I’m home today suffering the apex of a head cold and thinking, ‘This would be a great design challenge, curing the common cold.‘ I’m way out of my area here, but it’ll make me feel better to look at the problem.
In What causes the common cold? HowStuffWorks tells us, ‘There are many different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, but about half of the time a cold is caused by a class of viruses called rhinoviruses.‘ In their article on the immune system they say, ‘Many diseases cannot be cured by vaccines…. The common cold and Influenza are two good examples. These diseases either mutate so quickly or have so many different strains in the wild that it is impossible to inject all of them into your body.‘
The trick in battling the cold virus seems to be quickly detecting and vaccinating it. The mutating virus problem is a tricky one, and the plethora of strains makes having the right vaccination on hand difficult. But what if we went for an 80/20 solution, something that allowed us to detect and vaccinate just the more common strains, say just the rhinoviruses.
Let’s look at the patient’s experience. Here’s how my cold progressed:
- Sunday I felt an annoying discomfort in my throat.
- Monday I had a full-on sore throat
- Tuesday brought a runny nose and sneezing, to the dismay of my co-workers.
- Today, Wednesday, my head feels like it’s in a vise.
Now I’ll go into pure exploration mode. What if, on Sunday, I swab my nose with a special strip that performed a litmus test just for the rhinoviruses. If the test is positive, I go to the pharmacy and the pharmacist slips the strip into a machine that reads the strip, telling the pharmacist which vaccine to dispense.
Or, let’s say the vaccinations were still too varied for a pharmacist to have on hand. A positive test might enable medical associations to dictate specific recommendations to help your immune system fight the virus (zinc, rest, fluids, etc.). This litmus test plus the official recommendation could be recognized by employers, so one proactive day of rest would cure a cold instead of decreased productivity as the cold approaches plus a day off.
Michael Cage, who earns most of his income through writing, takes drastic measures to organize his time:
I just want better strategies for focus. So, I bought an iBook. It does not have E-mail set up and never will. When it’s time to work on important projects, I carry it into another office…. As for my main, office computer, I’ve made a life-changing shift there, as well. I only check E-mail once per day, at the end of the day….
I’ve noticed many people are happier with the illusion of progress than they are with progress itself. You can spend an entire day “appearing†productive by banging out E-mail after E-mail, writing memos, and barely taking a break. But at the end of the day you are where you started. Low-value, low-return busy work took up your day, and you are confronted with the fact that high-impact projects aren’t done. Or much/any closer to being done.
I used to do this more in my previous job, unplugging the laptop and moving to a lounge-like spot in the office. Sadly my current job lacks loungeness, and a laptop.
I’m not a hockey fan, but I must say this sport has far and away the best trophy of any major sport, a giant silver cup that can be proudly hoisted over the head. Look at that thing gleam.
Chatting with some IAs recently, we wondered into grammatical territory where to my relief everyone felt passionately that it’s alright to end sentences with a preposition. One or two people said that was a rule carried over from Latin that shouldn’t apply to English. Winston Churchill illustrated the preference of comfortable convention over artificial rule:
When an editor dared to change a sentence of Churchill’s that appeared to end inappropriately with a preposition, Churchill responded by writing to the editor, “This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put.”
I knew Christina was moving Widgetopia to Drupal, but I didn’t realize the community had already jumped onboard and was contributing widgets. This is turning into the definitive gallery space.
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
Issues in motivating each other…
- There is a spiral effect among
- Motivation
- Productivity and quality
- Economic success
- Marketplace success
- Honesty is very important in recruiting. It creates the right match between position and employee so the person’s motivation emerges naturally
- Firms should have slightly more work than staff to maintain an atmosphere of challenge
- Professionals are smart and want a variety of challenges. They usually have Impostor Syndrome
- Professionals need a meaningful understanding of their work
- And to be reminded that all of the work is important
- Outplacement is not just humanitarian, but a compliment to up-or-out and a way to build the network
I recently thought it’d be nice for digital video recorders like TiVo to access parts of programs, so if I wanted to see that one joke from a movie, not the whole movie, I could find it. Just tag and syndicate the video, right? Webjay Brett Singer has the seeds of an implementation, publishing clips of news video. Webjay creator Lucas Gonze calls it broadcatching.
