Friday, March 12, 2021

How to Build Something from Nothing

 


The article was initially published on 1/27/16 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 

Trying to explain my day job to the American Geographical Society at Geo2050. November 2015.
Everyday I have to give someone a 15 second summary of what I do for a living.  I often have to say it about 3 or 4 times a day, and depending on who I am talking to, the language shifts a little. Also, every year this task gets more difficult because its isn't always clear if I should describe what I've done, what I am doing now, or what I would like to do in the near future. 

These days it comes out something like "I specialize in designing technologies and processes that shift deeply entrenched problems" and then a rambling line with "...  cities...wars... robots... digital ethnography... machine learning... geospatial technology." 

This is clearly a terrible introduction.

In general terms, I solve really hard problems for others, but it is hard to explain everything in 7 seconds because while the problems are constant, their workings change, and in response my skills change at a rapid pace.  In 2010 I was entirely focussed on postwar reconstruction. A year ago I founded a fast-growing technology company that mobilizes breakthroughs in robotics for processing unstructured data.  Today I work with the White House Innovation Fellows as an innovation specialist, ripping through complex public problems from veterans services to cybersecurity with big transformative leaps.

So rather than stumble through a lackluster introduction on skills, these days I tend to summarize all of my work with a single line.

"I specialize in the ability to build something from nothing."


This is not mere urban planning, management, or entrepreneurship. It is a specific skill to create complex entities that thrive from zero or near-zero resources.  More importantly, the things I build do not require my ongoing participation to continue and flourish.  Initiatives I created years ago still exist in far away places, overseen and operated by people who have never heard of me.  Of course doing this isn't easy. Its a carefully considered and honed expertise founded on some core concepts.
  • No Ego. Any given person cannot be central or necessary to the operation of the entity or its continuation.  If you design an entity according to the objectives, emotions, and expectations of one or two people - including yourself- then it will fail to succeed over time because it will forever be limited by the constraints that you alone carry or will carry. You can be a stakeholder in your own work but it should not be about or for you. It should not be designed to serve you (especially if this is to be a profitable business). For successful startups, this is often phrased in an epic mission statement... but it doesn't have to be so bold. It simply must serve others more than it serves yourself.  If it cannot be justified as such, then it is not likely a worthwhile pursuit.
  • Build Psychological Scaffolding. The components of the entity exist as a suspension - not a mixture -so that the tensions are just as critical to the success as the harmonies.  For example, if building a business, you cannot expect everyone to get along, so your odds of success improve if the business is designed to leverage hostilities between people. You cannot expect to like all your employees. You cannot expect to always be pleased by performance or to hire excellent people. So what is the plan?  You can rotate through a constant stream of people, but nothing will grow from this except your own frustration. To build something, you must expect have a range of personalities and capabilities, and many will conflict so build for that conflict, not to avoid it.  Certainly there are times you need to ditch people, but typically, as long as they are reliable enough to show up, you can design the work in relation to their strengths and ask little of their weaknesses while leveraging the internal conflicts into new opportunities for the organization.
  • Resources are Flux. You cannot plan to rely upon any given resource pools, but must draw from finite resources that shift as distributions, compiled from diverse locations, and all resources have expiration dates. If you design and build an entity to rely upon a specific person, idea, model, or finance strategy, and these variables are orchestrated to come together with the expectation of a particular timing, you might succeed once or twice but then it will fail. Don't bother with that. You are wasting resources.  It is at least a great place to start as people are forever the greatest resource. According to "Lean Startup" you should design your product for a specific person with a specific problem - and I agree - that sensibility must drive the initial design. But people change, and you should expect that user to change as your solution is introduced, so you need to design for change over time, and not just for clients but also for investors, partners, and employees.
  • Embrace Suffering.  Do not build an entity with the intention that "all will come together and it will be great."  Instead, design and build it for the  bad times. Imagine the worst possible scenario - what and who do you want by your side to manage that bad time? .If you created pathways for people to manage projects in different ways, to embrace different communication styles, and to maximize agility then you will be in a better position (see psychological scaffolding). But more importantly, seize the pain - its only temporary when it happens but those are the most important moments.  Ben Horowitz likes to talk about "CEOs in times of war and peace." The times of war - budget cuts, lost contracts, massive layoffs - are profound human experiences and it is those moments that define the future of the organization. Build to suffer.
  • Generative Action-Thoughts Win. Often a new risky idea is proposed and someone (sadly the boss) will shut down these new ideas, usually because they fail to understand one of the above principals. Many people also want to talk about a given idea or possibility for a long period of time.  A better tactic - always - is to support a very small and rapid physical experiment on that idea.  A pencil drawing on a piece of paper, a quick survey on the street, or a couple phone calls will typically pull in new information and ways of thinking about the problem. Physical things and processes change the conversation and stupid ideas become radical insights. Always veer toward physical things - not ideas.
These principals appear abstract but there is a clear underlying thread throughout. Maintain a constant respect for others, do more and think less, and care less about the importance of yourself, your ideas, or your values.  Work for the bigger picture and mobilize the assets that come to you.  Obsessing about the right idea, the right execution, or the right result will only waste time and energy. Ultimately, if you want to build something bigger than yourself then you need to remove yourself from it, and it needs to be tangible. Everyday.

