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In Chapter 1, we discussed postmortems, where you analyze project failures so that you can do better next time.
In Chapter 1, we also discussed the third story, where you look at conflicts from an objective point of view. You need to use the same point of view when evaluating your own projects.
When starting something new, a good thing to remind yourself is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. It is unlikely that you are the first person in the world who has faced this task, and, with the ubiquity of self-published experts, you are likely to be able to find a website, blog article, or how-to video on almost any topic.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
design pattern, which is a reusable solution to a design problem.
design patterns for startups (how they are commonly financed, managed, etc.), coding (how code is structured, common algorithms, etc.), and biostatistics (common drug trial designs, statistical methods, etc.).
anti-pattern, a seemingly intuitive but actually ineffective “solution” to a common problem that often already has a known, better solution.
Anti-patterns in this chapter include bike-shedding, present bias, and negative returns.
While some amount of planning is always useful, sometimes the most efficient way to finish a task is to dive in quickly and start, rather than getting bogged down in analysis paralysis (see Chapter 2).
Exhaustive searches like this are a type of brute force solution.
Brute force solutions can be effective for many small-scale problems.
A better method than trying every combination at random might be first to try combinations of words from the dictionary, recognizing that people often choose words for passwords.
and words or numbers significant to this particular person, such as related birth dates, sports teams, or initials.
heuristic solution, a trial-and-error solution that is not guaranteed to yield optimal or perfect results, but in many ca...
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Automation like this makes sense when the eventual time and money saved through more efficient processing and possibly better results outweigh the costs of setting it up.
They can afford to pay the large up-front costs to have the biggest factories and warehouses with the most cutting-edge robots and machinery.
parallel processing, in which you solve a group of problems in parallel.
Parallel processing is an example of a divide and conquer strategy. If you can break a problem into independent pieces and hand these pieces out to different parties to solve, you can accomplish more, faster. Think of when you delegate parts of a project to different people or departments to work on.
reframe the problem.
In math and science, problems are often reframed or manipulated into forms that are easier to solve. This is done by taking advantage of already known algorithms and design patterns, transforming the problem into one with a readily usable solution.
Security employees (2016). From brute force to reframing the problem, the mental models in this section can all be used as tactical solutions to help you achieve project success faster.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the
This rise and fall of the dark-colored peppered moth is a showcase of natural selection,
but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
Luckily, science gives us such a mental model for making sure we stay among the “fittest”: the scientific method.
Inertia is a physical object’s resistance to changing its current state of motion.
inertia can describe any resistance to a change in direction.
confirmation bias and related models. This adherence to your beliefs can hamper your adaptability. By questioning your assumptions, you can adapt to new ways of thinking and overcome this personal inertia.
The more inertia you have, the more resistant you will be to changing these beliefs, and the less likely you will be to adapt your thinking when you need
Or that the war on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol that loomed large when we were kids in the 1980s has been completely revised, and now whole milk and eggs are thought to be part of a healthy diet?
A long-term commitment to an organizational strategy creates a lot of inertia toward that strategy.
strategy tax.
For example, in 2017, Apple’s Safari browser introduced a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which attempts to prevent ads from following you around the internet.
Google’s strategy of being the world’s biggest advertising company requires it to pay the tax of not adding significant anti-tracking features to its browser, since doing so would counteract that strategy. Apple does not have to pay this tax since it does not have such a strategy.
As the negative effects of man-made climate change are becoming clearer through increased catastrophic weather incidents, this strategy tax may start to cost politically.
The lesson here is that you should, as much as possible, avoid locking yourself into rigid long-term strategies, as circumstances can rapidly change. What strategy taxes are you currently paying?
Shirky principle,
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which the...
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Think of the stodgy person at your office or school who is always talking about the “way it’s always been done,” constantly anxious about change and new technology.
Inertia in beliefs and behaviors allows entrenched ideas and organizations to persist for long periods of time.
book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!
This model is peak, as in peak sexism, peak Facebook.
More generally, the Lindy effect and peak concepts can help you assess any idea or market opportunity and better predict how it might unfold. Is the market healthy? Has it already reached its peak? How long has it been around?
Momentum is a model that can help you understand how things change.
momentum is the product (multiplication) of mass and velocity, whereas inertia is just a function of mass.
To relate the concept to a real-world example, sending faxes is continually losing momentum. However, the act still has a lot of inertia since the technology is entrenched in many business processes. As a result, the momentum behind sending faxes decreases very slowly.
creating inertia by entrenching beliefs and processes in others is also a high-leverage activity.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Quite simply, to be successful you need your organization’s culture to align with its strategy. As an organizational leader, you must recognize if there is a mismatch and act accordingly.
It takes a lot of effort to get a merry-go-round to start spinning, but once it is spinning, it takes little effort to keep it spinning.
