Scott Berkun's Blog, page 70

When is good data impossible?

Was thinking recently about skepticism in small sample sizes. How I always doubt big claims based on scant data.

But what things in life can never have large samples? Some ideas or beliefs will never be shared by many people no matter how useful or right they are.

The scientific method is based in part of repeatability. That an experiment should produce consistent results and that's how we know a discovery is true. But what about things that are true, but are simply hard to repeat? To be provocative, what if perpetual motion is possible, but only once every 100 years? Or if UFOs exist, but they have equipment to ensure they only appear when crazy people with bad cameras are around? Sure, these things are very unlikely, but are impossible to prove.

The lack of data about a premise does not guarantee it isn't true, it only guarantees it hasn't been proven to be true. And my point is, some things that are true will always fall in that gap.

More specific to my half-baked line of inquiry: What situations in life have no possibility for good data, and mandate we make decisions anyway? I think there are more of these situations than we realize.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 01, 2011 14:12

Free Webinar: The Myths of Innovation, live

Thanks to the folks at GoToMeeting, I'll be doing a reprisal of my remixed talk on the Myths of Innovation – stories about sliced bread, the making of star wars, why managers fail at leading creativity, how to take risks and more great stuff. Anyone who works with ideas or manages people who do should tune in.

It's online, it's free, and will be provocative and fun.

When: Thursday, June 9 at 11 AM (PDT) / 2 PM (EDT)

Where: wherever you are

Free registration here

Please help spread the word!

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on June 01, 2011 13:31

The death of death?

Whenever I hear someone say an idea, or a technology, is dead, I sigh. Look at the history of so called dead things and you'll find surprises. Technologies rarely die completely. They fade from popularity and lose respect among elites, but it's surprisingly hard to truly kill anything technical. For niche groups, and specialized problems, things perceived as dead by most can live on forever.

Saying "X is dead" is a trope. It's link bait (and I will hang my head in shame for using the d-word twice in one title, though its perhaps clever enough to earn a pass). Saying "X is dead" signifies a lack of understanding, or a lack of interest in understanding, how the world works.

Alternatively, to having something you've made or done proclaimed as dead, is a hallmark of having been successful. People want to borrow some of your success to draw attention to themselves.

For fun, here are some supposedly dead things that seem to be doing just fine:

Books (written before Kindle)
Blogging
The Web
Web browsers
Cobol
RSS
VHS (ok, this one is a stretch)

What other things, from ideas to technologies to people's careers, have you seen proclaimed dead, yet still live on? Leave a comment.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 27, 2011 12:54

Cynicism is intellectual cowardice (short video of the week)

"I started coming to the conclusion that cynicism is intellectual cowardice. It's basically you not taking the time to deal with what is…"

-Henry Rollins

It's an entertaining and inspiring 3 minute riff, mildly NSFW (language).

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 19, 2011 10:31

Live version: How to write 1000 words (time lapsed video)

Here's (finally) the live version of my Ignite talk on writing, where I give voice commentary over time-lapsed video of me writing an essay about writing:

Below is the first version that was posted (background on how it was made here), just the video plus an audio track I recorded in the safe confines of my own office. Both are worth a listen as the commentary (and vibe) is different:

The actual essay shown in the time-lapsed video can be found here.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 16, 2011 13:21

Comment of the week

A privilege of having a popular blog is sometimes smart people come by and calmly, warmly, without a hint of snark, straighten me out. This post from Ian both identifies all my missteps in an earlier post about design and the 9/11 memorial (where I moronically jumble various contexts and points) and offers a recipe for how I could have more clearly made my point.

Here's Ian's comment:

It seems like the argument here rests on a couple of ideas:

1) The concept of name adjacencies on the memorial is a weak concept.

2) The memorial was delayed because of the difficulty of executing this concept.

And the conclusion is that because it's a weak concept, it wasn't worth delaying the memorial.

The first is your opinion, which of course you're entitled to. I have no way of disproving it, but if you do a search for '9/11 names' on Twitter you'll find a lot of people declaring themselves very moved by it, for example Linda Tischler of Fast Company saying it was the only press briefing that she's ever cried at. Again, just opinions.

