OVER DEZE AFLEVERING
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Show notes00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Digital tools which were supposed to give us a creative canvas that was more flexible, that was easier to use, actually constrained us quite a bit because as you said, I almost had to decide what’s going to be the final format. What is the output going to look like before I actually know what the output is going to look like, and I have to make this decision upstream of working on something.
00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.
I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. My guest and Laura Le Comf. Hey Adam.
We’re here entering the holidays, and I’m curious to know what you both are planning to do with your holiday break.
It’s a little different this year around. For me, the winter solstice, which I think in 2020 is on the December 21st, it can be a different day. But that’s one of my personal favorites to celebrate both because it’s not connected to any particular culture, but also because living now as I do in Northern Europe, where it gets very dark and cold, it’s a nice thing to celebrate when the days are getting longer. And Laura, what do you do in the holidays?
00:01:19 - Speaker 1: I usually have a very big dinner. I’m half French, half Algerian, and I guess in Algerian culture, the biggest the number of people around the table, the better the dinner. But obviously this year is going to be a little bit different, so it’s going to be small, probably just with my parents. The one thing that’s not going to change is that we’re going to have a mix of like French, European traditional Christmas food like turkey and stuff like that, and Algerian food as well, like couscous and meshwe and other little Algerian cakes and things like this. So yeah, just eating a lot with my family.
00:01:58 - Speaker 2: Well, that description made me hungry. And maybe you could tell us a little about your background and about Nes Labs.
00:02:05 - Speaker 1: Sure. I started my career working at Google first in London and then in San Francisco, and my last role there, I was working on the digital health team, where I was looking after the marketing and partnerships for products that were helping people being healthier, more productive, around self-care, fitness, all of. These kinds of verticals, and I left about 3 years ago. I’ve had a few stints trying to start different startups that didn’t work out for lots of different reasons, and I’m currently working on NetS Labs, which is a website with a blog and a newsletter and a private community that is for knowledge workers to be more Creative and productive while taking care of their mental health.
And most of the content on the website is based on what I’ve been learning in the past two years when I basically decided to go back to university to study neuroscience in 2018, and I’ve been writing about everything I was learning and trying to apply it to creativity and productivity on my blog.
00:03:11 - Speaker 2: I feel like many of my favorite, you know, YouTubers or podcasters or whatever who are talking about, you know, it’s called productivity generally, but maybe it’s about building healthy habits and how to be focused and that sort of thing are people who are in some kind of higher education and knows something about that environment or working to get a master thesis or a PhD or whatever that has you more reflective maybe about sort of the meta element of how do I do this better.
00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I call it mindful productivity because both at Google while I was working on startups and as a student, I actually experienced burnout a few times and I think there’s so much productivity advice out there that is really about getting stuff done. There’s very little that is about just asking yourself, should I really be doing this thing? Am I the right person to do it? Is there someone else who would actually be better to do this thing? And also just kind of checking in and asking yourself, how am I doing right now? How’s my mental health. So this is kind of what I write about as well because I think these are the basic questions you need to ask yourself if you want to do good work and find it enjoyable.
00:04:20 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting general dynamic here where Adam, you mentioned, when people are at a university, it seems like there might be more fruitful information about how to do something. I think there’s a general pattern where, OK, you’re a beginner, then you’re actively learning to become an expert, then you’re an expert, and then you’re teaching new beginners.
I think steps 2 and 4 are the most fruitful, because in the case of step 2, you’ve just discovered it yourself and it’s kind of fresh in your mind. It’s not so systematized, you kind of don’t even know how. You know all the stuff. And when you’re actively teaching beginners, you have to kind of relive that process of, OK, what are the steps that you need to take to go from being a beginner to being an expert.
This is something we’ve mentioned on the podcast before in the context of teaching hospitals, where often the best medicine and the most advanced techniques come out of these university teaching hospitals, and you think, wait, aren’t there’s just a bunch of like, our doctors here, you know, just learning stuff. Well, in fact, because people are actively learning and actively teaching, that’s where we often see the best results.
00:05:10 - Speaker 1: It’s super interesting what you’re saying because it reminds me of the Dune Kruger effect and if I’m thinking about this curve that you’re describing, for me, if you consider yourself an expert in any topic, there’s something static fixed about it.
I’m an expert. I have authority on this topic, whereas the steps 2 and 4 that you describe are the The moments where you realize the extent of everything you don’t know, either because you’re still in the learning phase yourself and you’re like, whoa, I actually know very little about this topic.
And then when you start teaching, you realize thanks to the questions you get from students that maybe you’re one of the more knowledgeable people about the topic, but you’re certainly not an expert if there’s such a thing as an expert. So I find that really interesting.
00:06:01 - Speaker 2: I think I personally find learning from someone who has sort of just learned something a lot more effective because they, as Mark says, have what it’s like to have the beginner mindset. They still remember that, that’s still in their mind, but they have the knowledge now. They’ve crossed that threshold of enlightenment, whatever you want to call that, and so they can maybe help you come there better than a like a seasoned expert who’s been doing it so long they don’t even think about it. They take it for granted.
00:06:27 - Speaker 1: That’s definitely an issue with some university professors who have been teaching a topic for so long that they seem kind of disconnected from the reality of learning the topic as a beginner, and I’ve had that several times. I think probably both of you, everyone has had that kind of brilliant, super smart teacher, very knowledgeable, who are pretty bad at actual teaching.