Advancing New Economic Models by Design

 

The article was initially published on 5/2/17 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 


A few weeks ago I had to opportunity to spend a couple days at the Urban Planning Department of Cornell University. I was impressed by the graceful way this group was able to move fluidly between rigorous quantitive analytics and participatory public processes.  Yet for all the brilliance I found among faculty and students, it became clear to me how much urban planning education lacks sufficient focus on design methods.

I am not referring to design as urban design or architecture. I am referring to the ability to translate a series of complex social and technical processes into physical form.  I am referring to the ability to translate ambiguity into action and to oversee the transmission of that action to generate results. This is not the same as project management or the mere practice of the profession.  Rather, given the massive range of assets are available in urban planning for engagement and analysis, the discipline completely lacks a rigorous methodological framework for what actions to implement by consequence of the planning process.  If the discipline of urban planning stops with pitching the plan - then planners deserve to be disappointed when their work does not reach fruition.

This realization explains much about the disappointments of the planning profession - such as the constant repetition of "off the shelf" solutions such as green roofs, walkable streets, and historic main street development initiatives. These tactics are fine - but why such a small range of possible outputs in a world of more than 2.5 million cities, towns, and villages?  Basic statistical intuition suggests that a profession dedicated to building new futures and generating new economic development initiatives would capture a broader range of possible solutions.

To consider the urban planning process is to recognize that it remains rooted in a Waterfall design methodology - which has been proven to drive up costs and reduce stakeholder participation.  Most socio-technical systems have long since discovered that Waterfall methodologies fail to consider the variability of human actors, and thus tend to fail.  While organizations continue to search for replicable solutions utilizing scientific research designs and clinical trial models, the assets of localized place-based development go ignored or fail to scale.

Private sector technical sectors have shifted toward lean frameworks, agile methods, and other systems rooted in rapid feedback to avoid the high risk approach of waterfall planning. Unfortunately this understanding has yet to see the light in American politics where sweeping legislative action is the norm - not iterative improvement and variation. Urban planning, a field long aligned with design, has an opportunity to update to the 21st century - but it needs to start in education.  Design is more than architecture, it is the execution of ambiguity into meaningful consequences. 

The Art Academy of Cincinnati - Education to be Radical, Relentless, & Radiant

 



I was deeply honored to give the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2017 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. These last few days, I am now continually reflecting upon the unique and powerful proposition this school makes to the world. There is no other school like it. 