The second premise is something that the NYer article could certainly lead you to believe, but really when you look at the overall project, the names arrangement was a smallish part of the overall complexity of the memorial and had no effect on delaying its construction. Consider that the memorials are waterfalls, each the size of the footprint of the WTC towers, and they are built on top of a 120,000 sqft museum.

I think this problem with this post is that it's trying to make a general point about project management, most likely in the context of software given your bent, but fails to take into account what this thing is. It's not a website. It's a permanent memorial to one of the greatest tragedies ever occurring on U.S. soil. It will become a part of the city and if the city is still there in 100 years, so will the memorial. It was worth it I think to go beyond a purely functional organization of the name and try to express something that makes the memorial more moving. If being moving isn't the core requirement of a memorial, I don't know what is.

My response is here.

Thanks Ian.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 11, 2011 15:08

Open letter to college graduates

Dear college graduates:

I will share what no one told me when I graduated: live for yourself. Do not make life choices based on what parents, girlfriends or buddies will judge you for doing or not doing. Be wary of people who tell you about regrets – they are projecting theirs onto you.

Eventually you may find living for yourself hinges on living with and for others, but you'll need to live for yourself first to find that out. Spend an hour a day believing nothing – it will be good for you. Some of the best things about college are what you unlearn.

Make bets. For every day since you entered kindergarten there have been safe choices waiting for you. Go to elementary school. Go to high school. Go to college. You've done all the safe choices already. Don't die with a headstone that merely says "was safe". Make some bets. Expect to lose some, and be open to surprise about which ones. Your profit in all outcomes will be to figure out who you are. If you were good at playing it safe, your mistakes and failures will be the first things in your life that are truly your own.

Move. Escape your house / town / state / country for a time. Every year that goes by in a career makes it harder to ever wander again. Work as hard as you have to, doing shit jobs, if it lets you get out of your hometown. See something else. Don't complain about your old stomping ground as if it were the world. You're still a kid – go see something before you decide anything. If you go somewhere you hate, you can always move somewhere else. That's the upside of learning how to move.

Stay in touch. The surprise of my degree was the people I met – my education could have been obtained elsewhere, but the collection of insane and wonderful people I met would be hard to replicate, many of whom I'm friends with today. Had I been less of a fool, I'd have stayed connected to more of them. Don't be shallow – don't use people. But do stay connected with the people you have bonds with. You'll lose most, but you can help pick which ones you'll keep.

Accept the Paradox. The confusion you feel about what to do or where to go may never leave you, and that's ok. Don't wait around expecting it to resolve itself. Graduation does not guarantee clarity. Most people twice your age don't know what to do with their lives either – why believe you should have it all figured out now? Certainly try, but know the odds. Make commitments and work for goals, but never believe their utility is persistent or guaranteed.

Believe in work. All things equal, those who put more in, get more out. If you can't 'find the job you want, make it. Do it for free, and do it better, and you'll find someone who will hire you. It may not be easy to get what you want, but if you swallow your pride and put in more passion than the slackers, you'll be rewarded. Not by the universe, but by your self-respect.

Best wishes.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 11, 2011 13:40

Movie Review: Winters Bone

There's something captivating about movies where you don't know all the rules, but care to stick around to find out. This is why I like some foreign films, the ones that aren't too weird, in that they grab your attention and mind in ways American films rarely do. They are actual artifacts of drama, instead of exercises in "guess which cliché will happen next".

Winter's bone is about a young woman in Missouri who, to save her family, has to take on many hardships and risks. And at its core as a quest driven narrative it works well. But what makes the movie so engaging is how it captures the sense of a place, and a people. All of the characters feel like a part of the world being filmed (and it turns out, many of them are locals), and there's a patience to the dialog and the plotting that lets the fears of this world, and the questionable nature of the characters, stand in relief.

It's not an easy film to watch – but it is a fantastic and heroic film.

Watch on Netflix, imdb listing here.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 11, 2011 09:05

Believe nothing

My favorite Buddha quote, in honor of his birthday:

Believe nothing,

no matter where you read it,

or who has said it,

not even if I have said it,

unless it agrees with your own reason

and your own common sense.