00:06:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, being an expert and being able to teach are two completely different things. You sort of need both of them to convey a skill or a knowledge area well.
Yeah, I think for myself, the kind of, I don’t know what you want to call productivity, self awareness, or tuning my mental machine and processes, I actually drew a lot of that from being in the startup world and in particular when I had management duties, when I had teams and particularly bigger teams depending on me because then my whole job and any The manager’s whole job is to make the team effective and so you are thinking about both the practical things of, OK, what’s the to do list, how do we line this up, how do we match up time and budget, those kinds of things, but there’s also exactly what you just mentioned, which is the mental health, how are people doing? Where are their emotions, what are they excited about, what are they dreading? You know, what are their aspirations, and a good manager is one who also covers that side of things and tries to make the team not just productive but also happy and healthy, at least within the structure of, you know, what makes sense within an organization. And once I’d done that for others or for sort of a team as an aggregate entity, I found myself a lot more aware of my own needs, not only again those practical things of time and to do this, but really that, you know, the emotional. Side and the what motivates me and why do I feel ground down, why do I feel burned out on this particular thing wait I thought this project was something I was supposed to be excited about. Why do I not feel motivated and trying to maybe prior to going through the managerial kind of path, I would be more likely to just kind of ignore it and push on through. And now I feel like, no, no, I want to dig in and understand my own psyche a little bit so that I, you know, in the end can be more productive, but also just be happier and have a nicer life.
00:08:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it boils down a lot to getting rid of some of the shame that we have sometimes when it comes to managing projects and being productive and work in general.
You mentioned working on something and not feeling motivated anymore, and I think a lot of the shame we have internalized because of the way we’ve been educated in traditional school is to Feel bad as a person, think that it’s you doing something wrong, if your motivation is gone, if you’re not feeling excited about a project anymore, when really there’s nothing bad or negative about it. It’s just a piece of information about how you’re feeling right now that can be very helpful to almost debug the situation. And try and figure out, should you keep on working on this, or maybe should you change the way you’re working on this? Should you get some help from someone else? Should you upskill because this thing is too hard for you and just posing and asking yourself these questions instead of burying the problem because you feel like acknowledging the fact that you’re struggling means that you’re just not competent.
00:09:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you could even dig a little deeper on that and ask why we are so fetishizing about productivity and you know, for myself, I like to make things and I like to get stuff done and I do feel good about that, but you can take it to an extreme where I think we want to make everyday productive even if that’s a holiday or a weekend or something like that. We have some concept of how to spend even time off productively and I think another.
An important journey for myself in recent years has been learning to really do nothing or have unproductive days and think those can be worthwhile too, that productivity is not the only benchmark for worthwhile use of time.
00:10:30 - Speaker 1: Totally, I was talking about it with a friend yesterday, and he was telling me, I know I’m very close to burning out because lately, when I read a book and I’m not taking notes, I feel like I’m not doing it right. And I told him, yeah, I agree. This is bad. This is really bad. You need to take a break.
00:10:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And the podcast and he’s working on a way to make more effective in terms of retaining and that sort of thing. And I was raising this question of, well, sometimes I don’t really care about the retaining the knowledge. I just enjoy the process of reading it, even if it’s a nonfiction book, where in theory, its purpose is to communicate information to me. But sometimes I just want to enjoy it and I don’t necessarily want to, you know, type everything I learned to do an on key flashcard. And that leads you into the whole thing about, well, to what degree do we consume information for fun and sort of enjoyment versus because we want to achieve something, and I think those things are often very tangled up for especially for knowledge worker, creative professional type people where we enjoy reading and learning and consuming information. And sometimes that has a very specific purpose, something in our work or our personal life, and other times it’s just for enjoyment.
00:11:47 - Speaker 1: And especially now that the work and life of knowledge workers has become more and more public, whether on Twitter or other websites, there can be sometimes a bit of an unhealthy competition in terms of how many books have you read this year, how many notes do you have in your note taking system, how many blog posts have you published this year, which I think it’s not necessarily good either for people’s mental health, but even in terms of creativity, as you mentioned, having these days where you do nothing, you just recharge your relax are super important as well.
And unfortunately, lots of people struggle with this because they can’t stay idle. They feel like I need to do something with my time. I’m not producing, I’m not creating, therefore, I’m wasting my time, which is very dangerous as the mindset.
00:12:38 - Speaker 2: The word idle reminds me of a book I read some years back, almost a manifesto called How to Be Idle.
Basically, it’s a whole long book that is both first of all, arguing the case for why this is a worthwhile way to spend time and then has a detailed list of ways to do nothing while seeming to do something, so they have, I don’t know, fishing and taking a walk and smoking, and they talk about many people, you know, being sick as in getting a cold, you know, common cold or being hungover as oh no, now my day is wasted or my couple of days wasted because I just have to stay home in bed and watch TV.
Or whatever, and the author basically describes a mental mind shift of actually be glad for this day where you’re under your normal capacity because you can spend it in a different way.
Maybe you can spend it with people that you care about, or you can spend it doing something that’s different from your normal thing and that can be worthwhile.
That was in many ways a tough book for me to read because I think I do come from that, yeah, productivity is everything, mindset somehow, but I also think it was quite good for me for that reason.
