Reflections on René Descartes

You stink, therefore I don't give a darn.

Rene Descartes is generally considered to be one of the greatest minds of his day and the father of the scientific method of inquiry.

Of Descartes, Philosophers.co.uk wrote;

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was not only one of the most prominent philosophers of the 17th century but in history of Western philosophy. Often referred to as the “father of modern philosophy”... he rejected the final causal model of explaining natural phenomena and replaced it with science-based observation and experiment.

On a much more personal level, the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews review of Desmond Clark's 2006 book; "Descartes: A Biography" makes some very candid observations about the father of modern scientific thinking, adding credibility by stating that the book is notable for its exhaustive detail, drawing helpfully upon Descartes' voluminous and revealing correspondence to reconstruct as best as possible Descartes' movements and mindsets throughout his almost 54 years of life... Clarke provides for the reader to better understand Descartes as a person and as an intellectual. 

NDPR points to three related themes which "edge repeatedly to the forefront throughout the book;"

• Descartes' seemingly endless travels and his eventual isolation in voluntary exile;
• Descartes' own largely unflattering character;
• The ubiquitous and sometimes menacing presence of others exercising an influence over Descartes' life and work, especially his scientific work.

What follows are some edited extracts from the review;

Beeckman, one of Descartes earliest close friends, remarked, on one occasion, that Descartes saw travel as a replacement for study in schools and through books, of which he read few.

His aversion to the ideas of others extended to his avoidance of learned people. 

In fact, as he matured, he tended to avoid all contact with people, and his adult life was lived primarily in isolation.

Clarke's characterizes Descartes as lonely, paranoid, and generally unpleasant: "He had become [by 1638] a reclusive, cantankerous, and oversensitive loner, who worried incessantly about his place in history and the priority he claimed for various discoveries."

Clark writes of Descartes' "sensitivity to criticism and the certainty that he claimed, prematurely, for his own view", stating further that Descartes "fought with almost everyone he encountered while constantly announcing that all he wanted was 'the security and tranquility' required to complete his intellectual projects".

Among Descartes other flaws Clark lists; lack of modesty, paranoia and suspicion, reluctance to concede intellectual points, a tendency to bear grudges, duplicity, and manipulative treatment of people, even of supportive friends.

Descartes seems to have been in almost constant battle with one or another critic or erstwhile friend, while describing himself as 'docile' and reluctant to speak in his own defense.

Perhaps the least attractive of his many failings was Descartes' duplicity. "He sends pairs of letters to Queen Christina and to Chanut presenting sharply divergent attitudes toward the Queen's invitation to Sweden. 'These parallel letters… ', writes Clarke, "show Descartes at his dissembling best."

I close this post with three questions;

• How does this seemingly self taught, argumentative, arrogant and self serving critic of everyone and everything but himself end up becoming the father of modern philosophical thought and scientific inquiry?
• How can one be a fan of Descartes methods now termed :scientific" without simultaneously harboring similar traits, or at least sympathies, within one's self? 
• Is the Cartesian mindset a necessary precursor for being a competent designer, scientist or engineer? 

Archer's Systematic Method for Designers

L Bruce Archer's Systematic Method for Designers was published 1964 by the  Council of Industrial Design in London and published serially in Design magazine in 1963 and 1964, revised, with additional material.

It is an impressive work, comprising seven sections, described in 13 pages;

1) Aesthetics and logic
2) The nature of designing
3) Getting the brief
4) Examining the evidence
5) The creative leap
6) The donkey work
7) The final steps.

Each section is loaded with the wisdom and advice of a seasoned practitioner, organized with the rigor of an academic mind.

In the introduction, Archer comments about the tectonic shift he saw under way in the design profession;

"The most fundamental challenge to conventional ideas on design, however, has been the growing advocacy of systematic methods of problem solving, borrowed from computer techniques and management theory, for the assessment of design problems and the development of design solutions."

With regard to aesthetics Archer observed that "as soon as two people start to talk abut design, misunderstandings arise. Some... are due to over-leaping vocabularies, such as those of the engineer and the architect, where the same term can mean slightly or completely different things. Many misunderstandings, however are due to fundamental differences in value and logic."

