From The Head Of Zeus Jones » systems

Looking for the fundamental contradictions.

adrian — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:36:19 +0000

We had an interesting meeting last week with someone very high up in the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, where the subject of 6 Gingerol came up. 6 Gingerol is a compound that can be isolated from common ginger which has been shown to be effective in reducing certain cancers. Not only that but it can also be produced very cheaply, apparently for around $14/dose.

Unfortunately this is a problem because the big drug companies aren’t interested in medicines that can be produced inexpensively. In order for their economics to work, they need drugs that cost lots and lots of money to make and which can then be sold for even more money. Ironically, this is also why drug companies aren’t lining up to cure some of the biggest diseases in the Developing World, because the Developing World can’t pay the prices required to fund expensive product development. (According to the person we spoke with, this has led to a situation where development and research on 6 Gingerol is stalled waiting for a smaller drug company to see some potential and take it on.)

I think of this as a very fundamental contradiction in the system. A system structure that rewards companies for doing the wrong thing. A system that, in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, simultaneously forces companies to look for the most expensive way to solve a problem and that prevents them from solving the most pressing problems.

A lot of other industries have very fundamental contradictions such as these. The credit card industry is built upon making money from the failure of its customers, the consumer electronics industry is built upon the lack of longevity of its products. In fact, there’s probably a contradiction somewhere in the systems of most industries. I think these fundamental contradictions are very interesting because can be the starting point for innovation. For example, as I wrote the other day, Netflix used a fundamental contradiction in the video rental industry as a starting point for its business. I also think that these fundamental contradictions are fairly easy to spot. The only question you need to ask is whether or not the financial gain of the provider is directly tied to what’s best for the customer. The fact that these contradictions still exist simply says that this question isn’t asked that often.

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Usability in City Utilities

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:59:10 +0000

Recently I’ve been noticing a change in the interface for city traffic signal buttons. A nice example of usable design proliferating into our everyday infrastructure.

Are you seeing more examples of usable interactions in your daily life?

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Sudoku as a metaphor and model for strategy.

adrian — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:14:07 +0000

As some of you may know, I’ve recently become addicted to Sudoku. I’d played it a few times back during the height of the Sudoku craze but had never really thought much of it back then. So, my recent fascination was as much of a mystery to me as it continues to be to my family. Having reflected on it a bit more, I have an answer for why I find it so compelling.

For me, playing Sudoku is like doing marketing strategy. It involves the same kinds of thinking, deduction and tactics that I might employ when trying to figure out strategy for a brand or product. In fact, I think playing Sudoku is a way to improve your strategy.

Strategy: At the start of any strategy project, it’s a wide open field. The possibilities are limitless. The problem is, this much choice tends to be paralyzing. My approach is to quickly limit the number of possibilities by asking the very fundamental questions, the main one being, “what’s really the problem here?” In fact, if I were to put a percentage against it, I’d say that strategy is 80% figuring out what the real problem is and 20% figuring out the solution. Usually it’s not exactly obvious where the real problem is and so I’ll engage in a process of elimination and narrowing in. This can involve asking questions like where is the problem, is it in manufacturing, distribution, product, packaging, naming, etc.

Sudoku: This is very similar to my strategy for Sudoku. The goal is to eliminate possibilities starting with the big obvious ones before diving into a row by row or cell by cell analysis. Here I’ll start by looking at individual numbers e.g. 9s across the entire board. Trying to fill in the obvious gaps and trying not to get caught up in too much detail. It’s here that I’ll also begin to form a sense of which numbers and which cells are going to be the real problems.

Strategy: In Sudoku as in strategy, big sweeping surveys of the landscape can only take you so far. That’s when you actually need to dive in and start to get you hands messy. In strategy, this would be the research phase, asking questions, eliminating more potential problems and generally narrowing in on what the problem or problems might be. In this phase it’s very much a process of juggling lots of different pieces of information and trying to make sense of them. Trying to see how and where they fit. Typically I’m drawing from a lot of different sources to try to form a cohesive picture in my head. So there’s a lot of having to cross-reference bits of learning from one place and testing them against another place to see what happens.

Sudoku: On the Sudoku board this is also where I’ll dive in and try a variety of different strategies an approaches for filling in more numbers. However, as before, I’m also trying to eliminate possibilities and winnow the choice for any one individual cell down to only two possibilities. Typically, on a tough Soduku board this is the most time consuming part of the game. It requires a lot different approaches combined in different ways. For me, it also requires a bunch of back-tracking too because I’m not that good at Sudoku yet. But, I can feel myself getting better and as in strategy, there are patterns that you see over and over again and it becomes easier and easier to spot them with practice.

Strategy: After having done all the research and synthesized it, I’ll typically be able to finally arrive at the real root of the problem. But in the real world, there are often a number of different ways to solve them. I’ll try to get the potential solutions or strategies down to a small number two or three at the most and then test them out. This may involve researching them but more often it involves brainstorming against the varous strategies and seeing where they take you and what the implications of following that strategy might be. Great strategies are great because they create great possibilities. The brainstorming process reveals the possibilities in each strategy and helps me decide which strategy to pursue.

Sudoku: On the really tricky boards you have no option other than to simply play through scenarios. You can get a number of cells down to just two possibilities but you can’t figure out which of the two numbers fits. At this point you just have to pick one and then see how that impacts the rest of the board. If it works you’re in luck, if it doesn’t then you know the only answer is the other choice. It’s time consuming and painful but that’s why I prefer playing on the iPhone.

Finally, I suspect this post may be of no use to anyone other than myself so to redeem it (slightly) I’m linking to this fantastic Sudoku guide here which may actually deliver some value.

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Introducing negentropy into a system

adrian — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:52:00 +0000

One of my guilty pleasures is falling asleep to science programs. Last night it was Fight Science on National Geographic. This show looks at the science behind highly trained fighters to see what’s really going on. The episode I watched brought in some special OPS people and exposed them to extremes of heat and cold among other things to see how it affected their performance.

Impressively, but not surprisingly, these soldiers endured their torture tests (losing 7lb of water weight in 30 mins and being submerged in freezing water for 60 mins) far longer than normal. But the real shocker was that rather than worsening their performance, they tested better on an obstacle course after being frozen or boiled than they did before.

This is an example of what Schrödinger first called negative entropy, later shortened to negentropy. Basically, Schrödinger observed that living organisms have the ability to defeat entropy – to defy the second law of thermodynamics and increase organization rather than to decay as might be expected.

In my simplistic way I boil this down to the idea that people can add energy to a system and produce results which might not have been predicted. We are not linear and we can achieve things that wouldn’t appear to be possible through linear thinking and processes.

By combining technology and humans, or by using technology to augment human power (rather than using technology to replace human power) impressive results can be achieved. Results that can actually beat pure technology solutions.

This thinking has featured quite heavily in some recent Zeus Jones work, and is seeping into the blogosphere courtesy of Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis, who are both talking about how human powered search models can overturn algorithm powered search. (Thanks for the links Adam!)

While I don’t have any predictions around that, I do think that this model shows incredible promise for creating very disruptive new experiences. Thanks to companies like Amazon.com and others, the web community pursued a strategy of throwing algorithms at problems that humans are better at solving. It does finally seem that the tide is turning and we’re now realizing that building a web around people is better than building a web apart from them.