On knowing when you're finished.

I wrote a post for the UC blog this week about something that I've been mulling over for a while. Fenske told us once in grad school that knowing when our work was done was as valuable a skill as the specialized crafts we were learning over those sixty weeks. This wisdom popped into my head a few months ago, when I was up late working on my first proposal and was plagued by self doubt. Instead of continuing to stay up all night, tweaking and re-reading and comparing it to past proposals written by the peers that I look up to so much, I made a decision that it was ready to send in its current form, and went to sleep. So here it is on the site, and cross-posted below.

I recently co-ran workshops at a couple of graduate schools in Stockholm. At the end of one of the sessions, a series of questions from the students evolved into one of the themes of the day: Knowing when your work is finished is one of the most valuable skills.

This was very helpful wisdom to hear as a student several years ago, and it’s important for everyone in the strategy world to take to heart. Because intellectual labor is intangible and expansive – and strategy is about making things without a defined “right answer” – we can get trapped in a cycle of perfectionism and hesitancy. Knowing and deciding when your work is ready is a powerful way to avoid being paralyzed by ideas staying in our heads for too long.

Opbeat’s much-shared F**k It, Ship It image encourages the same behavior – stop worrying about failure and learn to love the Launch button – but comes from a different place. Deciding and trusting when something is ready, rather than resigning yourself to the fact that there are dozens of additional things you could add to your work, is a powerful choice that requires skill, understanding of your own mastery of the subject matter, and an ability to pull yourself out of the storm of self-doubt that can prevent you from seeing the work from a higher, objective level. Deciding when your work is done isn’t easy, so here are four ways to help frame things.

1. Know your skill level, and tweak your judgment accordingly.
I wrote my first ever strategy document in 2004. I rewrote it 15 times before it was finished. There is a starting point in any craft in which you’re learning, and it’s sometimes necessary to do things many times to grok the craft and learn how you do your best work. The more mastery you have over the thing you’re making, the easier it is to pull yourself out of the weeds and realize when you’ve got it. But even if you don’t have the sufficient hours behind you, you can use your understanding of the context, time constraints (more on this next), and audience to make decisions within the parameters you are given.

2. Use your time wisely.
However much time you have to do something, it will take that much time. Because project scopes vary greatly and you don’t always get to choose how long you spend on certain things, you have to let your skills in the subject matter inform the intensity you put into the work, based on how much time you actually have. Let’s use the example of audience research. Over the past year, we have worked on projects with three-week research work streams (the most fun), and ones with three-day research work streams. With only three days to learn about a group of people on the Internet, you don’t have the luxury of getting lost down a bunch of rabbit holes. So, you force yourself to see behavioral patterns, motivations, and archetypes more quickly, and decide when you have an intuitive grasp of that group online – supplemented with all of your existing knowledge, of course. The result will be something that is appropriate for that project.

3. Resist the paint war.
A high school art teacher once described a dangerous tipping point in paint mixing. When you keep adding more and more of each color to get the perfect shade, eventually you end up with a muddy brown-gray mess – and you’ve wasted a whole lot of paint. When you stay up all night pushing pixels around until 4AM, or trying to cram every interesting link and quote you found in your research into a deck, you can get into a never-ending cycle that increasingly binds you to the work itself rather than your mastery of the material. When you have sufficient comfort with your process and your craft, eventually you recognize the point at which you’re good to go – you have made yourself a miniature expert in that one area and can riff on it freely. Conan O’Brien put this advice perfectly in his Guide To Creativity in Fast Company last year:

My formula has always been I’m big on preparing. Prepare like crazy. But then just as you’re heading out, half an hour beforehand, forget all of it. It’s there. It’s in your reptile brain. Go out but feel loose enough to grab opportunities as they come up.

4. Remind yourself that the Internet is never finished.
Like a city, the Internet is a dynamic and ever-evolving place that is forever being built upon and modified – there will always be things you can do to improve something. The Internet as a whole has gotten more keen on this reality, which is why we don’t use “Under Construction” banners on our sites anymore. Similarly, with strategy we don’t ever want our work to be the last thing, but rather a contributing factor along the way – a starting point rather than end point, to frame and begin conversations. Keeping this in mind will make it easier to put a stake in the ground about what the end of this project looks like, and in turn where to start the next iteration.

Perceived Disconnection & The Three Versions Of Out-Of-Office

A little while ago, I was horrified to realize that I had not taken a proper, off-the-grid vacation in around three and a half years. So I did – I took a four-day weekend with Mister Cellar Door, and we drove to Montreal. On the way, I deleted my Inbox from my phone, turned on a minimal data package, and proceeded to eat poutine, drink absinthe, stumble through toddler-level French, and finally meet Julie after six years of being pen pals. The entire experience was awesome, and I wrote this little thing the night after I got back. It originally went out as one of our weekly newsletters at Undercurrent (sign up at the bottom of the post on our site if you like digital musings).

