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INFORMA(C)TION No. 76:

The Long-term POV

How to act near-term without losing sight of long-term goals. Plus Hà Phan on product leadership and other things worth your attention.
Jorge ArangoJorge Arango
February 21, 2021

Welcome to INFORMA(C)TION, a biweekly newsletter about systems thinking, responsible design, information architecture, and other topics relevant to humans who create digital things.

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A photograph of a chalkboard with French writing that says, “The urgency of taking your time”
The urgency of taking your time by Amélien BayleCC BY-NC 2.0

Point of view is worth eighty IQ points.

— Alan Kay

Sometimes we face situations that demand an immediate response. Last week, millions of Americans dealt with unexpected weather conditions that disrupted their ability to keep themselves and their families fed and warm. Yesterday, the crew of United flight 328 had to deal with an engine that exploded in mid-air. (Fortunately — and through excellent piloting and engineering — the plane landed safely.) Such life-threatening situations call for skillful action now.

Most situations aren’t as urgent as landing a crippled plane or finding shelter in freezing temperatures. And yet, we often feel the stress of urgency in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps we’re on the hook for meeting this quarter’s KPIs, or we're running late to take our child to her 10 am martial arts class, or we have a big presentation on Tuesday. Whatever the case, we’re under pressure to deliver now.

Focusing on near-term commitments is crucial if we aim to get things done. Meeting the company’s near-term goals contributes to its long-term success and helps our career. Following through with our commitments to our kids builds trust and sets positive examples for their future. That presentation may land the account that breaks us through. These ‘small’ things matter. We reach long-term goals one step at a time.

The problem comes when our perspective becomes fixated on the near-term. We may have good intentions, but when we’re called to allocate resources (i.e., time, effort, money), we always opt for present concerns. We aspire to lose weight by summer, but we’re hungry now. We want to build a world-class application, but we skip the research and modeling steps to get to ‘screens’ ASAP. We want our team to develop strategic influence, but we have a backlog to get through.

These aren’t either-or choices. We must eat if we plan to be alive by summer. Research and models are necessary but not sufficient; we must also aim for excellent screen-level interactions. We must deliver on our backlog commitments if we are to have any influence at all. The question isn’t what to do now, but how to balance near- and long-term commitments.

Ideally, near-term choices are in service of long-term goals. We must cultivate the ability to act now without losing sight of the long-term vision. This isn’t easy to do; we’re wired for the here-and-now. We’re drawn to the richest sources of nourishment in our environment. We discount future conditions, which we can’t experience through our senses. Because of this, long-term thinking requires practice — much like building muscle requires working out.

Fortunately, there are models, tools, and frameworks that can help us keep a long-term perspective as we act in the near-term. Here are three I find particularly helpful.

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a prioritization framework attributed to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. Here’s how it works: draw a simple 2x2 matrix and label the X-axis ‘Urgency’ and the Y-axis ‘Priority.’ Now, sort your to-dos, appointments, commitments, etc. in one of the four quadrants:

  • High priority, high urgency: do them ASAP.
  • High priority, low urgency: you want to do these, but not necessarily right now. Schedule them. (And follow through!)
  • Low priority, high urgency: these must be done, but not necessarily by you. Look for ways to delegate them.
  • Low priority, low urgency: find a way to shed these.
Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower matrix assumes you’ve sorted out your priorities, so that’s the starting point. I haven’t found how to do this amid the daily bustle, so I periodically take time off to reexamine my priorities. I recommend you do the same.

I first read about the Eisenhower matrix in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I haven’t revisited that book in many years, but it could be a good starting point for exploring this tool.

Systems diagrams

It’s difficult to understand the full complexity of a situation when we act in the moment. We’re attuned to things we can experience around us and tend to discount second-order effects. We can’t think about such things linearly. Taking in the bigger picture helps.

One way to do this is by mapping the components and actors that influence the situation and how they relate towards producing particular outcomes. Systems diagrams allow us to understand these relationships and identify key elements we may have missed.

A systems diagram from Rosalind Armson's book, Growing Wings on the Way
Armson, 2011

Detailing such diagrams is beyond the scope of this post, but Rosalind Armson’s book Growing Wings on the Way offers a solid practical introduction. (Caveat: the Kindle edition has low-res diagrams. If I were to re-buy it, I’d get it on paper.)

Pace layers

I’ve written several times about pace layers in this newsletter, and with good reason: it’s one of the most valuable models for understanding the relationship between near-term actions and long-term impact.

The pace layers model explains how complex systems change over time. Such systems don’t change uniformly; instead, they’re composed of elements that vary in scale and rates of change. Grouping such elements into layers allows us to identify optimal strategies for enabling systems that evolve without compromising their structural integrity.