00:13:45 - Speaker 1: It’s funny that you’re mentioning smoking because I quit smoking cigarettes. And at first, the first few days, I was incredibly tired, incredibly tired, and I didn’t know where that came from. And I realized afterwards that all of my breaks during the day were smoke breaks.
00:14:04 - Speaker 2: Smoke breaks work well.
00:14:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I was just going out, having a little cigarette and doing nothing, just like staring in front of me doing nothing, not thinking, and then coming back to my laptop and doing work. And when I cut these out, I was basically working nonstop. So I had to create the habit of just getting up, stretching, doing something else, which to this day still doesn’t feel as natural. I still feel like I’m forcing it, but I know that I need it because if not, at the end of the day, I’m completely dead.
00:14:35 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is an article you wrote on the Nest Labs website that I was quite drawn to, called Thinking in Maps. I’ll link that in the show notes, of course, but maybe you can tell the listeners what that’s about.
00:14:48 - Speaker 1: I’m so glad you picked this article because it’s probably my favorite, or at least one of my favorites that I wrote this year.
And the reason why I wrote it is because every time I was telling people about connecting ideas, using symbols, crafting maps that are looking at different ideas, most people were replying to me and telling me, oh yeah, I know, mind maps. And every time I had to explain that no mind maps were just a tiny subset. Of the way we can think in maps, and I decided to do a little bit more research. It started as an article where I just wanted to review all of the different ways you could think in maps, but by doing research, I realized that Human beings have started thinking in maths way earlier than what I realized, thousands of years ago, and I thought that was fascinating. So the article is basically a review of the history of thinking in maps from the Lasco caves, that’s like 14,000 before Christ, something like this years ago, that’s like a long time ago, up until today. That’s what the article is about.
00:15:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I always love the historical example because those of us who work in digital tools of some kind, which include all of us at various points in our career here, or the three of us at various points in our career, tend to vary, I think box it into exactly how the devices or the tools that we have today work. So going back and looking at these older very different cultural contexts, very different, even writing implements and things like that. But I think the fundamentals of the human mind, because of the pace of evolution and biology, that’s gonna be the same. So you change all the other variables, but the mind is the same, and then that can be very enlightening.
00:16:35 - Speaker 1: This is what’s fascinating about looking at the historical examples as well, is that even thousands of years after these maps were created, even if you don’t speak the language that they were speaking at the time, even if you don’t understand every single symbol that they’re using, you still instinctively. roughly what’s going on, and I find that absolutely fascinating compared to text in front of you in a different language and you don’t read it or speak it, you won’t understand what it is about, but a map with symbols, it kind of just defies culture, defies time. Everyone will still roughly understand what’s going on.
00:17:17 - Speaker 2: And you had some nice examples in there that I was familiar with like Leonardo da Vinci, obviously is pretty famous for the visual thinking stuff he does in his notebooks, more recent, someone like Walt Disney or this fellow Cassor Doris, and I found that quite right, Roman fellow hadn’t seen that one before. Is there one on this list that you think is a good example or you personally found compelling?
00:17:38 - Speaker 1: The most fascinating one for me is the one that is one of the oldest ones that we’ve seen that’s from the Bible where someone It is Cassidorris, I think, actually, who took the stories from the Bible and decided to visually draw the different storylines and create this map of what’s going on in the Bible by connecting the different stories. And again, I don’t need to speak the language. I don’t need to speak Latin or anything. I look at it and I understand that each bubble is for a con. or a story and that they’re connected together with lines.
And this concept of having ideas in bubbles and connecting them together with lines, the fact that I think it was created in like 600 or something, this, this one, that’s such a long time ago, someone drew this, and I can look at it in 2020 and feel like, yeah, I know what’s going on here. It is absolutely fascinating.
00:18:36 - Speaker 2: Mark, what’s your take on thinking and maps?
00:18:39 - Speaker 3: I think it’s very interesting and very important, and I also appreciate the historical angle. I’ve often argued with respect to HCI type topics that there’s a lot of embedded knowledge in very old practices.
These maps that we’re looking at here, these are maps that people created when it was extraordinarily expensive to create a map and or that were preserved over thousands of years where it’s extremely hard to do that, and or where the technique was repeated again and again.
So there’s Something worthwhile are working here, even if we don’t initially understand, there’s definitely something important to know. And I also think it’s useful because we often get some blinders working in digital tools because it’s actually a very limited medium, you know, the screen is very small, it’s low resolution, and so on. And so you can often learn or get ideas for new techniques that become applicable as computers get more advanced if you go back and study these old examples. So definitely worthwhile.
00:19:27 - Speaker 2: One thing that comes to mind for me is I think the word map for I think most English speakers leads you to thinking about, I guess what we call a geographical or a cartographical map, that is to say what you see when you type maps. Google.com into a browser, but one, I think it’s interesting. this is actually we think of it as being a very kind of literal map, I guess, but it’s actually quite abstract.
First of all, you know, it’s sort of a projection, right? Taking the surface of the globe and the terrain and all that kind of stuff and flattening it down onto this like two dimensional thing. But secondly, putting aside, I don’t know, satellite photos or going up in a plane, we don’t see the world this way, but it seems to be quite natural for many or even most people to look at this kind of bird’s eye overhead map. It’s actually a pretty abstraction of how things are laid out and then be able to use that to navigate a complex place which is really. Quite interesting to me.