The only other college to which I can compare it is the mythical Black Mountain College of the 1960s that produced revolutionary minds such as John Cage.  To plagiarize someone else’s story, the Art Academy (AAC) doesn’t merely graduate artists or designers, it graduates the critical but hard to find team member of every successful business: 
"there are three kinds of people you want to launch a business: the person with the idea, the person with the financial sense,  and the person who makes you say 'what the fuck?' The last is the person who can rip ideas apart, remix them, and flip everything upside down to generate breakthroughs that no one else can see."  
Blackmoutain College w/ Buckminster Fuller
The last kind of person is particularly hard to find. Many schools can teach people to become accountants or to be entreprenuers but no school teaches students to be intellectually rebellious and operationally radical.  Except for the Art Academy of Cincinnati. No joke. It is even in their mission statement.

Everyday books about Innovation, Design, and Economic Disruption churn through billions of dollars in annual publishing sales. Parallel to the publishing industry, countless institutions argue they offer an education that will transform students into innovators who will change our world.  But do these industries actually generate the change-makers we seek?

In the last ten years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time at the world’s best universities as a speaker, student, or instructor including Oxford University, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon University – and these are indeed great schools.  Their students are brilliant and the faculty are more than competent. The programs are well funded and the students are nearly guaranteed the security of a well-paying job upon graduation.  These schools also attract people who already have a history of success - when Elon Musk attended Stanford, he had already earned degrees in Physics and Economics. Yet I have never encountered another school that transforms unknown students into true innovators.  In fact, when I recently taught Design Thinking at an East Coast top-tier MBA program, my students complained the entire time about the lack of clear directions and the constantly shifting parameters within the course requirements.  I have since learned that this complaint is exceedingly common within MBA Design degrees. These programs are forcing square people through intellectual circles and many graduates come out very little changed. 

2017 Commencement Address
Do all art schools impact students to think so differently?  I'm not sure... there are many art schools in the world. My sister is a student at SCAD. I have friends as RISD. When I was a teenager, I lusted for the attention of the San Francisco Institute of Art (SFAI) and the School of the Chicago Institute of Art (SCIA).  Unfortunately, in 1999, I had so little money for college, I did not even have the 50 dollars to apply to any of those programs let alone all of them.  With little hope to attend any college, I drove my broken-down ‘91 Geo Prism to the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a Portfolio Review Day in mid-October, to present my high school artwork to various colleges.  San Francisco was there, as was Chicago, and at least a dozen others.  Chicago offered a partial scholarship on the spot, which was incredible… yet, as I did not have the money to apply, let alone to live in Chicago, it held more symbolic meaning than opportunity. I was nonetheless motivated at that moment to find a way to go to art school.

Weeks later I happened to cross paths with some artists, Aaron Butler and Christopher Daniel.  Aaron worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and pioneered the experimental music group, Dark Audio Project, while Chris was a metal sculptor who went on to found the extraordinary and thriving Blue Hell Studio. They both held Art Academy ties, and with their encouragement, I decided to do everything possible to earn a scholarship. I applied only minutes before the deadline, in person, submitting my application in a massive wooden box crafted from an old PA system pulled from a dumpster in Kentucky (at Aaron’s suggestion that I make the physical application somehow stand out). As a mediocre student in high school, I had only applied to one other school at the time – the globally exceptional design school of the University of Cincinnati, DAAP – and I was not accepted.  The Art Academy took a chance on me, offered a scholarship to cover more than half of tuition, and I will be forever grateful.  Notably, after later graduating from the Art Academy, I received a full scholarship to DAAP for graduate school.

Art Academy of Cincinnati
Visiting AAC this last weekend was not only nostalgic – it was inspirational.  The Art Academy is a weird place. It consistently takes chances on people like me. It is a community of outsiders. It pushes them to build expertise on the ability to make something new  – which is not typical, considering most degree programs demand students acquire knowledge on a longstanding subject or methodology. It pushes students to invent new models of production, new identities as artists, and to take life to the frontier of possibility.  Graduates of the Art Academy of Cincinnati do not need books on creative problem solving, they need wicked problems where all others have failed.  If the Art Academy has a flaw, it is a simple fact that they do little marketing or high-profile partnering, and consequently, the world knows little about this school amid an insatiable demand.  The Art Academy of Cincinnati is not a diamond in the rough – it is a silent A-bomb in the exosphere.

