The Decision Strategist

I have spent the last couple of months incredibly addicted to this little game called nethack. It’s free and completely old school, and just terribly awesome. I have yet to beat it. Someday I’ll post a story of my exploits.

I was gearing up the other day to start working on new projects again, and went over my primary goals for 2007. It turns out I did ok. I was officially out of debt in November (not counting the dreaded student loans), made a lot of progress on projects, have been running, and maintained a pretty healthy diet. I could have done better, especially without the devil game referenced above, but I’m not as disappointed as I thought I would be.

Which brings me to two different but related thoughts. First, I feel like my life is composed of a number of cycles. It’s vary noticeable with respect to my work on individual projects. I tend to have a few months of hard work and extreme motivation, followed by a few months of a lack of enthusiasm. But there are other areas: exercise, games, jobs, etc… In fact, I’m starting to think that I only enjoy a particular job for about 2 years before I start to get bored. I spent two years at REMI, have spent two years at BBER, and am now looking at spending two years in the Peace Corps (by the way, I received my medical clearance the other day).

The second thought is about my expectations as I pulled up my list of personal goals for 2007. Why did I feel like I had failed? Are we predisposed to feel unsatisfied with our efforts? To some extent it seems like this is common-place, even in areas where other people think our work is spectacular. At work people and clients have been pretty happy with what I’ve done, but I tend to focus on the aspects of any given project that I didn’t explore fully, or had to make uncomfortable assumptions.

So is it just a difference of information? Clients have only the end results of my work to evaluate, and don’t see all the missteps or excluded possibilities. They don’t have access to full information. Is it yet another case of the signal to noise ratio?

Unequal information and the signal to noise ratio have something to do with it, but then why was I convinced of my own failure to achieve my goals? My perfect information of my own thoughts and actions should have kept me online with how I was actually doing. Of course part of feeling like I didn’t do well has to do with the non-trivial impacts of environment and my state of being, which could be related to any number of factors.

But a bigger force was at work. The major source of my disappointment came from my work on launching decyder. I had hoped that by the end of 2007 I would have a working framework for group decision-making, not to mention well-developed web application development skills. In reality I have only a basic framework, and though I know much more than I did at the beginning of 2007, I still have a long way to go.

This means that one goal, ‘launching a decision-based startup’, overrode my other goals and became a proxy for my success in 2007. Why is this? If you asked, I wouldn’t put it above my other goals, especially ‘developing stronger connections with the important people in my life’. But I think there are several reasons why it naturally rose to the forefront:

• It is measurable. My success or failure can be easily discerned by the health of the project, especially in metrics like number of users (0) and income generated (0).
• It has glamor. The idea fits into a society-wide story in which a lone person creates a business with spectacular success.
• It is perhaps most closely related to my future career (in my mind at least). If ultimately I’d like to be more involved in creative idea implementation, this is a good building block for my development.

The other possibility is that we, or at least I, are inherently optimistic about what we can achieve, and pessimistic about what we have achieved. Most people, programmers especially, have a terribly difficult time estimating how much they can accomplish in a given amount of time, often largely overestimating their abilities.

The key for me was that I realized that even if I didn’t accomplish all of my goals, I had made some fairly significant strides in all of them. Perhaps then the point of goals isn’t so much to accomplish them, but to give you something to work towards if you are floundering.

Baby steps

-zot

Popularity: 40%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Analysis is sort of all the rage in strategic planning these days, and is typically applied in a business setting to strategize about a certain objective. It is also this week’s new decision making technique, though it isn’t explicitly used in decision making as much as strategy. In this case I’m going to apply it on a personal level to analyze my own strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats.

Part of the popularity of the SWOT analysis may come from it’s simplicity. Once an objective is defined, a list of each aspect is created. This list is used to create a strategy for achieving the objective.

Yet that simplicity is also the source of it’s criticism. SWOT analysis has been criticized because it leads people to think they have done an adequate job of planning when all they’ve done is list four categories of aspects. SWOT analysis allows you to consider the factors that are affecting a situation or objective, but doesn’t provide the strategy itself.

One key for a useful SWOT analysis is to make sure you have an explicitly defined objective. SWOT analysis in the abstract tends to contribute to the error of thinking SWOT is adequate and the analysis ultimately has little relevance. Since I’m doing this exercise on a personal basis, here’s my objective:

To move into more creative work based on idea generation and execution in programming and design.

