6 ms·
How to make sense of any mess
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoOODA loops are everywhere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
- mvellandi 1y agoAbby is awesome and an old friend from NYC ux & information architecture scene in early 2010s. Her book is great, and like others mention, the homepage is just the TOC. Go buy it! Ultimately, the mess is yours to make it helpful for stakeholders.
- jennyholzer 1y agoCould you post the names of some influential books or articles from the Information Architecture scene? I've never heard of it, but I'm impressed by OP's website and I'm interested in learning more. edit: There's a whole list in the website. edit (pt. 2): How would you compare the Information Architecture scene to the Effective Altruism scene? Are these scenes linked/overlapping in any particular way?
- mvellandi 1y agoNo link. IA only concerned with organizing info for various mediums and its UX to meet org and individual goals
- gowld 1y agoCan you gently suggest that she consult her information architect community to help her make her website human readable?
- alexpotato 1y agoIn almost 20 years of working in FinTech at various banks, hedge funds startup etc, a lot of this rings true. e.g. - Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used and 90% of the time they are used it's b/c I made one - SO many important processes are not documented so people can't even opine about how to fix them. I once documented a process and everyone agreed step 4 was wrong. What was amazing is no one agreed on what step 4 actually was. - Most of the big arguments I've seen about projects are less "what should we do" but more "when do we want it" e.g. one party want's it next week but another one wants to have more features so it will take longer. [1] I've often dealt with this by using the following metaphor: "Oh, so you want to move house every two weeks? If you give me six months I'll build you the world's most amazing Winnebago/RV with a hot tub, satellite TV, queen size bed and A/C. If you want it tomorrow I'm going to give you a wheelbarrow, pillow and an iPad." 0 - https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/67/2-flow-diagram/ https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/67/2-flow-d... and https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/71/6-swim-lane-diagram/ https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/71/6-swim-l... 1- https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/51/reality-involves-many-players/ https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/51/reality-...
- miroljub 1y agoThanks. This single comment provided more value than a page itself.
- roenxi 1y ago> Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used... Making technically good decisions is one of a distressing number of domains where making any attempt at all will put someone a long way ahead of the game vs most people who wield power. Several advanced techniques that nearly nobody seems to do: "Do we have evidence that this is a good idea?" "What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0] "Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be in 12 months?" [0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate next time they're trying to start a war.
- bombcar 1y ago99% of all leadership is making a decision and then asking for data to support that decision unfortunately.
- balderdash 1y agoI’ve literally never seen that happen. It’s always problem, initial hypothesis, request for data (then data is either unavailable or typically supports the hypothesis, occasionally the data doesn't and you go back to the drawing board.
- morkalork 1y agoHave you worked on a data team? I've seen that bs a number of times, it's how I mentally grade different managers and PM/POs. Re the unavailable data: Smart people ask before a big change, get told what devs are missing and need to instrument/record and then leverage those new metrics for the before/after comparison. Not-smart people yolo the changes, ask for the metrics after and go whoops it's too hard or impossible to check.
- marginalia_nu 1y agoI've observed that messes and complexity often but not always tends to just be noisy information streams. If you try to make a decision based on large volumes of low quality data, the world feels incredibly complex and constantly shifting and self-contradictory. If you manage to improve the signal to noise ratio it feels a lot more manageable and understandable. Worked with an enterprise architect once who couldn't say anything that didn't start with "in this complex and ever changing information landscape". You built this complex and ever changing information landscape, sir. It consists of your hexagonal architecture, your microservices, your kubernetes cluster.
- radarthreat 1y agoThis is giving big TimeCube vibes
- cjbarber 1y agoThis reminds me of https://basecamp.com/shapeup https://basecamp.com/shapeup
- gowld 1y agoFrequeently submitted, rarely engaged: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=basecamp.com%2Fshapeup&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Not quite the same as this submission, but a better place to start for most people.
- balderdash 1y agoMy experience is that one mess is pretty straightforward, what is debilitating is interconnected messes. System A is the highest priority fix and we want to incorporate parts of system B into system A (they never should have been in B) but if we move them to system A, the other parts of system B will break (so we need to fix those) and then additionally system C will no longer work so we need to fix that, and on and on…
- pimlottc 1y agoI was a bit confused by this until I realized that this is just a table of contents and the sentences in each chapter are links. They are not obviously styled like hyperlinks.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- danparsonson 1y agoOh! Thank you, I was totally lost and thought it was some weird stream of consciousness or something.
- Voklen 1y agoOhhh I did think this was some interesting poetry...
- Lockranor 1y agoI did the same thing. Very Zen...
- michaelrpeskin 1y agoOne trick that I always fall back on is to make a dependency graph. In meetings I used to pull up yuml.com but now I use mermaid. You can just start typing text and arrows and it renders in real time what depends on what. It's great in a live meeting to help focus people on where the problem really is, or in documentation to show why a change here will affect something there. Both yuml and mermaid don't get you control over layout. I think that's a feature. If the layout engine can make a pretty picture that means your dependencies aren't too complex, but if the graph looks terrible and complicated, that means you're system is also probably terrible and complicated.