"Some of our most successful designers have been able to draw a line between sense and sensibility, logic and intuition, function and aesthetic, which needs neither analysis nor justification. They probably think that there is a deal too much talk and not enough action. Others, however, remain racked with prejudices which make them lash out at words like 'analysis', 'logic' and 'method' - or even at words like 'good taste' and 'style'. It would probably do them good to talk about design a bit more."

Phase 4 - Develop Prototype design(s)

The arc of Archer's thinking shifted over the years, as he struggled to close the gap between thinking, feeling and doing as foundations for a grand theory of design. After many years pursuing the idea that computers could help manage the immense complexity of a process which filled 13 pages, had 228 steps, plus five pages of accompanying arrow diagrams, embodies in six phases;

1) "Receive the brief, analyse the problem, prepare detailed program and estimate.
2) Collect data, identify and analyse subproblems, prepare performance specifications.
3) Prepare outline specifications.
4) Develop prototype designs.
5) Prepare and execute validation studies.
6) Prepare manufacturing documentation.

This detailed, top-down approach dovetailed nicely with the well organized planning methods being developed in government managed military and aerospace at the time.

Note that some of the arrows in the diagram point left, indicating some recursion in the process flow. (This is also true of the other five phases.)

 Archer's Eight ways an idea can be expressed

In Part five: The creative leap Archer states; "When all is said and done about defining design problems and analysing design data, there still remains the real crux of the act of designing - the creative leap from pondering the question to finding a solution." Several paragraphs later he observes; "...there can be nothing unscientific about the traditional reliance on intuition and inspiration in design." Confronted with the then recent discoveries of the Transactional school of perception, he concluded; "We are thus brought face to face with the reality of the need for rich, wide and fruitful experience among designers, as well as the capacity for flexibility and fantasy in thought." Archer also asserts that this leap is something which the designer must do alone, although I suspect he was referring to the idea that our thinking occurs within our individual minds first, rather than a collective, shared consciousness.

For all his process rigor, Archer understood the value of cut-and-try. He wrote; "In some industries - furniture, for example, it is often quicker and cheaper to build a prototype and submit it to user tests than it is to carry out extensive detailing and stress calculation. The advantage of suck-it-and-see (cut and try? -df) methods is that however subtle the variables, a direct measure of the overall success or failure is possible. The chief disadvantage is that so many problems of construction must be wholly or partly solved before performance testing can even begin."

Archer's family donated 34 boxes of documents to the Royal College of Art in 2007. The RCA's website states; Different stages of Archer’s model for the design process would later be understood in now-familiar terms such as ‘quality assurance’ or ‘user-centred research’, Unfortunately, access to the documents is limited due to their not having been converted to digital formats.

He did use the phrase "design thinking" on page 1 of Systematic Method for Designers, in context it reads; "Ways have had to be found to incorporate knowledge of ergonomics, cybernetics, marketing and management science into design thinking. As with most technology, there has been a trend towards the adoption of a systems approach as distinct from an artefact approach."

I'll leave it to the reader to determine if they think Archer was referring to a formalized method of design in that statement. My read is that he was speaking of the way designers think, as opposed to a formalized method - and, based on his work, writings and teaching, he clearly was interested in developing an expression of a repeatable design process.

Contact me for more information on Archer's work.

What's Your Style; Thinking, Doing, Feeling or...?

For several weeks I've had an idea percolating to frame Design Thinking as a learning style which combines feeling, thinking and doing in order to discover and solve problems. Today I found a web site by the New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages/ New Jersey Bilingual Educators which had a one page handout entitled What does your preferred learning style mean? Much to my delight, the column headings were; Thinking, Doing, Feeling and Innovating. The footnote said it was adopted from Skip Downing's On Course Workshop.

Unfortunately, the link to the Learning Styles Inventory there was broken, but here is what the NJTESOL/NJBE web page showed:

Reframing this to the context of the Design Thinking process, the pieces are all there; Analysis Empathizing, Building and Testing and Reflection. I was disappointed that the Innovating column didn't integrate more of the items from the other three - are Innovators not also Thinkers and Doers and Feelers? I also disagree with the notion that Innovators would be "Uncomfortable with answers based on abstract theories, cold facts, hard data, emotion, or personal considerations" but perhaps thats because the context is academic rather than practical.

