WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.889
it is critical for people who design anything to understand the capabilities and constraints of the systems that they're designing for.
00:00:09.208 --> 00:00:17.018
And for me, it hasn't even been a question about whether designers of software need to learn to code.
00:00:17.518 --> 00:00:20.138
I consider it essential.
00:00:20.278 --> 00:00:23.109
Like, it's, like, it's, it's not even a question.
00:00:38.234 --> 00:00:38.654
Hey, Jorge
00:00:40.380 --> 00:00:41.109
It's good to see you
00:00:42.031 --> 00:00:43.642
Yeah, it's, it's always a pleasure.
00:00:43.762 --> 00:00:46.171
I'm glad we get to continue this conversation
00:00:46.822 --> 00:00:53.192
Well, I'm hoping that we will talk about heady subjects.
00:00:53.192 --> 00:01:02.231
I-- We've had a couple of episodes where we've gotten into, like, capitalism and stuff, and I'm like, “Oh my gosh.” So I brought what I hope to be kinda lighter reading today.
00:01:02.421 --> 00:01:03.051
Oh, awesome.
00:01:03.192 --> 00:01:03.551
All right
00:01:03.841 --> 00:01:08.111
But it's actually, I'm gonna say it's lighter reading, but I think it's an important subject.
00:01:09.621 --> 00:01:18.721
Without telling you what this is, I'm gonna say that this is a bit of text that is very important to me.
00:01:19.227 --> 00:01:19.347
Hmm
00:01:19.611 --> 00:01:33.611
It is from one of the books that has most influenced my career, one that I read as a kid, and which I haven't revisited in many years, but the ideas in the book stayed with me.
00:01:33.611 --> 00:01:36.412
And this is one of the ones that I keep bringing up in conversation.
00:01:36.412 --> 00:01:39.992
I thought, “I'll bring it to the, the conversations with Harry.”
00:01:40.569 --> 00:01:41.290
I can't wait
00:01:42.022 --> 00:01:50.453
All right Games must be designed, computers must be programmed.
00:01:51.103 --> 00:01:57.414
Both skills are rare and difficult to acquire, and their combination in one person is even more rare.
00:01:58.174 --> 00:02:06.614
For this reason, many people have attempted to form design teams consisting of a non-technical game designer and a non-artistic programmer.
00:02:07.634 --> 00:02:14.813
This system would work if either programming or game design were a straightforward process requiring little in the way of judicious trade-offs.
00:02:15.633 --> 00:02:22.794
The fact of the matter is that both programming and game design are desperately difficult activities demanding many painful choices.
00:02:23.734 --> 00:02:29.433
Teaming the two experts together is rather like handcuffing pole vaulter to a high jumper.
00:02:29.883 --> 00:02:34.933
The resulting disastrous performance is the inevitable result of their conflicting styles.
00:02:36.104 --> 00:02:49.764
More specifically, the designer-programmer team is bound to fail because the designer will ignorantly make unrealistic demands on the programmer while failing to recognize golden opportunities arising during the programming.
00:02:51.054 --> 00:03:02.623
For example, when I designed the game Energy Czar, an energy economic simulation game, I did not include an obviously desirable provision for recording the history of the player's actions.
00:03:03.443 --> 00:03:09.463
During the final stages of the game's development, virtually everyone associated with the project suggested such a feature.
00:03:10.454 --> 00:03:15.183
From technical experience, I knew that this feature would require an excessive amount of memory.
00:03:15.973 --> 00:03:24.493
A non-technical designer would have insisted upon the feature only to face the disaster of a program too big to fit into its allowed memory size.
00:03:25.533 --> 00:03:29.324
Another example comes from Eastern Front 1941.
00:03:30.403 --> 00:03:38.913
While writing the code for the calendar computations, I realized that a simple insertion would allow me to change color register values every month.
00:03:39.734 --> 00:03:43.843
I took advantage of this opportunity to change the color of the trees every month.
00:03:44.443 --> 00:03:52.723
The improvement in the game is small, but it cost me only twenty-four bytes to install, so it proved to be a cost-effective improvement.
00:03:53.324 --> 00:03:56.623
A non-technical game designer would never have noticed the opportunity.