- KolibriFly 1y agoTotally agree on the lack of layout control being a hidden strength. When the graph looks like spaghetti, that's not a tool issue - it's a systems issue
- loa_in_ 1y agoTo save others confusion, it's not yuml.com but yuml.me, a UML diagramming tool
- michaelrpeskin 1y agoSorry, you're right. It's been so long since I used it, I forgot that it wasn't a .com domain.
- w10-1 1y agomermaid layout doesn't scale for me so I keep using yEd/yFiles and their tgf (trivial graph format -- tab-delimited relations) input with orthogonal layout. It's a bit of a hassle in a meeting but updates take about 15 seconds to refresh if you have everything set up. Automating it fully would require an expensive license.
- firesteelrain 1y agoI wish we could use that. I can’t use them because mermaid doesn’t have a way to assure no data is stored on mermaid servers so I can’t use it for anything proprietary or even work related at all. LucidChart has a way to tie into Corporate though
- KolibriFly 1y agoMesses can be eliminated - just understood, shaped, and navigated
- IAmBroom 1y agoDid you mean "can't"?
- ivanjermakov 1y agoReminds me of pilots' decision making process: - Situation: The pilot is required to recognize the current situation and identify the possible dangers. This is the most important step of the decision-making process since detecting the situation accurately gives the critical information to start the process correctly and produce a feasible resolution to the impending situation. - Options: Generate any possible option regardless of the feasibility of success. It is most important to create as many options as possible since there will be a larger pool of options to choose the most appropriate solution to the situation. - Choose: From the options generated, the pilot is required to choose a course of action assessing the risks and viability. Act: Act upon the plan while flying in accordance with safety and time availability. The most important step of this process is time, as the pilot is challenged against time to fix the problem before the situation further deteriorates. - Evaluate: Ask the question, "Has the selected action been successful?" and evaluate your plan to prepare for future occurrences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_decision_making#Decision-making_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_decision_making#Decision...
- bityard 1y agoThere are so many good concepts to borrow from in pilot training, it's almost ridiculous. I'm not even a pilot but have studied risk management, crew resource management, decision making, etc. Anecdata of course but I feel it made a pretty big difference in dealing with projects and problems.
- tclancy 1y agoAtul Gawande made a book out of the idea (well, sort of!), https://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/ https://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/. The original article is at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
- xp84 1y agoI’ve been increasingly addicted to Mentour Pilot videos in the past month, and I couldn’t agree more with you. Modern (and by this I mean really 1990s+) pilot training, with its decision frameworks and CRM ideas, is a model for how most professionals ought to organize their work and deal with challenges. Of course it’s easy to see why aviation developed such rigorous systems, but we’d do well to steal as many of their ideas as we can. If anyone isn’t already really familiar with those two concepts especially, I bet it would be worth your time to look into them a bit.
- csours 1y agoDesigned by History vs. Designed by Intent --- Working on a legacy codebase last year I kept repeating to myself: They made it work, they didn't make it sensible.
- hitekker 1y agoYou can't talk about messes without talking about Garbage. When a mess is inevitable, maybe even on purpose. Landfills, toxic waste dumps; every organization has them, needs them. I once worked in a department that was a dumping ground for failed projects. A 10 year long mess; it was both constant garbage and an essential scapegoat. A mess that everyone can blame, from the C-suite, to peer organizations, to even the people who worked inside the org. Wikipedia has a great primer on the topic, which I think is more incisive than the OP's holistic framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model
- dang 1y ago[stub for offtopicness] All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic, offtopic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pards 1y agoThe random word highlighting makes it hard to read for me.
- 000ooo000 1y agoYeah the 3 word lines one after another is god awful.
- jcolman 1y agoThis is a table of contents. Those are the names of sections. You can click on them to go to pages of more normally formatted paragraphs.
- WaltPurvis 1y agoThe paragraphs on all pages are formatted quite narrowly, displaying only 3 - 6 words per line. If this bothers people, it can also be changed with Stylebot or the like, using a rule like this to change the max-width, which is set to 400px, to a larger value: p, ul, li { max-width: 800px; }
- 000ooo000 1y agoThanks - my mistake. I thought this was some really bad LinkedIn style content.
- roxolotl 1y ago
- dang 1y agoAll: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there. (I've moved these complaints to a stubthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45389100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45389100 - if anyone has an urge to reply, it would be fine to do so there) (p.s. what look like chapter headings in the OP are in fact hyperlinks)
- Mobius01 1y agoInteresting to see it crop up here. I met Ms. Covert when she released the book and have a signed copy around here somewhere. It remains relevant as ever, and has value well beyond UX practices. It’s a short read too, I recommend it.
- edwin2 1y agototally agree with what dang posted here; obvious nitpicks aren’t worth discussing. it’s refreshing to see that principle on HN. I also want to add another thought to that: I’m so glad howtomakesenseofanymess.com exists, warts and all. I’d much rather it exist in some imperfect form than not exist at all. We ought to be more accepting of good and imperfect creations, because that encourages creativity. We need more of this!