What do you think? As a Design Thinker, are we not seeking to be Feeling, Thinking and Doing as the situation demands?

A Brief History of IDEO's Design Thinking Process

In the February 1, 2009 issue of FastCo Design, Linda Tischler told the story of David Kelley, the founding of IDEO and the d.school at Stanford, but there is much more to the story than that.  It also mentions the cradle of Design Thinking at Stanford; the Joint Program in Design. What follows is an edited and expanded version of what started out as her story;

Stanford's Joint Program in Design dates from 1958, when Professor John E. Arnold, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, moved to Stanford with a joint appointment as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Business Administration.

John Arnold and a friend from Arcturus IV

Arnold had received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1934 and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1940 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In the 1950s he sought to shift the meaning of design from being “the language used to tell fabrication and assembly where to make their cuts” to “the language of innovation,” by which engineers expressed their imagination, He proposed the idea that design engineering should be human-centered, which was a radical concept in the era of Sputnik and the early Cold War.

In 1959 Arnold wrote; "...[the engineer] can take on some aspects of the artist and try to improve or increase the salability of a product or machine by beautifying or bettering its appearance, or by having a keener sensitivity for the market and for the kinds of things people want or don’t want.” Similar to L. Bruce Archer and Harold van Doren, Arnold was suggesting that beauty and desirability were key elements for the engineer to consider.

John was already known for his unconventional methods of teaching engineers, for example; Arcturus IV; a problem-based learning assignment that put his students in an off world setting to work on tools and appliances for a bird-like race of "Methanians" who had “three eyes, including one with X-ray vision” as featured in the May 16, 1955 issue of Life Magazine.

Building on Arnold's work, Bob McKim (Emeritus, Engineering) and Matt Kahn (Art), created the Product Design major and the graduate-level Joint Program in Design. The curriculum was formalized in the mid-1960s, making the Joint Program in Design (JPD) one of the first inter-departmental programs at Stanford.

The Ping Pong Ball Problem made it into Adam's book

Textbooks included McKim's Experiences in Visual Thinking, and Jim Adams', Conceptual Blockbusting, a Guide to Better Ideas. McKim's work predated other writers and proponents of the Visual Thinking concept. ME101: Visual Thinking became the introductory course to the Product Design major. Adam's Conceptual Blockbusting contains more than one problem right out of John Arnold's bag of mental challenges.

When Bob McKim transitioned to Emeritus status, Matt Kahn, Rolf Faste and David Kelley  continued instruction in the tradition of merging art, science and need-finding though the 1980s and 1990s. ME101 is still taught at Stanford and the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Department of Art continue their collaboration, with faculty drawn from both schools.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon in 1973, David Kelley took a job at Boeing, designing what he calls a "milestone in aviation history"; the 747's LAVATORY OCCUPIED sign. He moved to National Cash Register (now NCR) in Ohio, which turned out to be a similarly frustrating experience. Fate intervened during the 1973-74 oil embargo, when a guy in David's car pool told him about Stanford's product-design program.  At Stanford, Kelley met Bob McKim, who became his mentor.

In 1978, Kelley and some of his Stanford pals banded together to launch a design and engineering firm, Hovey - Kelley Design, opening for business over a dress shop in downtown Palo Alto. In 1981, the firm created the first Apple mouse.

In 1991, Kelley's firm merged with two others; Bill Moggridge's ID2, which had designed the first laptop computer, and Mike Nuttall's Matrix Design, whose skill was in visual design, to form IDEO.

In a 2003 meeting with IDEO CEO Tim Brown, Kelley had an epiphany: They would stop calling IDEO's approach "design" and start calling it "design thinking."

"I'm not a words person," Kelley said, "but in my life, it's the most powerful moment that words or labeling ever made. Because then it all made sense. Now, I'm an expert at methodology rather than a guy who designs a new chair or car.”

