Words do not do it justice.. LITERALLY

The worst way to go. http://www.flickr.com/photos/almaz73/3564244382/

I started my breathing, er, reading time today by digesting this post by Matt Zimmerman which analogizes (quite effectively) reading and writing to breathing air. His comment on deep understanding through sharing struck a cord with me.

I believe this is a key component of human interaction and the way our brains work.

When inside our heads, we condense information into shorthand. An Ubuntu developer has a deep understanding of what “maintainer scripts” means, and so we just use that term in our head as an assumption. When we make these assumptions, we must consciously decide to challenge them, and often then we challenge them with other assumptions.

This also leads to “groupthink” as he calls it, where a group of similarly trained/experienced individuals start to share ideas, but they keep the shorthand, and can’t understand why their idea goes in circles.

Divergent thinking, and true understanding, only come when an outsider, a novice in the field, enters the picture. These assumptions must be explained, and in the process, often our own brain is going to re-evaluate the assumptions naturally.

This is why failure leads to understanding. As upon failure, you must explain to those holding you accountable why you failed, which often gets you the “aha!” moment that you missed because you worked so hard in isolation.

I think this is the reason that community driven, open source development produces high quality software. Two years ago my C++ was pretty rusty, and I started modifying code in the Drizzle project based on their documented guides. It turned out that my novice questions exposed a few ambiguities in the guides, in their blueprints, and in the way they were thinking in general, exacting some changes and (hopefully) producing higher quailty software. In a less open minded project, I’d have been cast aside as a distraction or an annoyance, a road block on the way to the end goal.

So, the moral of the story is, meet confusion not with more deliberation and furrowed brows, but with a bull horn and wide open arms. Meet failure not with shame, but proud explanation. Find somebody who doesn’t know anything about what you know, and tell them a story. Listen to their questions. You might just figure it out..

Seth Godin’s recent post about responding to discussions about things you don’t understand has got me thinking about hiring people.

When involved with a staffing decision, I look for one trait in particular above all others. If you don’t know how to say “I don’t know”, and ask for an explanation or help, then you’re not really smart. You don’t have a good process for learning. You may have a mountain of knowledge in your head, but it is surrounded by a huge, impenetrable ego shield, and so, cannot ever be added to. Its like you took the sum of what you knew, and stuffed it into a snow globe. When people shake you up.. sure.. its pretty, but thats all there is to it.

I’d rather work with people who are open to having their entire belief system about certain subjects shattered by a better idea. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stick to your guns and assert your own ideas and beliefs. It just means, when challenged, be like the Zen Buddhist Aikido master and flow with the force of the attack, and when possible, use it to your advantage.

(No google will not help you with the “trans-doran complex”. I’m hoping that upon seeing it you were curious, and after googling for it and finding nothing of substance, considered asking what it is..

I love Seth Godin’s blog. Its technology aware but focuses people, which is why we have this technology, right?

Anyway, he makes the point in his latest post titeld “I need more time” that more time doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions.

This is something I’ve tried to implement in my life, and I think it boils down to “decision versus precision”. Basically, precision is required sometimes, and the need for it will usually delay a decision. But at some point you lose value in the decision by working too hard on making a perfect measurement.

These two things are tangent to one another. The “sweet spot” for any decision is where they meet.. the right amount of precision, with a good firm decision, will generally produce better results. Making choices without accuracy is “wild ass guessing.” However, obsessing over the details is likesitting at home reading books about the museums of Venice, the culture of Venice, even learning the language of Venice, to the point where you know the routes of the canals better than the gondoliers themselves. The problem is, it might mean you never actually *get* to Venice. Of course, you might actually hasten your decision on when to go, if during your reading you learn that the city is, in fact, sinking into the sea.

Likewise, wild ass guessing can be fun, but you might miss something great. Any good negotiator knows not to take the first offer, that its just to be used as information to help you understand the other party’s position.

I think ultimately, its better to make decisions as soon as you have enough information to satisfy a few criteria. One is risk tolerance, and another is urgency. These really boil down to an examination of your goals. If your goal is to get a man on the moon, you need a lot of precision before you can throw a fishbowl over his head and run him up the ladder into the rocket. You are risking at least one person’s life. Getting there isn’t really that urgent (though it was for NASA in the 60′s..). On the other hand, if your goal is to capture the latest media market craze, you *must* take risks, and if you don’t capture it soon, someone else may do it. The iPhone is a great example of this, where Apple took the time to do the smart web enabled phone concept right, but still took some big risks in releasing it without GPS or Copy & Paste ability.

For me, I struggle with precision more than decision. Often times I end up changing my mind a bit too much because I set off in one direction without all of the facts. If this sounds like you, then you might need to rethink your process, and get into the habit of gathing a little more information. However, I think most people fall into the category that Seth talks about in the linked article. If you find yourself researching, and not really “doing”, maybe swallow your reservations once in a while, and make a wild ass guess. You never know, it might be fun!