Surprise seems to be one of the most important ingredients to getting things to spread (I won't quote the academic or anecdotal research of that here.) So I use this inversion analysis often in thinking about coming up with ways of surprising people. My most successful example of this:
I was originally thinking, "How can I get more customers?"
Inverting it I came up with, "How can I lose more customers?" (A different inversion from the OP's but an inversion nonetheless).
Using that as my base I came up with this funny campaign where I tried to figure out how to fire more of my customers. What if I could fire the worst of my customers. So I invented a honey pot website called trickajournalist.com where I described some software you could signup for to spam journalists. And then I used the list of people who signed up for that and banned them from using my product that had an email newsletter component. We didn't want spammers.
It was a nice media/traffic win for what we were doing. And it all came from inverting what we originally struggled to answer.
P.S. If you're interested more in the whole trickajournalist.com thing, the original site is dead now, but some articles about it:
As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail.
The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
God, yes, this. I have twenty years's of failure-mode engineer mindset training, and my wife has generalized anxiety. Between the two of us, we are constantly in this state of trying to prevent bad things from happening.
And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020.
But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc.
It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.
I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?
It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
I wanted to contribute the same to this discussing.
At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof.
Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens.
It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.
At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
> The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.
Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.
For me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I think of all possible events happening on the route. On the plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I _really_ hate driving.
There is a secondary issue on this sort of thinking too. Sometimes you can doom out anything worth doing. I see it on the internet quite a bit. "look at the cool project I built". Then come out the doomsayers. How everything is wrong with it. The opposite happens too. But the negative ones stick out in my mind this morning :)
Can be very difficult when you can only see the problems in other people's ideas. Knowing that it's not the purpose, but rather to actually help, people that don't know you will not appreciate it.
My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.
Something I've taken to doing is a pre-mortem with my team. A few months before launch I say "Let's fast forward and pretend the project failed. Why did it fail."
This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating:
Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
> Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, think of the worst boss you’ve had and act like that. Be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work. When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible.
> Employees: Be forgetful. Clumsy. Work slowly. Think of ways to increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench do instead of a big one.
> When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
> Apply all regulations to the last letter.
Admittedly, some of the techniques—like releasing a bag full of moths in a movie theater to disrupt enemy propaganda—are oddly specific and not easily inverted.
I work on the algorithm for a widely used search engine and can confirm that this line of thinking has been very effective in improving our product over the years.
Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user engagement.
I think it is a very effective approach, but can require some discipline and perspective. When you spend so much time focusing on the failures of your product, it can create this internal perception that the product is constantly failing and broken. So you do need to actively remember what you're doing well and how far you've come as a team/product.
> Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user engagement.
This sounds a lot like the 6-sigma approach of driving improvement by focusing obsessively on eliminating "defects".
There are certainly huge wins that can be obtained by identifying and eliminating bugs or corner-cases with undesired behavior. But it's scary to imagine a world where this is used as a replacement for innovative thinking - ie, "how can we make our search better". If Steve Jobs had focused all his proverbial efforts on minimizing flip-phone defects, the world would have missed out on the smartphone revolution.
There's a huge potential in mining search data, especially if you can group top-of-funnel vs. bottom-of-funnel searches to see where failures are occurring. Segmenting queries like "zm950" against "shoes" or "nike" and seeing where gaps exist against user intent.
When it comes to zero (or near-zero) results, I've had good results using this to identify gaps in the current product offering and what visitors are expecting to be there. Two examples:
1) A seller of custom prescription glasses: top two search queries were "contact lenses" and "sunglasses". They didn't offer the former, they did sell sunglasses (most frames could take a tinted lens as an option) but didn't make it obvious with design, content, or marketing.
2) A seller of cabinet hardware (pulls & knobs): a large proportion of their top 10 search terms seemed to have a door hardware intent. Adding this missing category boosted sales without additional marketing dollars spent (the customers were already there and just bouncing when they realized the site didn't carry what they wanted).
These are all ways to focus on understanding failures instead of trying to optimize successes, which is often finding the local maxima.
One of the ways to apply this inverted thinking is to conduct a "pre-mortem" at the start of a project. By deliberately imagining that something has failed, and speculating about the reasons, you can sometimes uncover useful steps that prevent those imagined failures from actually happening.
I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk, and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature ideas.
It's also a useful way of making people not feel like party-poopers.
Typically, everyone's excited at the start of a project and people are reticent to share their fears (especially if there are bosses around).
A pre-mortem gives them the mental freedom to share their fears as they are asked to imagine they are in a future where the project has turned out to be a disaster).
Conducting a pre-mortem, as you describe it, is almost precisely what STPA (Nancy Leveson) is about. You think of the system's behavior and present design and the things that can go wrong. Then you try to determine what would lead to bad or erroneous outcomes, and build in controls based on that analysis. Sometimes it's things that should be blindingly obvious, but we've demonstrated over the past 60+ years of higher technology use and development that we aren't good at spotting those things. Even simple things like, "The lawn mower should have a dead-man switch" is often forgotten.
I think it depends on the scenario selected. I’ve found pre-mortems annoying, and given any number of risks that could materialise how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for maximum value discussion?
Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend that should go away.
I use an old inversion technique. Not sure where I read this, and I think Tim Ferris said it:
The last thing you want to do is the first thing you should do
There is always something mega pertinent on my TODO lists that I really don't want to do, and it calls out my name when I sleep saying: 'You really need to do this' and the feeling of procrastination makes you feel ashamed of having not completed the task. But it gets done thanks to inversion, and I proudly check it off as being done, until the next task I don't want to do comes along (and yes it will come along).
> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?
Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)
Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.
Yeah a direct inversion doesn't seem to work. I think you invert the idea but with the premise that you don't want to do it.
So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?
You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?
I think this works anyway. Another example:
Goal: Fly to Spain
Question: How do I fly to Spain?
The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)
The inversion principle is a great mental model in my opinion. The best way I can sum it up in the most basic way is instead of thinking "What can I do to [achieve goal]?", think "What is preventing me from [achieving goal]?".
If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
Reminds one of PG's "just don't die and you become rich" advice for startup founders.
FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill you.
That reminds me of the foreword in the High Output Management, written by Ben Horowitz and Andy Grover's words "only the paranoid survive":
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
But this insight won’t be in any book. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that’s a good thing.”
A similar principle from the ancient boardgame of Go is, "Your opponents best move is your best move." i.e. sometimes it can be hard to see what the most advantageous move is for you. but if you can see your opponent's most advantageous move, then just steal that one.
This is how I summarize my time in photography classes.
- What’s in focus? (What’s out of focus?)
- What’s in light? (What’s in shadow?)
- Where is the light coming from? (Where is the light not coming from?)
- What’s in the foreground? (What’s in the background?)
- Positive space / negative space
Similar things end up happening in audio. You want to set up a microphone to record something, it’s usually better to point the microphone away from the noise that you don’t want, instead of towards the sound that you do want. When you’re EQing, you usually want to remove unwanted frequencies rather than boost wanted frequencies. Etc.
That’s fun. My personal version of this is when I’m stuck on a problem at home or work I’ll lay down on the ground and look up at the ceiling or lay on a couch with my head hanging off to see the room upside down.
Surveying an area I’m familiar with from a weird perspective always sparks new ideas for me because I almost always also see something new in that familiar place because of the positioning.
In doing so, it helps me unblock other thought processes.
Interesting way of describing/thinking about hazard or risk analysis which is applied in many industries through ISO standard frameworks such as ISO 14971 for medical devices (but is also used elsewhere). Risk analysis complements requirements analysis in that risk mitigation plans become requirements of the system (if the risks meet some threshold).
I came here to note the same thing, from an aerospace perspective.
In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet, the high level system functions are considered and a Functional Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those functions failing. Then one can add requirements and architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment is developed.
The article gets it right, but "man muss immer umkehren," is better translated as "man must always turn upside down", "inside out," "turn back" or "reverse" depending on the context.
In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.'
Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly 'about face'.
To turn a piece of clothing inside out is "auf Links ziehen", which is hard to translate. I find "inside out" to be quite the intuitive metaphor.
The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left side is visible, i.e. on the outside.
Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
According to the wikipedia page about Jacobi, in the mathematical context the best translation is invert.
Also in Italian (my language)it is used the verb 'invertire' in this context.
What is the difference between a bug report and a feature request? Is it simply that a bug report is something the system should already be doing, either because it's an advertised feature or it's something which is universally expected from that kind of software, while a feature request is about something which the system does not do, does not advertise that it does, and is not expected to be there by default? If so, we should be able to "invert" any bug report into a feature request (and vice versa), which could gain some insight by looking at it in a different way.
Another thing we could do is write a feature request — which often over-specifies what should be done in a classic up-front design way — like a bug report, which usually only specifies a goal which we can't yet achieve, rather than how it should be achieved.
Yet another thing which would be interesting is TDD-style tickets. Rather than simply explaining the happy path to a goal they could explain the various things which could prevent someone from reaching that goal: invalid inputs, missing permissions, inaccessible dependencies, missing UI, etc.