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Sociology grad student Nathan Jurgenson recently spurred interesting debate with a post at The New Inquiry called “The IRL Fetish.” As the title suggests, Jurgenson approaches the verve with which people celebrate disconnecting, unplugging, and going offline. The romanticization of being offline – of trading MP3s for vinyl, email for letter writing, and wearing a weekend tech sabbatical as a badge of honor (and later tweeting about it) – has been a recurring topic as the tools for digital communication have accelerated and become more widespread.

The IRL Fetish puts a new perspective on things, though, and argues that there is no such thing as being either online or offline – the two are intrinsically intertwined. As The Verge wrote in their discussion of the piece:

…Offline interactions are precisely what drives the churn of information on networks like Facebook, and that the internet actually allows us to appreciate the real world in a way we would have taken for granted before. The next time you’re hiking up a mountain, relieved to be free from the constant chiming of email notifications? You couldn’t get that feeling without an email account.

These distinctions between online and offline, between between being plugged-in and being unplugged, have weighed on me somewhat as I prepared for vacation. Six months ago, I was introduced to three versions of being “out-of-office” at Undercurrent:

1. You are out of the office, but still working – from home, a coffee shop, across an ocean, take your pick;
2. You are out of the office/on vacation, but still “connected” – regularly checking and responding to emails;
3. You are out of the office/on vacation, and completely off the grid.

Because we have no official vacation policy, we are encouraged to decide which version of out-of-office we want to be, and to plan accordingly – give enough notice, delegate responsibilities to teammates, notify clients, and set an appropriate auto-responder email.

Once upon a time, there were only two versions of being out-of-office – you were either working from home (or traveling to be with a client), or you were on vacation. And when you were on vacation, you were generally unreachable except via bat phone if something went seriously wrong. Being out-of-office and on vacation but still “online” is a more recent development – a hybrid option of these two states – and it is arguably the most tricky to navigate since the out-of-officer exists in a sort of limbo state, both actively thinking about work and not at the same time.

This limbo state can be experienced not only while on vacation, but during the weekend when days spent brunching with friends or visiting a museum will be punctuated by the buzz of an email (because someone will always be emailing on a Sunday). Having true “balance” of work and life these days is harder to achieve than ever, because more and more, “taking time off yet on email” seems to be the easiest mode to slip into – even if you are trying to enjoy option 3 and going “off the grid,” you will still be thinking about how full your Inbox is getting.

In the end, these three tiers of being out-of-office are functionally practical and reflective of the contemporary realities of doing business. Several studies have explored technology’s effects on the expectation of instant gratification, and managing those expectations is critical in preventing misunderstandings and generally keeping things moving while you’re away.

But setting your own personal expectations and acting accordingly in turn could mean the difference between rerouting an email while sitting on a hill, and taking in the full experience of watching a foreign city buzz from a spectacular view over a long weekend. Sure, we will not psychologically be able to be truly “offline” anymore. But we, for the well-being of everyone here, enthusiastically encourage its analog – deleting the Inbox from your phone from time to time and making the decision to return later.

Self-Interest And Collaborative Systems

Something else I wrote ended up on the Undercurrent blog today; this is something I've been working on at varying levels of intensity for months and months. I'll save the whole story for a bit later, so here it is: Self-Interest And Collaborative Systems.

I'm pasting the body below, so a little preview before you dive into one of the longer things I've written: Driving a car is a hassle for a lot of reasons – more and more cars for limited road capacity is one of the big ones. Congestion can lead to a lot of frustration, feelings of isolation (which is interesting since driving is a communal activity), and selfish behavior (cutting people off, not letting other cars merge into your lane, running red lights, rubbernecking at accidents, etc). I explore how different forms of digital in transportation can be used and combined with other things to lower selfish behavior and encourage drivers to be more collaborative on the road. Traffic is a system, after all, and one selfish move can throw ripples of inefficiency throughout the entire thing. Interested? Read on!

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The increase in the number of cars on the road over the past few decades has created headaches for everyone, from drivers to transportation planners and law enforcement. Advances in digital technology over the past several years, however, have made driving in some places less of a pain. For instance, digital signage on busy roads can alert drivers of alternate routes if there is an accident up ahead. Automakers have been working on Adaptive Cruise Control technology to help regulate your car’s speed in relation to the ones around you. GPS systems now plan your routes based on real time traffic data pulled from sensors, news stations, and other drivers over time.

