Category: Uncategorized

If you feel that you’re buried in management crap that is getting in the way of you doing your work, why not secretly send your managers this article from Fast Company – a miracle might happen and some of them might feel that moment of zen:
“‘People who join Toyota from other companies, it’s a big shift for them,” says John Shook, a faculty member at the University of Michigan, a former Toyota manufacturing employee and a widely regarded consultant on how to use Toyota’s ideas at other companies. “They kind of don’t get it for a while.’ They do what all American managers do–they keep trying to make their management objectives. ‘They’re moving forward, they’re improving, and they’re looking for a plateau. As long as you’re looking for that plateau,it seems like a constant struggle. It’s difficult. If you’re looking for a plateau, you’re going to be frustrated. There is no ‘solution.”
Even working at Toyota, you need that moment of Zen.
‘Once you realize that it’s the process itself–that you’re not seeking a plateau–you can relax. Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing,” Shook says. “This is what it means to come to work.'”

I was taken by surprise today when I came across an obituary of Clifford Geertz. While I only knew him through his writing, the news felt like the death of an old friend. Hurrying to google I rediscovered a lecture he gave in 1999, “A Life of Learning”. As it turns out it is as good a memorial to a life well lived as anyone could have written. I include its beginning and end as a taster and urge you to read the bits between:
“It is a shaking business to stand up in public toward the end of an improvised life and call it learned. I didn’t realise, when I started out, after an isolate childhood, to see what might be going on elsewhere in the world, that there would be a final exam. I suppose that what I have been doing all these years is piling up learning. But, at the time, it seemed to me that I was trying to figure out what to do next, and hold off a reckoning: reviewing the situation, scouting out the possibilities, evading the consequences, thinking through the thing again. You don’t arrive at many conclusions that way, or not any that you hold to for very long, so summing it all up before God and Everybody is a bit of a humbug. A lot of people don’t quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don’t even know, for certain, where I have been. But, all right already. I’ve tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman.”
“I am, as I imagine you can tell from what I’ve been saying, and the speed at which I have been saying it, not terribly good at waiting, and I will probably turn out not to handle it at all well. As my friends and co-conspirators age and depart what Stevens called “this vast inelegance,” and I, myself, stiffen and grow uncited, I shall surely be tempted to intervene and set things right yet once more. But that, doubtless, will prove unavailing, and quite possibly comic. Nothing so ill-befits a scholarly life as the struggle not to leave it, and—Frost, this time, not Hopkins—”no memory of having starred/can keep the end from being hard.” But for the moment, I am pleased to have been given this chance to contrive my own fable and plead my own case before the necrologists get at me. No one should take what I have been doing here as anything more than that.”

Gill Wildman of Plot and Chris Downs of live/work make an energetic and thoughtful case for Service innovation design in a conversation with GK VanPatter, Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute. Well worth a read in full.
To give you a taste, here is a snippet from Gill:
“Service innovation design encourages you to take a genuinely people-centered, empathetic approach, beyond even the user-centered design methods popularized by best-practice product designers. User scenarios often frame people in a passive role as part of some machine (“the system”). People show up as talented thumbs in texting scenarios. They turn up as talking wallets in retail scenarios. They turn up as walking luggage in airport scenarios. At the worst level of practice, people get transformed into a kind of material inventory to be processed. The messy reality of people’s everyday life and dynamic need-states get smoothed out or abstracted. Whole sets of preconceptions sneak in unnoticed, framing the innovation brief.”

And here’s one from Chris:
“… my advice to a recent design graduate would be to embrace and enjoy the complexity. Get out of college and get a job. Don’t hang around in your school’s new ‘future design blah innovation blah lab.’ Don’t prostitute your services for free to get a toe in the door at IDEO, Humantific, Plot or even live|work. Go and work for a hospital, the government or a credit reference agency.
Hold on to the unique skills and perspective you have as a designer and apply them in strange but fruitful environments. You can, and will, make a real difference there.”

Michael Bywater has long been one of my favourite social critics – though I am sure he would disown that title. So I was really pleased to see an article in the New Statesman, “Baby Boomers and the illusion of perpetual youth” and to see he is continuing this theme in a book to be published November 2, “Big Babies: or why can’t we just grow up?”
The opening to his article gives a flavour:
“If we want an image to sum up the spirit of the age, it would be this: a middle-aged man playing air guitar. A mime; a simulacrum; a declaration of unearned, shared identity; a banner of fake democracy; a determined declaration of youthfulness indefinitely prolonged. The air guitar is the Baby Boomers’ swastika, their marching banner; the Boomers, now growing old, are running the show; and they are making big babies, not just of themselves, but of the lot of us.”
Can’t wait to read the book.

Milton Glaser has an interesting take on professionalism. In his rule number 4, from his “10 Things I Have Learned” (all ten rules are well worth reading in full) he talks about how professionalism is about diminishing risk. The professional finds out how to do something well and then goes on doing it. For people involved in creative activities this carries a downside. As Glaser says:
“… Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.”