00:20:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s funny if you look at old maps, they tend to basically just be of coastlines and rivers, cause that was essentially the only way you could get around was on water. It was extraordinarily difficult to travel any distance over land, so you basically had to use the water. So the maps are just basically all these exploded coastlines and rivers, and they don’t look anything like our normal maps, but you have very high detail on all the ports and harbors, which is what you actually care about.
00:20:42 - Speaker 1: And if you go back in time, even further, the oldest maps were not even trying to capture anything real when it comes to geography.
They were being used as a message to position a particular culture in the world.
So if you look at one of the oldest maps ever found that it’s in good condition that was created by the Babylonians. It’s a circle that looks like a sun, and Babylon is here in the middle. And then everything else is in the shadows. What’s really interesting here is that we know from historical evidence that the Babylonians were very, very aware of the. Existence of other cultures outside of their own. So it was a deliberate choice to not include them and to position Babylon as the center of the world. And to your point, Adam, of how all maps are an abstraction. I think what’s dangerous is when we forget that. And nowadays because they feel like most geographical maps feel like they’re closer to reality. They feel more real, they feel more true when really they aren’t more true or more real than the map that the Babylonians create. at the time just gives us that impression because, as you were saying, maybe the coastlines are a little bit more detailed, maybe whatever, maybe it just looks more real, but it isn’t. All maps are just a collection of symbols and all maps are taking a subjective position as to what the world looks like.
00:22:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the map is not the territory issue, and I think it’s a great point because it’s one that we’re especially susceptible to these days. We do so much work in symbols and abstractions, and we write term papers and emails and we feel like we’re masters of this domain of information and it’s very easy to forget that that’s not in fact reality.
00:22:41 - Speaker 2: Another historical example that I like a lot that also connects to a pseudo geographical map is Alexander von Humboldt, who’s this great, to my mind, great thinker, sort of really changed the scientific world with his, he essentially invented the concept of nature or ecology as we would think about it today.
There’s a great book called The Invention of Nature that documents his life, but he has this famous again map, sort of an elevation profile. It’s called the Jimborazzo map.
And it’s essentially like a side view cut out of a mountain that shows the different creatures, the different flora and fauna that live at different elevations. And again, this is one of these things where nowadays kind of an elevation map that shows you this kind of information seems, if not obvious, then not too surprising to the kind of ways we’re used to visualizing information, but it was pretty breakthrough at the time. And it was part of what allowed him to first, I think have the insight and then convey that to others, which was, he was comparing the flora and fauna at different elevations on some mountains in South America to some in Europe in the Alps and saw that even though the creatures are different, there’s essentially what we would today call ecological niches, which is not an idea that People just assumed, yeah, you go to a different place, there’s different animals and different creatures, who knows why, that’s just the way the world was made versus seeing this concept of again an ecosystem and ecology and there’s niches within that and different creatures and different plants that fill different needs within an ecosystem and it was largely this now pretty famous sort of side view of a mountain that again helped convey that idea to the world.
00:24:19 - Speaker 1: It’s so interesting. There are two parts to the work he did. The first one is connecting ideas that were seemingly unconnected. So by drawing these different maps, he noticed these different ecosystems. And then the second part you mentioned, which is also fascinating and has been The use case for maps for a very, very long is just as a communication device because it’s visual, especially when a map is really well made and using the right symbols, it can help people understand a concept much quicker than if you were to write a really long book, for example.
00:24:55 - Speaker 2: So that kind of geographical or semi geographical maps. Can you give us some examples of other types of maps?
00:25:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we can also have maps that are focused on connecting abstract ideas rather than real world landmarks. So mind maps, as I mentioned at the beginning, is the one that I think most people are familiar with because the person Tony Buzan who invented them is also an incredible marketer and businessman. And so he did a really great job at promoting his mind maps, but you also have concept maps, radial maps, it’s all sorts of different maps.
The one thing that I think all of these more abstract maps, which goal is to connect ideas have in common is again, this idea of using lines or arrows. To connect different nodes, and the main difference between these different maps is what kind of arrows and what kind of nodes. So are the arrows bidirectional or not? Are the nodes overlapping? Can you include several nodes like Russian dolls in the same one, or are you just mapping them out on the canvas without any of them overlapping? And depending on the choices you’re making here, you’ll get different types of mental maps.
00:26:19 - Speaker 3: Yeah, one really interesting example from your article was the Disney map about how he imagined the business working and it’s amazing.
See, he literally mapped this out, you know, back before it was ever built, and it’s basically exactly right, like how it all end up feeding back on each other, you know, how the merchandise supports the film, supports the music, supports the theme parks and so on.
This one’s also kind of near and dear to my heart because it’s this topic of, you call it an institution, it’s a kind of a complex web of people and properties that all reinforce each other, like another example this would be a university, we aspire for Ink & Switch and it’s surrounding entities to be this, so it’s an interesting example.
00:26:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s the concept of the flywheel, right? If you manage to have a part of that map that works well, it’s going to feed into the other nodes and if you do your job well. It should just be this virtual cycle where it just keeps on working, and I feel really bad for the creator of this map because it’s not Walt Disney, it’s one of his executives, but no one knows the name of this person and everyone thinks that Walt Disney made the map. So just a thought for the anonymous maker of the Disney map.