"They went meta on the notion of design," says Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, referring to the shift from object design to focusing on organizational processes. "They concluded that the same principles can be applied to the design of, say, emergency-room procedures as a shopping cart.”

Like Arnold's view, Design Thinking represents a serious challenge to the status quo at more traditional companies, particularly those where engineering or marketing dominate the process. Patrick Whitney, Dean of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) sends many of his graduates off to IDEO and says he sees this resistance all the time. "A lot of my students have MBAs and engineering degrees. They're taught to identify the opportunity set, deal with whatever numbers you can find to give you certainty, then optimize.”

It took David Kelley a while to appreciate the power of stepping back before forging ahead. In the mid-1980s, while at Hovey Kelley, he used to write proposals with the phases of the process he'd learned at Stanford — understanding, observation, brainstorming, prototyping — all priced separately. Clients invariably would say, "Don't do that early fooling around. Start with phase three." Kelley realized that the early phases were where the big ideas came from — and what separated Hovey Kelley from other management consultants.

"That moment was really big for me," he says. "After that, I'd say, 'No way, I won't take the job if you scrap those phases. That's where the value is.’ "

How much value? Procter & Gamble's CEO A.G. Lafley sent the company's entire 40-member Global Leadership Council to IDEO headquarters twice for a total immersion in the process. "Our senior management was blown away," says Claudia Kotchka, former vice president for design innovation and strategy. "They learned that design is more than aesthetics, and that there are different ways of solving problems than the analytical methods that most disciplines teach.”

Still, despite the enthusiasm in Palo Alto, once the P&G Global Leadership Team got back to Cincinnati, ideas created in the design process kept getting stuck as they ran into the commercial side of the business. This frustrated Kotchka, who called Kelley, Rotman business school dean Roger Martin, and IIT's Patrick Whitney to help find a way to break the deadlock. Over the summer and fall of 2005, the three came up with a prototype of an integrated approach that took a product team through the design process all the way through the impact on strategy. What's more, they trained the P&G employees to facilitate such programs on their own.

The way Kelley sees it, a polyglot team gives an extraordinary advantage in generating truly creative ideas. That idea was one of the animating forces behind the d.school — a place that would help typically analytical Stanford students become more creative thinkers. The school would draw from business, law, education, medicine, engineering — the more diversity, the better.

Kelley is still a bit astonished at what he has been able to pull off. "I've been here 30 years, and nobody paid any attention to me at all," he says. "At one point, they were trying to reduce the size of my office — which was 78 square feet. Now I'm sitting in meetings with the president, with him asking if I want another building and talking about making creative confidence a requirement at Stanford, just like a foreign language."

The most mature form of the process turns up the gain on the artistic/feeling leg of the art/science/business problem solving triad. Participants in the d.school's seminars start their journey by empathically interviewing strangers, looking for emotional hot buttons, in an effort to discover hidden problems to solve. It's a long way from the top-down, buttoned-up world of Mil-Aerospace inspired methods where everything is carefully planned out in advance. but its a lot more creative and Kelly would testify that it's also a lot more fun.

John Arnold would be pleased.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Aesop's Lions and Oxes

In a recent article from TheStreet, Brad Hall described the eight things Google's Project Oxygen discovered about truly effective management; He wrote:

"As a young PhD student, I read thousands of academic articles on leadership. But one day a friend asked me a simple question on how to coach a struggling manager. I was baffled. I could compare and contrast almost any prominent leadership theory, but I had no idea how to fix the simplest management problem. I realized that I was lost in a sea of knowledge. The more I learned, the less I knew."

Google's Project Oxygen was designed to identify what successful Google managers do. Too often, training departments try to help managers improve their "skills" or "traits." But changing traits is very difficult. Instead, Google chose to teach managers what to do - after doing a lot of very disciplined research.

"The team spent one year data-­mining performance appraisals, employee surveys, nominations for top manager awards and other sources. The result was more than 10,000 observations of manager behaviors. The research complemented the quantitative data with qualitative information from interviews. The interviews produced more than 400 pages of notes, which were coded using standard behavioral science methodologies."

