Thread by @MrAlanCooper

Well, all of the above. Mostly, design is widely considered to be a lightweight, visual, post-facto treatment of complex engineering products. That’s kinda all wrong and backwards. 1

https://twitter.com/YasithTheBA/status/1169664549059842049

It wouldn’t be an unreasonable argument to say that complex systems cannot be designed, and software is always a complex system. 2

But of course, complex systems are designed all of the time. The main problem is that the design given to them is simple, because everyone struggles with the complexity. 3

But that “simplicity” is an illusion. The complex systems don’t become simple systems behind a simple user interface. They just become inscrutable complex systems behind an interface that is unsuited to the task. 4

That is, you don’t achieve simplicity by making things simple. You achieve simplicity by making things understood. 5

And making complex things understandable is a complex problem, and a difficult problem, and a problem that takes a lot of time and iteration to understand, solve, and refine. 6

And the people who can do that job are not that common, and the training for those people is not that common, and the understanding of that job is not that common. But that isn’t the worst part of the problem. 7

The worst part of the problem is that people who claim to do that job are very common, and training that claims to work is very common, and understanding that fails to actually understand is quite common. 8

Like all complex problems, solving it starts with observation. Then one has to make some sense of those observations. Then there’s a creative interlude where treatments and solutions are proposed and assessed. And then the work begins. 9

Basically, everyone in business is looking for a way to do things more quickly, more easily, and with less skilled people. The solution, of course, is to take more time, work harder, and use more highly skilled people. 10

In other words, the best business people are wrong.

Those same bad business people often make lots of money being wrong.

Don’t conflate making money with making successful products. 11

Your boss will not reward you for taking time and working harder. You have to make a choice about how you wish to shape the world you live in. It’s a very tough choice. 12

Do you want a raise and a promotion? A nice house and a new Tesla? Or do you want to create a supportive, healthy, peaceful world in which your children can grow old in happiness? 13

The higher up you go in the ranks of business, the more sociopathic the behavior gets. CEOs have already sold their souls. Practitioners have it easy: they just do stuff. It’s middle managers and wannabe middle managers who have the hard choice. 14

Humans have a conscience. Sociopaths are sick humans who lack a conscience. Businesses are thought structures without a mind, and therefore have no conscience. Business is inherently sociopathic. 15

I’ve been a business person all of my life, and I’m not against business. It’s just that business needs to be constrained in ways that healthy humans don’t. 16

Over the past 30 or so years we have removed all of those constraints, and businesses have turned from being a productive part of our community to being ruthless predators in our midst. So who do you think they reward in the middle management ranks? 17

All of the practitioners I know are suffering from acute cognitive dissonance. Their values, attitude, and training all orient them to delivering quality products. 18

But sociopathic businesses don’t want quality products and don’t care about that. They don’t even really want money, otherwise they would care about quality. 17

Quality products and service are how you create a lasting company of value with trusted, happy employees and customers. Businesses are clearly not creating such things. 18

Unconstrained businesses loot marketplaces, and loot established companies. They destroy communities and plunder their wealth as the citizens go under. They are like sharks: a giant muscle that eats, and never stops eating. 19

Practitioners—being the good citizens they are—try to reconcile the unreconcilable. They ask, “do you want it faster?” “Do you want me to calculate the ROI?” “Do you want it jazzier, sexier, prettier?” “Should I be more agile?” “Should I use design systems/thinking/methods?” 20

It’s like we are in the cockpit of an airplane with the engines dead and the control wires all cut, trying to find the correct settings on the levers and gauges that will somehow right the aircraft. 21

We are looking for answers in the wrong places. We have to look inside. 22