Potpourri Number One

At the end of the last post I mentioned I was reading an article on Aeon about “instrumentalisation” - The six-second hug.

While I think it’s worth reading, it didn’t touch on what impacted how I approach the Kantan Kanban program. Roughly - the disconnection between a metric and the full reality of what is being tracked, and how over-reliance on metrics leads to an inaccurate or shallow understanding of the situation.

Because I want users, including myself, to make the effort to consider and understand their work and how it’s progressing I don’t include reporting. While they can be helpful they’re also limited, to overcome those limits you’re forced to add more and more reports. Ending up with something that is less limited but which can fool you into thinking it is comprehensive.

I’ll come back to this in the future. In part because I’ve started reading The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, which might touch more directly on this discrepancy.

In the meantime, as I consider the short-term direction, I want to share a couple of blog posts that I’ve come across related to current events. These are a bit out of my wheel-house, so I can’t speak to the finer details, but they demonstrate the scale and depth of thinking that I find most interesting.

• Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure by Craig Tindale. What are the foreseeable consequences of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, broken down by component and how it is used.
• The Naphtha Heart Attack: Why $120 WTI is a Ghost Signal Preceding a Negative-Price Inversion by Steven J. Newbury. Highlights a current assumption and how it may not be correct - worth noting that the user “ChinArb” provides a long (seemingly LLM generated) comment that attempts to disprove the main article.
• Conflict in Iran Ripples Through Global Fertilizer Markets, Raises Prices Even Higher by Michelle Rook. Goes deeper on the fertilizer issue.

And one that meets the Ig Nobel Prize criteria - it gets a chuckle but also makes you think:

• The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes

Takeaway

It’s critical that you have the best information possible for any choice that matters. One of the best ways to make sure that you do is to try and get input from sources that criticize the dominant view, and scrutinize all sources.

Some things to consider:

• Does the article use clear logic to describe why something happens, and what the chain of causality will be?
• What assumptions are made and why?
  • Can they justify those assumptions, and how does that match your understanding?
• Do the cite references? How trustworthy are those sources?
• Are you emotionally invested or involved with the topic? If so, is that impacting how you view it?
• Is the author focusing on one small aspect, or the large-scale?
  • Can you find articles which address the other end of the scale? How do they relate - do they agree or disagree?

Next Time

I don’t know what I’ll be covering next time - I expect that I might have another short gap before the next post comes out, but I’ll be back as soon as I can to dig into something substantial.

Photo credits: Photo by Jessica McClure on Unsplash