Atlas · Details
Innovation 101
Author’s note
This one didn't do it for me on re-read 20 years later.
My thinking on metacognition got a huge boost from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow a few years later.
AI Notes
Written at four in the morning on a couch at home, lights mostly off, a few candles lit — Steve's Just Right Factor is around a 9.0 on a scale of 10, and the number is the working evidence. The essay catalogues the conditions that produced it (not too hot, not too cold, not hungry, no pinkie-toe smashed in a door, no anxiety, no pager) and works the Goldilocks framing into a working theory of cognition: short-term memory is a small, leaky DRAM cache that has to keep refreshing or it fades; long-term memory is hard disk, huge and slow to write. Sustained thought is a tree-walk where you keep blowing the stack every time someone interrupts you or the waiter asks who ordered the pork loin. The remedy is the device the piece is best remembered for: paper as RAM. External persistence — notebook, whiteboard, Emacs buffer, or another person you bounce ideas off — is a hardware upgrade for the brain, and the essay's own existence proves it.
The closing observation is that the modern office is engineered, feature by feature, to prevent the conditions it requires — open seating, ventilation that gets turned off after hours, the impossibility of finding a meeting room.
Related listings
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2006
Good Agile, Bad Agile
The following year. Innovation 101 is about the personal conditions for thought; Good Agile is about the organisational conditions for shipping. Together they describe most of what's broken about modern engineering culture.
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2005
Not Managing Software Developers
Same year, same author, the manager-side companion. Not Managing is the case that the manager's job is to remove distractions; Innovation 101 is the inside view of what those distractions actually cost.
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2005
My Save Excursion
Companion piece on the writing-as-thinking habit Innovation 101 is grounded in. Save Excursion is the writer's-room view of the same engine.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 2 more
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>>> In Heaven, also known as a Four-Star Hotel in a good city,
It's hard to fault your logic, but I've always found the rooms and lobbies of even expensive hotels to be pretty sterile and often noisy (lobbies, and hallways outside rooms).
Wouldn't you rather have the tranquility of a room in a quiet country inn, in say the Cotswolds, or Shropshire? I've stayed with friends in a small cottage just outside this village: http://www.leintwardine.info and I got a lot of thinking done, _and_ came away relaxed and happy.
You probably won't get broadband yet, but I'd trade bandwidth for quality-without-a-name beauty any day. If you're really lucky, there won't be a TV either.
That would be my ideal for deep thinking on a known problem. But what about pure innovation? Surely the most important factor there is who is working nearby, and what they are working on? e.g.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0887309895
And from http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/384/weiser.pdf...
We placed a ParcTab on the CSL coffeepot. Whenever anyone made a new pot of coffee we pushed the reset button on the ParcTab, which sent an infrared signal to the computer network. A message popped up on our computer screens letting everyone know that there was a fresh brew. This caused an instantaneous gathering around the coffeepot, and as a result generated lots of fresh hallway discussion which is one of the best ways to create new research ideas.
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Beach houses, country homes -- I can certainly see those venues, as long as (a) the surrounding entertainment (hikes, kayaking, etc.) isn't too distracting, and (b) you can actually get errands done when you need to. Being in some downtown area in a hotel seemed like the best solution to all the constraints I had in mind. But there are all kinds of places that could work, and I agree with the Quality Without a Name (QWAN) being really important.
I worked for about 18 months on a project at HP Singapore, and they flew us out frequently to work with the engineers there. They always put us up in the Westin or in the Shangri-La. Both hotels were amazing, more like resorts than hotels. We used to think HP were total fools for spending all that money, but we eventually realized that it made us *want* to go out there and help. We didn't mind staying for 2 or 3 months at a time, although after that even the Shangri-La could wear on you. But in retrospect, HP was pretty smart to put us in 5-star hotels; we would have been leaving after the first week or two if we'd been in anything but heavenly conditions. I doubt we'd have launched the projects on time (and we did) if they hadn't been able to lure us out there for so many weeks and months at a time.
Shangri-La Singapore has QWAN.
I hope everyone realizes this blog entry (other than the paper-as-RAM part) is just idle fantasizing, and it would probably never happen in real life. But it can be fun to imagine!
"Peopleware" talks about a manager sending the entire dev team to a beach house for a week, to create the architechture and design for a new product. The manager stayed at the office to handle phone calls.
— Derek U · December 11, 2004 01:00 AM
John Carmack is known to take a sabbatical right around when the latest id software shooter comes out. He hunkers down in a hotel far away, laptop in hand, and just hacks and tinkers and research/prototypes new ideas.
— Andrew W · January 19, 2005 10:50 PM