Monthly Archives: January 2017

FEEDBACK, DESIGNED BY COMMITTEE, FRIEND OR FOE

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In the modern world, with its sense of image, popularity polls and populous mantra; a more primitive relative may observe this behaviour and trend as wishy-washy and indecisive.

Think about the general trend that has become common place, talent shows like Idol, X factor, Voice; shows like Big Brother where people are voted out. Can you say Bah! We follow like sheep, chasing the populous’s approval, hoping it will lead to our goals of increased sales, profit, reduction of wasteful spending.

These shows are a sign of the times, we want to know our profitability before we even start building. Even when built we do trials to tweak or discard prototypes. Feedback has become the double edged sword that can destroy an otherwise perfectly good idea or “hone it to perfection”. All heavily skewed by general knowledge, biases and experiences of the sampled group, dangerous territory for a cutting edge, revolutionary concept or product. The old axiom “the customer doesn’t know what they want, until they see it”, springs to mind.

For the known domain, where the type of product is well established and only slight variation, in either packaging or product is the goal then feedback is definitely the path forward. All the variables are well known or they follow well defined parameters. In this environment feedback enhances, tweaks and maximises but what about more unknown or unexplored environments? What about original thought?

In these more abstract, uncertain, unknown and unexplored conditions experimentation not feedback is the only true viable option.

Let me clarify. Feedback in this context does not include the information gathered by the investigative experimentation from analysis; even though technically results are a type of feedback.

Feedback is considered here as the third party opinions often collected and given even when not asked for. The designed by committee, too many cooks and option paralysis scenarios, most of us have felt it; when the process becomes too process heavy, that forward movement is but an illusion. The end result is often frustration, depression and often listlessness, we are emotionally like sharks and require forward movement to maintain our happiness.

This double edged sword, feedback is seen, even in our everyday lives, in the auto correct functions of word processors, the GPS navigational aids, calculators and even in programming tools to aid the programer. They all have their place and offer improvements in efficiency, yet they also take and undermine.

How many of us have checked to see that auto correct has “corrected” our spelling in an inappropriate manner, hopefully we catch it before we hit the send button.

Calculators are a useful tool, yet we have reduced or lost the ability to do mental arithmetic, in the pursuit for a rapid answer. People now days find it difficult to mentally estimate the total of their shopping, to see if they have enough money to cover it. Without a calculator the modern world stops.

Programming tools are a valuable tool and offer feedback upon our coding options and are often relied upon, for increased speed and guidance. The problem is that it can become a crutch, undermining and slowing the development of coding proficiency. The easy answer given by tools such as this, tempt us into a false sense of ability and takes from us the opportunities of discovering our own techniques and understanding of the code.

My personal favourite would have to be GPS navigation, I hate this one and therefore don’t have it. The course is plotted and locked into your Nav computer and you prefer to do something different, maybe you don’t like U-turns, it’s a very busy intersection, whatever the case, the GPS get almost annoyed offering recalculations again and again, demanding you comply. Then the pinnacle of folly, drivers that drive off cliffs etc by blindly following their GPS tools.

The reliance upon the feedback, given by an ever increasing number of auto correctional tools has resulted in a stifling of human ability for self analysis. The fundamental flaw with feedback mechanisms is that they often suffer from a static and fixed reference point. The coding tools can only give you the options its developers knew. The GPS navigation is only as accurate as its data and does not know your emotional state or wether you hate U turns, you the driver should be in positive control of your vehicle at all times and not defer part of the responsibility to a disembodied voice.

Feedback should never be the sword used to control or influence our direction or outcome, it’s a guide a sounding board. It should be part of the equation but never the solution.

Designed by committee, how many times have we all suffered through this and option paralysis. It all starts as a good idea if we can get a sense of what is required or in what direction we should head, then things will become clear and we will have a greater chance of success. The irony is that when we defer control to external influences we often lose our way. The reason for this is basic, we’re all different so what others may suggest usually doesn’t gel for us.

Feedback should be a guide, a navigational aid for our endeavours.

Unintended or invisible consequences

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Have you ever tried to do a nice thing that went completely pear shaped ? 

Have you ever said something that was taken out of context ?

These are the unforeseen consequences, that surround us every day of our lives. The basic fact is that every interaction is open to misinterpretation. Sounds absurd but I propose it’s painfully true. The fact no one can read your mind or understand precisely what you mean is founded in the variety of life experiences we all have. We all have a “mental rule book” that we inherit/adapt/devise as we live our lives, moulded by our experiences and more importantly, our interpretation and responses to them.

Management and the unintended and invisible consequences

We are a modern culture of goal driven and result focused beings, rushing towards completion. The result is that there is entry level and management and the erosion of the middle.

