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Gli ambienti di pensiero integrato
Just a quick note of gratitude. Antonio Dini has generously translated my article “Obsidian, Roam, and the rise of Integrated Thinking Environments—what they are, what they do, and what’s next” into Italian. Exciting!
Thanks, Antonio. I hope Italian readers find the concept useful.
i saw someone say that note titles should be like API names ( from @davestridsr on the Obsidian Discord)
An app adds an API when its developers want other developers to be able to extend and work with the app’s functions, e.g., to develop other features or to let services interact with one another.
Some “good” features of an API in software development might be that the API is: (1) deep (you can get at as many functions of the underlying app as are useful), (2) expressive (you can fine-tune interactions between your extension and the app), and (3) intuitive (by looking at an API function’s title and parameters, it’s pretty easy to guess what it allows you to do).
Andy’s saying that a good note title fits those parameters too. The metaphor goes: you “extend” an atomic evergreen note by invoking its title in a new note. By doing so (and if done right), you can grasp the details of that note easily while, at the same time, you can reinterpret it in its new context.
In a recent episode of Hello Monday, Jessi Hempel interviews Dr. Natalie Nixon on creativity and her new book, The Creativity Leap. Natalie’s PhD in Design Management—plus her work in fashion, design, and business—led her to a catchy and compelling description of creative work. We accomplish creative work, she says, “by toggling between wonder and rigour.”
In the podcast conversation, Jessi and Natalie talk about intuition—and I was struck by something. “We don’t talk about intuition,” Natalie notes at about 6 minutes in. “We don’t talk about intuition in business school, in law school, or in medical school.” And yet, she says, “I observed that really successful leaders—especially really successful startup leaders—in their origin stories, there’s always this moment where ‘Something told me not to do the deal. Something told me to work with her over him.’ […] Every successful leader really reckons with incorporating acting on their intuition to make decisions.” Jessi agrees, noting that intuition comes up often in her interviews with leaders on Hello Monday as leaders cite it as the reason for their success.
The thing is, just because we don’t name intuition doesn’t mean we aren’t talking about it. That’s because intuition is really just confident, logical thinking.
Charles Sanders Peirce was a philosopher. He investigated how we inquire into and discover new knowledge.1 Before Peirce, we generally recognized the logical processes of deduction and induction. Deductive thinking helps us identify what must be true about a situation in order to explain it. When we deduce something, we look at the general rules and principles we know of and draw specific conclusions from that evidence. Inductive thinking involves drawing general conclusions from specific, limited evidence.
Peirce argued that effective reasoning follows a pattern: we determine the specific consequences of an idea (deduction), and then we judge whether the available evidence fits that idea and its consequences (induction). But how do we develop ideas?2
Abduction is the name of the logical process Peirce described for developing ideas. To think abductively means to generate and choose ideas that fit the situation at hand. A good idea should be verifiable—we should be able to use evidence to judge its fit—and should help us resolve the situation at hand. Peirce also had criteria to help choose the best ideas to test. He suggested that we should strive to conserve resources (e.g., those that most are most efficiently verifiable and usable in the situation), identify the most valuable ideas (specifically the “uberty” of an idea, or how likely it is that a possible idea might bring about an innovation), and the most relevant ideas (e.g., those that may apply beyond our current focus, too).3
Abduction is clearly an important step in any innovative process—but it is no more important than testing and using the ideas you generate. What, then, if you don’t have enough evidence to truly test and prove your ideas?
The process Peirce described—abduction, deduction, induction—is the ideal. However, we do not always have time and energy to follow the process diligently. Instead, we quickly make creative judgements based on a few observed qualities. This requires two related processes.4 The first Peirce called “abductory induction,” and it combines the first and last step of the inquiry process. We observe the qualities of the situation, and we generate possible ideas to resolve it based on those observations. The second process is known as “inference to the best explanation” (IBE).5 IBE is exactly what it sounds like. Given a number of possible ways of resolving a problem, choose the best one. (Peirce’s criteria, noted above, apply here.)
So what does all this have to do with intuition?
Intuition is the confident application of these shorthand logical approaches to creative problem solving. As Jessi and Natalie noted, we aren’t often explicitly taught about strengthening our intuition. Yet, everything we learn supports its development. The more we have to draw on in order to pull into the processes described above, the better our intuitive decisions will be.
I say that intuition is the confident application of these processes because they only work when we follow through. In reality, we use abductory induction and IBE all the time. When we engage in creative problem solving, we’re not only using information from the evidence in front of us. We’re drawing on our lived experience and our knowledge base. Even if we don’t directly recall or reference that background information, it is drawn into the creativity of abduction and it defines the general rules and principles we use in deduction. It provides us with the heuristics we use when engaging in IBE. But if we don’t have a bias towards action and instead operate with e.g., perfectionism, we fail to actually execute on these ideas. Thus, we need to have confidence in our abductory induction and IBE processes.
All this is simply a gentle challenge of the idea that we don’t talk about intuition. I think that all knowledge management practices and forms of education are actually fundamentally about strengthening our intuition.