The technique is also pretty good for acknowledging one's own personal decisions and being ok with them. For example:
What's preventing me from being richer, more powerful, more famous?
Perhaps you'd give up privacy, autonomy, free time. That might be all it takes to realize that happiness and performance are not always, or even often, the same.
Funny a few years ago I thought that Failure Oriented Design could be a nice starting point. Think about all the failures/errors, the remaining space will then be a safe playground.
Standard: Start with standard, commonly applicable piece of advice. Lists of these can be found many places (for example, "to achieve success, avoid failure").
Paradoxical: Reformulate in terminology that's opaque, paradoxical, jargony and truncated (OPJART!)
Fixation: Claim that's always true, that it's best thing since sliced bread. etc. Your audience will recoil but some of them will work and realize there's some good advice in your stream of jargon. And having worked at getting this understanding, they will value it more and be happy to endorse the exaggerated value you're assigning to your jargon and your point, which is, indeed, something that is true moderately often.
STA-PAR-FI! This phrase can launch a thousand consultancies.
It seems to me that a better English equivalent to umkehren would be turn around. That also fits the text of the article better. That is to say look at the problem from the other side, form another angle. Invert is simultaneously too specific (leading to formulaic methods) and too ambiguous (leading to pointless discussions of whether it means considering putting the steering wheel at the back or on the other side when in fact it means do both).
Murphy's law is a more humorous way of saying the same thing.
"If something can go wrong it will go wrong."
There are earlier references - but Murphy's Law is associated with high g-force testing just after WWII. The team used Murphy's law to anticipate every possible failure and prevent it before the experiment ended in death. There is nothing like death to sharpen your focus.
[+] [-] nate|5 years ago|reply
Surprise seems to be one of the most important ingredients to getting things to spread (I won't quote the academic or anecdotal research of that here.) So I use this inversion analysis often in thinking about coming up with ways of surprising people. My most successful example of this:
I was originally thinking, "How can I get more customers?"
Inverting it I came up with, "How can I lose more customers?" (A different inversion from the OP's but an inversion nonetheless).
Using that as my base I came up with this funny campaign where I tried to figure out how to fire more of my customers. What if I could fire the worst of my customers. So I invented a honey pot website called trickajournalist.com where I described some software you could signup for to spam journalists. And then I used the list of people who signed up for that and banned them from using my product that had an email newsletter component. We didn't want spammers.
It was a nice media/traffic win for what we were doing. And it all came from inverting what we originally struggled to answer.
P.S. If you're interested more in the whole trickajournalist.com thing, the original site is dead now, but some articles about it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/03/08/reddit-...
[+] [-] mola|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raducu|5 years ago|reply
What was the yield on that?
[+] [-] mlangenberg|5 years ago|reply
The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020.
But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc.
It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.
I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?
It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
[+] [-] teekert|5 years ago|reply
At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof.
Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens.
It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.
At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
[+] [-] jimbokun|5 years ago|reply
I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.
Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.
[+] [-] maps7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yetanta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solidr53|5 years ago|reply
My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.
[+] [-] arthurjj|5 years ago|reply
This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
[+] [-] eumenides1|5 years ago|reply
The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles.
Your problem is just a little more meta.
[+] [-] cutemonster|5 years ago|reply
May I ask what situations do you have in mind?
> influencing my personal live negatively.
What if everyone else is crazy not you
[+] [-] liveoneggs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neal_jones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgp1000|5 years ago|reply
Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
[+] [-] philwelch|5 years ago|reply
> Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, think of the worst boss you’ve had and act like that. Be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work. When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible.
> Employees: Be forgetful. Clumsy. Work slowly. Think of ways to increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench do instead of a big one.
> When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
> Apply all regulations to the last letter.
Admittedly, some of the techniques—like releasing a bag full of moths in a movie theater to disrupt enemy propaganda—are oddly specific and not easily inverted.
[+] [-] seanpquig|5 years ago|reply
Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user engagement.
I think it is a very effective approach, but can require some discipline and perspective. When you spend so much time focusing on the failures of your product, it can create this internal perception that the product is constantly failing and broken. So you do need to actively remember what you're doing well and how far you've come as a team/product.
[+] [-] whack|5 years ago|reply
This sounds a lot like the 6-sigma approach of driving improvement by focusing obsessively on eliminating "defects".
There are certainly huge wins that can be obtained by identifying and eliminating bugs or corner-cases with undesired behavior. But it's scary to imagine a world where this is used as a replacement for innovative thinking - ie, "how can we make our search better". If Steve Jobs had focused all his proverbial efforts on minimizing flip-phone defects, the world would have missed out on the smartphone revolution.