The final result was eight behaviors great managers do that make them great. (I broke one of them apart into two, so now there are nine. -df)

They are, in order of importance:

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower (don't micromanage)
3. Be interested in direct reports, personal and work success and wellbeing
4. Be productive and results ­oriented
5. Listen to your team
6. Be a good communicator
7. Help your employees with career development
8. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
9. Have key technical skills, so you can advise the team. 

Interestingly enough, these correlate with another list, complied by Professor Jeffrey Pfeiffer in his 1998 book The Human Equation - Building Profits by Putting People First, which he called Seven Practices of Successful Organizations. These are not in any order of priority. Pfeiffer is known for his steadfast commitment to data backed recommendations, not fluffy leadership advice backed by guesses.

• Extensive training
• Employment Security
• Selective hiring of new personnel
• Reduced status distinctions and barriers across levels
• Self managed Teams and decentralized decision making
• Extensive sharing of financial and performance information
• High performance driven compensation compared to your competition

Sheryl McMillan took it one step further in her July 8, 2016 posting, which began with a re-telling of Aesop's tale of the Lion and the Oxen;

"A Lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them; but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another, so that whichever way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarrelling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the Lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four."

United we stand, divided we fall."

Cheryl wrote of how she was once part of a leadership group formed from two merged organizations. Headcount reductions ("right sizing") followed, and all leadership jobs, including her new boss’s, were under scrutiny. The new boss only liked ideas that supported his position. many felt that he didn’t care about others' opinions. As a result, instead of being encouraged to work together for the good of the organization, everyone felt pitted against one another and found themselves protecting their own “corners of the pasture”.

Cheryl observed that in every interaction with your employees, you are either creating a psychologically safe or unsafe environment and gave three concrete suggestions to help build what Simon Sinek calls a "Circle of Safety:"

Actively Seek and Take Feedback

Understand that as the leader, you hold position power and can directly impact the livelihood of your employees. You must make it safe for your employees to challenge you and to give you candid feedback. Share some examples of your own past bad ideas and decisions, and explain the dangers of future one’s going unchallenged. Frequently request feedback and grateful to receive it. Never rebuke what is offered. Instead, restate what you heard and thank the giver for the feedback.

Learn to Listen with Empathy

Learn how to really listen so that your employees feel your empathy. Restrain yourself from reacting and responding before the other person acknowledges that you understand their position. Be curious about their perspective and ask open questions when you need clarification. Having empathy means you understand and respect the other person's point of view even if you end up not initially agreeing with it.

Work is About Relationships

As social beings, we are wired with a strong need to connect and belong. Only when employees feel safe will they pull together as a unified team.

According to a research study published in Harvard Business Review about key leadership competencies, “Making sure that people feel safe on a deep level should be job #1 for leaders.”

Note that none of these points say anything about using your position or authority to direct or order the other person to do anything. Quite the opposite; Your role as a leader is to figure out how to bring the best out in your employees and make a safe space for them to discover and do what needs to be done. (Even the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers.)

Now, go out and ask your people some open ended questions. Listen. Take notes. Thank them for sharing and encourage them to tackle the problem as a team.

You'll be amazed at the results.

The Contingent Workforce Contradiction

Why are these Contingent Workers smiling?

In a recent article entitled "No Longer Just A ‘Temp’: The Rise Of The Contingent Worker,: Maria Wood quotes some interesting statistics about the "Contingent labor" workforce.

"In 2014, the average share of contingent labor was 18 percent, up from 12 percent in 2009."

"Elance-oDesk and the Freelancer Union report that 53 million people — or 34 percent of the workforce — did freelance work in 2014."

"By 2017, contingent workers, including independent contractors, statement-of-work-based labor and freelancers, will account for nearly 45 percent of the world’s total workforce."

"MBO Partners’ most recent “State of Independence in America” workforce report revealed 30 million classify themselves as independent workers, either as “solopreneurs” who work independently as their only source of earnings, or “side-giggers” — those picking up outside assignments for extra income. That number is projected to grow to nearly 40 million by 2019."

