Using Stories to Bridge the Attention Chasm

Using Stories to Cross the "Attention Chasm"

Many people believe that the attention of audiences follow a U-shaped curve, where audiences remember mainly what said first and last during presentations, leaving a significant chunk of presented material in what I call the "attention chasm".

Stories can help to bridge this chasm.  I recently watched the movie "The Lives of Others" (an excellent film by the way), and even though it was more than 2 hours long and was in a foreign language, I was amazed at all the details I remembered from the film!  And some of these details were not critical to the movie's main story, like what presents were given at a birthday party and what was eaten for dinner.

Why are stories able to accomplish this, and what does this mean for me?  It is not easy to answer the first question, but I feel that in short, stories are able to bridge the attention chasm mainly because they weave loose pieces of information together into a coherent trajectory.  Details are carefully chosen to reinforce the characters of people in the plot; similarly, events are carefully selected to "tell the story".  In comparison, presentations usually are looser amalgamation of information.  Moreover, stories appeal to human's inert curiosity to find out what happened in other people's lives!  (As such I thought the title "The Lives of Others" is an excellent choice from a film marketing standpoint)

For the second part of the earlier question, one answer that popped out at me is education.  Use stories to teach fact-heavy subjects such as history.  Instead of making students remember all the dates and events, have them watch related movies!  I can also consider using stories to bring together all the key points of a presentation.  It is a lot of work though, as I will need to think about the plot, the characters, etc.  Maybe airlines should consider using stories for the flight safety video!  It can be made interesting and humorous, and that would make life better for both the flight attendants and the passengers.

Stories' ability to help their audiences retain large amount of information is fascinating.  I hope I will gain more insight on how to leverage this capability.

Deliver late or less: best options for a behind-schedule project?

Delivering late: a viable option for behind-schedule projects?
(photo credit: marcp_dmoz)

Projects that are behind schedule are usually faced with the following options:
1. Add more staff to the project
2. Work longer hours, including doing overtime and burning weekends (Ouch...)
3. Work people harder, expect more out of the same number of hours.  Employees might do this by reducing interaction time with other employees, or some might cut corners, like do less documentation, testing.
4. Cut scope, i.e. deliver less
5. Do nothing and deliver late

A poll of 50+ mid-career professionals showed that in their workplaces, the preference is for option #1, #2 and #3.

However, research into this area showed that option #1-3 generate negative "side effects" that can develop into vicious cycles having major impacts on the project.  For example, by adding more staff, the average experience of the team is diluted, lowering the productivity of the team and also causing more errors in work done.

The key though is the vicious cycle, or in technical speak, feedback loops.  Continuing on the earlier example, the generated errors can create more errors downstream, for example think of the situation when software is implemented based on erroneous requirements.  Consequently, though there are more people in the team, the team gets less work done than before.  Similar arguments apply for the other two options.

Model showing "side effects" of various approaches to catch up on late schedules
Credit: Professor James M. Lyneis

Does this mean option #4 and #5 are the best options? i.e.  deliver the project late or deliver it with less scope?  Not always so, but my key thought is we need to give those options more considerations.  And to educate our project stakeholders that those are not cop-out options, especially when we bear in mind all the vicious cycle side effects presented earlier.

Designing flexibilities into systems and enterprises

Does your system or enterprise need a spare tire?
(photo credit: jbdenham)

In face of uncertainty and rapid pace of change, flexibilities like a car's spare tire can be useful for systems and enterprises.  An example of a flexibility is stronger beams in a parking structure.  A shopping mall might choose to build less levels of parking initially, but by putting in stronger structural beams, additional levels of parking can be easily added.  Another example of flexibilities is hiring contract workers.  Hiring in this manner makes future scaling back of operations less costly.

However, these flexibilities come at a cost.  Stronger beams cost more, and contract workers have hidden costs like long term commitment to the company.  How then can one decide what flexibilities are needed and how much of it is needed?

