The general consensus in the SI research team is that there is a Goldilocks curve for just about everything in life. You can’t keep increasing something and expect that the outcome the something is supposed to produce will also keep increasing. What goes up must come down, and all that.
The key to establishing the truth behind such hypotheses – the difference between a Law and a heuristic – is an active search for exceptions. Things that not only don’t fit, but aren’t exceptions that serve to prove the rule either.
Enter the rather lovely and brilliant video from @rogerskaer (https://twitter.com/i/status/1576025818182332416) and his bluntly stated insight that the best way to find stuff out is to fuck-around. And that if we want to find out more, then we need to fuck-around more:
Because the act of ‘fucking-around’ is, by definition, about not trying to be productive. Or perhaps more appropriately, recognising that when it comes to learning something new, the best strategy is to try and turn off the conscious parts of your brain – the parts that think they already know and don’t need to find out any more.
As far as we can tell, thanks to this consciousness constraining element, there is no immediately apparent Goldilocks Curve associated with fucking-around. More leads unendingly to more.
On the one hand, this is quite encouraging. On the other, as we’ve found to our own cost when it comes to missing the promised deadlines for delivering the expected results to clients, the practicalities of life often prevent us from being able to carve-out enough fucking-around time to get where we’d like to be, when we need to get there.
What to do about this problem?
Here’s where we might want to try and evolve Roger’s sage advice. It’s an evolution we think stems from a recognition that not all fucking-around is equal. Some forms of fucking-around are more effective than others. Meaning that if we want to find out faster, we can’t just fuck-around faster, we need to fuck around more effectively. The person (or team) that fucks-around better than other people (or teams) is the one that finds out first.
So, what counts as effective fucking-around?
Well, it starts – we think – from recognising that, unlike the belief held by many in the Complex Adaptive Systems World that the future is completely random. Stupid as humans might be in the short term, in the longer term, all the TRIZ research tells us that things get better. Value goes up. More benefits, less cost, less harm. And, moreover, it also tells us that the very best way to ensure things travel towards the shiny-bright version of better called ‘Ideal Final Result’ and away from the ego-driven delusional-droolings of populist politicians, is to be constantly looking out for conflicts and contradictions. And then, once we find one, to overcome our natural Zero-Sum Bias and actively seek ways to transcend them.
The faster we find and solve contradictions, the faster we find out. So, rather than just randomly fucking-around, we need to spend more of our time fucking-around with contradictions. The fucking-around-finding-out relationship remains linear, but the slope of the line is in our control:
