Unsolved problems

Kegan Schouwenburg's advice to entrepreneurs working in 3D printing, from an interview with Ideas Lab:

Do something that isn’t being done currently. There are so many unsolved problems in 3D printing, and it seems like everybody is focusing on the same one right now, which is basically: Let’s make a cheaper 3D printer. But that problem has been solved. We have that. I think the question now becomes, How do we create products that people want? How do we develop the infrastructure to support that?

Something unexpected

Gui Cavalcanti, writing in Make about the difference between various types of hardware coworking spaces:

To me, ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’ are fundamentally exclusionary; whether they refer to the traditional act of programming to defeat or circumvent existing systems, or the act of working with physical parts, there’s a basic understanding that ‘hacking’ refers to a specific subset of activities that involve making existing objects do something unexpected.

I'm not sure I would have put this just so, but I think there's something interesting here.

The bloggy way of doing it

Felix Salmon, writing about Newsweek's handling of the Satoshi Nakamoto case: 

The bitcoin community is just that — a community — and while there have been many theories as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, those theories have always been tested in the first instance within the community. Bitcoin, as a population, includes a lot of highly-intelligent folks with extremely impressive resources, who can be extremely helpful in terms of testing out theories and either bolstering them or knocking them down. If Newsweek wanted the greatest chance of arriving at the truth, it would have conducted its investigation openly, with the help of many others. That would be the bloggy way of doing it, and I’m pretty sure that Goodman would have generated a lot of goodwill and credit for being transparent about her process and for being receptive to the help of others.

Premortem

More from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine.

Organizations may be better able to tame optimism and individuals than individuals are. The best idea for doing so was contributed by Gary Klein, my "adversarial collaborator" who generally defends intuitive decision making against claims of bias and is typically hostile to algorithms. He labels his proposal the premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster."

...The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction. 

As a team converges on a decision - and especially when the leader tips her hand - public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team and its leaders. The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts. Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier. 

This is a brilliant idea. 

Relative Position

Nick Denton, talking about Uber in a great interview on Playboy (SFW). Emphasis mine.

Markets are more efficient mechanisms for the distribution of services. The only thing that happens if you don't have surge pricing in a city like New York is that the limos and the cars dry up at certain times. Then nobody gets anything. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the point is that human beings are not so much concerned with their well-being as with their relative position. If they can't have access to this thing that's in short supply, then they don't want anybody else to either.

Questions

John Hagel, writing about the act of publicly expressing vulnerability as a tool for building influence (emphasis is original):

In the old days, it was simple and straightforward.  We built influence by having answers...In an exponential world, answers have rapidly diminishing value. The greatest value in this kind of environment comes from questions, questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention and effort on promising but previously ignored areas. Questions invite a different and more powerful form of participation. It’s no longer just about spreading the word and persuading others.  It’s about inviting others to explore a new domain and help to generate new ideas and insights...

But questions do something else that’s absolutely vital for influence – they rapidly build trust with the person posing the questions. The person posing these kinds of questions has just done something very important – s/he has expressed vulnerability.  S/he has acknowledged there’s something really important that s/he doesn’t know and needs help to solve...

But what about the influence that comes from having privileged access to knowledge flows? Won’t we undermine that by moving away from hub and spoke networks to mesh networks? Not to worry, by posing the questions that excite and motivate everyone to embark on their exploration, we’ll still have privileged access to the knowledge flows occurring within the network.  Whenever someone comes up with an insight that they think is important, they’ll want to reach out and vet it with us. And if we continue to refine and evolve the questions as new insights become available, participants will continue to connect with us to get the most up to date framing of the questions that matter.

I agree with all of this.

Hat tip to Clay Parker Jones for the link.

Smart Factories & Design Intent

Robert Schouwenburg, writing on Medium about a utopian idea of manufacturing automation.

To be clear humans are still needed. Certain steps are better handled by a human (refill / maintenance of machines or specific process steps like assembly or packing of parts – all depending on the factory setup and supported production steps), but the human is just a resource in the factory. A resource which can be planned and directed by a computer. It is not about fully automating the factory but about the creating a smart factory.

So how does this work? A product production request comes in. Based on the product production requirements a production plan is generated. The production plan contains each step necessary to produce each part and – if applicable – how the product is put together. The production of the product is scheduled based on capacity and necessary process steps. Not only the machine are planned but also human operators where needed. In the end the factory runs itself in the most optimal way based on the incoming production requests.