In the next decade, many design jobs will move offshore. If you think I’m wrong, if you think this is preposterous, then talk to out-of-work programmers who thought the same thing only five years ago. But Victor, you protest, someone can’t do user research from 4000 miles away. To this I’d say, most companies aren’t doing user research anyway. Good-enough design is good-enough to most companies, and good-enough design can be done offshore.
Paul Ford, in Outsourcing, Etc., says, ‘I’m struck by the irony that the tools, networks, and protocols built over the last 40 years by programmers are the exact mechanism that allows these jobs to move overseas.‘ The same is true for design, as we write about design, critique each other’s work, and release our tools for those overseas to learn from. Furthermore, when we offshore our programming work, we send them our designs, we explain our designs, and in doing so we educate offshore workers in design. They’re probably getting a better case study-based education than many of us have had.
India, for example, has a new, growing middle class that will absorb the jobs that we won’t be able to fill in the coming years. Already firms right here in New York City have difficulty finding entry-level web design workers. You’d think recent college graduates would love a job in this industry, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing, it is simply the ways things are. If we recognize this now and prepare our skills accordingly (i.e. move up in the problem-solving food chain) we’ll protect our ability to earn a living. Brett Lider has some good ideas along these lines.
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
On coaching…
- Coaching is even more important when the market for employees is constrained.
- The best management is not the most intelligent or the highest skilled, but the best at coaching. They can make people feel special and focus their talents.
- Use the Socratic method to stimulate thought.
- Senior people coaching junior people is another form of leverage.
- Maister does the math and shows it’s more profitable for managers to spend their time coaching than to do their own work.
Manager’s performance should be measured by
- the aggregate performance of the group they manage
- 360 degree feedback
He goes on to say more about managing, that he finds there’s a big difference between the duties of a professional and a manager of professionals. The entire chapter is good, but in summary managers should be…
- patient
- willing to give credit to others
- good leaders in tough times
Brett volleys with an expansion of my backslider idea for enhancing the browser back button.
Browsing recently seen pages is very frequent behavior, so this is important functionality to improve.
In the past I’ve said that design is a conversation, a dialog that should be enjoyable for all parties. Last night at the NYC IA Salon we discussed a similar idea, where the designer creates something that either benefits the client, the customer, or both.
For example, Bella mentioned how some desks at the U.S. Library of Congress are slanted, with glass over the wood and no ledge at the bottom. This keeps anything harmful from being placed or spilled on the wood. It also keeps books from staying on the desks. James calls this slanty, design that purposefully reduces functionality. An even-handed solution would have protected the wood and provided an enjoyable surface to work on.
Statements of design goals like usable, useful, and desirable only describe the user’s experience. Return on investment only describes the business benefits. Design is a conversation that should benefit all parties. If a slanty design only benefits one party, then a balanced design benefits all parties.
Of course, people will have different understandings of what is balanced. But having a term makes it easier to discuss where the balance lies. ‘Well Bob, this design isn’t as slanty as before, but it’s still unbalanced. How about a revised handle that fits the hand better but is still inexpensive to assemble because it’s all one piece?‘
Someone – not sure who – makes a compelling argument for using Flash for planning designs rather than Visio. It might also help collapse some of the distance between direct and indirect design; the planning tool is also the prototyping tool. This is a good thing for at least two reasons:
- Interactive media are dynamic; it’s difficult to use paper to plan designs
- Indirect design in some firms has gone too far. Work that should be prototyped and iterated is analyzed instead, which can be less effective in finding what works and mitigating risks
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
Ways to build your assets as a consultant:
Learn by reflecting on recent work
- alone (e.g. journal)
- with your team
- with your client
- with your peers
- with your mentor
Apprentiships are the most effective way of developing knowledge and skill. Depending on the company culture, balance apprentiships with a Darwinian system where initiative is rewarded.
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
Your assets as a consultant basically boil down to your knowledge, technical skill, counseling skill, and the depth of your client relationships.
Six lessons about your assets as a consultant:
- Your existing knowledge and skills will depreciate in value
- The health of your career has less to do with the volume of business you do than with the type of work you do and the type of clients you do it for
- When you take control of your own business development, you take control of your own career development
- The same is true of asset development
- Balance using your existing skills with developing new skills
- Marketing to existing clients is the best way to build your assets
Build experience through industry depth first, then breadth of clients
Skill in counseling consists of activities such as facilitating groups, building consensus, resolving political conflicts, etc.
You not only want to solve problems, you want to educate the client.
