Going beyond the method: The separation between great professionals and true experts

From Chadwicks Systems View of Planning, 1971

There is a lot of industry concerned with method. We buy books for cooking and we watch youtube videos to learn how to sing, play piano, knit, and skateboard. 

I suspect a method, however, is a little more developed than a technique. It is a string of techniques, and thus functions as a form of knowledge in itself. 

Back in the 1950s, the world was transfixed by methods. Lean manufacturing, urban planning, and design methods were all developed as ways to intelligently identify, engage, and solve complex problems. The industry is still booming today, with evangelists covering Linkedin and twitter for Agile Coaching, Service Design, and a range of other "isms." Job ads regularly hire based on method as well. Do you know how to do focus groups? UX Research? Rapid digital prototyping?  It is not enough to know how to write the code, you need to know the method to apply the code in a meaningful way.

Personally, I love methods. I collect them. I collect books on methods (like Chadwicks 1971 publication on systems planning, above) and I am constantly trying to learn new methods across many different fields. Consequently, what I find problematic about methods in industry is not the requirement or mastery, but rather the lack of imagination.

Product designers, for example, have thoroughly codified their profession around methods. Interviews, sketch sessions, value mapping sessions, and paper prototyping are a string of methods to inform product development and strategy. They work fairly well, and are therefore repeated across industries and problem sets. 

But what about the creation of new methods? Whose job is to do that? After all, someone invented many of the methods relied upon today. Specific persons pioneered these canvasses and concepts, then shared or taught them with others. 

What I find alarming is that so few designers are inventing methods. Creativity is a foundation principle of the discipline, and yet the methods are redundant. 

Perhaps then, this is the mark of distinction between good professionals and great ones, the question you should ask at your next interview: "Tell about a time you invented a method to solve a problem."

The Persistence of Debating A.I.

There are lots of theories on how you built a team to develop and deploy artificial intelligence capabilities within an organization. It is hard to do. Most people have not done it. Everyone seems to have an opinion and few have real-world experience. Yet the question comes up on how to do it, because there seems to be consensus that trusting our machines to drive actions and decisions for us will have real repercussions in the world.

Just the other day, I found an article breaking the dilemma down into a simple binary question, do we trust data scientists with the questions of creating AI in government, the subject experts who work for those agencies, or someone else - like a program manager? 

Admittedly, I find such articles a little tedious, because they use the word AI like it has a special impact on people, different from the use of other technologies. Do you have car insurance, or life insurance? Then your life has been measured, quantified, and ranked to identify a particular level of risk. This risk decides how much money you pay for your coverage. Insurance has been around for a long time, hundreds of years really, and while the methods of risk analysis have changed over time, the overall experience remains the same. You pay more money if you are high risk and less money if you are low risk. If we had AI/ML/DS then we just end up with a more granular risk to cost ratio. The granularity might create a cost savings for you - or more likely - will better benefit the insurer. 

With such a robust history of calculation driving day-to-day decisions in the world, these questions on AI have sufficient historical context. The power of team building and decision making is multifaceted, and the overall bias of that team is primarily rooted in the interests of those who are driving it in the background. In the case of private sector efforts, we see the shadows of financing and financial goals, and in public sector we have the guardrails of public policy. If there is no policy, then the people on the front lines will have the most influence, for better or worse. 

What is forgotten in such discussions is that the issue is not merely solved by identifying "who" is doing the work. The second part is "how" are they doing it?

Our our processes, our tools, and our communications shape our outcomes. I've hired highly talented data scientists who were terrible communicators and thus failed the project. I've also hired incredibly communicators with deep expertise, and yet they relied upon antiquated methods and therefore their work was not easily absorbed into the organization. Not to mention, tools and code have flavors and bias. 

If we want to build great AI, we have to stop pretending that the open ended questions on "what should we do," can be solved with simple heuristics. Rather, lets education ourselves to better understand the problems, discuss them, collaborate, build, and share our work with each other. We will make mistakes, and with persistence - our mistakes will change - as we also change our tools and our minds. 