Today, we miss a significant piece in this puzzle. The current standards for design files (Autodesk's .ipt, Solidworks' .sdlprt, the ISO .step format, and of course the now-ubiquitous .stl) are agnostic regarding manufacturing processes. They simply convey geometry, and don't communicate anything about how that geometry is to be created.

I suppose that an ideal manufacturing environment would be clever enough to analyze part geometries and produce a manufacturing plan that was highly optimized for efficiency, but that reality is still far away. It's also worth noting that such a world would never produce another Eames Lounge Chair Wood - an artifact which was designed specifically as a use case for a new material and manufacturing process. When computers control the manufacturing method, the only control a human has is to tell it what shape to make.

I should be clear that I don't fight that future's development; nor do I have enough foresight to find it either delightful or troubling. But it's worthwhile to consider the implications of a world in which the nature of design is so radically reimagined - and it's good to consider what it'll take to get there from where we are now.

Satya Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, quoted in the NYTimes about an interview he had with Steve Ballmer.

I went on to ask him, “How do I compare to the people who had my role before me?” And Steve said: “Who cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you’ve been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark.”

Availability Heuristic

Also (again) from Thinking, Fast and Slow.

A major advance in the understanding of the availability heuristic occurred in the early 1990s, when a group of German psychologists led by Norbert Schwarz raised an intriguing question: How will people's impressions of the frequency of a category be affected by a requirement to list a specified number of instances? Imagine yourself a subject in that experiment:

First, list six instances in which you behaved assertively.

Next, evaluate how assertive you are.

Imagine that you had been asked for twelve instances of assertive behavior (a number most people find difficult). Would your view of your own assertiveness be different?...

The contest yielded a clear-cut winner: people who had just listed twelve instances rated themselves as less assertive than people who had listed only six. Furthermore, participants who had been asked to list twelve cases in which they had not behaved assertively ended up thinking of themselves as quite assertive! If you cannot easily come up with instances of meek behavior, you are likely to conclude that you are not meek at all. Self-ratings were dominated by the ease with which examples came to mind...

Psychologists enjoy experiments that yield paradoxical results, and they have applied Schwarz's discover with gusto. For example, people:

• believe that they use their bicycles less often after recalling many rather than few instances
• are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it
• are less confident that an event was avoidable after listing more ways it could have been avoided
• are less impressed by a car after listing many of its advantages

Editor's note: PEOPLE ARE SO WEIRD!!!!!

Kahneman

From Thinking, Fast and Slow. Emphasis mine.

A very generous estimate of the correlation between the success of the firm and the quality of its CEO might be as high as .30, indicating 30% overlap. To appreciate the significance of this number, consider the following question:

Suppose you consider many pairs of firms. The two firms in each pair are generally similar, but the CEO of one of them is better than the other. How often will you find that the firm with the stronger CEO is the more successful of the two?

In a well-ordered and predictable world, the correlation would be perfect (1) and the stronger CEO would be found to lead the more successful firm in 100% of the pairs. If the relative success of similar firms was determined entirely by factors that the CEO does not control (call them luck, if you wish), you would find the more successful firm led by the weaker CEO 50% of the time. A correlation of .30 implies that you would find the stronger CEO leading the stronger firm in about 60% of the pairs - an improvement of a mere 10 percentage points over random guessing, hardly grist for the hero worship of CEOs we so often witness. 

If you expected this value to be higher - and most of us do - then you should take that as an indication that you are prone to overestimate the predictability of the world you live in. Make no mistake: improving the odds of success from 1:1 to 3:2 is a very significant advantage, both at the racetrack and in business. From a perspective of most business writers, however, a CEO who has so little control over performance would not be particularly impressive even if her firm did well. It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance. 

Daryl Davis

Daryl Davis, talking with Nick Van Der Kolk about his work combating racism by befriending KKK members. Emphasis mine.

Q: What about well-meaning white liberals?

A: There are a lot of those... and there are a lot of well-meaning black liberals. But you know what? Again - when all they do is sit around and preach to the choir, it does absolutely no good. If you're not a racist, it doesn't do any good for me to meet with you and sit around and talk about how bad racism is. 

If you don't listen to Love + Radio... ugh.

Stewart Butterfield

From "We Don't Sell Saddles Here," the title given to a memo sent to the team of Slack by the CEO of Tiny Speck, Stewart Butterfield.