[+] [-] gav|5 years ago|reply
When it comes to zero (or near-zero) results, I've had good results using this to identify gaps in the current product offering and what visitors are expecting to be there. Two examples:
1) A seller of custom prescription glasses: top two search queries were "contact lenses" and "sunglasses". They didn't offer the former, they did sell sunglasses (most frames could take a tinted lens as an option) but didn't make it obvious with design, content, or marketing.
2) A seller of cabinet hardware (pulls & knobs): a large proportion of their top 10 search terms seemed to have a door hardware intent. Adding this missing category boosted sales without additional marketing dollars spent (the customers were already there and just bouncing when they realized the site didn't carry what they wanted).
These are all ways to focus on understanding failures instead of trying to optimize successes, which is often finding the local maxima.
[+] [-] imhoguy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lentil|5 years ago|reply
I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk, and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature ideas.
[+] [-] LaundroMat|5 years ago|reply
Typically, everyone's excited at the start of a project and people are reticent to share their fears (especially if there are bosses around).
A pre-mortem gives them the mental freedom to share their fears as they are asked to imagine they are in a future where the project has turned out to be a disaster).
[+] [-] Jtsummers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssss11|5 years ago|reply
Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend that should go away.
[+] [-] jermier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwmj|5 years ago|reply
> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?
Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)
Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.
[+] [-] maps7|5 years ago|reply
So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?
You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?
I think this works anyway. Another example:
Goal: Fly to Spain
Question: How do I fly to Spain?
The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)
[+] [-] EGreg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] load|5 years ago|reply
If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
[+] [-] corry|5 years ago|reply
FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill you.
[+] [-] davidrm|5 years ago|reply
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
But this insight won’t be in any book. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that’s a good thing.”
[+] [-] knodi123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klodolph|5 years ago|reply
- What’s in focus? (What’s out of focus?)
- What’s in light? (What’s in shadow?)
- Where is the light coming from? (Where is the light not coming from?)
- What’s in the foreground? (What’s in the background?)
- Positive space / negative space
Similar things end up happening in audio. You want to set up a microphone to record something, it’s usually better to point the microphone away from the noise that you don’t want, instead of towards the sound that you do want. When you’re EQing, you usually want to remove unwanted frequencies rather than boost wanted frequencies. Etc.
[+] [-] codezero|5 years ago|reply
Surveying an area I’m familiar with from a weird perspective always sparks new ideas for me because I almost always also see something new in that familiar place because of the positioning.
In doing so, it helps me unblock other thought processes.
[+] [-] davecap1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kejaed|5 years ago|reply
In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet, the high level system functions are considered and a Functional Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those functions failing. Then one can add requirements and architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment is developed.
[+] [-] pgt|5 years ago|reply
In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.'
Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly 'about face'.
[+] [-] hibbelig|5 years ago|reply
The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left side is visible, i.e. on the outside.
Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
[+] [-] alberto_ol|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi
[+] [-] trampi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l0b0|5 years ago|reply
Another thing we could do is write a feature request — which often over-specifies what should be done in a classic up-front design way — like a bug report, which usually only specifies a goal which we can't yet achieve, rather than how it should be achieved.
Yet another thing which would be interesting is TDD-style tickets. Rather than simply explaining the happy path to a goal they could explain the various things which could prevent someone from reaching that goal: invalid inputs, missing permissions, inaccessible dependencies, missing UI, etc.
[+] [-] ibejoeb|5 years ago|reply
What's preventing me from being richer, more powerful, more famous?
Perhaps you'd give up privacy, autonomy, free time. That might be all it takes to realize that happiness and performance are not always, or even often, the same.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|5 years ago|reply
That is:
Standard: Start with standard, commonly applicable piece of advice. Lists of these can be found many places (for example, "to achieve success, avoid failure").
Paradoxical: Reformulate in terminology that's opaque, paradoxical, jargony and truncated (OPJART!)
Fixation: Claim that's always true, that it's best thing since sliced bread. etc. Your audience will recoil but some of them will work and realize there's some good advice in your stream of jargon. And having worked at getting this understanding, they will value it more and be happy to endorse the exaggerated value you're assigning to your jargon and your point, which is, indeed, something that is true moderately often.
STA-PAR-FI! This phrase can launch a thousand consultancies.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|5 years ago|reply
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umkehren
Edit: fixed typo.
[+] [-] maire|5 years ago|reply
"If something can go wrong it will go wrong."
There are earlier references - but Murphy's Law is associated with high g-force testing just after WWII. The team used Murphy's law to anticipate every possible failure and prevent it before the experiment ended in death. There is nothing like death to sharpen your focus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law