Better Decisions
Cynefin, Against Note-Taking, and "It's people"
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and relentless like-bait drum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
🤔 How to Use the Cynefin Framework to Make Better Decisions:
Any business can put its various parts into this framework. Some activities in the business are simple, easily expressed in “if this, then that” statements. Others are complicated: requiring expert knowledge but ultimately solvable. Still, others are complex, dynamic, and ever-changing. The lines between these are blurry and most roles are going to deal with various pieces of them.
11-minute read by Taylor Pearson
👩🎨 Notes Against Note-Taking Systems:
It’s also a fantastic way to convince yourself that unpreparedness is what’s between you and creative work. If you believe you’re unprepared, know that you will never transmute into the perfectly prepared person that you think exists in the future. Unfortunately, you have to start with the person currently in this chair. That’s all there ever is.
3-minute read by Sasha Chapin
🤭 That Wild Ask A Manager Story:
Designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological […] when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority. There are times – and this is one of them – where addressing outlandish behavior requires steps that are just unacceptable.
4-minute read by Jacob Kaplan-Moss
🎧 Listening
🤓 Crypto Scams, Big Tech Tumult, and Tech Optimism:
One of the things to keep in mind is that the first Internet was full of grifters [..] This is not a fresh new idea that technology gets abused. I think you got to look at what is happening and separate it from the hucksters, and the grifters, and the self-promoters. They get enthusiastic at the beginning, and they are going to be eventually washed out by more substantive companies that are really trying hard to make this a thing.
60 minutes with Kara Swisher on Big Technology Podcast
🤖 Hard Sci-Fi Worldbuilding, Robotics, Society, & Purpose:
I think that for this next century, the two largest technologies that will drive everything about humankind are bioscience and AI & robotics. But I will say that, though bioscience will have a tremendous impact on human life, in a hundred years, in many ways we won't notice. If you went back to the 1950s, we live 10-20 years longer than we did before and live with greater, but we don't notice it: we expect it to be normal.
55 minutes with Gary Bengier on Complexity podcast
🚀 Research Speaks - Progress Studies:
[C]ulture has soured so much on the idea of progress, and young people, for instance, may not see engineering and business as exciting and meaningful fields to go into anymore. And indeed, a lot of young people have been instead attracted into the opposite: trying to slow down and push back and fight especially technological and industrial progress wherever it occurs.
37 minutes with Jason Crawford on Austin Next
📬 Suggestions?
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