My life has changed much since I attended the Art Academy. I am writing this blog entry while on a flight to San Francisco. Tomorrow morning, I will run a series of design strategy workshops for a Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley to explore new investment models for Artificial Intelligence. Since attending the Art Academy, I have lived in multiple countries, built companies, and am fortunate that my abilities to tackle entrenched problems in new ways are continually in demand. When I think of the year I started college, 2000, my life is now very different from the future that was most likely ahead.  Though I have my fair share of life challenges, I have a wonderfully creative and satisfying life. It has been a hard journey, but I credit the faculty and students of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. While most colleges chart a path for your future, the Art Academy provided a compass to guide me through the deep woods of the unknown.

The Demand for Fuzzy Science and Explicit Design: Rationalism is Not Universal


The article was initially published on 5/24/17 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 


Whenever I explain Design to non-designers, I essentially describe the scientific method - observe, hypothesize, test, repeat. Many designers work this way, although they might think creativity is something more magical, and are less inclined to describe their work as sequenced trial and error via prototyping.  Also, let's face it, clients will pay for magic but not for experimentation. The differences between science and design are more cultural than procedural. Science is better tuned to the needs of validation and design facilitates more generative insight, but the largest difference is that the scientific method is often stuck in the culture of science - we tend to think of the scientific method within fields like biology or physics, and thus resort to reasoning and intuition for day-to-day matters. Thus we think we use the scientific method all the time, but actually, we rely mostly on the power to reason.  

At the Thresholds of Reason
Unfortunately, human reasoning is not universal. Rather, it is situated in disciplines, as each discipline enforces a particular kind of language and patterns of cognition. The lawyer does not interpret the world the same way as the doctor or the engineer. Yet if forced to work together on a worldly problem, they will each insist on using reason (common sense) to engage problems of magnitude. Yet as each person in the room is attuned to a different way to frame and engage a given problem, it seems that direct experimentation would be more valuable. So why the fear to experiment for results? 

There is a widespread predisposition to assign the scientific method to the profession of science, wherein science is only for science-y things, and likewise,  we assign design methods to the design professions like architecture. Why is the method of science only reserved for biology but not for daily action? By extension, we are prone to work through other disciplinary problems in discipline-centric methods- and those methods are all the same, but get diluted by disciplinary language and habit - so why don't we step outside of our discipline with our methods? Most MBAs for example, never do scientific experimentation, although it is the premise of all worldly knowledge. They might embrace a design workshop (as business has to embrace superficial elements of design), which is a good way to synthesize ideas and create opportunities, but it also is a high-risk endeavor because it lacks any direct role for validation - it is a synthesis of assumptions. In contrast to generating learning opportunities, we rely upon the idea of the "expert" who has knowledge based on previous experience and we expect that knowledge to cross over. 

In contrast, we resort to rationalism and rationalism relies heavily upon our subjective interpretation of previous experiences - and our memories are not the best way to record the world because memory is highly subjective. Design is an approach to understanding the world through observation and experimentation, yet it also considers and takes advantage of personal subjectivity, cultural patterns, and the emergent outcomes of group interaction.  It does not merely accept the implicit assumptions and detriments of subjective memory. Design attempts to leverage those things actively avoided within Science. We could all probably use more science in our lives.

