Testing and Finance Conference 2011

Written by Jamie Wednesday, 11 May 2011 08:49

I wrote this yesterday on the train coming home from the Testing and Finance Conference that this year, like last year, was held in Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt, Germany.  Jorrit and I were working on some ideas which we loosely called ‘Preparationism’.  At first this was a joke, a way for me to justify my angst-driven need to succeed.  (I think Jorrit, after plucking up some courage and getting sick of me taking too long to do things, accused me of being a perfectionist. Preparationism was my defence, which shows just how far the human mind will go to defend itself.)  Once we got over the joke we started to separate angst-driven perfectionism (a bad thing) from the type of deep work we do in order to solve engineering problems (a good thing).  Preparationism was the result.

The slide deck was broken into about 18 slides, but excluding the introduction, conclusion and further reading, it was more like 13 or 14.  The talk starts with an examination of the life of Virginia Woolf, her upbringing, her writing practice and the failure of the 1922 novel Jacob’s Room which was the precursor to her famous Mrs Dalloway (1925).  I made the point that Fred Brookes made, plan to throw one away, you will anyway. 

The next slides were about Woolf’s sexual abuse, depression, her autobiographical writing and her suicide.  Woolf tried to make sense out of her life and it was this sense making, achieved with temporal distance, that drove her writing.  I argued (do argue) that sense-making is what engineers do, it guides our thoughts and we are better at our jobs when we can find the space and the courage to make sense - it is not a passive process.  Virginia Woolf’s life provides a metaphor for the type of work we do.

My next slide told a story with a similar structure to Woolf’s: I told the story of an mental orgasm I had in a field in Holland.  Learning to program over a period of years and having a final Eureka! moment made the point of how a creative breakthrough occurs.  Creative breakthroughs, I was arguing, are how software and finance projects complete: one breakthrough at a time in the same way we pull an essay into existence one paragraph at a time.

Once I had set the scene of what a creative breakthrough was, I then made it clear that Preparationism provides heuristics for managers and engineers.  I used a model of the Central Nervous System to highlight the disproportionate amount of time we waste on working (and not thinking).  I went as far to say not having regular orgasms was a sign of a defective system of management/engineering.  (ODD - orgasm driven development could be the acronym.)

The rest of the talk was about the things that stop you having cognitive leaps, so:

• Teams are not a good idea, as they get in the way of deep work and deep reflection via coercion and social inclusion.  (I used the metaphor of Hobbes Leviathan for managers and then showed how, although a Leviathan is not perfect, it’s better than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s savages.)
• Multi-tasking is not a good idea (and the lesson for managers is: don’t allow it, the message for butterfly thinkers is: don’t do it).
• Being a coward is not smart and nor is playing the ‘autodidactic lottery’.

I was quite happy with how it went.  They are friendly lot in Germany (although they wear gray suits, I wish they’d stop) and were engaged in the talk, raising eyebrows sometimes and laughing at others.  Jorrit and I didn’t set off to do it, but we covered the effects of childhood trauma, the death rates of the Ecuadorian Jivaro peoples, the old testament, the summer of 1998, BASIC, the BBC Computer Literacy Project and non-deterministic programs.  And the good thing is, it all made sense.  (I think.)

Further Reading

This talk was based on a number of blog entries, including:

• Self-Awareness
• Inspiration Through Preparation
• En-Garde.

The PDF of the deck is below.

Attachments:

Preparationism

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11/05/11 08:55