But a well connected network is only part of the solution to chronic traffic issues. For the past few years, drivers have been using tools that largely focus on making each individual user’s life easier, when we really need to be moving toward innovation designed to make the system as a whole more efficient. And for this to fully work, people must then learn to use new technologies in less self-interested (and more responsible) ways.

PEOPLE AREN’T PROGRAMMED TO COLLABORATE IN ANY UNORGANIZED SYSTEM

From driving to work to standing in line at the store, people don’t tend to think of themselves as part of a system when they make decisions. Everyone has an agenda when they’re on the road, and different individual factors – personal speed preferences, schedules, and desired destinations – contribute to the fact that drivers largely act in their own self-interest. Personal agendas are compounded by the fact that, despite being a communal activity, being stuck in traffic can feel very isolating – everyone is alone in their own vehicles. This lowers their perceived proximity to (and empathy for) each other even more. What results is a transit version of the tragedy of the commons, and yields the opposite of what drivers are working toward – each person reacts to the unpredictable and selfish behavior of others near them, which, like dominoes, sends ripples throughout the entire system that lead to more delays and frustration over time.

Why do systems that transport things other than people run more smoothly? With fiber optic networks, for example, light is sent down a tube at different frequencies, and (like traffic) all of these pulses of light travel at different speeds. The difference here is that each of these pulses never goes at any other speed. When you design a fiber optic network, you can account for all of these predetermined differences, and everything will keep running smoothly. Humans are not pulses of light sent down a fiber optic tube, and are not programmed to interact with each other in predetermined ways (or drive at a constant speed at all times). But small digital steps can be taken to help drivers understand their role in a larger system, and encourage them to collaborate a little more with each other to help everything flow better than it does now.

GROWING OUR SYSTEM AWARENESS

The first step in increasing collaboration between people in a system is to help them understand that they are, in fact, part of one. The Spectrum of System Awareness below broadly outlines the different levels of understanding that one is part of a bigger network of people. A person acting in completely self-interested ways is at the very center (A) – they are going to get to their destination no matter what, other drivers be damned.

The next ring (B) represents a broader awareness to include people in one’s immediate vicinity – in front of and behind them, and on either side. People at this level may exhibit some degree of collaboration with the drivers around them – they will switch lanes if they see the person behind them is driving faster, for instance.

Drivers at the third ring (C) have an awareness of everyone else on the road, and while they might not think expressly that they are “all in this together,” they do tend to think about their actions invariably affecting everyone else.

People at the fourth ring (D) are the holy grail for a truly collaborative human system – they have a full understanding of the fact that they are part of a system that necessitates collaboration between all participants to run well.

The farther out from the center someone is, the more they realize that the whole (traffic) is greater than the sum of its parts (each driver), and the higher their likelihood of understanding the benefits of collaboration. Rather than trying to get everyone on the road to level D at the same time (which is unrealistic), the goal for automakers, technology companies, software developers and transportation planners should be to keep all of the levels in mind when designing new technology and experiences – this will ensure that there are tools in place to broaden everyone’s degree of system awareness, organically. Real-time reporting and feedback loops are two of the most straightforward ways to give people more awareness of the system they are part of, their position in it, and the effects of their actions on it as it is changing.

Real-Time Reporting– Traffic reporting is not new, but it has traditionally happened on a mass, one-to-everyone scale within cities (usually via the radio). Since digital technology has afforded us the option to slice content to make it more relevant and personalized to us, we have some interesting opportunities to zoom in a little and put real-time information into a more personal context.

Feedback Loops– You’ve probably heard of the kind of sensor technology that gives cars awareness of their immediate surroundings: cameras to help you parallel park better, or alert you when you’re getting too close to another car. A Volvo concept car debuted a new form of sensor at the Shanghai Motor Show last year: touch screen dashboard controls are embedded with eye tracking technology, and are only activated when you glance at the screen.

What if sensors and behavioral tracking (think Prius’s consumption monitor) were combined? Layering both external and behavioral reporting together make understanding one’s place in the broader system much easier. Imagine a combination of sensors that tracks your driving behavior and its effects on the cars in your immediate vicinity. Or, combine real time traffic data with Volvo’s eye tracking technology, allowing you to know if you’re rubber necking too much at accident scenes, or constantly scanning your surroundings for a chance to pass everyone.

Either of these Frankensteined combinations of software and hardware can accumulate information about your own behavior, resulting in a report that tells you how much time you wasted by passing 4 cars and stalling at a traffic light over the course of your 20-mile trip. It could also tell you how much your actions delayed everyone else’s trip, and that 60% of people in your town drive better than you, on average. Reports on the effects of one’s driving behavior on the entire traffic system over time – framed in a personally-relevant context – would eventually give people a higher-level awareness of the ramifications of their actions.

