Tag: strategy

Scout before you accept: what SpaceTraders contracts taught me about economics

Notes on evaluating SpaceTraders PROCUREMENT contracts by economics instead of taking them on faith.

3 Horizons

From Three Horizons, The Patterning of Hope , by Bill Sharpe Horizon 1: The status quo. The current, dominant business or system, which should be maintained and improved. Horizon 2: The transition zone. The contested space where innovations are…

Why an AI centre, and why now

The case for shared AI infrastructure at the university.

The third horizon of human-centred approaches

The way we work as human-centred practitioners needs to change. From its beginnings as an engineering technique, through its transition to being a product design tool, user experience now needs to be adopted as a strategic approach.

Think about the game theory of coalitions

If there’s a coalition, think about the game theory. Who is participating, and why? Who would defect, and why?

Playing to your outs

"Playing to your outs" is a term from poker by way of Magic The Gathering. The idea is, when you're bound to lose, you gotta stop making sensible plays. Instead, you must identify a specific card or sequence that could still win you the…

What, so what, now what

Driscoll's model of reflection (Driscoll, 1994): What? So what? Now what? Often used by the intelligence community to structure briefings. Good heuristic for generalized problem solving .

R&D is two jobs, and research doesn't run on autopilot

Research figures out what good looks like. Development executes against a known good. The trap is the work in between.

Software that gets distributed to every employee trends toward commodity

Put another way: commodity work breeds commodity software. This is why suites emerge (Office suite). They are lowest-common-denominator, but everything works together. Exception: software for teams that drive direct business value. If a product…

I counted nine kinds of agents

The word "agent" is doing too much work. A rough map helps.

An Early look on what's to come

Early roadmaps for my working projects and establishing flows

KCS and Technical Writing

Alternatives to Product Managers

When data is bad, use simple models

Simple models outperform complex models when data is bad or sparse. Simple models work better in VUCA environments. From the SFI Podcast Apr 6, 2020 , discussing Jurgen Jost and Luu Hoang's paper on making the most of bad data : When data is really…

Write the press release

Amazon.com has a product development process they call Working Backwards . Rather than starting from an idea or a technology, you start by writing the press release for the product. The target audience is the customer. The press release is…

VUCA

We live in a networked world, a world governed by asymmetry, feedback loops , and power laws . The US Army and Navy War College has an acronym for this kind of world: VUCA . Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous

Slowly, then all at once

How complex systems fail: slowly, then all at once. All complex sytems are full of non-linear feedback loops . In a healthy complex system, these will have balancing feedback loops, holding each other in dynamic equilibrium. Given a small…

Places to intervene in a system

From Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System , by Donella Meadows: PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM (in increasing order of effectiveness) Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards). The sizes of buffers and other…

Manifesto

Manifestos are statements of absolute belief. They offer no provision for measuring outcomes and course-correcting. Manifestos can't change their mind. A manifesto is a feed-forward system .

Job-to-be-done

Job-to-be-done theory is part of Clayton Christensen 's thinking framework for investigating Disruption Theory . Rather than thinking in product categories and market segments, ask what is the job the customer is hiring this product to do ? A…

Gimmick Book

Pulp sci-fi author Alfred Bester kept a book of storytelling tricks . All I ever wanted was to be a great storytelling pitchman, which is why I collected the tricky devices and means which are entered in this Gimmick Book. Why? Back in the 18th and…

Generalized problem solving

Stanley Kubrick: "develop a generalized method of solving problems". I think that if you get involved in any kind of problem-solving in depth, on almost anything, it's surprisingly similar to problem-solving on anything. I started out by…

Cross-impact analysis

Used in the analysis and deciding phase of scenario planning . Cross-impact analysis (CIA) is a foresight methodology to map interrelationships between a set of scenarios/trends/factors to assess their potential combined impact. It uses a matrix to…

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations

Alfred North Whitehead : Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. And: Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number,…

Thinking Strategically About Documentation

The Strategy Layer: Why the Best Creative Work Doesn't Happen in Silos

Strategy decks get approved then tossed over a wall. Here's how overlapping strategy, creative, and production from day one makes work sharper and faster.

Where Your Video Money Really Goes: 400+ Real Budgets Analyzed

Analysis of 400+ real video budgets reveals the 70/30 rule, hidden costs that blow budgets, and how multi-asset strategies cut per-video costs dramatically.

Strategists audit for progress

Goodhart's law

Goodhart's Law : When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart's Law applies to feedback system with humans in the loop . It does not apply to feed-forward systems. Any system including people is a kind of feedback…

Measure it

Two rules of thumb, seemingly in tension: What's measured gets optimized Goodhart's law : when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Just because you can measure it doesn't make it important. We tend to measure what is…

Amara's Law

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Why? According to Clark's 3 laws , failure of nerve and failure of imagination.

Wars of the Juriels

As a learning experience, I have started building a turn-based strategy game based on Ilandrior.

Lindy effect

The Lindy Effect posits that the lifespan of an idea is about 2x as long as it is old. If the story of Beowulf has been told for about 1000 years, we can expect it to be told for 1000 more. Unlike mortals and machines, ideas don't wear out with…

4 ways to augment thought

In Augmenting the Human Intellect , Doug Engelbart identifies 4 places where thinking can be augmented: Artifacts — tools for manipulating materials and symbols. Language — symbols we assign to concepts, allowing us to manipulate concepts at higher…

OODA loop

Observe Orient Decide Act A strategic thinking framework developed by Colonel John Boyd, USAF. Since the theater of war is constantly changing, OODA treats decision-making as a control theory problem. You're constantly measuring and readjusting to…

Conformability

Looking through the lens of conformability means looking at what isn't changing, and asking how you can tailor your product/service/technology to conform to that landscape. What changes slowly? Our fundamental needs — food, water, shelter, energy.…

Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping is the process of getting better at getting better . Things that bootstrap exhibit exponential improvement . Doug Engelbart coined the term bootstrapping to describe the strategy at his Augmentation Research Center , of focusing on…

Tools over technique

The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. —Brian Eno The extent to which technique is a defensive moat is the extent to which human expression is being limited by…

Be approximately right

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. (John W Turkey) Consider the value of an answer along 2 axes: accuracy and precision . High…

Modularize later

A principle from The Innovator's Dilemma . An innovation always starts out integrated, and is modularized later. The boundaries of modularization matter. An object can be sliced in an infinite number of ways. What is important is that you slice…

Games with more than one player

Every game with more than one player becomes a game about the interactions between those players. Also: Provoking emergence , Villain, team, system .

Gall's Law

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. –…

Design patterns

Design patterns are the solutions that have survived natural selection. Somewhere between folklore and formalism, they point out the pivot points on problems. Design patterns are unreasonably effective. They give you leverage even if you don't…

Value, scale, time

Community gardens, time banks, credit unions, etc are small, but they're economic institutions that are resilient, sustainable, ppl-centered — Mai Sutton (@maira) August 17, 2016 Often, we associate impact with bigness, speed: large-scale…

100 Users

One of the most interesting ideas at Parc was: “every invention has to be engineered for 100 users”. So if you do a programming language or a DTP word processor, etc, it has to be documented for and usable by 100 people. If you make a personal…