Five things I like right now
Listen
Smoove and Turrell is peak Northern Soul. Just the thing for getting into the groove of the new year.
Watch
Are we still in the doldrums post the writers strike? Nothing new is very good. Season 2 of Reacher is pretty good, I guess.
Read
Gosh, the Thursday Murder Club books are good.
Also Ali Abdaal’s Feel Good Productivity was not what I expected, in a good way.
Eat
Biscotti which must be “assertively crunchy”. The recipe in this old Guardian article is very good.
Think
Going to need to plan out the year, somehow.
Turns out cars really are smartphone accessories
Disney+ apps aren’t in Teslas any more because Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger don’t like each other.
The move comes a month after several major companies, including Disney, Apple, and Sony, pulled advertising from X because the site is becoming a racist, transphobic cesspool whose owner is promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Five things I like right now
Listen
It’s Christmas so get into Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings It’s a Holiday Soul Party.
Watch
I am in the depths of nostalgia for The West Wing. It holds up.
Read
I’ve been reading a bunch of strategy books. Chet Richard’s Certain to Win is a good one.
Eat
Natalie Paull’s book Beatrix Bakes is full of complicated recipes but they are all worth the effort.
Think
Gosh it’s a been a year.
You should be wearing two watches
Antonio G. Di Benedetto in The Verge
A little over a year ago, I made the conscious decision to wear both a traditional watch on my left wrist and a smartwatch on my right wrist day in and day out. And I’m here to tell you with a straight face that this best-of-both-worlds solution has no downsides.
Most days, I wear a Fitbit Charge 5 on my right wrist and a traditional watch on my left. I agree with Di Benedetto, it’s the best of both worlds.
Committee or Working Group?
The difference between a working group and a committee
working groups relax organizational boundaries while committees reinforce them
Replace “AI” with “Automation”
I think that discussions of this technology become much clearer when we replace the term AI with the word “automation”. Then we can ask:
- What is being automated?
- Who’s automating it and why?
- Who benefits from that automation?
- How well does the automation work in its use case that we’re considering?
- Who’s being harmed?
- Who has accountability for the functioning of the automated system
- What existing regulations already apply to the activities where the automation is being used?
Five things I like right now
Listen
Apple Music just started showing me a new “Discovery Radio” channel. So far I’m getting a lot of downtempo electronic jazz, like St Germain but new. Cool.
Watch
Justified. It’s a little of-its-time (early 2010s), but it’s good, too.
Read
I just finished Kill it With Fire by Marianne Bellotti. It’s about replacing legacy software systems. Bellotti is an anthropologist by training, and though she’s clearly a fantastic engineer, the book is really about change management.
There are three or four fundamental concepts that were new to me in Kill it With Fire that I will be wheeling out for clients from now on.
Eat
Been so sick recently that I’ve just been making easy things with lots of veggies.
Think
Most organisations operate on deductive reasoning. They know what they have, they know how those things are arranged, and they know what outcome that produces.
The building blocks are things, arrangements and outcomes.
Most “design thinking” operates on abductive reasoning. Compared to deductive reasoning, the equation is reversed. There’s a desired outcome, we know something about the arrangement of the situation, and we’re trying to come up with the things that, when suitably arranged, produce the desired outcome.
It turns out that coming up with new things is hard and surprisingly expensive.
But there’s another way to think about things. Inductive reasoning, uses the same building blocks, but it’s the arrangement that we create, not the things. That is, we know the outcome, we know the things we can use, but we have to come out with a way to make use of them to achieve (or explain) the outcome.
I’m increasingly convinced that most of the time, most organisations need inductive problem solving, not “design thinking”.
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