Stewart Brand's pace layers diagram
Brand, 1999

Faster-changing layers draw more of our attention, but slower-changing layers have greater power. Knowing what layers you’re dealing with and where your commitments lie helps you make more effective choices.

I can’t do justice to this subject in a short post, but Stewart Brand’s paper on the subject in the Journal of Design and Science is a good introduction.

Shifting between near- and long-term perspectives

Again, the idea isn’t to focus exclusively on the long-term. That’s a prescription for failure. What we want is to ensure our near-term actions support our long-term goals. This requires setting aside time once in a while to review our goals and priorities. Then we can use tools like those listed above during our day-to-day to ensure we’re aligned with our long-term aspirations.

Doing so helps us regain perspective: Not everything should be treated with the same degree of urgency. Some situations and systems are best served by adopting the attitude that they’re meant to endure. Conversely, some of our most complex and consequential challenges, such as climate change, require that we make near-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs that may not seem clear-and-present now. In this sense, the most urgent challenge we face may be how to overcome our misplaced sense of urgency.

I’d love to hear from you on this. How do you make space to keep the long-term in sight? Does your organization make it easy for you to do this, or do you always feel pressured to deliver on near-term objectives? What would help you make near-term choices that contribute to your (your family’s, your organization’s, your community's) long-term well-being?

 


A reminder: pointers to Amazon in this newsletter are affiliate links. I get a small commision if you buy from Amazon after clicking on these links.


The Architecture of Information
reddit.com as it looked in February 2011

The Architecture of Information

A core principle of information architecture is that user interfaces change faster than their underlying structures. Given how quickly digital things change, this principle is easier to contemplate in the abstract than in practice.

“Bored coder” Neal Agarwal recently published a one-page website called Ten Years Ago, which showcases fourteen websites’ homepages as they looked in February 2011 (through the graces of the amazing Internet Archive, which deserves your support.) I took Neal’s page as a prompt to look at how websites have changed in a decade.

In Ten Years, I examine Apple, ESPN, Goodreads, Reddit, and IMDb. As expected, the sites look different than they did ten years ago. (Some more so than others.) However, their core navigation structures remain remarkably consistent.

As I’ve said before, structure changes more slowly than look-and-feel. These five sites offer compelling proof.

The Architecture of Information: Ten Years

Also worth your attention

  • Citibank lost $500 million due to a bad user interface. But the primary issue isn’t just aesthetics or usability; it’s the lack of a clear user conceptual model.
     
  • Scott Berkun compiled a list of the most difficult UX concepts to explain. I especially loved this one: “Even the best UX design can’t fix messed up organizational structure or people problems.” Preach!
     
  • Boon Chew's resources for designers who are into systems thinking. I was sad to miss Interaction21, but I’m happy to see systems thinking was a running theme in this year's conference.
     
  • If you’re concerned (as I am) about the effects of internet culture on our body politic, I recommend Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public. This book reset my understanding of what’s happened to our societies over the last fifteen years or so. Amazon and my book notes.
     
  • “So far, it appears that the American people have not yet developed the critical thinking skills to sort truth from nonsense online, plausible argument from baseless conspiracy theory, science from wishful thinking.” A long-view take on the digital publishing revolution. (H/t Cecily Sommers)
     
  • “People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.” A hilarious reality check on the claims of AI superintelligence advocates. (H/t John Thackara)
     
  • Same Energy, an intriguing new visual search engine that uses deep learning to find images that ‘feel’ like other images. Useful for creating mood boards? (H/t Kevin Kelly)
     
  • A profile of graphic adventure pioneer Roberta Williams, who co-founded Sierra On-Line. Her work has been tremendously influential; it’s good to see her career celebrated by the Smithsonian. (Bonus: you can play Williams’s first graphic adventure, Mystery House, for free on the Internet Archive. Again, send them money if you can.)
     
  • I'm always thrilled to see other creative people's thinking artifacts. If you're a fan of Christopher Nolan's film INCEPTION, you'll likely enjoy his hand-drawn map of the movie’s plot.
     
  • Enduring digital artifacts: on the origins of GPS triangle cursor, which – I was surprised to learn — comes from one of my favorite classic video games.
     
The Informed Life episode 55: Ha Phan

The latest episode of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with Hà Phan, the Director of Discovery at Pluralsight. Hà came to this role from GoPro, where she was a principal UX designer. Our conversation focused on the transition from UX design to product leadership.

Hà's approach strikes me as a designerly way of leading; an inspirational example for designers tasked with taking on broader responsibilities. I hope you find as much value in our conversation as I did.

The Informed Life Episode 55: Hà Phan on Product Leadership

Parting thought

Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

— Obi-Wan Kenobi

Thanks for reading!

-- Jorge

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Jorge Arango
Boot Studio LLC
P.O. Box 29002
Oakland, CA 94604

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