Only Dead Fish

Flexible Technology Stacks

One of the areas that I think companies find hardest to let go of is the concept of locked-down technology stacks. There's no doubt a number of good historical reasons why it was once important to maintain rigid controls over the technologies your staff use, but with the plethora of advanced, secure tools and systems now available, times have changed.

And yet I still encounter teams in companies that are unnecessarily restricted in the technologies they can use and at a time when innovation, prototyping, tesing, collaboration, efficient communication and project management are so critical this becomes a potentially significant problem.

The answer of-course is about balance. To have sufficient controls in place to enable effective technology stack management, remove unecessary compatibility or security issues whilst still empowering teams to do their jobs better, use tools appropriate for the job at hand, and enable healthy levels of autonomy.

It's rarely perfect and there are always challenges but utilising broad lists of approved technologies and tools that then enable choice and flexibility by individuals and teams is a sound approach (and the guiding principles of the GDS technology transformation programme is a good place to start).

So I liked what Robert Rees had to say over on The Guardian's developer blog about the technology stack they use and how instead of being a fixed stack, they allow the teams to choose the technology that solves their problems whilst also having a 'whitelist' of approved tech:

'A lot of organisations standardise technologies to help them move faster. Our whitelist attempts to do this for us. If you believe in autonomy, though, then you have to let teams choose the technology that solves their problems most effectively.'

Like most things it's about balance but it does seem to be one that many companies struggle to move forwards with.

Protecting Against Obsolete Beliefs

'When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world. Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to good.'

I liked what Paul Graham had to say about protecting yourself from obsolete beliefs (or what I have previously termed toxic assumptions). In order to respond well to a rapidly changing world, he says, we need not only to have an explicit belief in change (to be actively looking for change) but also to be 'aggressively open-minded'. Although I seem to have a stronger belief in the importance of having a point of view on the trajectory of change, he makes some good points about meaningful change typically originating from unforeseen places, being disciplined about not letting your working hypotheses or domain-expertise overly-constrain your view on the future (not becoming 'a prisoner of your own expertise'), and to focus initially on people rather than ideas:

'Surround yourself with the sort of people new ideas come from. If you want to notice quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you can't do better than to be friends with the people whose discoveries will make them so.'

Nicely put.

On Design, Strategy and Planning

Shane Parrish had a great extract from (of all places) The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual describing the relationship between design and planning. Worth repeating in full:

"While both activities seek to formulate ways to bring about preferable futures, they are cognitively different. Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework. Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving that problem. In general, planning is problem solving, while design is problem setting. Where planning focuses on generating a plan—a series of executable actions—design focuses on learning about the nature of an unfamiliar problem.

When situations do not conform to established frames of reference — when the hardest part of the problem is figuring out what the problem is—planning alone is inadequate and design becomes essential. In these situations, absent a design process to engage the problem’s essential nature, planners default to doctrinal norms; they develop plans based on the familiar rather than an understanding of the real situation. Design provides a means to conceptualize and hypothesize about the underlying causes and dynamics that explain an unfamiliar problem. Design provides a means to gain understanding of a complex problem and insights towards achieving a workable solution."

Shane goes on to talk about the importance of gathering different perspectives when dealing with complex, multifaceted problems, in order to become not just opinionated but informed, clarifying the issue to the point where logic and intuition can then be applied effectively. If, as Shane suggests, design is an ongoing enquiry that focuses on framing the problem (alongside regular reassessment), and planning focuses on developing courses of action, then rather than being the link between them, strategy is perhaps the continuum across both of these two things. Or in Noah's words, the set of (continually evolving) 'rules' that you build to help drive optimal outcomes in decisions, informed by a start point but also ongoing outcomes.

On the Renaissance of Email Newsletters

The email newsletter seems to be undergoing something of a continuing renaissance. Quite a number of the smartest people I know now do their own update, and the list of insightful newsletters that now arrive my inbox keeps on growing. Since I first wrote about the Rebirth of the Newsletter, there's a number of others that have been added to my recommended list, including: 

Shane Parrish's (aka Farnam Street) weekly update

Alexis Madrigal's excellent '5 Intriguing Things' 

The Undercuurent weekly dispatch

The Storythings weekly newsletter

Anjali Ramachandran's international startup-themed Other Valleys

Strands of Genius from Faris and Rosie

The Almighty weekly Dark Matter

Steven Johnson's innovation focused How We Get to Next

And it would be remiss of me not to mention my own curated weekly newsletter which (unbelievably) I've been doing now for almost five years (you can sign up to that here). And of-course there's Fraggl, which is set up on the premis that combining different forms of curation can surface great and relevant content.

It's notable too how apps and publishers are using email as a key tool for content discovery, and some are creating new context-driven email products. Pocket, for example, do an excellent weekly summary of top articles saved using the app. The daily Medium emails are the main way in which I find Medium posts I want to read (although if I'm honest I find them a tad too much), and no doubt inspired by the excellent Quartz daily email (which acts as a kind of distributed home page), the FT recently launched First FT - key news and thought stimulus delivered to your (mobile friendly) inbox in time to read on your daily commute to work.

And there seems to be real value in it. Witness Thrillist Media who send out over a billion entertainment and product driven emails a year which are the foundation for an e-commerce operation that generates almost $100m in revenue. And interesting startups like TheSkimm, an informally written daily news briefing targeted at young women that has recently passed a million subscribers and raised over $6 million in funding.

The interesting thing about all this is that inspite of how much we all complain about groaning inboxes, email seems to be growing in importance as a content discovery tool (perhaps because we spend so much time in it, and it is such a device-agnostic, action-oriented medium) and ironically has the potential to help us better distinguish signal from noise.

This Week's Favourite Fraggl Links

Here are my favourite links curated this week by Fraggl:

• It's not out just yet but Adam Morgan's (of EatBigFish) new book 'A Beautiful Constraint' ('An inspiring yet practical guide for transforming limitations into opportunities') looks well worth pre-ordering. I saw Adam speak at the APG Big Thinking conference recently and he was excellent
• Gosh. Bots now outnumber humans on the web
• Sobering. Reporters Without Borders published a 2014 tally of abuses against journalists - 66 journalists were murdered this year, 119 were kidnapped, and 40 are currently being held hostage.
• A lengthy but good round up of the state of consumer technology at the end of 2014 from analyst Ben Thomson
• The best job ever?

And of-course you can sign up to Fraggl here.