Overthinking (2021)
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Overthinking (2021)
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Re: Overthinking (2021)
#2A refreshingly good take on paralysis by analysis. I have suffered from this in the past as well. I found that having projects that are otherwise meaningless that I can hack together helps. It’s almost like a mini hackathon where the only thing that matters is the end product. Maybe I’ll choose something completely out of my professional life (eg woodworking with scrap wood) or write something in a language nobody around me likes because it’s “ugly.”
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#3A refreshingly good take on paralysis by analysis. I have suffered from this in the past as well. I found that having projects that are otherwise meaningless that I can hack together helps. It’s almost like a mini hackathon where the only thing that matters is the end product. Maybe I’ll choose something completely out of my professional life (eg woodworking with scrap wood) or write something in a language nobody ar…
Kind of like practicing non-perfectionism? I received that advice from a friend once. Pick a domain with much lower stakes, and practice making decisions.
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#4A big part of learning this is not overanalyzing past failures. Check and see if you missed something major, but then don't dwell much on the details; perhaps anything you would have done would have been doomed to failure; it wasn't the time, etc.
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#5Living in China it's quite amazing how the business culture differs from many western markets. People seem to throw themselves in to ventures without business plans, market research or specific costings. I suppose that when the cost of failure is reduced, dynamism results, because reaction times to opportunities are reduced and people are able to take the risk of following a new path. These days, when I think of analysis paralysis, I think of conservative traditional western business mindsets. The worst of which, frankly, seem to be continental European and governmental bureaucracies.
FWIW in the last 18 months I recall pitching one major European industrial group requesting specifically disruptive technology for established industries. Considered at the board level, their feedback was unanimously positive: but they could not take the opportunity because it was "too far from existing business lines". If you thought corporate VC was bad, try that in an old-Europe context...
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#6[deleted]
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#7Thing that helped me with avoiding this kind of problem was learning about wabi sabi[0]. A mindset of accepting and finding beauty in imperfection.
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#8Thing that helped me with avoiding this kind of problem was learning about wabi sabi[0]. A mindset of accepting and finding beauty in imperfection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
Are there any books you recommend?
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#9A big part of learning this is not overanalyzing past failures. Check and see if you missed something major, but then don't dwell much on the details; perhaps anything you would have done would have been doomed to failure; it wasn't the time, etc.
PA Yeomans, the 'other' father of permaculture, had a checklist he called the Scale of Permanence. It's a sort of priority list for irreversible decisions, and is helpful for figuring out if you're expending energy on something that's easy to change later, or rashly deciding on something that is going to be difficult or infeasible to change later.
In a system that favors watching first and acting at the last responsible moment, this is in someways both a counterweight and an anchor for analysis.
There are some ways in which systems thinking is the same no matter what domain you're looking at, and to some extent the ways in which they are different have more to do with lack/lag in cross-domain communication rather than any intrinsic distinctions between the domains. There is probably a Scale of Permanence for creating a business, it's just not called that or nobody has compiled a canonical list from the available sources.
Re: Overthinking (2021)
#10I like the article. The architecture bit I'm not so sure about though. I wish in my company the architects actually did more thinking and especially talking / negotiating with all the other architects of adjacent components. That would really help. Instead they work hard to fix minor problems and build walls in between the components... or yet another middleware-generator-middleware-wrapper.