Nothing is Digital

Proposition 1: The map is not the territory. What I mean is that nothing that is human is ever really truly on or off or in any other discrete state. This is in the sense that nothing is certain. The world is analogue, regardless of what “digital” structures that we try to put on it and a lot grief comes from that gaps between the digital structures and the places where the analogue world rubs up against them.

Proposition 2: The meaning of a communication is its effect. I think I mean something else as well though. I mean that anything you communicate has more meaning than you think it does. And its meanings spin off in all sorts of ways that you might not expect. We are capable of reacting emotionally to almost anything. Just think of sitting at a red light, waiting a few seconds, you’re starting to get irritated, a few seconds more, you’re starting to wonder why me? A few seconds more and you’re wondering if you could hunt down the people who are responsible for setting these lights and kill them and their families and burn down their houses. What about if the opposite happens? You drive through a busy city on a “green wave”. Every traffic light that you come to turns green. Suddenly, you’re feeling light and relaxed and as if you can do anything. A traffic light isn’t quite a binary signal, you need two digits to deal with its four states (Red, Red and Amber, Green, Amber) but just look at how much emotion it generates. So, even though the traffic light is binary, the reaction to it sure as hell isn’t. People don’t just stop and go at traffic lights, they get emotionally involved. Emotionally involved at just that tiny piece of traffic flow management. Think what might go wrong if you ask one of your employees to do something for you!

Proposition 3: Nothing anyone does is digital, their motives are always complex.

There are all sorts of ways in which understanding this, and continuing to keep it at the forefront of you mind can really help.

1) This means that nothing is ever finished, and nothing is ever perfect

This means that you need strategies in place for deciding when something is “good enough” that you can go with it, and getting it past that point, otherwise you could be stuck, literally forever.

This also means that whatever situation you’re in, no matter how good it is, you can make it better. This is how the Japanese can work apparent miracles, not with radical changes to their processes, but with incremental changes.

2) This also means that project management methods that try to talk about work as if it’s a digital system (one where everything is definitely specified) and then try to supply methods that can manipulate a digital system are doomed to failure. From proposition 1: the map is not the territory comes the understand that no-one can say precisely what they want, from proposition 2: The meaning of a communication is its effect comes the understanding that even if someone could perfectly say what they want, there is no guarantee that when they asked someone else to get it for them and they would get what they want. This is why one of the most important aspects of Agile is, not the short iterations, but the information that comes as feedback. Feedback gives you a mechanism for getting nearer perfection. But it doesn’t guarantee it.

This is also why trying to drive project management digitally - as if a project were some kind of adding machine and all you need to do is to be told how to turn the handle - is doomed to failure. This is why stand-up meetings are a good idea and why, if you’re working with people long-distance or distributed you are instantly at a disadvantage and need to use all the equipment you can, conference calling, video conferencing, on-line chat to do the best you can to make up for the shortfall in “analogue feedback”. This is why you need to demo what you’re doing to the client regularly and often. Analogue feedback stops expensive fights. It’s why there’s more road rage than pavement rage. It’s why people say things in emails that they’d never say in real life.

Whenever you’re thinking of project management in mechanistic terms, don’t. Maybe think of your project instead like there’s been an earthquake at the zoo and all the animals have escaped. You need to capture the animals? Are all the animals equally easy to catch? Are they going to use the same methods? Is maybe more important that you catch the lion or the mountain goats? Once you’ve got the hang of netting all kinds of beasts as a team, would it be OK to have one of the team drop out and be replaced by “another equally able animal catcher” who you’d never worked with? Would this have any effect on the team?

3) Sometime what people do is digital, they just say the things that they need to say, do the things that they need to do, but their heart isn’t in it. The American’s have an expression for this - “phoning it in” and generally, behind this kind of “just doing my job, just doing what I was told to do” behaviour, there are other, more complex motives. What this means is that you can’t get people to act well, digitally unless you get them to act analogically. You don’t want anybody who does as they are told working for you. No matter what you’re paying them, no matter how supposedly senior to them you are, you still have to persuade them to do what you want in such a way that they put their “Heart and Soul” into it.

This means that multi-tasking is very bad. Again, get away from the idea of your brain as a machine. No switches. Imagine instead that it’s a troop of monkeys feeding on the fruit of two trees? How long does it take to transfer a troop of monkeys from one tree to another? What if you kept switching trees 10-20 times a day? Would you have some tired hungry monkeys? Research shows that it can take a programmer as much as 40 minutes to get all his monkeys back in his programming tree after an interruption like the phone ringing.