00:27:31 - Speaker 2: Thinking of process diagrams or things flowing from one step to the next in the medical field, you have the Krebs cycle, sort of like the way that basically these acids and proteins flow through the body. And I remember my colleague Orion kind of using this as a metaphor when he was doing distributed systems engineering where you have messages being passed around the system and interpreted by different components in the system, and at some point you get really confused trying to hold out of that in your head and you naturally lean to drawing kind of a process diagram, which reminds me a bit of this Disney executive’s map.
00:28:08 - Speaker 1: This is such an important use case, the fact that there are processes that are way too complex to hold in your mind and to really understand in their entirety and maps can really help with that. Just having a canvas where you can lay them out, that allows you to see. how the system works, but also to identify any gaps, any places where really there should be an arrow here, but there’s not, or there are too many arrows going in the right direction and none of them going in the other one. So that’s definitely a use case that’s very helpful.
00:28:46 - Speaker 2: How do you think about the interaction between maps or maybe visual thinking more broadly and symbolic representation. So obviously there’s prose, text, you know, I’ll sit down and journal out paragraphs of text, but also most of these diagrams have text labels in them. They do have symbolic representations, even though there’s these maps or sort of visual thinking layouts. Do they go hand in hand? Are they for people who have maybe different kinds of minds, maybe some people do better with symbolic representation, some do better with more visual?
00:29:20 - Speaker 1: I think you absolutely need symbols for maps, and it really depends on who your audience is, but the only mistake really you can make with symbols is using symbols that you’re the only person to understand. And I see some people doing this, just assuming that the symbols that they’re using, everyone understands.
One that’s really fun, I told you I did a workshop about visual thinking. Sketch noting and an example that came up in the conversation was the floppy disk, how some people were still using this as a symbol for saving something, and how if you show this to a kid who’s like 15 or 14 years old today, they’ll look at it and they may know because they’ve seen it on computers, that it means saving, but they have completely lost the connection with the physical object that was.
The basis for this symbol.
So symbols can be extremely helpful, and I think they’re even necessary for maps to make them easier to read and to make them more useful. However, and it’s the case with any powerful tool, it’s really good to always ask yourself, Should I use this one? Is it the right one? Do I really need it? Just being a bit mindful of how we use symbols is quite important when creating maps.
00:30:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, symbols are very information dense and general purpose, so they think they’re good for labeling the entities and also for labeling the properties of the connections, and the map aspect is, what is the relationship among the entities. So I think they’re very complimentary in that way.
00:30:50 - Speaker 2: Right, so whether you’re talking about a geographical map and you label, here’s the name of this mountain or here’s the name of this lake, you’re naming it or you’re saying what it is, but you’re not showing its relationship similarly with a lot of these diagrams.
00:31:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, you wouldn’t write the mountain is 100 kilometers north and 20 east of the town. You would just put it there on the map.
00:31:09 - Speaker 2: Well, that question in particular, I think is of interest to the Muse team when we’re designing our product because I think most digital tools, they’re very visual and spatial or they’re text oriented, right, you know, text editors or writing tools or processors, whatever, you can kind of put some images in, but it’s very hard to do, you know, it’s just basically flows top to bottom. You usually try to pick one or the other, and definitely it was a major evolution of our product and we added essentially these little text cards, which is sort of a simple thing. But being able to put in a few sentences of text and then draw an arrow from that to something else, which could be something visual or some more text.
And so I think that the mix of them together, different people will use them for different kinds of scenarios and some people maybe tend more towards one and more towards the other, but in the end, I do think mixing them, which I think is a weak point of a lot of technology, but as a potential strength of just pen and paper, is definitely something we can get better out on the digital side, I think.
00:32:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say about pen and paper. It’s really interesting that we have been using this tool for so long and for the longest time, if you compare the amount of time we’ve been using digital tools compared to pen and paper, we’ve been using pen and paper for much longer.
But for a very long time, digital tools which were supposed to make our life easier, to give us a creative comeback. That was more flexible, that was easier to use, actually constrained us quite a bit because as you said, I almost had to decide before creating something, what’s going to be the final format? What’s going, what is the output going to look like before I actually know what the output is going to look like? And I have to make this decision upstream of working on something, which is quite unnatural. And not really helpful when it comes to creativity.
So I think any solution that gives us back this freedom of deciding as we go in the creative process, what kind of format we want to use? Do I want to use symbols? Do I want to use images? Do I want to use text here? Do I want to doodle? Do I want to do all of these different things, is something that is much, much needed.
00:33:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is super important, and we’ve mentioned on the podcast often that the human thought is inherently multimedia.
That’s the way people want to and do think, and it’s important for tools to support that. And again, it’s important to understand the historical context of why tools historically might not have.
So for example, with books, until quite recently, it was extraordinarily expensive to add pictures to your books. You had to get an engraver to carve a plate, each one was individually numbered. You know, it’s much harder to press these out and so. And then eventually it got to the point where you could add images to books pretty easily, but now we’re just crossing the same threshold with computers where until relatively recently it was hard to add images and especially video all in the same document. We’re just now being able to do more of that. And so we should be mindful that it’s not an inherent property of reality that you have a text document and an image document like many of our existing computing tools in force. It’s a matter of that’s a sort of historical accident and limitation that we’re now moving beyond, hopefully.
00:34:07 - Speaker 1: And hopefully that’s going to get us closer to being able to really map our thoughts, the way they do happen.