FACILITATING COLLABORATION

How do we now encourage more collaborative behavior on the road? One way to do this is through a marriage of unconscious and conscious behavior change techniques.

Unconscious Collaboration
Unconscious collaboration results from a system using behavioral guides to influence how people act in relation to each other. The stoplights on highway on-ramps that seem to randomly alternate between red and green are called ramp meters, and they use real-time traffic information to regulate the vehicles entering a highway. Most drivers don’t realize that this guide changes based on current traffic conditions, or that they have been helping traffic as a whole flow better for nearly 50 years.

Conscious Collaboration
Getting people to consciously collaborate with each other is obviously trickier. Revisiting feedback loops: More than just receiving spoken turn-by-turn directions, drivers with certain GPS systems can now benefit from the integration of real-time traffic reports with detour features and rerouting suggestions. If the real-time tracking technology that makes ramp meters work connected with GPS systems, a driver’s Garmin could help them (and their fellow drivers) better navigate their surroundings smoothly by making contextual recommendations. Smarter, more-connected GPS systems could provide directions such as “Based on the traffic ahead of you, you will get to dinner 5 minutes faster if you stay in this lane and drive 5mph slower.”

Balanced Collaboration
Unconscious and conscious collaboration should not be looked at separately – a combination of smart behavioral guides and educational behavioral recommendations is the ideal.

Small digital steps can be taken to help drivers understand their role in a larger system, and encourage them to collaborate a little more with each other to help everything flow better than it does now.

Let’s combine our previous two examples together. Someone leaves their house to meet their friend for dinner, and punches the restaurant’s address into his dashboard (or mobile app) when he turns his car on. The car takes both traffic reports and information about other cars’ destinations into account when giving that evening’s driving directions. The car is also outfitted with proximity-based sensor technology – like Ford’s Adaptive Cruise Control – to regulate his speed when he’s actually on the road. The driver’s mind is operating on both the unconscious and conscious level – he realizes he is being directed along a route that makes his car “work with” all of the other drivers in traffic that day, but may not realize how much more efficient his regulated speed is actually making him and everyone else on the road. Over time, he might consciously make the decision to tone down his self-interested behavior and help the system run more efficiently.

On rating systems

I wrote something with Josh on the Undercurrent.com blog today, and wanted to share: Trust, Complexity, And The 5-Star Rating.

It was inspired by a meandering conversation two weeks ago – this post on five-star ratings and Yelp had been sent around the office, and the following morning Sam, Joe, Mark, Josh and I met up over coffee to talk about it. The basic gist of our post is that it's difficult to compare rating sites (Yelp and Netflix, for example) to each other like apples to apples, because a lot of things affect people's relationships with them – who the intended audience is, what the thing-in-question being rated is, how sophisticated the recommendation algorithm is, what the user base is like, etc. The two hypotheses we single out are:

1. The primary user benefit of a rating system affects our motivations to rate and review, our rating behavior, and our perception of the aggregate ratings (and the collective who contributed them).

2. The level of trust people place in an aggregate rating system is determined by the cohesiveness of the community and the sophistication of the recommendation engine.

We had a third hypothesis down, but it for various reasons got cut from the final post. But I still love and believe it! So here it is – a "deleted scene," so to speak.

3. The higher the opportunity cost associated with an experience, the more complex the rating system should be.

The more involved the action is, and the greater the cost of the experience, the more complex the rating system for it should be built. For example: Stopping a bad movie and choosing another from Netflix’s Instant Watch catalogue can be done from the comfort of your couch. All this costs is some time (and maybe a little bit of annoyance). The costs associated with going out to eat are much higher – transit (time and financial), wait times, crowds, weather, interacting with staff, and paying for the food. Even more so if the experience sucks and you have to head to another restaurant. Even in a city with a multitude of bars, the opportunity cost of looking for a dance party in Manhattan on a Saturday night is much higher than that of renting a video from Netflix (either by disc or streaming). So a recommendation site's algorithm should not just be as sophisticated like one like Netflix's is – it should be better! Take more things into account, weigh by different variables, triangulate information from a variety of sources, etc. (This is actually related to another post I've had swimming around in my mind about the best hybrid of all going-out-to-eat planning sites; maybe I'll write it up this week).

If you want to read more about all of this, read Trust, Complexity, And The 5-Star Rating and let us know what you think! Any other things you can think of that make no-two-rating-systems-created-equal?

If you're curious:
Rating Systems and Personal Rules by Noah a few years ago
Horsehead Nebula on Wikipedia (from our post image)