief led to the environmental damage, inequalities in society, etc.. So I wonder what Post-humanist philanthropy might look like?
Thinking
I’ve been thinking methods and modes of thinking. We have lots of tools that help to guide thinking (ideation processes like Design Thinking spring to mind) but I think we’d benefit from being more explicit about the ways we think and so use those tools. I started with a list of words that seem related to thinking to see if this would help me some grasp some relationships but so far I just have lots of questions. Does ‘ways of thinking’ need a hierarchy to help explain how one way relates to another? Is ‘hierarchy’ one of the ways of thinking about things? Do we need to think different about different things, so consider Objects differently to Events? Is thinking really more about information (which Wolfgang Hofkrichner describes as a mediator between subject and object)? Or is information just the ‘stuff’ of thinking and separate from ways of thinking. It’s going to be a long piece of work.
The shift
I’m starting to get some grasp of how to explain what I mean when I talk about digital and digitisation, and it comes from expressing it as a shift away from industrialisation. So whether I’m talking about ways of conceiving of work as above, or how we explain business models, the same approach of showing the shift applies. The premise of my thinking then, is that this shift is occurring so how is it going to affect the charity sector and wider civic sphere?
Direct, discovery, define, design, develop, deliver. do
Over a year ago I started thinking about a linear process for running projects. I’ve started thinking about it again as part of the Fire Control problem where each step towards the goal helps to figure what the goal is. It isn’t quite a Big Upfront approach to project management that assumes we can know what will be achieved by the end of the project, but it follows a clearly phased process. Direct the scope of the project, discover the problems, define which problems to focus on, design the solutions, develop the solution, deliver it, and then do the work to operationalise the outputs of the project.
Personal websites
I’ve been interested in people’s personal websites for a while. Why do we have them (are they part of our digital identity), what do we use them for (recording thoughts in one place). Googling ‘why do people have personal websites’ just gives the usual articles about personal branding from the assumption that a personal website is all about work and career, which doesn’t seem very useful. So, I’ve started looking through the three and half thousand Twitter accounts I follow to see who has a personal website, how they use it, etc., to see what I can figure out. If I learn anything interesting I’ll probably write a blog post.
And read:
A Meta-Layer for Notes
Julian Lehr writes about notes and his “idea for a radically new kind of note taking app“. He talks about how the notes work in Hey (Basecamp’s email product), how postit notes are spatial in their relationship to the object they are about. He says that stand-alone note-taking apps are suboptimal and that, “Neither the creation nor the consumption of notes should be treated as separate workflows”. He talks about notes existing as a layer over all of the other apps that we use rather than within an app that is specifically for notes. I think there is an interesting assumption about what notes and note-taking is for which leads to the idea of surfacing notes in multiple locations as a means of connecting things. Are notes to right tool for creating connections? Does that make them a means of recording interest in something? Does the internet (and our brains) need more connections in this way?
Unlimited Information Is Transforming Society
Technology is blurring the lines between consumers and producers, amateurs and professionals, and laypeople and experts. We’re just starting to understand the implications. The articles starts by talking about how “the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances”, and talks through some of the big technologies of the last few hundred years (Electricity, nuclear power, space travel) before making it’s point that, “In the past the flow of information was almost entirely one-way, from the newspaper, radio or television to the reader, listener or viewer. Today that flow is increasingly two-way—which was one of Tim Berners-Lee’s primary goals when he created the World Wide Web in 1990.” It concludes rather abruptly with “For better or worse, we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home, between “amateurs” and professionals, and between public and private.”, which seems only obliquely connected to the point that the internet is changing the ways information flows.
It’s interesting that the article talks about information and doesn’t mention data (John C Havens talks about data being the differentiator in changing society that we never had before in The Tech Humanist podcast). Information and data are very different things and conform to different rules, but both are greatly affected by the internet. Perhaps the unifying theme is not so much about what data or information is created but that its usefulness comes in how it flows around systems.
Ben Tossell tweeted: “strong opinions, weekly held is definitely a theme running a startup“. It follows the idea of ‘strong opinions, loosely (or weakly) held, but obviously changes it to suggest that the strong opinions should be changed with regular frequency. Avoiding the obvious issues with assuming that cliches contain insight, its interesting to think about what causes someone to change their mind frequently. If someone changes their mind because they’ve learned something new, we’d probably consider that a good thing, so then underlying this is perhaps something useful about ensuring a sufficient pace of learning so that you could change your opinion frequently and easily.
Work like we used hunt for food
Andrew Ruiz tweeted: “Work is probably the most rewarding if it resembles the way we hunt for food“. Which is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, the only reason that any of us are able to do any work other than hunt, gather and grow food is because civilisation figured out ways to produce enough food. In fact the entire premise of society and its progression is that there is enough food to eat. Secondly, without getting too nostalgic for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the idea of hunting a woolly mammoth involving people working in teams towards a single goal, providing value to their community, celebrating success with a ceremony, etc., starts to sound like our modern ideal of work. And it contrasts with the industrial approach to work.
Notes on Weeknotes
Giles Turnbull wrote some tips on writing good Weeknotes. I particularly liked, “The best way to write weeknotes is as a genuine personal reflection of the week.”, mostly because that’s how I use Weeknotes. I’ve often thought whether I write a blog post about each of the things I include if I didn’t use the format and frequency to prompt me, and although I think I might I don’t think they would have the same self-reflective tone.
What is it? Theory of constraints is an approach to identifying the most important limiting factor (ie constraint) that prevents any system or process from meeting its goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor. Within healthcare systems these constraints may show up as bottlenecks within the process. While the bottleneck is evidence of a constraint, the constraint is usually related to equipment, staff or a policy which is stopping the process from functioning effectively. The link between constraints and bottlenecks is particularly important as a bottleneck determines the pace at which the whole process can work. Just as the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link, the limiting step and its constraint determine the work rate (throughput) of a team, process or hospital. Knowing where the constraints are enables you to focus your improvement efforts and employ specific techniques to increase and maintain throughput.
John C. Havens is Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. He is also executive director of the Council on Extended Intelligence (CXI). He previously served as an EVP at a top-ten global PR firm, where he counseled clients like Gillette, HP, and Merck on emerging and social media issues. John has authored the books Heartificial Intelligence and Hacking Happiness and has been a contributing writer for Mashable, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post. He has been quoted on issues relating to technology, business, and well being by USA Today, Fast Company, BBC News, Mashable, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Forbes, INC, PR Week, and Advertising Age. John was also a professional actor in New York City for over 15 years, appearing in principal roles on Broadway, television, and film.
