Ever since I read this image/meme it has stuck with me:
Its a game the spare neurons (yes I have a few to spare) like to play while life goes on. Instead of elevator music playing in my cerebellum, the vast empty silence is masked with silly word games.
I’ve found them to be quite quite useful at times.
Let me demonstrate with a silly example.
A Silly Example #
There’s a joke that gets told, usually when trying to demonstrate that correlation doesn’t imply causation:
100% of people who drink water die.
Aside from the living people who have drank water and aren’t dead yet (who are probably statistical anomalies or are maybe just “pre-dead”), this is a universally true fact.
My retort is usually:
100% of people who don’t drink water also die. Almost always quicker.
Also a universally true fact. Leaving us with two, universally true, almost useless facts…
…unless you’re bored and want to play a game of “find the bounds”.
Bounding #
If you don’t drink water your lower bound is T+0 (you could, of course die immediately following your questionble decision), and your upper bound is T+4 days (the average is 3, but this is an upper bound so I’m fine shooting higher. Jesus was likely much smaller than a temple).
If you choose to continue on with your dihydrogen monoxide addiction, you also enjoy a lower bound of T+0 (oops, down the wrong pipe!). Your upper bound is literally “the upper bound of a human lifespan” (assuming you’re a human) which is about as generous as an upper bound can be.
In finding our bounds, something has emerged. You are dead either way (drats) but drinking water does seem the better choice.
Which leads us then to question, what are the bounds for people who drink soda? Alcohol? Soylent? Coffee?
Now let’s try this using something I heard at work today.
Something I heard at work today #
We don’t invest enough in the infrastructure that allows us to forge new paths forward.
This was said earnestly and in the context that implied we ought to have built or be building (more of) this infrastructure. Let’s take a moment and acknowledge the speaker. They are probably saying this out of frustration that they can’t forge the new path forward that they would like to, due to the lack of supporting infrastructure. That sucks - let’s be a good person and tell them we understand their frustrations, then sit in the uncomfortable silence so they they know we know the difficulty.
(while we’re doing that, there’ll likely be some neurons you aren’t using. Queue elevator music)
Bounding #
It’s easy to imagine a lower bound here: no investment (do not pass Go, do not collect $200). No paths forged - womp womp. Surprisngly I’d actually argue this bound isn’t a bad place to be on the spectrum. It’s very unambiguous and somewhat final (“there is no investment here - go elsewhere”).
For the upper bound, we could say “infinite investment”, but let’s be more realistic: “every time someone wants to forge a new path, the infrasturcure already exists”.
You could argue the upper bound be further along the spectrum (something along the lines of “more infrastructure than you could ever conceivably need”, but I would argue this isn’t a realistic upper bound.
In finding our bounds, something has emerged. Unless our organization lives at the very tippy tip of the spectrum, our dilemma is doomed to feel underfunded (drats). This may feel bleak and unhelpful, but let me pose an alternative perspective.
Assume you’re guaranteed to underinvest in infrastructure and therefore miss forging some new paths forward.
- What paths might be more or less forgeable today?
- What paths are worth forging, and how much infrastratructure is required?
- What investments in our infrastructure would unlock the most paths?
The point #
By taking a data point, and imagining it on a spectrum with realistic bounds, we’re able to see a “bigger picture”. This reframing helps turn a potentially unhelpful singular point into an array of choices and tradeoffs. You’re no longer trying to push or nudge the point this way or that, you’re creatively imaginging the places the point could be and how it might get there.
…or at the very least, your neurons have something fun to do.