"Ardent’s found that 92 percent of enterprises indicated non-traditional staffing was a vital to moderate facet of their overall corporate strategy."

At the same time one of the most popular speakers on TED is Simon Sinek. His message is almost the polar opposite;

"The best organizations foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build a Circle of Safety. 

This safe culture leads to stable, adaptive, confident teams, where everyone feels they belong."

If a contingent workforce is "a provisional group of workers who work for an organization on a non-permanent basis, also known as freelancers, independent professionals, temporary contract workers, independent contractors or consultants." there is something seriously wrong.

Do you see the conflict?

For some insight into this, take a look at Benno Bos' EDSO in Action.

Please note, this isn't touchy-feely, guru-speak, munmo-jumbo. We're talking neuro-biology. The type of human neuro-biology at the heart of all the web chatter about Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, and Design Thinking. The neuro-biology that your most basic actions and thoughts are built on.

Quoting from EDSO in action;

"When we are in an environment where we feel safe, with the people around us, we naturally protect them and look out for their interests. Our leaders protect us and we protect our leaders. We hope to make our leaders proud, showing them that their sacrifice to protect us and help us grow has been worth it. We are more capable of overcoming the constant dangers from the outside and creating a Circle of Safety on the inside."

When Simon Sinek asks what it would be like to have a job where you are in a Circle of Safety does working for an organization on a "non-permanent basis" immediately spring to mind? How about being in a family on a "non-permanent basis"?

This isn't about that availability of insurance benefits, or equal pay for equal work, or protection from discrimination of any flavor. It's about belonging to a group with common goals and beliefs.

To get a feel for what Americans are worried about Chapman College publishes an annual survey called America's Top Fears. The group area with running out of money and unemployment ranked #5 in 2015, just behind Man-made disasters, Technology, Government and the Environment.

Its part of the reason 70% of workers report they are disengaged in the workplace and a thinly veiled disguise for lack of commitment, even infidelity in the workplace. Staffing agencies love it. Selfish management loves it. Stopping it should be in the platform of any viable political candidate or party.

Its time to call foul on the Contingent Workforce Revolution for the baldfaced lie it really is.

(End of political rant. We now return you to our regular programming. -df)

This Truly Changes Everything

An article by Bryan Kolb, Robbin Gibb and Terry E. Robinson of the Canadian Centre for Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge could literally change your-self perception, enough that you might change your world.

 Yes, you read that right. I said the information in the article could change your world.

The abstract states;

"Although the brain was once seen as a rather static organ, it is now clear that the organization of brain circuitry is constantly changing as a function of experience. These changes are associated with functional changes which include memory, addiction and recovery of function. Behavior can be influenced by a myriad of factors including both pre and post natal experience, drugs, hormones, maturation, aging, diet, disease, and stress. 

Understanding how these factors influence brain organization and function is important not only for understanding both normal and abnormal behavior, but also for designing treatments for behavioral and psychological disorders ranging from addiction to stroke."

The popular term for this phenomenon is brain plasticity and the implications are huge.

Generations were taught that the brain grew until we reached adulthood, stopped growing, and that was that. By the time you reached your mid-twenties, the die was cast, the organic computer between your ears was built and the rest was just about applying the information that was stuffed into it at school. That idea was a pillar of education and the law, what we taught and how we taught it, our ideas and definition of crime and punishment, treatment of disease and who you could become in your career and family.

There have been a few who thought about this differently - Carol Dweck and Albert Bandura, for example - scientists and sociologists who dared to suggest that what we teach our children can have a dramatic effect on their success and that even the most primal fears can be overcome. But this confirmation that our brains and behaviors are plastic from cradle to grave, even to the point of recovery from massive loss of function, is more than ground breaking - its game changing.

And it couldn't have come at a better time. The challenges we face in our families and at work are literally tearing the fabric of our society apart. As long as we believed that there was some immutable, organic reason why we couldn't change there was an excuse not to change.

That excuse has been blown away and what is left opens a range of possibilities which could literally change the world.

Don't take my word for it. Read the article. 

Think about it. Do something about it.

Stop making excuses.

Be the change.

Design it.

Do it.