The Right Tool For The Job
"There's a right way and a wrong way," Keith Sweat once sang, "to love somebody." There's also a right way and a wrong way to solve technical problems --- and the definition of "technical problems" we use here is very broad. For the purposes of this discussion, we will consider two technical problems. The first one is avoiding a cost of nearly a million dollars for a potentially unnecessary computer program. The second one is appointment scheduling for hairdressers. The method we'll use to address both problems is identical.
Warning: there are no cars, racing, music, or sex in this post. Sorry about that.
I believe that pattern recognition is the primary measure of human intelligence. Most of the qualities we ascribe to "smart people", from quick wit to the invention of the theory of relativity, resolve to pattern recognition. We don't truly know how it works; there may be a quantum factor involved, or there may not. The difference between a top human chess player and Deep Blue is that the human only "sees" certain moves, while Deep Blue has to try all possible moves against its list of internal rules and predictive algorithms.
Pattern recognition is, at its heart, an imaginative activity. Brilliant people are expected to think of new ways to use an existing tool or equation. We expect them to generate these new ideas out of thin air, so to speak. The act of creation is typically the imposition of a new idea on an existing one of some sort, even if the existing idea is as basic as "paint sticks to canvas". Without the new idea, you're just an imitator, a biological machine. If you aren't doing anything creative, you're not being human. There's a reason we call some work "soul-destroying". It reduces the amount of time we spend doing human things. It makes our souls smaller.
Raw imagination is a fascinating thing to behold and I see it in my son sometimes when he sits down and tells me stories that he makes up as he goes along. At the age of four, I accept this from him, but pretty soon I'll start expecting that his stories will be internally consistent and that they will be logical as well. Logic is the lens that focuses imagination and creativity. Without it, you're simply babbling nonsense, even if it's interesting nonsense.
I had somebody come to me the other day with an idea to use a certain program on a group of computers that I had working out in the field. This somebody was very excited about the capabilities of the program. I could see that he was using his imagination to think of new ways the program's capabilities could be used. That's what brilliant people do. It's how we got Eric Clapton's tone on "Bluesbreakers" and it's how BMX freestyle started and it's how the Internet came to exist. New uses for existing items.
It fell to me to explain to him that the program that he thought was "free" would actually cost nearly a million dollars a year for us to use. He thought it was free because he briefly scanned the pricing information and, in his haste to get started with the fun new features, he didn't really do the math. So I did the math for him. Then I asked him, "What do you need the program to do?"
His response was to enumerate the features of the million-dollar program. I asked him again, "What do you need?" He said he'd get back to me on that. I rather suspect, based on what I know of his needs, that when we have that conversation, the resulting logical requirements set won't look anything like the list of capabilities his preferred program had. He was working from the perspective of "What cool stuff can we do with this toy?" when he should have been working from the perspective of "What do I need in a program like this?"
With that incident still fresh in my mind, I had a talk with V. McB about a recommendation she'd recently fielded regarding her scheduling for her hair business. You see, when she started working for herself, everybody she knew told her to get a PDA or laptop to schedule, track, and evaluate her customers. Everybody seemed to have at least one great idea about using a computer to schedule appointments. So she came to me to help her pick and set up a computer.
That's the kind of thing I could easily do and I was tempted to just pick out an Android tablet for her, show her how to use it, and consider the matter closed. Instead, I sat down and role-played the scenarios in which she interacts with clients regarding scheduling. It turned out that in many of these situations, she would have trouble operating the phone and a scheduling device, whether that device was a netbook, a PDA, or even a separate app in her smartphone. We considered different devices for the task. Finally, we evaluated the idea of a dedicated notebook with an attached pen. That turned out to work the best, and it's worked for her since last year. The best "computer" for the job was a pad of paper. She can operate it in her car, with nitrile gloves on, while handling chemicals, in the evening, when she's traveling, in the airport and in areas with no 4G data service.
By starting with the requirements and working forward to the appropriate tool, instead of starting with the most interesting tool and modifying the requirements and tasks to fit, we settled on a pen-and-paper method. But yesterday, while I was on a plane to San Francisco, she ran into someone who just insisted that she consider using the newest Android tablet. So it looks like we're going to go through all the requirements and capabilities yet again. I have a feeling we'll end up with the pen and paper again, but it's possible that I'm wrong.
Brilliant people love finding reasons to use "toys". Effective people match solutions to problems, not the other way around. Those rare few who are both brilliant and effective come up with better solutions for problems. When I was younger I used to say, with no small dose of self-satisfaction, that it was possible to teach the naturally brilliant to be effective, but that it was impossible to make the quotidian type brilliant. I still believe the latter, but I'm no longer so sure about the former!