Dangers of Expertise
Dropping expertise within approaching a problem is important because expertise is really the opposite of science and design.  Expertise makes the assumption that experimentation is no longer necessary because the expert has all the necessary information already or can quickly filter available information.  Experts supposedly already did all the hard work to understand a particular worldly pattern. Expertise can be reasonable - in any given problem, we all find a point in which additional experimentation is redundant, and an outlier result will have little statistical significance. Yet what happens when we combine this statistical argument with the psychology of a group? In this context, the value of expertise is diminished because of a necessity to all reach a common understanding. Without a process of experimentation, people will talk about things they understand as individuals with poor translation to others. They will impose known patterns upon new problems. They will fail to experiment.

Patterns of Cognition: Habits
Later, studying robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, this way of thinking was entirely beneficial to advance the state of human robot interaction.  How do you build stronger human relationships with technology? It takes more than mere manipulation of pixels or a human factors design assessment. Yet when I was a graduate student in economics and law, this way of thinking was not helpful.  In fact, economics never touches the same time of reasoning. Economists are looking regularly at the circulation and balance of inputs and outputs - a far more linear and sequential type of thinking. Law likewise was a headache to study, as legal reasoning relies more upon the accounting of evidence to identify conflicts of logic. The reasoning of pattern relations - whatever they teach in art school - has far less to do with sequencing or logic. These different paths to engage and interpret the world establish radically different understandings of a given problem.

The notion of "patterns of reason for knowledge construction" is perhaps a critical element in how we all approach problems. When I was an art student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, I developed a way to see and understand the world that was not explicitly rational or empirical. It was more akin to pattern recognition at large, the ability to identify and symmetries/asymmetries amid abstract collections of information.  Studying historical and contemporary art, I became attuned to the relationship between cognition and body mechanics and to the relationship between physical materials and economic production. I learned to look at the associative relationship between materials and ideas.  For example, I recall seeing a photo with a dogwood tree, and by association bring up a legend about how the dogwood tree is cursed by God to grow crooked. This story implies personal meaning, and thus as an artist, I am inclined to use the tree to indirectly communicate something about religion. Compared to basic arithmetic, this way of thinking makes no sense, and yet, moving through the world by association is an important part of the human experience. 

Scientists attempt to identify and negate their values, yet there is sufficient evidence that all science is situated in the subjectivity of the scientist.  Many scientists accept this.  Good designers also take stronger responsibility for their own values and situated knowledge. Yet both can also discover other paths of inquiry and reason.  In the end, the only ones who fail to adapt to new problems are those who rely explicitly on their own situated reason.  The world is too complex for experts.

Design Comes First for High Tech Entrepreneurs: Quantum Computing, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, BioComputing, Machine Learning

 


The article was initially published on 7/26/17 at www.humanitarianspace.com. It has been relocated here for continuity. 

While the design is increasingly central to the operations of established technology companies, it remains overlooked within research teams pursuing initial research of those same technologies. This is due to the lack of understanding held by high tech entrepreneurs about the role of design. They think it is decoration - when in truth - it is the fundamental process to transform abstract ideas into new realities. Design is the cornerstone to successful entrepreneurship.

In the last few weeks, I have had conversations with dozens of high tech startups that have one foot in the lab and one foot on the path to a new market. Interplanetary robotics, quantum computing, and super intelligent machines are exciting new domains described at length in business and technology magazines alike, yet these ventures struggle to overcome the leap from research in unstructured domains to generating meaningful human-product experiences and viable companies. They struggle to think and work like designers.

How Design Serves Advanced Technology Companies

Computers are everywhere. As more of our lives are inundated with computers - cars, planes, banks, security, government - the software on those computers is getting very sophisticated and difficult to test. It is also difficult to build to ensure that it is testable. Think of the complexity to manage all air flights in a country, the testing of that software is critical to everyone's safety - but with so many airplanes, airports, satellites and so on - how do you test it?

In my engagement with machine learning companies throughout Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh, I found one that has solved this problem. They build tools to help other big companies build reliable software for complex systems.  They can even predict if your company is going to create a bug before it happens. It is incredible.

