Driver who killed teen cyclist sues for damage

The Denver Post – Driver who killed teen sues for damage: MADRID, Spain—A speeding motorist who killed a teenage cyclist is suing the boy’s parents over damage to his luxury car, the government says. [What a mess.]
[Update: “Hundreds of people had gathered outside the courthouse in the town of Haro in northern Spain where the case was to be heard when Delgado’s lawyer announced his client was dropping the lawsuit.”]

Certainty kills

Disaster is not set up by inexperience but by experience.

When you *know* things and those things are untrue, they are far more dangerous than if you believe you don’t know. Certainty kills. There’s always hidden characteristics, newly input energy about which you are unaware. If you think you don’t know, you remain agile and open. You improvise your way through ground you believe familiar, but on your toes, ready for the unexpected. Knowing breeds inattention. So while large scale collapse is virtually certain, your involvement in that collapse is not. The butterfly effect tells us that small inputs can create powerful effects. One moments attention could be all it takes to remove you from a catastrophe.

Be Here Now

Seems like simple advice. It’s something I discussed with my wife just before the birth of Noah. The context was a discussion about whether to purchase a video camera. Our decision was based on my feeling that you can either concentrate on collecting excellent footage to be assembled into some masterpiece of cinema or enjoying the moment and not caring that it wasn’t preserved for an eternity, or until the disk crashed, format changed, etc. Other’s might be better at pulling this off, but I didn’t want to split my attention. I wanted my focus to be on the delight and wonder of watching my child grow, not on whether something was exposed correctly, in focus, enough disk space of tape etc. etc.

It also works for all relationships and work.

Simple but powerful. Be of the moment. Be here now.

The last interaction

The last interaction: Forever, my only memory of the job is going to be the mess. Forever, the only thing I’ll talk about is the mess. The last interaction, in my experience, is responsible for virtually all of the word of mouth you’re going to get, positive or negative. [Yet it doesn’t color my impression of how an interaction went. Interesting that it so greatly influences what we talk about.]
Source: Seth’s Blog

Doing bold things (a start) (part trois)

So here’s some starter steps to doing bold things.

At the top level…

  1. Dream Big
  2. With high goals comes high risk
  3. Things will go wrong

So, you’ve got a big dream… now what? Break that dream into manageable pieces. Vision drives activity so put that first manageable piece, that “focus” into writing. You want to reach a singleness of purpose, because that singleness drives simplicity into the project. Forget failures, forget past mistakes, only think about what you want now. Only work on prioritized activities. Once you’ve got your “singleness” together, prioritize your actions and use those as a guide. Otherwise the wandering and yak shaving will drive progress out of your dream.

Because you could well be risking a lot to make this big dream come true, don’t take any uncalculated risks. Accepting risk will be part of doing bold things, but you can manage the risk you own by preparing. Two things dramatically reduce risk. Preparation and specificity of practice. Practice what you need to prepare for the task at hand. Practice to feel confident that you can handle many emergent situations. Be aware that your adaptations and experience maybe wrong. People tend to rehearse rather than practice. Rehearsing is repeating and refining. Practicing is developing new skills which are often the things you’re *not* good at! Don’t waffle around, practice the specific things at which you are worst. Expert resources shorten learning, so by all means seek out experts to help you get in the groove sooner, or to explain adaptations that you never considered (differing experiences).

Things will go wrong. You’ll balance and juggle, and dodge a few bullets as the saying goes, but sooner or later the big one is going to happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it (before it happens). When it does defer decision making until the last possible moment — you’ll have the most knowledge. The critical step is to decide “when” is the last moment. Once you decided when “when” is, do not hesitate when it arrives. It’s time for action! Rethinking “when” (rather than fine tuning it) could simply stall the entire affair until the clock runs out. Lastly, make decisions at the lowest possible level (respect people.) It’s easy to convince yourself that no one has any insight but yourself or the couple of folks you interact with all the time. It’s rarely true. People at every level can have the insight to provide the solution or resolution you need.

A corollary to things will go wrong is pain is temporary. Sometimes when things go wrong they hurt. A lot. It can certainly make you rethink what you’re doing, and whether you ought to be doing it. It’s almost always the wrong time to make that decision. Wait until the pain eases. You can only quit once. It might be the right thing to do, but it’s a one trick pony.

Sales people will tell you that “No” means “Not yet”. It’s a very wise piece of advice in many cases. Timing is critical for ideas and products to grab hold. Whether at the individual level or the broader market. You can always learn something from the folks who are saying no, about why, when, and what is working for them etc. that will probably improve your situation down the road.

Teams outperform individuals in many ways. Teams are far more resilient when things go wrong with an elastic strength that moves projects along when individuals run out of steam. Individual success is a team function in almost every case. To think otherwise is self centered, and usually incorrect.

