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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

So, I tried an experiment to improve communications around my house by the use of a very simple and dumb web application to allow folks to post notifications when they make changes to common things, like eating a meal, bringing groceries into the kitchen, starting the dishwasher, taking the trash out, etc. It was aptly named “House logs for dummies!” What did I learn? A lot.

First of all, let’s discuss teams versus groups. What’s the difference? A team has shared responsibilities and shared outcomes across all members, whereas a group has independent responsibilities and outcomes. Also, both a team and a group must have three or more members. With only two members, a the operating dynamics of a “duet” are quite different. Additionally, teams and groups have their advantages and disadvantages, a team is not necessarily superior to a group. And, guess what? A family need not operate as a team, operating as a “group,” possibly with one “duet” (the parents) suffices.

Groups and teams, of course, have differing communication dynamics. Suffice it to say, the communications of a team need to be more extensive and intensive to satisfy the requirements of a team, that they can succeed when they have a shared fate, and thus they need to communicate enough to effectively perform as one. And that’s where things start to pull apart.

In the business world, there are some times when a team dynamic really is a requirement in order to succeed in some disciplines. No so under default assumptions at home and in family life. In family life, by contrast, the requirements are much more minimalistic for many of the members, for example the children of the parents. And this intuitively make sense. By minimizing the requirements, family structures can maximize the number of people who may qualify to be part of the family, including young children who cannot be expected to perform to higher standards. But it also means that such a family, on its own, cannot be expected to perform to the requirements set by the business world and free market competition. Although some families are capable of acting as strong teams, many cannot.

Although it sounds like I’m about to draw a dismal conclusion of my experiment, hold on, there is actually some magic to this. Even though the members of the group were personally disinclined to act as a team, I have successfully found a way to partially step around that limitation. The oft-repeated adage is that “humans are creatures of habit.” With the right tools and technology, you can work this aspect of human nature to your advantage. If you train the humans involved to build a habit into communicating with a computer, then you can get some of the necessary communication input required to operate as a team. But, this is key. The logic for executing actions based off of that input is all sourced inside the computer itself, rather than resting in the hands of the humans who, otherwise as team members, would directly receive that information and act accordingly. Of course, that being said, this approach has its obvious limits. Namely, any time a course of events deviates from an established habit, the humans, unwilling to adopt the team mindset, will regress back to independent group members, and the computer will not get adequate input to make the smart team-oriented decision.

This is where habits alone cannot succeed: any time there is a deviation from the normal conditions under which a habit worked well. The only true way to perform well in adversity is to have adopted the proper mindset, attitude, or virtue. When the conditions are not exactly identical, what are the core principles by which your habitual actions were performed? How can you adapt your actions to achieve the same core principles even when the environmental conditions to not match those required to apply your habit?

So, the bigger question. How do you go from building habits in other members to building mindsets, attitudes, or virtues? “Buy-in” is the key word. First of all, one thing that is definitely worth reiterating. It is pretty easy for people to build habits. Therefore, to persuade others to build a habit does not require as much buy-in as to build a mindset. Second of all, well this is a much bigger question than I am willing to answer in this blog article, but I’ll give some quick summary hints. You need to build “mutual purpose” and “mutual respect” with the other skeptic members, one important idea is to make them “feel safe.” But the other thing, well what keeps them willing to keep going on the mindset thing? One approach may be to keep reminding them, at the same time preserving mutual purpose and mutual respect.

So… all that being said. One of my ideas of setting up the system was to be able to test out some simple but efficient business operation tools at home. Yeah, that’s really a “think big” mindset, and it’s not something that can be expected out of just anyone. You may know many family members who are content with “thinking small.” The problem with change of mindset, attitude, and virtue is that it all takes a rather large amount of time for humans, but the tech world doesn’t stand still. If you look at the lifestyle of the average American, there are plenty of places with room for improvement.

At the same time, there are plenty of limiting behaviors and attitudes. Kitchen automation? Many people agree that this is something that would be nice to have. However, they don’t have any clear plan for a means to this end. One thing that we know about any automation, in the simplest sense, is that automation works very well when a precise and quantified list of instructions are readily available. So you might say, yeah, recipes are a good place to start kitchen automation, right? Ah, not so fast. Conventional cooking recipes are written for humans to follow through, inserting their human judgment where the instructions are not precise enough. An automated kitchen robot will need a much more precise list of commands, namely the units and measures of time. But, alas, this very simple ask is just too much for your average person to cope with. What, I need to keep track of all timing when I work in the kitchen?! That is an unacceptable nuisance that wastes my time and cramps my style, I’m not going to do that! Yet, this is partially a lie at the same time. It actually doesn’t take too much time out of a typical cooking ritual, it just takes a little bit of… well, attention. Most of the time spent in the kitchen is literally on watching hand movements and waiting.

So, it is the attention required that will quickly get upset. But, this goes even further. What recipes are to be included for trying out your kitchen automation robot? Alas, as it turns out, the main problem is that many people are too disorganized, they can’t even find their own recipes, how are they going to contribute in any meaningful way to a kitchen automation project?

Here’s another useful point to consider. Why do we go to the big box store when it is likely that your next door neighbor may already have what you are looking for? They are too disorganized. Yeah, they can scan barcodes in a grocery store, but the ability to create labels, that is not for dummies to do. They can only remove and destroy labels, and once it is unlabeled, it cannot go back into the commerce system, so it goes to the trash. But then they needed what they just threw out, so they have to buy it again, and that costs more money. They’ve just succeeded in making themselves poorer.

But… the tech industry doesn’t stand still, and it has correspondingly a very little tolerance toward such inefficiency. Companies that have showcased that kind of inefficiency in their practice for years, well new companies came up that didn’t have as much of that inefficiency, and the old inefficient ones were pretty quickly put out of business, simply because their selling prices were considered too high in comparison to the new companies.

The leaky bucket… it is the American consumer norm. But now, we also have an additional problem of “perverse incentive” among some companies: they want to make the bucket leak faster. Humans are creatures of habit, are messy and disorganized people, and when you have this world view of the imperfect human, how are you going to exploit them as much as possible for your own business’s financial gain?

Purportedly inefficiency would not be so much of a problem if one was guided by mathematical reason… but Americans are bad at math compared to the world standard, and they spend no shortage of time listening to “fake news” that is absolutely king at card stacking and presenting unquantified information, “half-truths” that tantamount to lies because their lack of statistical and quantitative disclosure essentially has the same effect on people as telling a lie.

But… even though humans are creatures of habit and slow to change, they do change eventually. It just takes the course of one or more decades before they will change their ways. Sometimes the problem is that people really don’t want to learn new things. In the extreme case of this, it takes the forgetfulness of the younger generation, who despite their true desires, are forced to learn new things out of necessity, and that’s how people who endemically hate learning end up learning new things. But most of the time, 10 to 20 years with the same person submersed in habit building and exposure to thought leaders will do the trick. In all honesty, the extreme case is only slower than the average case by a factor of 4… 80 to 120 years.