From “The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads” (pdf).
As requests go “How long will it take?” is one of the tough ones. Taleb’s book Black Swan makes an thought provoking point about it. Like most of that book the underlying question is what statistical distribution the data is drawn. Naturally, that should color our expectations.
Some project durations are reasonable, Gaussian. How long you will live, for example. As the project unfolds the expected end time draws progressively closer. Delay in these projects push out the end date; yes but, you do get always closer to the finish line. Such projects can be standardized.
But many projects are unreasonable, their duration is drawn from a highly skewed distribution. Choke-a-block with extreme cases and little black swans. In this case as the project unfolds it’s end date moves further out. Each delay increases the expected time to complete the project. Taleb’s example is the refugee who imagines that each passing day brings closer the day he will return home, but as that is likely the this second kind of project, these passing days infact push out that day.
You manage these two kinds of project in very different ways. Most projects are a hybrid. The nature of hope is very different for one v.s. the other.
See also: Time to Market
A short but interesting posting that helped liberate an idea for me. Globalization’s fans claim the market for much of their ethical underpinnings. The market is good; globalization is an example of the spreading reach of markets, hence it’s a wonderful thing.
But, but. It seems to me that it’s just not that simple. It seems to me that much of globalization owes it’s motive force to state actions. These range from the huge successes in India to educate it’s population, which took place under governments that were to say the least somewhat suspicious of market forces, through international trade negotiations. Those have been largely co-opt’d by the largest firms in the markets. It’s a stretch to say that these large firms are exemplars to what most people mean when they speak of the wonders of markets. The posting adds another to those two; the question of how states have deployed their wealth in support of globalization.
I like threes and I’m currently quite interested in how we manage our navigate our attention - how we make our choices, how we decide what to do. So I liked the intro to Kahneman and Lovallo’s 1993 paper on how “decision makers” go about their work. The paper is introducing a behavioral model for that, but the introduction briskly suggests two others to get things going. So I get my threesome.
First, the rational man model presumes we reach into at our basket of risky alternatives, gambles, and carefully withdraw the one with the maximum expected utility. This process involves a lot of quantitative statistical talent coupled with stellar data sampling. It’s has a kind of chess club tone to it.
Amusingly few professional decision makers sign up to that model. Rather, they talk of their skill, prudence, focus, and self control. That’s all a process involving a lot craft knowledge. It has a kind of top flight athlete tone to it.
Model #3, that Kahneman and Lovallo put forward, is cognitive. In crude form it argues that we pull our decisions out of a thicket of cognitive failures. They broadly sort those into two camps. We shun a range of decisions because we are too timid, while on the other hand grabbing those about which we are excessively bold. This treats the decider’s free will in a more nuanced, more respectful of his animal nature.
So there you have it, three models of how we make our decisions:
Here’s a nice sentence template:
“This mechanism is called Z and Z is a pivotal driver of Y. See W for an approachable introduction to the theory of Z. But be forewarned that there is a lot of artistic praxis involved as well.”
I’ve always liked the word praxis, or “practice or exercise of a technical subject”. It also has a common usage in political theory naming the puzzling part: how to connect your grand theory of the world to practical application, or “that through which theory or philosophy is transformed into practical social activity.”
The original of sentence which I distilled that template was about financial futures. It is a nice example of the two meanings playing off each other. The practitioners of a craft are all about praxis, and are likely to scoff at contents of W; while readers of W are likely to find that they can’t quite make actionable the lovely theory found there in.
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