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buddha-231607_640Still at my home town some people equate being fat to prosperity. A fat person is someone who had steady access to food even at times of drought and famine, hence dying of hunger was ruled out. People ate whatever they can so that starvation does not kill them. Food revolution increased the availability of food and people started to eat well; when the life expectancy of every one improved, obesity became an issue. People were now dying because of overeating, unhealthy snacking and not maintaining a healthy life style.

The same is applicable to information, the differentiation between wise and knowledgable is not understood well. Just few decades ago in India, information was flowing slowly through government run TV channels, newspapers and books. The commute times were shorter with predictable work schedules, leaving more time for interaction with people and also enough time to read. I vividly remember the elders at home reading a novel in the evening, weekends or while standing at a long queue. There were reading desks at home where people read something and make notes.

If you summarize a book, often you will end up with a few lines which was the message from the book, but it will have a deep meaning to us if we had come up with those lines after reading and summarizing our thoughts, than those lines arriving in tweet.

french-fries-461705_1280We are right now in the era of information snacking where we are increasing our knowledge to a great deal, learned to drink it out of a firehose but not able to apply it effectively when needed. More and more people are addicted to ‘pull to refresh’ and snack on one liners, emails are annotated with TL;DRs and prefer to read a lot of tweets than read a book.

Manage the distractions before you are ruled by them.

TV was cloud-709148_1280one big distraction which was overtaken by social media, staying away from this for quality information consumption and time for family is a difficult but not an impossible thing to do. It is like going to gym toning up the body complemented by a healthy diet. Start slowly by turning off all notifications, keeping only one or two channels like telephone as an instant communication system; in other words change to a pull mode than being pushed with information. Dedicate slots for reading books, newspapers or other things which has long text, periodically clear out the social media backlog; indulge yourself once in a while but come back to a healthy routine.

book-419589_1280Why read long texts? Reading has helped me gather thoughts, play thought experiments, ability to write & articulate well; beyond that it took my mind of the constant buzz that follows a work day. Maintain a list of books to read, motivate other friends to read and share your learnings and stories. There are so many books that are rich in content and only limited time to read, sharing the book experience with others is rewarding as we get lots of information from others in a condensed but more interactive form as well as encourage us to read more and share. Stay away from information snacking, it just feeds empty knowledge. Consume information with a planned diet.

 

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Success transforms people a lot, it makes people feel that they are successful only because of their intelligence. By attributing success to their intelligence, people over the course of time regard themselves way too higher than their peers. This makes them feel that they are superior and sometimes not so appreciative of the knowledge and work of the new comers or the relatively inexperienced ones.

I observed that success was largely due to being at the right place at the right time and from then on it was a matter of hanging on to it. Just like a discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind, success is also an accident meeting a well prepared mind. Some studies on IQ shows that intelligence is very much overrated. A person with an IQ of 110 can possibly do any job and excel at it with some deliberate practice and discipline. On an average, one in every four individuals have an IQ of 110, which means out of four people one person is capable of doing any work and excel in it like any other top performer in that field.

Below is a ted talk which talks about how humans perceive themselves to be superior when they have more wealth compared to others.

The talk also mentions that people do not do it knowingly. If we give those nudges and pushes at the right time to make people understand that they were at the right place at the right time to be at this level, then people will stay humble throughout their successful journey. Wealth is very easy to measure, so any individual looking at their wealth could easily know what their worth is. Knowledge and skill is not so easily measurable and hence people can get into a wrong sense of accomplishment and success. If that wrong sense of success gets into the head, it will lead us into a learning stage called “Expert Beginner” as mentioned in this blog [Expert Beginner]. In short “Expert Beginners” are the ones who have learnt something and before progressing to become competent they stop learning looking at the rapid progress and success they had in their new initiative. Growth stagnates from there on.

We just need to remind ourselves that a successful career may be just because of being at the right place at the right time and there is lot more to learn and lot more to do than to feel entitled and be on top.

Two things define you – Your patience when you have nothing, and your attitude when you have everything

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I get a chance to meet lots of people who have a good exposure to the manufacturing industry either by work or education. If we take a look at the Cynefin framework, manufacturing industry fits in the ‘complicated’ quadrant. In this context if we are to create a wrist watch then there will be a clear design on how to create the parts and standard instructions on how to safely assemble the watch. This works in most of the cases and people will gain dexterity over time and will be able to assemble watches at a much faster pace. What is necessary here are the design and the standard instructions to assemble; incase someone else finds a better way then the standard instruction is updated with the new method.

Software work on the other hand is knowledge based and fits in the ‘Complex’ quadrant. There are some good practices for basic things like clean code, continuous integration etc but there is no defined way to approach it using the methods which apply to tasks in the ‘Complicated’  quadrant. If I am assembling a watch or a similar task, it is possible for me to split my work into 1 hour increments and produce output at a predictable pace. I can also stop doing the work in between, attend a meeting and resume work later on without much impact to productivity after resuming work.

Knowledge workers such as software developers cannot do this, their time increments are more like 3~4 hours. A break in the flow of work is bound to cause rework from scratch. Concentration of task at hand is of prime importance and if plans are made such a way that there is a meeting scheduled in between the 3~4 hour stretch of window, it will impact the productivity for sure. Also the power of context is too pronounced, the productivity will be much lower earlier in the development cycle and will progress much faster as common understanding of the system emerges. Plans usually consider only linear throughput and that adds pressure on the team to be at peak from the initial phases of the project.

What should we consider if we are dealing with knowledge work especially if we have been exposed to manufacturing or similar sector which fits the ‘Complicated’ quadrant in Cynefin framework?

Reflection

  • Plan for a progressive increase in throughput
  • Standard instructions and processes will not fit and may prove to be counter productive
  • Work requires thinking time, concentration at task comes with unbroken attention, plan for developer time in chunks of 4 hours
  • Reflection is as necessary hands on coding. Tasks like staring outside of the window, enjoying the coffee or doing nothing with eyes closed are not unproductive, it helps reflections which helps innvoation
  • A degree of autonomy is required, it is better to let the team evolve the design based on their experience than forcing an expert’s opinion on the team
  • There has to be avenues for continuous learning and sharing the learnings

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