Yesterday’s challenges are today’s norms. Once things thought impossible are now every day, ho hum occurrences. Expect that growth as part of your work.

Five whys – Joel on Software

Five whys – Joel on Software: After some internal discussion we all agreed that rather than imposing a statistically meaningless measurement and hoping that the mere measurement of something meaningless would cause it to get better, what we really needed was a process of continuous improvement. Instead of setting up a SLA for our customers, we set up a blog where we would document every outage in real time, provide complete post-mortems, ask the five whys, get to the root cause, and tell our customers what we’re doing to prevent that problem in the future. In this case, the change is that our internal documentation will include detailed checklists for all operational procedures in the live environment. [Joel ran across the checklist article in the New Yorker and is putting it to use. Smart. So is understanding the value of service and where it makes sense to live on that continuum. Anyway, all this ties in nicely to the thoughts about system failures and people, with further proof that you cannot engineer out the occurrence of a collapse.]

Doing bold things, part deux.

More from Gonzales: Heraclitus said that every time you step into a river, it’s a different river. Every time you walk a [mountain] it’s a different mountain. It’s a boundary condition, a phase transition zone. Because of that it can make a mockery of the most thoughtful plan. Experience is nothing more than an engine that drives adaptation, so it’s always important to ask: Adaptation to what? When the environment changes (a given) you have to be aware that your experience might be inappropriate.

People are always part of the system. And people love forward motion. It’s very hard to get them to disengage once a course has been set. Add to this that people “normalize” risk. If something feels less risky they’ll take more chances; more risky and they’ll take less. “We’ve been through a similar situation and emerged just fine.” It’s easiest to assume it was your skill and savvy, your adaptations that saw you through. That’s why accident preventative engineering always fails. Add anti-lock brakes to a car and people push the limits of their driving skills. They feel safer, so they increase the risk until it matches their risk comfort zone. And of course, they get into more accidents since they no longer understand the level of energy in the system, and worse, feel protected from it.

Apply this to business. A project owner will increase risk until the level matches their risk comfort zone. If they fail to understand the amount of energy in the system, if this project represents a “different project” than the one they managed the last time, their adaptations (business experiences) no longer match… and the project is at risk from the outset. One disturbance will eventually lead to a failure cascade. As they say in mountaineering “A rope without fixed protection is a suicide pact.” A project that is not self-aware, that does not introspect, that does not provide a voice to all the participants is a suicide pact.

Doing bold things

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival writes about “Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why”. There are some clear lessons in the study of physical survival in the wilderness.

We all operate in failure mode… all the time. All. The. Time. Most failures are small ones, a dropped bit of food, a spilled drink, extra traffic, a burned-out light, the glitches we dismiss as normal.

These system failures are the outgrowth of the tightly coupled complex nature of our lives — self-organizing complexity of astonishing proportion.

These small failures are normal, and unfortunately, so are large failures. The small things are like the temblors in an earthquake zone, the quiet harbingers of the larger collapses that must eventually happen. Large accidents or failures, while rare, are normal too. Efforts to prevent them always fail.

Failure processes happen very fast and can’t be turned off. Recovery from the initial disturbance is not possible; it will spread quickly and irretrievably for at least some time. These interactions were not designed into the system by anybody.

Doing bold things is not about engineering risk to zero. Failures happen, and if we restrict ourselves to where they can’t… we’re not going to do anything very interesting.

We’ll all have good idea of how our system behaves with it’s more frequent smaller failures. But we rarely understand how much energy is in the system… and how quickly things will go critical.

If we can’t “engineer” it out, and we can’t predict anything beyond that a failure will happen, what do we do? We trust, we risk, we embrace failure when it occurs and try to understand how it fits into the system, and like the walkers on the wire, we accept that at some point, everything may suddenly and irrevocably change. We also join and build teams of people, which are far more resilient than an individual. And from a business sense, can produce far more consistent results, with higher quality, and greater speed. And do bold things.

How much for digital?

How much for digital?: It’s important to charge something, because the act of paying fundamentally changes the dynamics of the relationship. The question is this: at the start, is your goal to maximize profit or to build a platform that scales? The fact is that the market is too small right now for the price to matter. What matters is whether you can build an audience that is in the habit of paying you, an audience that wants to hear from you, an audience that you can build a business on.

At fifty cents a rental, all desire for piracy goes out the window, replaced by convenience, ease of use and a clear conscience. More important, entire new services show up, habits are built and the studios end up with a direct relationship with consumers who want to hear from them. If they don’t get greedy at the start. [I think Seth nailed this one.]
Source: Seth’s Blog