I really like this expression you just used how the mind is multimedia because it’s true when you think about something, you kind of follow these different branches of thought, and sometimes you recall an image, sometimes you recall someone’s voice when they told you something during the conversation.
Sometimes you recall a Smell and you connect all of these experiences and thoughts and memories in a nonlinear way.
And I really hope, and I hope, I know it’s going to happen, but I’m excited about a future where I can capture all of the diversity of, let’s call them formats of memories and thoughts that I have in my mind and capture them onto my digital device so I can work with them. Right on.
00:35:01 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good transition to talking about the sort of the technology and tools that do exist that we do think are interesting on that front.
One that comes to mind for me, I think is the web has always been good and especially in the last, I don’t know, 5 to 10 years on this kind of multimedia being able to mix together different formats.
Now, obviously the web is, it’s sort of a publishing format. It’s not a place for raw sketchy thoughts, but when you talk about these, for example, von Humboldt and communicating about something through his diagrams in his published works, I think the web has a lot of potential and we’re seeing some Movement there, particularly when you combine it with the data side of things.
So I think a great one in that world in the JavaScript world is this D3 library that has all these really interesting, unique and often quite attractive kind of data visualizations that you can do and it’s a nice way to explore expressing some concept.
And there’s other kinds of these often more interactive like parametric press.
Now all of these require a lot of knowledge, programming specific technical knowledge, and again, it’s more of a communicate to others at scale rather than kind of a more personal level thing, but that’s one area where I think digital technology is not only Starting to catch up to what we could do with good old pen and paper that actually offers new affordances and new ways to visualize things and communicate things that we actually even go beyond what you can do with analog tools. I’d be curious to hear if either you have particular tools or technologies that you think are promising in this area.
00:36:36 - Speaker 1: It’s not an individual tool for thinking in maps. It’s more of a collective one, but I recently, a few months ago discovered this website called Connected Papers, which you probably heard about because it’s absolutely amazing. It basically shows you by just entering the DOI of a specific research paper, it shows you a visual map of all of the papers that or. Connected to this original one that you entered, and the strength of the connection is correlated with how strongly the two research papers are connected.
So instead of every time you’re reading a paper, going through the references one by one, checking the paper, reading the abstract, being like, OK, that’s not what I’m looking for, going back and Doing this very tedious work in one click you can have this constellation of papers related to this topic that you’re researching. You can navigate them, you can save them, you can click on each node to see the constellation related to that specific one. It’s fantastic, and the reason why I’m so excited about it is that I think it will also help make it more accessible for non-academically trained researchers to just do research for Just the sake of their own curiosity.
00:37:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a good one cause that domain is inherently very networked. The process of science is all about building up this increasingly rich mesh of citations and papers, basically. It also brings to the forefront the issue of projection. This meshes like a zillion dimensions, you can’t actually look at it and forget to pick some subset of it to show and then project it down to 2D and in fact your projection is probably gonna change based on which paper you’re looking at. So the highlights again, the map is not the territory difference.
00:38:24 - Speaker 2: Mark, do you have a favorite technology or product for map-based thinking?
00:38:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I’m always interested in looking at the gravity wells that form, and this is the areas that everyone seems to fall into and converge over time. So one of the more obvious ones is the idea of pinch to zoom on maps. This is so common actually that people are now getting accustomed to it at very early ages. So if you put into YouTube like babies zooming into magazines, you can see these little kids like trying to pinch into physical paper magazines, and of course it doesn’t work, but that’s what they’re used to, it’s a very natural emotion. And we’re seeing that more and more, of course, and uses one example of that.
Another more tools for thought oriented example would be the emergence of cards on a canvas as a standard document type. And everyone’s coming at this from a slightly different angle. So Figma’s coming at it, for example, from the angle of product design. There’s some of the notepad type iOS apps that are coming at it more from the example of you start with a page, you add in and now you can add images. And so on. But everyone started, I think, kind of converging around this idea of you can have a canvas and you can put different types of media as well as perhaps handwriting on it and move things around in a free form way. And I think in the same way that text files and folders or directories have become a sort of standard metaphor for computing in the desktop age, I expect that this becomes a sort of standard content type that more and more apps support in a more consistent way.
One other example that I’ll mention is I always bring up this theme of video games are at the forefront, eventually a lot of consumer and enterprise computing draws from them. And again, the maps on video games are like super advanced. You have imperfect information, so you tend to discover the map as the game or whatever. Go on and also you have a sort of collaborative information sharing where your teammates are also collecting information and conveying it to you, so you’re trying to build up this collective picture of where your team is and where the others are. And you have all these indicators of where other people might be like off to the edges of your screen, and you have this notion of quasi mode or HUD where you can Instead of either you’re looking at the map or you’re looking at the world, you can have them superimposed on each other, so you might have a translucent map, or to be able to hold down a key to bring up the map very quickly and then let it go. These are all advanced ideas that I suspect we’ll eventually see appear in the world of, for example, these cards on a canvas tools.
00:40:29 - Speaker 2: Earlier mention of pinch to zoom.
Mark also reminded me of the iPhone one and what made that such a revelation.
I was actually a bit of a skeptic about it, but I think the thing that really made it work was Google Maps and the pinching.
So the multi-touch screen obviously had all this potential and I think in retrospect, folks talk about basically being an internet connected multi-touch screen, but I really think without Google Maps it would not have had the same impact.