It takes an artist to paint a picture

This last year I had the fortune to meet author Anjali Sachdeva, who in 2018 debuted an extraordinary collection of short stories in her book, "All the names they used for God." As much as we all want to ask Anjali about her process, I found that reading her biography was enough to glean some insight. Anjali has lived a full and robust life. She has travelled and lived around the world. She has spent years working with other writers to hone her skills. She is an active reader. She cares not just about the craft of story making, but she has made choices and pursued goals to live a remarkable life from which she can reflect and draw upon.  Her stories come from her, and she has thus invented herself from the bits and pieces of the world so as to create those stories. 

We can do this in business too.

In the last year, I was working with a team to design, build, and deploy custom software for a government office. Like most engagements, it started off with a request for a mobile app, but through engaging in a deep research and design process with robust client engagement - much more happened. 

We never built a mobile app, because after digging into the problem, it was obvious that the problem was just as much about the organization as anything else. We couldn't just say that though - rather, I made a point to travel widely across the country, meeting the people and spending time with them to understand the problems. I made sure we documented these engagements, presenting our work to the client, taking them on the journey too.

We made some software, but better, we delivered and approach and an architecture for change, working closely with the client to lead them on a journey of self discovery and unlocking a range of interventions. The outcome was profound. 

Higher levels of leadership began to discover that they had an internal vision for how their organization could work, leveraging modern technologies and values, to create faster and more effective outputs. The business grew and the work expanded.

And here is the thing I realized:

Leaders often know what they want, but sometimes they need a guide to help them articulate it to everyone else. Especially in a government agency. Federal hiring practices tend to hire the same kinds of people, with the same kinds of background, over and over again. They need someone with sufficient outsider status, but insider language, to help break open the organization and paint the sky a new color.

On another occasion, I once crafted a service blueprint of an entire organization to identify where and how our cloud software will function to change the company. Upon presenting the image, the COO boldly spoke aloud to say, "for the first time, it's like everyone in the room can see everything in my head."

Day after day, this man had been trying to communicate this organizational design to his staff, and yet we managed to achieve it within a matter of minutes. This is not a poor reflection on the COO, but rather demonstrates the challenge to create and live a great story. 

We are not really taught in school or in many career fields how to tell a story. We are instructed on how to relay information with clarity. As children we might be asked to write a story, but rarely have teachers taught how to create one. When you learn to paint, you learn about color, form, and must look at paintings - over and over again. Painters are taught more than technique and materials, but learn about the legacy and personalities of painting. They learn the biographies of painters and trade stories about profound, world changing exhibitions. They learn to create a different world.  

We who make software, algorithms, robots and cars - the hard tackle of 21st century industrialism - could learn much from those artists and writers.

Thinking alone in the world

For whatever reason, there are lots of images in pop culture of the lone genius - the scientist or the artist or the technologist - who takes an idea and turns it into a profound gift for the world. We talk about Jim Morrison wandering through the desert to create the Doors. Steve Jobs picked apples and invited the personal computer revolution. Leonardo Da Vinci created notebooks and paintings in his studio, filling hundreds of pages with profound ideas about flying machines and war battlements. Whats up with this idea of the lone genius? It is a lie. 

For many years, I prioritized the value to build something from nothing. Years later, I discovered the bigger magic act is to build something that really matters - to create profound structural change on a problem, or a set of conditions, or for a group of people. This is the same reason we hire product managers in tech firms, to bring together all the different people and inspire them to deliver a ground breaking change in the world through a product. 

If we think about how this is done, the idea to build something from nothing is misleading. Because the ability to create profound impacts is founded on the ability to discover and pull together resources, expertise, and insights from lots of different places. Creating the thing that matters doesn't happen in a vacuum.

There is a point where one does need to pull away from the world for reflection and to imagine new things. To imagine new things is not easy, it takes dedication.  Anyone can borrow an existing way of living - I want that job, that car, that house. Yet what about inventing a way of life that is less apparent? 

In all the years I worked as an urban planner in fragile states, there were not many people I could look upon as direct role models. I met a few people who did similar work, or had some interaction online, but this wasn't exactly a common way of living or working. 

Much of the ability to imagine a new way of being depended upon constructing metaphors.  In interviews, people would ask about my work, and I'd say "do you like to drive fast? All I'm doing is taking something really boring - urban planning - which is typically concerned with things like zoning, and traffic, and green space and I'm driving fast."

Metaphors enable us to imagine and create a better world, but to create a metaphor, one cannot remain hidden away in the studio. One must engage the world, and learn other ways of living, so as to best give back.