Sketchplanations

Hello Sketchplanations Tumblr follower!

The Tumblr here has been a bit quiet. But that's only because, after 6 years of Tumblr as a home, I finally moved to my own hosted site.

The new site is awesome because:

It has a super archive page

A nifty tags page for browsing

Finally, a top notch search

Sketches are bigger and the layout cleaner

It still has rss support and you can subscribe by email

Plus you can even browse using the cursor keys

Thanks so many of you for supporting me on Tumblr for so long. Hope to see you at the new site, by email, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or however you like to keep in touch.

You can still find sketchplanations at: sketchplanations.com

The 4 horsemen of relationship apocalypse

John Gottman and colleagues identified what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships. They are called this as, left unchecked, they can spell the death knell to a once healthy relationship. In fact, they found that by watching just 3 mins of a conflict conversation between a couple they could predict whether they would still be together years later with over 90% accuracy.

The four horsemen are:

Criticism: framing problems as the partner's defect

Defensiveness: counterattacking, whining, being the innocent victim

Contempt: talking down from a position of superiority, insults, eye-rolling, name-calling — the most dangerous of all

Stonewalling: withdrawing from the conflict, refusing to engage

In my first draft of this sketch I left it at that, but it felt a bit negative to leave it hanging on everything we do that's wrong and harmful. Fortunately, there are antidotes to the four horsemen, the traits they saw the masters at relationships use instead. The Gottman Institute explains the four horsemen and their antidotes in more detail.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is

Some simple wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut: notice when you're happy.

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is”

Kurt goes on to say:

"So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is."

Perhaps needless to say, so do I.

States of matter

A school science refresher: the 3 primary states of matter, solids, liquids and gases and the transitions between each one. If you're like me you probably forget about the more obscure sublimation and deposition directly between solids and gases. And vaporisation of a liquid is evaporation, occurring at the surface, if it is below boiling point, otherwise it's boiling.

Solvitur ambulando

This phrase from the Greek philosopher Diogenes translates more or less to 'it is solved by walking'. And, indeed, there is something about walking that helps both clear the mind and think clearly.

Nurse log

In some forests where the trees grow tall such as in the US Pacific Northwest, when a giant falls it clears a patch of forest letting in light, and provides a new surface for seedlings to take root away from the competition of the forest floor. Sometimes the nurse log is so successful as a sort of creche for the young trees that they will grow along the full length of the fallen trunk. And when the original log decays away it leaves a remarkable, straight line of trees.

Manager Time, Maker Time

In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don't have to worry too much about what you'll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It's great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you're a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone's gone home, when you'll be free of interruptions.

If you're a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

Forcing function

Forcing functions are a super way to help make things foolproof, or better, errorproof — as all of us make mistakes with designed things without being fools. You may have used your own forcing function when, in an attempt to make sure you remember your passport or tickets before a flight, you put them directly in front of the door so you couldn't open it without noticing them. That little dialogue that asks you if you want to save your changes before closing your work, that's a forcing function too.

My first memory of understanding a forcing function was when working with a giant machine capable of cutting through 100 pieces of paper at a time. The two buttons to operate it were on opposite sides of the machine. I couldn't start the machine without spreading my arms out wide. There was then no way to also accidentally have your fingers in with the paper and near the blades when it started. Smart.

The BS Asymmetry Principle

Also known as Brandolini's Law, this is the simple observation that it's far easier to produce and spread BS, misinformation and nonsense than it is to refute it.

In fact, the iSchool at University of Washington launched a course on Calling Bullshit with the first class being booked up within one-minute of registration. The professors, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West have since written a book: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.

RACI

This acronym acts as a handy checklist to consider and clarify roles and responsibilities for projects. You could even build a table — a Responsibility Assignment Matrix —  with what needs to happen and the people who are involved identifying what relationship each person has for each task. In particular, sometimes making it clear who doesn't have a say can be the most helpful thing to do. It breaks down somewhat like this:

Responsible Who will actually be responsible for doing the task.

Accountable Who is accountable for it being completed and achieving its goals.

Consulted Whose opinion will be sought for the task, though they won't be doing it themselves.