Corollary: Given the tendency for businesses to reward status quo success over creative innovation, it is likely, though not necessary, that this means a startup or freelance work.

With this objective in mind, the first step of a SWOT analysis is to consider the internal factors: strengths and weaknesses. These should be things that are inherent to the person (or company usually) and not things that involve external factors.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The next step is to consider the external factors: opportunities and threats. These are things like political and economic factors, market trends, situational and environmental changes, etc…

Opportunities and Threats

That’s the complete SWOT analysis process, but I hardly have a strategy at this point. I’ll have to work on developing one and post it later. There are some key things to point out here though.

First is that I listed more positive than negative factors when talking about myself and less positive factors when thinking about the external situation. Is this a result of selective consideration of evidence as a confirmation bias, or is it just the truth of the situation? Something tells me that if I was someone else doing this analysis on me I’d find more negative personal aspects.

Second, there are some things I listed that need qualification or explanation. I should start by saying that I need to go back and revise my objective to explicitly say creative problem solving instead of just creative work. When I think of creative work I’m generally thinking of new approaches to problems, not things like art or poetry (not to dis on all you cool artists out there).

Another thing that strikes me is looking at the lists of strengths and weaknesses, I am much more capable of succeeding that I usually think. One of my perennial weaknesses is that I underestimate my ability to program, but as I work with code more and more, I am finding myself naturally learning and able to do stuff I would have recently balked at.

None of my weaknesses seem particularly strong or debilitating. Further, taking advice that I heard from somewhere (maybe The 4-Hour work Week), I’m going to focus on increasing my strengths rather than eliminating my weaknesses. Why? Because the return on investment for increasing my strengths is exponential, while the return to eliminating my weaknesses is (at least in the beginning) linear at best, not to mention demoralizing.

One the other hand, my biggest concern for any advertising-based revenue source (such as this blog) is that a consumer spending led recession, especially with the astronomically high levels of debt, will result in a significant decline in sales of all kind, including ad-based internet sales.

So that’s a SWOT analysis, and it gives me a basis for examining the variety of factors that will affect my failure or success in obtaining my goal. If you’re like me, you’re thinking that it’s rather similar to other decision making techniques like the Pros-Cons-Fixes method used in What am I doing with my life? and Plus-Minus-Interesting used in Buy vesus Rent Part II.

The only real difference is that instead of considering the pros and cons of each option in a decision, we’re considering the pros and cons of ourself or our organization with respect to an objective, and we’re explicitly separating internal and external factors.

If you’d like more information on SWOT analysis, Wikipedia has a nice SWOT Analysis page and businessballs has some good (though garish and terribly designed) information here.

On an entirely different note, why do so many decision making and strategic planning web sites seem like the digital version of a car salesman? There are only two real possibilities here. Either all these decision making techniques are snake oil, or the techniques are ok but the consultant is about as valuable as a car salesman.

Decision making techniques in general seem useful, but don’t do much to account for decision making errors. In a way they are merely the formalization of methods we do implicitly. Though I think there are real benefits to plotting things out explicitly, I’m not convinced of the usefulness of hiring consultants to do so. My suspicion is that there are a few really good ones and a whole lot of ineffectual ones, just like most other fields. More on this later.

-zot

Popularity: 100%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

I received an interesting comment from Isabella at Change Therapy on Problem Restatement suggesting a focus less on the solution of a problem and more on the creation of what you want.

The Problem Cycle

The idea is that focusing on the problem tends not to resolve because you get stuck in a cycle. One of the things I struggle with on occasion is not being motivated at work, and the cycle works like this for me:

1. Problem is bad. I get bothered about my lack of motivation and pursue a variety of exercises to do some values clarification, identification of life goals, and set up structure to enable a better working attitude and environment.
2. Solution works, sort of. These things do help by refocusing my and reminding me why I like what I do.
3. Problem lessens. I’m more motivated and getting more done! Wow this planning and scheduling stuff really works.
4. Motivation to solve problem drops. Now that I’m back to motivated, I don’t actually need to take all that time and energy to write up plans and schedules and update my goals do I?
5. Problem gets worse. In a couple of weeks, I end up back where I was, feeling unhappy and unmotivated.