One possible approach is through the use of Excel modeling and simulation.  MIT Professor Richard de Neufville's class taught this approach.  Through not-too-complicated modeling in Excel, we were able to include into a standard financial analysis several flexibility designs.  For example, we were looking at the manufacturing of a product, and one flexibility we included was to produce more in years when production costs are low.  Then, through simulation, we were able to evaluate flexibilities for their effectiveness.  For example, as shown in the chart below, we found that we were actually worse off with one of the flexibilities as the Net Present Value (NPV) of the project was lower with the flexibility compared to being without.

This is a useful approach, though one key challenge is to come up with a good approach to compare different flexibilities.  In the above example, the NPV is used.  However, there are many other scenarios where there is no single number that can be used to evaluate the "goodness" of a scenario.  For example, in building public housing to meet the needs of citizens.  One design might house more people but cost significantly more than another design.  When then is a better design?  In addition, even in the NPV scenario, the outcome is a distribution of values, so the "goodness" of a flexibility often also depends on the risk appetite of the decision maker.

Lastly, a key insight I got from the class is that it is a mistake to think that including flexibilities in systems will be more costly than not including them.  If you compare building a parking facility with four levels, versus one with the same number of levels but stronger beams, which one would cost more?  Obviously the one with stronger beams!  However, this is not the correct comparison, and this is the key cause of the misconception.  The correct comparison should be to compare the stronger beam building against one with more levels.   Why?  Because the parking facility without stronger beams is built without any plans for future expansion, so it should have more levels to cater to growth in demand.

Modeling Enterprise Architectures using System Dynamics

System Dynamics model for adoption of a new product
(source: Patrhoue)

System Dynamics, a field invented by MIT professor Jay Forrester, was created by adapting engineering control theory into social-economic domains.  It was first used to solve supply chains challenges, then urbanization issues, then global sustainability issues, and now applied to many other fields.  At first glance, System Dynamics' approach to solving problem sounds similar to some approaches in Enterprise Architecture (EA).  It seeks to create pictorial representations of the situation to help stakeholders understand what is going on, providing a powerful decision support tool for decision makers and policy makers.  In EA, views of organizations are created to capture key elements of organizations to achieve impacts similar to those mentioned.  However, looking deeper, System Dynamics is not an alternative to EA, but can actually complement EA.  In fact, System Dynamics might one day become an indispensable tool for Enterprise Architects in understanding and communicating dynamics within organizations.

The key value System Dynamics bring to EA, in my opinion, is to provide EA with the missing third dimension for describing enterprises.

System Dynamics adds the missing third dimension to EA

EA views provide visibility into the major components in an organization (e.g. the main business processes and business data) and how these pieces depend and inter-relate with one another (e.g. linkages between business process and data).  However, it is not clear how the organization will behave when changes occur in the organization.  For example, how well does the current organization structure and human resource policies support the assimilation of new hires?  System Dynamics offer tools to describe such dynamics.

System Dynamics describes dynamics in systems primarily by identifying feedback loops.  For example, in the new hires example, one feedback loop at play is the "teach a man to fish" loop.  Here, as existing employees spend time mentoring new hires, the productivity of new hires increases and soon the new hires become more capable of sharing in existing workload.  The sharing of workload eases the burden on existing employees, giving them even more time to mentor the new hires. This becomes a positive reinforcing cycle that is very helpful to the organization.  In most organizations, there are also other loops at play that counter this positive dynamic.  The key value System Dynamics offer to organizations then is helping them identify such key loops in their organizations, as well as key levers for influencing those loops.  In the new hire example, a key lever would be the amount of work of teams where new hires are added.  My friend Kai Siang wrote an article that elaborates further on this new hire example.

System Dynamics also offer tools for understanding the dynamics of different future state designs.  By leveraging on computer simulation, System Dynamics is able to provide insights to decision makers on how different organization designs can impact the behavior of their organizations.