Schadenfreude

Ah, that satisfying, superior, at once gleeful and slightly sinful feeling when the aggressive driver that overtook you gets his comeuppance and gets flashed by a speed camera. That feeling is Schadenfreude, a nifty German word made up of schaden for damage, harm or hurt and freude for joy. Taking pleasure in others' misfortunes.

I hadn't thought much of it beyond that before reading some excerpts from Tiffany Watt Smith's book Schadenfreude. She makes the compelling case to examine the moments where we feel superior at another's expense as a small window into ourselves. A little twinge of joy when a colleague doesn't get a promotion might reveal your jealousy at their situation, or perhaps a deep down resentment of unfairness. If the person who pushed in front of you in the queue drops their ice cream straight after buying it your secret twinge of joy might be a sense of justice and equity for obeying the rules when they didn't. Schadenfreude can be a little boost to your own self-esteem.

Survivorship bias

So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989:

The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot's head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned.

It's easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can't leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn't create Microsofts and consequently you didn't hear about.

Silent evidence — the evidence that we don't or can't easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb.

When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman's American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler's letter in Nature quoted above.

Finishing lines

"Just remember that finishing lines are good, but their most important role is to get you over the start line in the first place."

This little piece of wisdom is from Stevie Smith (not the poet). Stevie embarked on a human-powered journey around the world — Expedition 360 — and reached Hawaii under pedal power*. I learned about him from a little chapter in One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter. The chapter where he speaks with Stevie I immediately reread as soon as I finished it.

Mike also shared this deeper and more poetic version of the same insight:

"Happiness is the acceptance of the journey as it is now, not the promise of the other shore"

Hope

I hadn't given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of CR Snyder's cognitive model for hope which shed a new light on it for me. He proposed a model of hope where (paraphrasing) an individual may be hopeful if they have:

Goals they desire. If you don't or can't picture any future state you'd like then you won't have a lot of hope.

Pathways. You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal.

Willpower or agency. You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.

With all of these you can imagine feeling hopeful. Without any one of them and you probably won't so much.

The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower) and yet they remarkably did.

Sexy value

This is what you get when someone is able to launch something that is not only cheaper, but also better. It’s kind of an irresistible proposition. Most new things that are better don’t tend to also be cheaper. Often this is only possible with a whole new technology or approach. It’s like when the first taxi apps started appearing. To me it was like hang on, this is way better — no trying to catch a taxi in the rain, simple, non-awkward, no swinging by the ATM payments — and also cheaper. It’s also similar to Target’s Cheap Chic.

It is of course, not the only way to compete. If you make something better, people will pay what it’s worth to them. But if you can do it cheaper too you’re on to a winner.

Sexy value is a name, I believe, from Ogilvy and Mather.

Solstice

From the combo of sol (sun) and sistere (cause to stand or stop) the solstice marks the highest or lowest points of the sun's path in the sky each year.

In Summer, for instance, the sun's arc in the sky stops going higher each day — at its highest point with the longest day— pausing before descending through the Autumn equinox of equal day and night — where the sun rises and sets exactly East and West — to its lowest point and shortest day at the Winter solstice. At that point — when you're getting up in the dark and returning home in the dark — it will stop its descent and slowly climb higher each day once again towards the Summer solstice.

Analytics maturity

There are lots of questions you can ask of data. I like this model as it gives a framework for the different types of questions you might ask. It was introduced to me as the data science pyramid with descriptive analytics — measuring what's happening — being the foundation on which others are built. You don't have to go in order, but it's a nice approach to consider how the questions you're asking of your data might evolve.

To take our school Summer fête as an example, for a long time takings were all in cash and put into one bucket at the end for counting. You end up with one number for how much you raised. But you might move to collecting more descriptive data on the takings for each stall — whether the bar earns more than the tombola, for example. You then might be able to ask diagnostic questions like figuring out why one fête earned more than another with a different mix of stalls. If you know how many people came you might be able to make some predictions on the takings of a future fête based on number of people and stall types. And if you get fancy you might start to use your data to figure out how you could raise more money for the school in future.

There are many ways to slice and dice data and the questions you ask, but I like the clarifying simplicity of this one.