Come to think of it, for me this process also occurs with exercise.

Instead of focusing on the problem, she suggests focusing on what you want to create. In my struggling with motivation at work, the real problem is that sometimes the work I’m doing is repetitive and boring. By structuring and planning my life, I can artificially make it less boring for a little while, but the ultimate source of the problem is still there.

Forget About the Problem

What if instead of focusing on what I don’t have, I focused on what I want?

I want to make my work more creative, innovative and dynamic. I want it to be exciting. I sat down and thought about the kinds of things I can do to make my work better fit that picture, and this is what I came up with:

1. Eliminate repetitive tasks. I’ve already done a lot of this, but I can do a lot more. Sometimes a lot of my work happens in Excel, but while I’m a whiz at using formulas, I’ve never taken the time to learn to use macros. If I have to repeat the same thing over and over, a macro would definitely help.
2. Take part in creation and planning. While most projects are brought in by senior staff, Taking part in the creation and planning of projects gives me a sense of ownership and control that is motivating. Also, as a project leader the final product reflects on me as a person. Since I want to be known for doing quality work, that encourages me to be more productive also.
3. Delegate. We have a lot of work-study students here, but I rarely take advantage of the time they offer. Some of the less interesting parts of my work can be delegated to students and junior staff.

I’m optimistic about this new plan of attack, but I’m always optimistic when trying something new, so we’ll have to see how well it works out.

There is some reason to think that this kind of focus will be more useful. First, by focusing on the problem we enhance our confirmation bias and our concept of the status quo, which leads to the problem sticking around. By focusing on what we are trying to create, we turn our mental energy toward that, and that becomes the new status quo.

Happy Friday!

-zot

Popularity: 13%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Social networks are extremely important, not just in keeping us connected with people and encouraging communication and interaction, but for influencing what kinds of decisions we make.

So far we’ve talked in terms of personal decisions, but the influence of the people you spend time with are a huge factor in everything from deciding what to do with your life to which car to buy.

The Situationist has an article describing recent research that found a tremendously strong link between social networks and obesity. From the perspective of social networks, obesity, much like drug use and memes in general, spreads like a disease through groups of people.

Be careful who your friends are

This isn’t really a new idea. We’ve known for quite a while that who you spend time with affects how you turn up. Especially growing up, your peer group has a stronger effect on who you are than your parents.

There are a million different methods for breaking bad habits, all focused on changing how you should behave. But these methods neglect the importance of your social group.

Entrepreneurs

Why is Silicon Valley such a strong attraction for startups? The costs are huge and it’s packed with a bunch of people at least some of which are probably trying to do the exact same thing you are.

There is benefit in terms of access to venture capitalists and skilled workers, but the real benefit seems like the simple fact that you are surrounded by people all trying to start a company. Everyone talks about it all the time, and it encourages you to think and work even harder on your own idea.

Obesity

The same is true for obesity. No matter how many diets or motivational techniques you use, if you are eating meals with friends and family that want big portions of bad food, you will have a really hard time saying no yourself.

I’ve noticed that this is particularly true in relationships. There is something special about sharing an indulgence with the person you love. If normally you never consider ice cream, you might walk by an ice cream store with your partner and think about the two of you eating ice cream together and laughing in the sun…and it’s all over.

So what is to be done?

Change who you spend time with

What do you think of when you look at the people you spend time with? What bad habits do they have that you are trying to avoid? What good habits do they have that you value?

Try to find some people who you admire and want to learn from. These are the people you should be spending time with.

It is very hard to consciously change your social group, especially for negative reasons. Still, changing your friends can have a very real impact on your ability to make changes in yourself. There are at least two ways to make things a little easier:

• Make incremental changes. If you have weight problems don’t start spending all your time with marathon runners. This will probably just demoralize you. Instead, find people who are more active than you, but perhaps not fitness nuts. As you progress, you can move to a new and even better group.
• Don’t actively reject old friends. In fact, they may accompany you as you move to a different lifestyle. Instead, focus on the people you admire and want to spend time with. As you spend more and more time with these people, you will spend less with your old group, but important people from your old group will maintain contact.

It may seem harsh to suggest getting rid of social groups, but in a very real way the people you spend time with are either encouraging you to be better or holding you back. And if they are holding you back, how much is the relationship really worth?

-zot.

Popularity: 7%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.