That said, Natalie’s work is fascinating. I recommend the episode of Hello Monday and plan on picking up her book!
In this article, my reading of Peirce comes from the writing of William Mcauliffe. ↩︎
Peirce was actually specifically concerned with science and hypotheses generation, selection, and testing. Here I refer to generating, selecting, testing, and using ideas to apply these concepts to problem-solving more broadly. ↩︎
He also cautioned not to produce ideas that stop the inquiry process—e.g., magical thinking, or by suggesting that whatever happened must be a complete mystery. ↩︎
Actually, the difference between these two processes is the subject of substantive, controversial debate. This is in part because the scholars who study inference to the best explanation have also used Peirce’s term “abduction” to describe it. This understandably caused extensive confusion, but also probably a lot of philosophical debates and scholarship, so maybe it was for the best. ↩︎
Philosopher Gilbert Harman originally described and named this process… and mistakenly suggested it was the same thing as abduction. ↩︎
The report concludes that the campaigns represent “a clear danger to democracy” and could allow powerful organizations to target their opponents. “The extensive targeting of American nonprofits exercising their first amendment rights is exceptionally troubling,” Citizen Lab’s report says.
We didn’t want this part of cyberpunk sci-fi…
This is a quickly-sketched model created from a breakout group conversation during the MUN School of Graduate Studies’ “Earth’s Carrying Capacity” dialogue.
According to designer/strategist Roger Martin, a strategy is an imagined possibility with which we ask the question “What has to be true for this possibility to become real?”
In this episode IDEO U’s Creative Confidence podcast, Roger talks about how that approach helped unlock Bianca Andreescu’s success at the Grand Slam singles championship in 2019.
One of the fascinating things about this approach is that it acknowledges the need for system-wide changes. By asking “What has to be true?”, a strategist must consider all of the conditions of a system that should shift to make the imagined possibility a reality. Of course, most approaches to strategy do require some appreciation of the state of the strategic environment (e.g., the five forces model). None, however, emphasize the need to guarantee these systemic conditions quite as explicitly as asking “What must be true?”
This changed with the emergence of “Patient 31.”
Reuters’ coverage of the “Korean clusters” provided the world with a vivid glimpse of the volatility of COVID-19. One person showed poor judgement, and in turn caused cascading catastrophe in her communities.
Events like the COVID-19 pandemic are thankfully rare. Moments like these—when a lot happens all at once, and the experience is shared by a collective—shape future history like nothing else. We are learning a lot from this. Not only are epidemiologists now a famous profession, but we’re all learning exactly what it takes to provide good healthcare, what good governance looks like, how public health is community health, and more.
Patient 31 holds a simple lesson for systemics: the fragility of apparently solid social systems. South Korea seemed to do everything right. Yet, due to the volatile nature of this particular socio-health system, a single “free radical” caused immense damage.
Similar volatility is evident—but more subtle—in other social systems. Consider how memes spread. Our massive communities may seem immovable at times, but it’s clear that the wrong (or right) phenomena can spread rapidly and deeply.
Stay safe.
I have often hesitated to draft up an idea because I’m not sure the folks reading this site want to hear it. I (aim to) publish about a few disparate subjects, really:
Obviously, this is too many topics for any one blog. If you’re reading this, you probably came here for just one of the topics above, and you might be interested in another one or two. And listen, I like you, and I want any visit of yours to be a valuable one. That’s why I’ve launched a sibling blog.
I could cluster the topics above a number of ways. Here’s what I think makes the most sense: This blog, Fulcra, will focus on finding leverage for complex change, including:
The newest one, Axle, will focus on how we change ourselves, including:
Moving forward, this site (Fulcra) will be a platform for writing on complex systems change. I aim to study, share, and write about how the world changes—and how we can get better at changing it.
Axle is a new site I will use to share my thoughts on how we change ourselves. After all, the better we get, the better we better get. The easy thing to write about (and what you’ll probably see the most often there) are the apps and tools I use and the designs I apply in my life and work. I also plan to share functional resources (such as scripts) as well as ask questions and debate about making progress in life and work.
This was a weird decision. After all, I barely publish here, so running two different sites seems like a terrible idea. I hope, however, that having more focused platforms for these different topics will help me publish more impulsively. Feel free to follow both, or none!
Welcome to Axle.
I probably don’t need two blogs, but I have found myself hesitating to publish a variety of ideas on Fulcra because I wasn’t sure that those who read that blog for the systems/design thinking or social change focus would care about my thoughts on productivity, practice, and personal development.
So that’s what this place is for.
While my writing on Fulcra will (continue to) explore how the world changes, Axle is about how we change. In particular, I’m interested in “augmenting cognition”: how information systems and systemic design can help us think, do, and be better. I’ll also be writing about the different techniques and tools I use in my own work, as well as publishing resources that you might find useful.
What’s in the name? Well, while Fulcra emphasizes the search for leverage points in complex systems change, Axle is centred on the core of that change. That’s us—the people driving it. We try our best to amplify the forces of the world in order to shift something that matters to us. We roll with our changing worlds—and we are also in constant motion (and transformation) ourselves.
Welcome!