And so there you took a type of map, a type of semi-abstract representation of the world that most people were familiar with, but you put it kind of on this ready device and with this gesture that was so natural somehow, and the two put together to just be this really incredible, incredible device.
00:41:16 - Speaker 3: One other example I’ll mention that I was reminded of by the network of papers example is this class of maps that I would call like relaxation based clustering, and by that I mean you have many, many nodes and you’re in a multidimensional space and you need to figure out how to basically group them together. So I’ve seen this done with Twitter accounts where people pick some valence, it might be political ideology or geographic location or whatever, and then you can Cluster the entities so that they tend to be near people who are similar to them. Of course it’s imperfect cause you’re projecting down to 2D, but you can get a really quick sense of, OK, who are the clusters, who’s in them, which clusters are close, which clusters are far apart. I’ve actually seen this applied to academic papers where you can look at all the clusters of like the economists on Twitter or something, and you see that there’s the cluster for the macro people and a cluster for the micro people, and a cluster for the Austrians or whatever, you know, you see these cool patterns emerge.
00:42:06 - Speaker 1: It’s so interesting. I’ve seen this done where I was included in one of these maps, and they didn’t even seed it with specific portance.
It was just seeded with a starter account. So you had this account in the middle, and then it would branch out and have all of their followers and you could see these different groups and For me, it was really interesting because there was kind of a difference between where I thought I was in the Twitter sphere and where I actually was. And I realized that I still had a lot of my past startup life that was showing in terms of people that were following me and that I was following back.
And way fewer of the academics or the researchers that I feel like I’m engaging way more with today, but in terms of social graph, that shift actually takes way longer than you think. So that was really interesting for me to see those different bubbles, and I think lots of people who saw the map were also kind of surprised to see where they were on that map versus where they thought they were standing.
00:43:14 - Speaker 3: Interesting, yeah.
00:43:15 - Speaker 2: Uh maps to my anecdotal experience of probably a lot more of my Twitterosphere is an artifact or reflects the history of Hiroku, Silicon Valley, Y combinator, a phase of my life that’s 10 years in the past now. You know, I built up these really strong social connections over time and maybe newer things are more nascent, obviously. And so, yeah, when you actually look at the reality there, it can be surprising. I’d love to hear about both of your personal techniques, how maps of any kind appear in your thinking process, and Laura, maybe you can start us off.
00:43:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I use maps a lot. I have paper maps that I use whenever there’s a problem I want to try and solve.
It’s just a really good way to close my laptop and get my head down and just try and think about a specific problem space and I take my, you’re not going to see it because it’s a podcast, but I take all of my colored pens. With me and I just draw and try and connect ideas together.
Sometimes when I’m on my laptop and I want it to be a bit more organized or something I can use in an easier way later, I use a tool called Staple where I also map ideas this way. I really like using it. And another kind of map I’m trying to use more, which I still haven’t found that useful in terms of connecting ideas together, is my knowledge graph in Rome. I feel like at this point it’s more I can be to me. I like. Looking at it and playing with it, but I still haven’t managed to really produce or create anything new by just looking at this graph or playing with it. More creative for me is definitely pen and paper and just playing with cable.
00:45:01 - Speaker 2: Apel actually was one of our influences from you, so this is by the same folks that do Scrivener, which is a writing tool, but I guess I don’t know, there’s lots of maybe more general audience writing tools like Ulysses or Kraft is what I’m using these days that I really like.
But Scrivener is really for not only authors, but I’d say fiction book authors. They have lots and lots of tools that are about organizing chapters and all that kind of thing and so.
I assume you’re not necessarily writing fiction stories, but I know their ideation tool, which is another one of Mark’s kind of cards on a canvas kind of style of things, but it is very much about, yeah, understand, get your characters together, figure out your plot lines, do that all in a kind of a loose way that resembles a little bit like moving post-its around that has a lot of the benefits of digital. It’s an old school tool, but a really good one. Mark, how to maps here or not in your thinking.
00:45:53 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have this philosophy of idea generation that most of your good ideas come from your sleeping mind.
It’s not when you’re actively trying to have a good idea, it’s that you have this background process that’s running.
And you need to feed the background process. And the way that you do that is you sort of work over intellectual materials.
So one thing you can do is read, one thing you can do is annotate, but another important thing is to sort of arrange and organize. So often what I’ll do when I’m working on a new topic is I’ll bring a bunch of stuff into Muse, for example, I’ll bring in some links, some images, some PDFs, maybe some handwritten notes, and that alone is good.
But you can also do the exercise of how do these things relate, what are the connections, what are the different ways to organize? And you’re basically just moving stuff around the screen and putting things next to each other.
And at the end, you basically throw that thing away.
It’s not necessarily to produce a knowledge map per se. It’s more that when I’ve done that process, OK, that’s another way that I’m building familiarity and connections, and then back in my sleeping minds tonight, that’ll be more for my brain to use to come up with new ideas.
00:46:49 - Speaker 1: That’s very similar to the concepts of focused mode and diffused mode of thinking by Barbara Oakley. I don’t know if you’re familiar with her work, but that’s exactly what she’s explaining that there’s the focus mode where we’re trying very actively in a very specific space to solve.
A problem and then this diffuse mode, which is our brain working in the background, whenever you have what we call a shower thought, that’s the diffuse mode of thinking that’s happening where you don’t really feel like you’re trying to solve the problem, but there’s this eureka moment, you find a solution without seemingly even trying.