The loss of the middle
The rush to completion culture, that is modern life, results in an erosion of the middle. Think about it, there is a devaluing and almost loss reflected by the middle layers of our work place and lives. This doesn’t mean that the middle layers don’t exist anymore because they do and if anything there are more of them. What has happened is the middle has expanded all while an erosion of its substance/quality has occurred. The middle has become a waiting room with no intrinsic value, just a place on the way to somewhere else. We are all trying to be/get somewhere else and therefore are focused forward and not in the present. It’s like people who are so busy, thinking of the next thing say, that they actually aren’t listening. They are actually, just frantically scanning /searching for the next sound bite to hang their comments upon. This type of hollowness is symptomatic of the erosion of the middle. This layer has become what I call “fluff” taking up a lot of room but with no real substance. The term busy work, tends to be made for this middle layer. So why has this happened?

Apprentice easy to learn hard to master

I remember buying a backgammon set when I was very young which had an instruction booklet with it. The instructions/rules were rather simple but it ended with this statement “easy to learn but hard to master” this line always resonated with me because I was a moratore’s son and knew that most things are easy to learn but really hard to master. The mastery of a skilled task takes time, time to encounter all possibilities and time to develop responses and reactions to them.

How many of us have learnt things, passed the exams and only years later, does the penny, actualy drop? Only then do we see for the first time what the concepts heart or the true nature of the knowledge was. Maths is littered with these sort of realisations, trigonometry is one.

Trig Wiki
I remember being told by a professor at university, when I was demonstrating and discussing with him how we learn and teach. He replied you only really learn something when you have to teach it, when you first learn anything, it is really just a getting to know you exercise, like a first date. This introduction allows you to pass an examine but really only superficially introduces you to the concepts involved. This initial exposure familiarises you with specific terms and basic concepts, so when you actually need to know and teach that lesson you can find the solution more easily and make it part of you.

The act of learning is greatly enhanced by teaching, why? The answer is simplicity itself. Everyone sees and exists in the world differently, these differences mean that when you learn something and try to understand it, you frame it in familiar and logical steps, for you anyway. When others try to learn and understand the same lesson they will also try to make sense of it according to their life view and understandings. So it’s obvious that when teaching you will find a continuum of how others perceive and try to understand the lesson. Some will think very much like yourself, others slightly differently and still others will need vastly different points of reference to come to terms with and understand the lesson. Good teachers must and can rephrase and explain things in a variety of ways, this necessity is what makes teaching the best way to learn because it stretches us to examine what we “know” from other perspectives and points of view.

The unforeseen consequence of teaching is you learn much more completely. This takes time and understanding.

So why do we rush to “completion” ?
Our modern culture is densely populated with 5 year plans, strategies, expectations, milestones and the list goes on and on. Every minute of every day in our lives is under constant scrutiny both internally and externally. We must develop and attain certain milestones within culturally expected time frames or we seem to be ineffectual or below the curve.

There is no room or time for mastery, we learn and we move on. The modern view is that “the now” is only a stepping stone to a future goal. The worth of the journey seems lost to us and only the allure of promotion and success is our goal. We have become tradesmen, with no patience or will to develop into master craftsmen. Society accepts the passable, to feed instant gratification and speed. The respect and value of craftsmanship and quality has become subservient to efficiency and greed. The attention span of the modern world is framed by sound bites and popularity poles.

Bread and Circus rule the day, with distractions and being seen as cutting edge, objectives in themselves.

Think about your workplace, how many times do we heard “they’ve been in that dead end job for years”, “they have no ambition” these statements maybe true but only partially so. The fact maybe that the worker derives get pleasure and satisfaction in developing their skills beyond acceptable and into the realm of mastery. Yet we don’t acknowledge this, we only see the same person in the same role, and evaluate this as “what is wrong with them?”

The absolute irony I noted while I was working IT, no matter how expert and skilled the programers were they were never “appreciated” as much as management. In fact it was sad to watch true masters of coding, having to become management so they could earn more money and get some appreciation. The actual engine which kept the company in business was devalued because they were content applying their craft. The ironic topper to this observation, was that graduates who had studied coding, just used coding to get a foot into a company, so they could quickly move into the management streams. Does the saying “too many Chiefs and not enough Indians”, spring to mind.

Words of wisdom from my father an old muratore “It takes hardly any extra effort to do a good job than a bad one.” This is very true, when you actually think about it, how much time, effort and money has been flushed down the toilet by bad projects with little or nothing to show for it?

The unforeseen consequence of our modern society is we rush to our goals and loose sight of the reasons and real benefits why we started in the first place.

There seems to be a disconnect between the limbs and the governing body, the brain. The “new talent” needs mentors to help and aid learning of best practises, while the “wiser” and older ones need the vitality of youth to physically accomplish the task and encourage new exploration into possibilities.

Companies are run like the military, chain of command, need to know and follow orders. They should be run as a biological system or organism, where there are feedback systems with more than one way to elicit change, the nervous system for rapid responses (management) and the endocrine system for slower invasive moderation (cultural).