Owning concepts

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout contain a few laws that I’d like to highlight:

• The Law of Exclusivity: Two companies cannot own the same word in the concept’s mind.
• The Law of Leadership: It’s better to be first than it is to be better.
• The Law of the Mind: It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.

Now consider the following categories and who pops into your mind:

• a giving person
• a great programmer
• a do-it-yourself mechanic
• a politically liberal or conservative person
• a talented artist
• someone who sells things online
• someone who is in fantastic shape

My experiences

Generally I can think of only a person or two for any given category. I don’t know why this is the case. But not knowing the reason does not stop it from being a useful thing to know about.

I notice that I associate people with a concept and believe them to be knowledgeable in a certain area when they are the first person I heard about the concept from. Until I have evidence to the contrary or find a more knowledgeable person, this is the working assumption. Whether they are really the most qualified people on these subjects, I would go to them first with questions. Their face pops up when I think about the category. I try to be more open-minded than believing that my mental model of them is accurate, but I am fallible.

When a consultant came into work and wound up a Pomodoro clock, several people glanced at me and I guessed that they were thinking about the Pomodoro Technique article that I wrote. I did it at work for a month or two, and it elicited some strong responses. It must be that when people think of the Pomodoro Technique, they think of me. While it was not my idea, it was one of the earlier published descriptions of using the technique. I don’t think this is egotistical or out of left field–it is just the way the mind works. We associate concepts with specific people.

In my own mind, for example, one or more people “own” the following words:

• Windows Azure
• dependency injection
• exploratory testing
• Stoicism
• jQuery

So what should you do about it?

Ask people what they know you for. Does their response mesh with what you think they know you for and what you want them to know you for? This understanding is critical in developing your personal narrative. You are the stories you can convincingly tell. Who would not want to be first in the mind for something they care about? Who wants to be first in the mind for something that they don’t like or identify with?

Do you associate yourself with positive or negative concepts? Being early is risky, because the concept’s associations might change or be run into the ground. But you could be first in the mind if you are early.

Do you read about new concepts and breathe life into existing ones? By writing about things that already exist, you reach people that have not heard of them.

Generally it’s hard to disassociate yourself with concepts, even if they are value neutral. Robby Slaughter writes about this and more in the excellent (and quite relevant) The Tyranny of the Niche:

The worst part about switching your major in junior year is not the administrative paperwork or the additional coursework. Rather, bailing on art history and heading to journalism means you will spend the next few years of your life reminding every acquaintance and distant family member that you no longer plan to work in museums. Your assertions will grow more firm and flustered as you repeat them to the same people. Our tidy stereotypes cannot weather the complex nuances of individual choice. Change is hard; getting others to actually remember that you’ve changed is often more work than the initial reinvention.

What words or phrases or terms do you own? The rewards of being first in the mind are disproportionately large. There’s only so many slots one typically lumps a person into. Consider what concepts you mention in passing that people might begin associating you with. What do you need to drop to be first in the thing you care most about? Consciously manage these perceptions. They are real.

This post generally relates to using meta-information, although that is a bit theoretical.

Feedback

Have you seen the principle of owning concepts in life? Am I full of crap?! Post a comment!

Original article: What Does Everyone Know You For?

• where I found something
• how I found it
• who recommended it
• how long ago the information was published
• the context of techniques
• how surprising the information was to me

I contend that this meta-information is actually more valuable than the information itself.

It’s helpful to think about these attributes to get higher signal streams of information. When I find that a particular blog or person has interesting content, I listen much more closely to what they have to say. While I don’t turn critical thinking off, I don’t need to spend as much time considering the source. Links and ideas presented from a trustworthy source tend to be of higher quality. Finding a good source of information makes it much easier to get good information in the future.

Conversely, remembering meta-information allows me to debug and debunk things that I have come in contact with. When I start to disagree with someone whose opinion I previously agreed with, I also think critically about other things that they said or thought. Perhaps there are other views that they held that are also incorrect, and I’m basing my thoughts on this incorrect information. This helps me realize when my mental models need to shift. Everyone has a bias, and I want to make sure that I understand their bias and that is it not harmful to me. If I realize that a much-read software pundit just started selling bug-tracking software, I might start to examine the quality of his articles because of a potential conflict of interest. Similarly, if I understand that the last time I read about something was five years ago and believe my information be out of date, I might preemptively decide to brush up.

Filtering out theories based on recommender is clearly not using the scientific method, but it’s an effective way to get more interesting, useful, and accurate information in a time-efficient manner. Social media proponents purport that search is dead, or at least the type of search commonly thought of today. Tomorrow’s search will be more personalized. I think that this makes sense–crowdsourcing humans are better than computers at the present for separating remarkable things from the merely great and good, and facilitate the spread of useful memes.

Software developers and managers often subscribe to the belief of best practices. After reading Managing the Design Factory by Don Reinertsen, I don’t think best practices exist. To say that something is a best practice and can be applied blindly to any situation ignores the context. Perhaps I’m using a straw man here. But no practice used in the wrong context can be responsibly effective. While I might read that a particular practice was useful for someone, I cannot be considered a responsible practitioner unless I understand their rationale and the constraints of their project and think that the practice will apply to my situation. For example, if I am following various entrepreneurial types and remember a technique for increasing sales, it is crucial to be able to remember who gave the advice because of the differences between bootstrapped and VC-backed startups. Trying to apply advice from one category to the other will likely have deleterious, if not disastrous, effects. At best, the outcome will be positive even though the understanding was flawed–a lucky break. So meta-information is crucial in making effective decisions based on information.

Asking “Why do I think X?” and being able to figure out the answer is invaluable. The answer is possible with meta-information. Thinking about meta-information forms a structure for information to go into for future review and comparison. Forming this structure allows one to navigate through information overload by being able to quickly gather up-to-date information and ensure that this information is reasonably correct. Do they teach this in school? How does one learn this technique?

It’s interesting to talk with people who can trace their mental models. I typically place a higher degree of trust in someone who knows not only what they think, but why they think it, with relevant citations. I can trace their thoughts and compare them to my own structures. Doing this well requires a focus on the context and validity of information.

Writing this post leads me to consider that the best information sources will actively supply context to reduce the overhead for readers. Useful case studies or research papers supply the problem, the specific conditions of the situation, and the attempted solution with metrics to show the effectiveness. The best journalism paints a broad picture and gives not only information, but context. These are the articles that people reference and point others to, because they are timeless. Every forgettable blog or forum post contains mostly the author’s unverifiable and subjective experiences and musings.

The last thought process that I want to discuss I got primarily from Managing the Design Factory: information is valuable for disproving theories. When I come across something that surprises me, I get pretty excited. The surprise could be a new way of linking disparate concepts or just a fact that does not mesh with my worldview. New perspectives could very well be incorrect, but it more likely that the context is different from my normal context, or the approach is different from my normal approach. The reason surprising information excites me is because it means that I am not wasting my time. Information is most valuable when it doesn’t fit cleanly into my current mental models. This is more along the lines of the scientific method. If I only look for confirmation of my own theories, I will never disprove them and will instead become infatuated with them. However, if I actively introspect and search for information that might disprove my own models, I stand to be more correct in the long run.

Original article: How to Use Meta-information Effectively