A couple of hours ago I sent off the first draft of my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: Making it up as we go along” to Change This right on the edge of their deadline. So please join me in crossing fingers, touching wood, saying a little prayer, or whatever else you do to encourage the gods of fortune to smile on you, or in this case me, and hope they like it.
It has been quite hairy at times. There is the hairyness of trying to get my thoughts clear and then to communicate them, which, while at times painful, is in the end very satisfying.
Then there is the pain of wrestling with Microsoft Word to put it into the template and format that Change This require. That is simply painful and at points induced Basil Fawlty type expressions of rage.
To add to the pain, my internet connection went down. Our fault, not my ISP. So, thanks to Elena for rescuing me in my hour of need. It is amazing how simple the solution to what seem like complex technical problems can be when you know what you are doing.
So, so far so good. I’ll let you know what Change This’s response is when I know.
Meanwhile, keep those fingers crossed.

As a kind of postscript to my last entry, “Trust me” there were a couple of bits in a long profile of Diane Setterfield, who has become an unexpected bestselling author in the US, that caught my attention.
The first was this:
“But it took five years of rewrites and wrestling with the plot – complete with a genuinely hard to predict denouement – before it came together. ‘After about three years, I had index cards all over the living-room floor, and my husband used to come home and find me sobbing over the index cards,” Setterfield recalls. “But actually index cards aren’t the way forward. I did learn that. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.'”
The second this:
“The crowning twist in her plot dawned on her three years into the writing. ‘And yet when I came to look at everything I’d already written, I found everything that was needed for that [twist] was already in place’ – an instance, she says, of ‘the writing being more intelligent than the writer’. She pauses. ‘Although when I say that, I’m aware that people might think I’m a scribe, that all you’re doing is taking dictation. Which is to vastly underestimate just how damned hard it is.'”

I don’t visit Designer Observer as often as I should, so today’s visit was a particularly pleasant surprise. Michael Bierut has a really nice piece about the real processes involved in doing creative work as opposed to a neat schema such as, “This project will be divided in four phases: Orientation and Analysis, Conceptual Design, Design Development, and Implementation.”
This is his version of what an honest description of the process might look like:
“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?”
Follow the links and read the whole thing, it is well worth your time.

Abe Burmeister, raise an interesting dilemma in a recent post. He has three bikes and thinks he should get rid of one. The problem he poses is this:
“From a purely bike riding perspective its an easy question, the one I call my neighborhood cruiser has practically no value at all, it’s worth more as parts than as a complete bicycle and those parts are not worth much. It shouldn’t be too hard to part with, should it? But that is exactly the problem. I live in New York City and this bike is actually tremendously valuable based on the sole fact that it has no value.
This is a bike I can lock up on the street and not stress about in the least. I can, and do even leave it out overnight. From an economic standpoint this creates quite an interesting situation, a value that can not be monetized, for the very act of this feature taking on a monetary value would eliminate any value that existed. A bike with a real monetary value is worth stealing and that translates directly into both financial risk and psychological stress for a bike owner.”
This reminds me of a similar problem faced by my son and some of his friends when they were younger. Wearing many of the popular brands of sneakers and clothes made them potential victims of street crime, so they had to evolve a style of dress that felt OK to them, but didn’t scream ‘rob me’.
This concept of the valuable no value looks to me one that is worth further exploration.
As a kind of PS, I would also urge you to take a look at his book, “Nomadic Economics”, written under the name of William Abraham Blaze.

A little over two year ago I wrote a short piece,”The Trouble with Blogs”. In it I said:
“Now I don’t know if this is just me, but the problem I see with the blog as a form is that the focus is always on the latest entries. There is little to encourage you to explore the site as a whole. I know if I arrive at a blog and there hasn’t been a new entry for a while, I tend to move on somewhere else. Of course, with some blogs this makes sense, their focus is very much on the current, on what’s happening now. But with others, this makes less sense. Something they talked about three months ago, or a year ago, or even longer may be equally as interesting as something they are talking about today. So I guess the question I end with is how could a blog look more like a web than a diary?”
I had been prompted to write that by reading Grant McCracken’s blog, of which as I said at the time:
“Grant McCracken is on a roll, scattering ideas and insights in his wake. I have linked to him before when I pointed to a piece by him on welcoming difference and another on modern identity. But thinking about some of his more recent entries, highlighted for me what seems to be a problem with the blog as a form. McCracken’s site is rich in ideas and things to think about.”
I was reminded of this entry by remembering some stuff McCracken had written about creativity, in particular, a piece called, “Creativity and a tennis ball”. I’ve put in a taster below. Well worth a read and maybe, if you find it as interesting as I did, it will encourage you to explore some of his back catalogue and then with that as an exemplar to do the same on some other blogs. You can start that process here:
“Back to the tennis ball. I don’t know which one of us found it and first kicked it. But the moment it emerged from the rough grass of the hotel lawn, it was “in play.” The world had changed in a very little but very distinct way. And the other two players accepted the new presupposition of our interaction and “fell into” the game. No one much cared when they did well or badly. The official idea was to move the ball forward at something like at a pedestrian pace. The unofficial idea was ‘to see what happened” and to be party to this little act of chaos. I remember being struck that there was no hesitation to engage in the game or to continue playing it, despite the fact that we did it badly.. And I think this must be one of the characteristics of creativity, especially group creativity, and most especially of group creativity dedicated to thinking about dynamic phenomena. It is dynamism about dynamism. It is, in a phrase, spontaneous, selfless, tentative, reflexive, propositional, experimental, constantly forming, and utterly open source.”