The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.

and:

...all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself. We are asking a lot from our customers...

To get people to say yes to a request that large, we need to (1) offer them a reward big enough to justify their effort and (2) do an exceptional, near-perfect job of execution...

The reason for saying we need to do ‘an exceptional, near-perfect job of execution’ is this: When you want something really bad, you will put up with a lot of flaws. But if you do not yet know you want something, your tolerance will be much lower. That’s why it is especially important for us to build a beautiful, elegant and considerate piece of software. Every bit of grace, refinement, and thoughtfulness on our part will pull people along. Every petty irritation will stop them and give the impression that it is not worth it.

Hugh Fiennes

Electric Imp CEO Hugo Fiennes, paraphrased:

Root cause every. Single. Problem. 

When you ship 200 units and you get two back, it's just two units. But when you ship 200,000, that's 2000 back, and when you ship 200 million... you do the math.

Failures scale. You *need* to understand them.

The Viral Self

Rob Horning, writing in The New Inquiry about virality. Emphasis mine:

Virality, unlike celebrity, isn’t about exclusivity or personal talent; it’s about moving information continually. Wanting to go viral is not the same as wanting to become famous. Whereas a famous person has become a someone, a viral self is always in process of becoming, always proving itself. But it needs only to be circulating; it doesn’t need to climb.

And later, on a different note:

In a consumer society, we aspire to be as popular as the products we are expected to crave.

That last part is brilliant. 

Exactly the right tool

Ian Frazier, writing about his experience developing a tool to remove plastic bags from trees: 

From that point, in a small but real way, my life changed. Having the exact right tool for a particular job is always satisfying, but when the tool (and, indeed, the job) never existed before, the satisfaction is multiplied. Plus, what we were doing, in addition to being fun, actually was benecial to society. In an over-full urban environment, we had found our niche, one we had all to ourselves. Nobody else in New York City, or in the world, was taking plastic bags out of trees. 

And later:

Now I understood, a bit, how people felt who had worked on the construction of some major public landmark like the Empire State Building.

The fun part about developing a useful tool is that it doesn't really matter what it's used for. The fact that it is used, and that it was never used before, is plenty.

Experience alone is a poor substitute for critical thinking.

-me.

Being Copied

Bunnie Huang, responding to a question about IP theft in Chinese contract manufacturing. The question is at about 22:30, here.

I'm different than a lot of people - I'm a big fan of open hardware, so before I get to that point with the factory I'll publish my schematics and everything online anyways. Feel free to copy me. Right? And the good news is that your idea was good. You were copied. None of my ideas are ever copied, so obviously they're not very good. 

Shapes

Scott DeFelice, CEO of Oxford Performance Materials, said something in conversation yesterday that I found really prescient. I'm paraphrasing this a bit from my notes, but the feeling is there:

There is a business selling shapes. It's not a new business. Shapeways and MakerBot are doing interesting things with the business model, but it's the same business. 

The business of selling *useful* shapes is totally new.

What Scott's saying here rings true to me: When designers are able to create shapes that are functional in and of themselves, the nature of the product - and its value to the end user - changes dramatically. 

If I'm selling shapes, I want to be selling useful ones.

McKinsey

Two excerpts from a short piece on 3D printing by McKinsey. Emphasis mine:

As of 2011, only about 25 percent of the additive-manufacturing market involved the direct manufacture of end products. With a 60 percent annual growth rate, however, that is the industry’s fastest-growing segment. As costs continue to fall and the capabilities of 3-D printers increase, the range of parts that can be economically manufactured using additive techniques will broaden dramatically. Boeing, for example, already uses printers to make some 200 part numbers for ten different types of aircraft, and medical-products companies are using them to create offerings such as hip replacements.

And:

Design is inherently linked to methods of fabrication. Architects can’t design houses without considering construction techniques, and engineers can’t design machines without considering the benefits and limitations of casting, forging, milling, turning, and welding. While there is a wealth of knowledge around design for manufacturing, much less is available on design for printing. Our conversations with executives at manufacturing companies suggest that many are aware of this gap and scrambling to catalog their design know-how.

Incidentally, I'm not sure that the premise of that second quote is necessarily true, regardless of what I believe *should* be the case.

Execution

Joanna Beltowska in a good post on Medium:

It’s hard to invest in ideas alone. The old startup adage rings true: ideas are worthless unless executed.

True.