And I absolutely agree with you that it’s so important to balance the two.
That’s also why sometimes when you’re trying to solve a problem and you can’t find a solution, it’s good to just step away and go and do something else or do something that activates the more diffuse mode of thinking like doodling, organizing, playing visually with different topics and ideas.
Without having the explicit goal of finding a solution, which sounds like what you’re doing when you activate your sleeping brain, as you say, so I really like this.
00:47:58 - Speaker 2: For me, taking a walk is a big one. I want just enough activity and stimulation to keep me occupied, but not so much that the brain’s full capacity is taken.
I will say that I think that kind of, yeah, sleep on it or take a walk or, you know, take a shower kind of thing. I think it’s not just, well, OK, can I solve all my problems by sort of not working on it.
I think that is a second half to the focus time is when you really load that stuff into your head and you give the sleeping mind, as Mark would say, something to work with, but then you balance that with the non-focused time and that’s potentially the one to punch that can work really well.
00:48:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you need both. If you’re focusing for very long and not letting your brain do the job in the background, you’re not going to find a solution, but if you’re giving your brain the space to think about nothing, you don’t have any starting material, you’re not going to get anywhere either. So the focus time is to just try and do your best. To understand the problem as well as possible, and then the diffused time is to let your brain assimilate, connect all of this information and come up with a solution that may not be as obvious as what you would come up with consciously if you’re trying to think in too much of a linear way.
00:49:19 - Speaker 2: Two types of maps that make their appearance in my work. One is timeline, which is maybe similar to a geographic map in that it is at least on one dimension trying to make an abstraction for something in the physical world, in this case, the passage of time.
But I find it surprisingly helpful for, there’s obviously like organizing a project or you’re launching a product and you want to put together a little road map of the pieces that lead up to that, you’re taking a trip and you want to make sure everything’s covered.
But I find it’s a really focusing thing for when I start to lay out what I’m actually gonna do and what the sequencing needs to be, and what comes before what, and in some cases there are specific calendar marks that I want to hit. I actually find that really helps me get clarity about the meaning or the purpose of the project as a whole and what you realize, for example, you can’t fit everything in, so what needs to stay and what needs to go, or what things can be done kind of more in parallel and what things need to be done sequentially. And so it’s a, again, it’s a very simple kind of abstraction against something real, but for some reason it just really brings things into focus for me.
00:50:25 - Speaker 1: It goes back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier in the conversation, how some processes are too complex to just hold into your mind and in your case, having all of that, either on paper or in news on a tablet or wherever you put it is a way to see those places where you’re trying to cram too much in the places where you have a little bit more space that you didn’t see. So it’s a really good way to augment the way you’re visualizing your work and you think about it in general.
00:50:55 - Speaker 2: The other one I’ll name is uh Affinity Maps, the idea where I think normally you do this post-it notes or index cards or something, but you basically kind of You want to make sense of a space. You can do this in a group, can sometimes be interesting, but you can also do this as an individual, just kind of write down every thought you have on a space or a problem or a project, or what have you, and in no particular order, and then once it’s all down on say on posted notes, you kind of stick them and just put them near each other. Maybe this comes back to the same. We use spatial nearness, you might say in the case of the paper clustering you described, or the geographic map of the mountains near the lake, or some of these D3 visualizations, nearness or the Twitter graph, nearness describes a relationship. And so there’s a similar. with the affinity map here is just a set of ideas that seem to belong together somehow from those patterns emerge and we can kind of zoom out a level maybe in turn what seems like a big jumble of things and actually there’s three big themes here that lets us clarify our thinking as a group or as an individual.
00:52:00 - Speaker 1: This sounds great.
00:52:01 - Speaker 3: I wanna try it.
Yeah, Adam, it’s interesting that you mentioned these cause these were two of my go to general purpose tools for engineering management.
The first being make the work cues visible because all production work is essentially a series of cues. That’s the universal abstraction, and it’s very important to make work visible if you’re gonna manage it.
And the other is the sort of affinity maps where a very general purpose exercise you can do is identify all the things, have people put like pluses and things that are important, and then group them together. You can basically apply that for anything, you know, what should we build retrospecting our past work, how are we feeling? It’s very universal, so good ideas there.
00:52:32 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, and Laura, I’d be curious to know if there’s anything that you left out of that article or has since you’ve written, you feel like you would add on to it?
00:52:41 - Speaker 1: There’s something I touched upon a little bit towards the end, but I think I want to explore more in the future. All of the different maps that I talk about at the end of the article are tools for individual thinking or once you’re done crafting them, they’re communication tools to communicate whatever ideas you had or connected together with other people. I think maps can also be amazing tools for fostering collective intelligence, and that’s definitely something I want to explore more in the future.
00:53:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s very interesting. It’s those multiplayer maps as predicted.
00:53:15 - Speaker 2: Augmenting collective intelligence right on brand for us. Well, if any of our listeners out there would like to tell us about how you use maps in your thinking or your communication, or you got other feedback or questions for us, please feel free to reach out at @museapphq on Twitter or through email. Hello at museapp.com. We always really love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. And Laura, thanks for this great article, all the writing you’re doing over at NES, and I hope you have lovely holidays and the end of your year. Thanks for having me. All right, see you both later.