Furthermore, in reading System Dynamics materials, I found several best practices that are often heard in EA:

1. All models are wrong - don't strive to emulate reality, but think of models as tools to help human thinking.

2. Creating the model is not the end goal!  Skills in group facilitation, enabling organizational learning and getting the needed results are also very important.

3. Making mental models explicit might look trivial, but it is key to facilitating useful discussion!

4. People will have different views of what is the "correct" mental model.  Don't get too caught up with that, simply capture the conflicting views and move on.

5. People feel more comfortable to comment on the mental model drawn on a board or a piece of paper, as it is more seen as critiquing an object rather than attacking a person.

It would be interesting to investigate further the intersection between Enterprise Architecture and System Dynamics.  A quick web search revealed a 2010 paper that possibly address this area.  I will definitely welcome any pointers to work done in this area.

Five principles I use to plan my day

Make the day enjoyable!
Doing my work outdoor with a hot drink.

Have you ever invested a lot of effort to get into your dream college but then sloughed through it because there were just too many interesting classes and you ended up taking more than you had time for?  Or waking up feeling nervous because of the many items on your to-do list?  Or move from task to task with such precision in time planning that you felt like you were doing a combo move in a computer arcade game?

Well, if that is you, you are definitely not alone because that is me too.  Summer term has been pretty busy for me as class schedules are condensed to accommodate this shorter term.  Moreover, other demands for my time--like family, church, friends--added to the tension.

To make matter worse, I know that I should enjoy the journey and not be caught up with getting things done.  It can be really enjoyable to slowly mull over a topic taught in class, do the class readings in a park with a cup of coffee in hand, and then take time to reflect and blog about the topic.

The reality though is often different from this ideal.  Given the many things screaming for my time, my temptation is to squeeze as many tasks as I can into a day.  That makes enjoying the journey more difficult.  Moreover, sometimes when I do have free time on hand, I feel a nagging feeling that I am wasting time, and that I should think about what task I can complete next.

I feel the key to resolving this tension between getting things done and enjoying the journey is to establish some principles for planning my daily schedule.  This relates to my life architecture.  Here are the five principles I distilled after untangling my thoughts as I wrote this post.

1. First things first; some things will have to go.  I have finite time and energy, so I cannot have everything!  Don't fall into the greed trap.
2. Make the day enjoyable!  If it looks like a breathless schedule, then drop some tasks so that it is more achievable.  Don't be overly ambitious.  The journey will not be enjoyable ALL the time, there will be moments when it will be a mad rush.  My aim is to make them the exception rather than the norm.
3. Leave half of the day unplanned to leave room for the unexpected (this one is tough! I'm still working on it)
4. Minimise switching of tasks in a day...focus on at most 2 topics to minimize "memory thrashing"

5. Better planning, squeezing time from between events, multi-tasking can help me do more, but beware of making more room just so that it gets filled up with other busyness...

Where the CIO sits makes no difference to EA?

Photo titled "sit where you want".  Pretty apt for this article!
(photo credit: DorteF)

Enterprise Architecture deals with the blueprint of enterprises, so it might make sense that the blueprint function sits close to the Chief Executive Officer in the organization chart to ensure alignment between planning and execution. Is there a correlation between where the Chief Enterprise Architect sits in the organization chart and the Enterprise Architecture maturity of that enterprise?

Figure 1 shows the data from an interview of almost 20 government agencies that included questions about their EA maturity as well as the number of layers between their CEO and Chief EA.  No clear pattern can be identified from the interview data.  Some might even argue that having two to four layers between the CEO and the Chief EA is the best!


Figure 1 Relationship between Chief EA's distance to CEO and EA Maturity

In addition, my discussions with a researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests the same finding: that there has been no support in data of correlation between an organization’s Chief EA’s proximity to the CEO and its EA maturity.

Does this mean that it does not matter where the chief EA sits in organizations? In many organizations, the Chief Information Officer is the chief EA, so does that also mean that it does not matter where the CIO sits in organizations?