Buddha

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 10, 2011 16:40

How to ruin a design: the 9/11 Memorial

I rarely use the word requirement – it's a weenie word. But I know if you royally screw up requirements, regardless of what you call them, no designer's power can save you. Case in point: this story about the design of the 9/11 Memorial in NYC.

The specific problem in question was how to organize the names of all those who died:

In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg… suggested that people be loosely grouped according to their location that day. And so Arad [the architect] created nine categories. Around the south pool, he'd list everyone who died in the South Tower and at the Pentagon, along with the first responders and the passengers on Flights 175, 77, and 93. Around the north pool would be those who died in the North Tower and on the plane that crashed into it, along with the six who died in the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993.

As is often the case, it's an executive who issues the problematic requirement, unchallenged by more practical minds, that sends the project into a tailspin.

Chronological is what worked well for the Vietnam memorial (and many others). But they passed on that. So alphabetical perhaps? Noooooo. Too easy. Perhaps by specific incident (Tower 1, Tower 2, Pentagon, etc.)? That's where they started, but that was too simple - here's what they did instead:

But how to group these? Arad and Daniels settled on the idea of a distribution that would seem random, reflecting the chaotic and arbitrary nature of the event itself, but that would have some kind of underlying logic, reflecting the bonds that preceded or came of it. "One of the biggest messages of the memorial and the museum is that the people who got up and did whatever they did that morning, and then died doing it, were no different from the rest of us," Daniels said. "They were us, we are them." In 2009, the foundation sent out letters to the victims' families, soliciting "meaningful adjacencies"—that is, the names of others with whom each victim should be listed.

Random, as a goal? Really? And getting everyone involved in creating requirements? Can you see where this is going?

By the end of that year, the foundation had received twelve hundred requests for adjacencies (and these didn't include the self-contained adjacencies, such as, say, Ladder Company 7 or Cantor Fitzgerald, which, with six hundred and fifty-eight names, represented the biggest, and most challenging, adjacency block of them all) The reasons for these requests were varied. Sometimes the victims were cohorts, or best friends. In other cases, the families knew, from last phone calls, whom their loved ones had been with in the end—in an elevator, on a ledge—and wanted those people listed together. A same-sex couple and their three-year-old son all perished on Flight 175; their names, certainly, belonged together.

These are moving stories of course. And stories that should be shared. But why did these stories need to define the design of something as simple as a name list? On a project that's been delayed for nearly a decade? Every other war memorial in the history, including the great ones, didn't need to go this far.

At this point it was probably too late to simplify, as all the victims had already made their requests. How could they be turned away? But as any good designer knows, if it's this hard to figure out or explain, odds are no one who visits the place will make sense of it either. But they pressed on:

At a certain point, the foundation recognized that this job could use the assistance of a computer. Even so, the first few computer scientists and statisticians the foundation got in touch with said that it couldn't be done. "It really did seem insurmountable," Daniels recalled. But then his chief of staff called Jake Barton, the principal at the media-design firm Local Projects, who took on the assignment, and, with a data artist named Jer Thorp, designed an algorithm that could sort the names in keeping with all the overlapping requests. Before long, they had a distribution designed to please everyone, including Arad.

I'm certain many families would be better honored by finishing the memorial sooner, and making it a welcoming and calming place for all visitors, rather than the micro details of how exactly names are grouped, or not.

I haven't seen the latest plans for the complete memorial, and I admit the entire experience is unlikely to be ruined by this small set of issues. But I'm also confident the time spent overthinking the list of names earned much more effort than it was worth.

Requirements is a maligned word among designers, but for anyone who sees my point – pick up a copy of the wonderfully potent Exploring Requirements by Weinberg. It will forever improve how you think about problems, designs and working with clients through them both. Had Bloomberg or Arad read it, it would have saved all the victims and NYC much wasted time.

View more on Scott Berkun's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on May 10, 2011 09:05

Scott Berkun's Blog, page 70

June 1, 2011

May 27, 2011

May 19, 2011

May 16, 2011

May 11, 2011

May 10, 2011