What is Airlocking? Airlocking is a process where a belief spreads and locks-in to the point that direct, disconfirming, evidence is disregarded, and people believe something to the point that they’ll kill themselves by throwing themselves out of an airlock. If there is another term for this phenomenon, could you please let me know? In the meantime, I’ll call it Airlocking. Etymology Consider the following scene from Avenue 5, Season 1, Episode 8. It aired just as those in the United States and Canada were understanding the full gravity of Covid-19 in March, 2020. TV is useful because it gives everybody the opportunity to experience the same phenomenon for themselves, independently. Everybody has a different reflection. The whole episode is[…]
Tag: culture
I used to conjure Louis Del Grande to appear on my television. I used steel wool on the antenna of a black and white set, Tuesday’s at 7 or 8pm, on CBC. Louis played a tabloid journalist that fought crime, fought his wife, fought the Crown, cracked jokes, and in the end would solve the murder mystery with a fuzzy psychic flashback. The show was called, wait for it, Seeing Things. I thought it was neat how he could see the past so clearly, with psychic flashbacks, often at the most inconvenient time. I remember wanting to see the future like that. It was unlike anything I remember watching on television. Last night I scrolled through over a hundred titles[…]
In this post, I’ll outline some of the best parts about product managing data science. Data science is the creation of product from data, requiring a blend of the skills of technology, statistics, and business. Product Management brings and keeps product in the world, requiring a blend of the skills of technology, user experience, and business. All of the challenges of product management appear in data science. And then some. The Knowledge Funnel The Knowledge Funnel is a concept introduced by Roger Martin in Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009). At the top of the funnel, you got mysteries. It would seem that there are an uncountable number of mysteries. In the middle, you have heuristics,[…]
What if code is an artifact of the culture that creates it? What would your interpretation of the code suggest to you about the culture? What would different layers of code tell you about how people lived in the past? Culture Code is instructions to be run by machines and interpreted by the humans that take care of it. So much code is managed by people. And groups of people get to together and create language, standards, rituals, traditions, meanings, arguments, rhetoric, procedures, regulations, obligations, agreements, memoranda of understanding, specifications, memes, stories, and values. Cultures evolve. For instance, as a startup goes from 2 people to 5, then 5 to 11, (11 to 23, 23 to 47, and so on)[…]
On the walk in, I thought of Livy, of networks, and of hierarchies. I thought of Samuel Doe, the Liberian that brought an end to the brutal True Whig Party and brought in his own brutal regime, and of Emperor Bokassa, who once spent a third of his nations budget on his coronation. They each grew up physically, yet never had a chance to develop fully as whole people. And because they were leaders, the societies they led never got the chance to develop either. Are systems really that sensitive to leadership? Can it really be that institutions are that sensitive to the development of their leaders? The thought rocked me for a few minutes, and then subsided into an[…]