Through the interviews, I noticed that the organizations who reported having mature EA roughly falls into three groups. The first group is made up of organizations with very influential CIOs who reported either directly into the CEO or to a direct report of the CEO. The second group has stories of their CEO believing strongly in EA, and pushed the EA agenda top-down. The third group consists of organizations that I was not clear why they reported high maturity for their EA. It might be a lack of understanding on my part, but I also suspect some of them are still early in their EA journey and thus not yet equipped to provide an accurate assessment of their EA maturity.

Analyzing the mature organizations gives the following thought: where the chief EA sits is less important to an organization’s EA maturity than EA’s mindshare among senior managers. If the CEO believes in EA, the organization is more likely to have mature EA. If the CIO is influential and believes in EA, it is more likely that he can influence the CEO to think the same. The challenge though is that it is difficult to measure EA’s mindshare among senior managers, but this does reinforce an often-repeated EA best practice on the importance of gaining top management’s sponsorship to achieve successful EA implementation.

Feedback loops: the central tool for understanding everything around us?

Loops, loops, loops.  How much do we understand, how much do we not, and how much more understanding do we need? (photo credit: wolfpix)

Heard an excellent talk by MIT Professor Jay Forrester this week.  He is the founder of Systems Dynamics, a growing field offering powerful tools and frameworks for understanding complex systems such as organizations, urban cities and healthcare systems.

A key idea Professor Forrester shared, is that everything that changes through time is controlled by feedback loops.  And that means that we can understand things around us better if we understand feedback loops better!  City growth, spread of infectious diseases, stagnating profits, misbehaving children, you name it.  Even a simple task like filling a glass with water is controlled by feedback loops, as shown in the diagram below:  as water is being poured in the glass, the level of water in the glass goes up, and that prompts the pourer to slow down the pouring.  You can even use feedback loops to better understand the popular children story "The Lorax" (see "Studying The Lorax with Feedback Loops")!

However, most of us are not accustomed to feedback loop thinking.  Professor Forrester said that we are more used to "open-loop thinking", instead of "closed-loop thinking".  This means that usually we look at a situation, think about possible actions and consequences, decide an action, and then move on. Rarely do we think about how our actions result in ripple effects in a larger context, and somehow comes back to impact the originator.  It feels as if we need to worry about how the fluttering of wings of a butterfly in China could create a tornado in the United States.  How does one even start thinking about impacts like these?  It is too complex for most people to handle, or to have an interest in.  Feedback loops (or more accurately System Dynamics) seem to offer tools to help us manage such complex analysis, and avoid the pitfalls of open-loop thinking.

Professor Forrester envisioned that the world will be a better place if more of us are trained to analyze situations with feedback loops.  He pointed out three ways in which the world would be bettered if people are trained:

1. We would make better citizens

Many national policies are bad because they are made with open-loop thinking.  Those policies focus on short term gains, at the expense of creating long term burdens.  But why are policy-makers still making them?  It is because the general public is better at identifying the short term gains.  But when citizens of countries are able to tease out short term and long term impacts of policies using feedback loops, they would be more discerning of short-sighted policies and provide the necessary support for long term investments that have less short term gains.

2. We can learn faster

Professor Forrester shared how one Masters student was able to very quickly get to the research frontier of a new field using feedback loops to do his analysis.  In the same way, he believes that all of us can benefit from the power of closed-loop thinking.

3. Our children can learn faster

A very interesting project that Professor Forrester is pushing now, is teaching feedback loops to K-12 children, and helping them using this tool learn better.  From literature to math to science, it is quite unbelievable how broadly this tool is targeted to be applied.  I am excited to try this out myself and evaluate its effectiveness in educating children and helping them gain better analysis skills.  Check out Creative Learning Exchange for more information on this initiative.

I am currently learning more about feedback loops.  Definitely hope to share more about it as I learn.