The company does amazing work and is profitable. Yet they have a terrible website. They know it. Their tools do not really have a user interface that users enjoy using or easily understand. Their software is very advanced and difficult to communicate.  It is challenging to hire for this company. They see every market as possible and yet are not sure how to access them. Their work is in such high demand they are doing well... but will this always be the case?  What are the limits of their current market? How do they know?

Upon offering to help with the website, I've since had multiple conversations with the founder of this company. I understand the technical details of their software. As a researcher, I am equipped to study and understand the problems they face. I also am a designer so I am able to communicate it to people who do not understand.  Consequently, as a designer, I also have methods to rapidly TEST & LEARN from the range of possible consumers on how to tailor the language, the product, and the transaction. We do not, consequently, have to worry about marketing or even business development. With design, we can KNOW and VALIDATE our language, our image, our transaction, and our team to transform machine learning into highly needed customer solutions. With Design, we can better engineer success, not just software.

This is Different than The Current Business Models and Operations

At each startup, the conversation unfolds the same way every time.  I ask about the product and the CEO demonstrates or describes the product. I ask about the business and they display a prepared document or slide deck on the business strategy and organizational shape.  I ask about financing and they tell me about early mistakes made impacting future financing for the negative. I ask about the distinction between the market they set out to pursue vs the market opportunity they have discovered - and they start to get depressed.  I ask about new market or growth opportunities, and they say "we hope to figure that out soon... " and perhaps "if only we could hire the right person for business development."

Hire the right person for business development?

Certainly, the most important aspect of building a company is the team. Yet to assume that the success of the business - to align internal operations to market demand - is the job of a solo individual is misguided.  MBA programs tout the ability to transform graduates into such beings - and there are many times this person can hold an instrumental role - but for highly sophisticated technologies, there is no evidence that a traditional business approach will always work.  To make the assumption is high risk.

In addition, when I ask "do you have a designer?" - the CEO confuses my question, thinking I asked: "Do you have someone to make this pretty?"  They say no or "that is important, but we aren't there yet" or "we know it needs to be attractive so we outsource that, we have someone make it look good." The worst ones point to their current success and say "we don't need a designer, we are doing just fine" and months later are panicking because they had all along been meeting the needs of only one or two clients and could not actually scale their business. By their definition, to have a designer on the team is expensive and the person would sit around most the time with nothing to do. If they learn their lesson - it is often too late.

Design Driven Business is an Optimized Transaction

Every company requires some basic components - they need the product, they need an efficient way to generate the product, they need a clear path to connect to the consumers for the product, they need a very simple mechanism to exchange the product for capital, and they need the ability to do this over and over again.  If this process is well tuned, the capital acquired will outweigh the capital exhausted and the company can flourish.

Nothing in this product demands marketing, or branding, or financial planning. There is no need to hire agile coaches or communications consultants. I also mentioned nothing about aesthetic design. These things - these tasks - are simply tools to help solve the core problem: the material transaction. The material transaction is made possible by the optimized movement of information. It is possible to invest in these things to make that transaction happen, but within an unknown market for an untested product, operating on the thresholds of possibility... it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of these tools. Marketing language, targetted advertising, and agile product development are all just attempts to optimize the movement of information. Yet with advanced technologies, early wins are just as likely events of luck. There is no way to know.

Design is the Process to Optimize Transactions

Designers are specialized in the art of communication. This communication may take place through graphic text, plastic form, or even through the process of a work itself (this is where the post-its come into use). Optimized communication within a team will increase efficiency, to transform a team from thinkers to doers but with less technical debt.  Optimized communication to external consumers will get the two groups together faster for the transaction to take place.

Optimized design of the transaction itself - a form of communication - will result in high satisfaction for everyone.  If transactions are fast and positive, and communication from the buyer can connect to the team (who internally is optimized to leverage it by communicating), the transaction will take place again.

You can call this stuff strategy, marketing, team building, communications, - whatever you want. But to get from lab to market - you are better off to optimize your business by starting with Design.