00:03:57.193 --> 00:03:59.674
Neither would a non-artistic programmer.
00:04:00.698 --> 00:04:03.237
I am 100% certain I've not read this
00:04:03.667 --> 00:04:05.537
I would be very surprised if you had.
00:04:05.546 --> 00:04:15.086
It's, first of all, it may be clear from the references to, memory limitations, and he even said, like, 24 bytes, right?
00:04:15.556 --> 00:04:22.747
It may be clear that we're talking about personal computing, uh, in, like, very early on in the history of personal computing, right?
00:04:23.526 --> 00:04:35.177
So this is a book called The Art of Computer Game Design by, I, by Chris Crawford.
00:04:35.562 --> 00:04:36.062
That's right
00:04:36.247 --> 00:05:01.706
People who are listening to the podcast might not see this, but I'm holding up for Harry to see a copy of the book, which is inside a Ziploc bag, an ancient Ziploc bag, because this is my original copy, which I acquired shortly after this book came out.
00:05:02.997 --> 00:05:09.956
This book was published in, I believe it's 1984.
00:05:10.576 --> 00:05:15.487
Yeah, so the copyright is 1984, so the pages are yellowing.
00:05:15.627 --> 00:05:20.507
It's not, it's, you know, it's the kind of paper that degrades, and I wanna protect it.
00:05:20.646 --> 00:05:27.807
It's very precious to me, if for no other reason because it's inscribed to me by Chris Crawford.
00:05:28.146 --> 00:05:48.377
Uh, I had the great privilege of inviting him to speak at a conference where I was the program chair, and I told him, “This book changed my career, and I would love for you to inscribe it,” and he wrote,“Jorge, look where this got you.” Which is awesome, right?
00:05:48.786 --> 00:05:54.076
Uh, but anyway, th-this book changed the course of my career.
00:05:54.117 --> 00:05:57.651
It, um- I'll say this.
00:05:57.651 --> 00:06:11.334
I bought it not understanding what it was, and I read it, and then I reread it, and I must have reread this book maybe a dozen, maybe a couple dozen times.
00:06:11.345 --> 00:06:12.754
It's a short book.
00:06:13.415 --> 00:06:31.884
But it opened up to me a completely different understanding of design, computer programming, and games, something that I was very interested in as a kid.
00:06:31.894 --> 00:06:39.605
All three of those things I was interested in, but I was more interested in games and programming, and this book kind of opened me up to design as well.
00:06:40.130 --> 00:06:47.920
But I'll say I wanted to bring this particular piece here because he's talking about two things that are very important to me.
00:06:48.620 --> 00:07:00.512
One is the power of constraints and the fact that constraints are our friends, and that's something that I learned in architecture school.
00:07:01.793 --> 00:07:20.372
I think that when we start out, I think we naively understand constraints to be problems to solve, when in reality, constraints are opportunities to do things in different ways, in ways that might even be better.
00:07:20.963 --> 00:07:23.273
Um, so that's one thing.
00:07:23.302 --> 00:07:50.093
And the other thing is, what I took him to say here, and this is something that again, was formative for me, was it's very important for you to understand the constraints of the system you're working with if you want to have creative control over those constraints, and you can only get acquainted with the constraints of the system by going hands-on.
00:07:50.892 --> 00:07:51.103
Mm-hmm.
00:07:51.523 --> 00:07:54.012
And he's talking there about craft.
00:07:55.622 --> 00:08:04.843
The relationship between craft and constraints is what I wanted to, to bring to the table here, because I think it's an underappreciated subject when talking about gaining traction
00:08:06.199 --> 00:08:09.649
Uh, I l- I mean, I don't even know where to start.
00:08:09.858 --> 00:08:12.918
I mean, let me just… I have so many different thoughts.
00:08:13.319 --> 00:08:28.079
The first thought I'll just share with you, the one that popped into my head, is that we could have a whole episode on, you know, what is the book that's changed the trajectory of your career, right?
00:08:28.538 --> 00:08:33.458
And I mean, just talking to people that we know, all of us have books like that, right?
00:08:33.458 --> 00:08:50.788
And, and in fact, weirdly, like when I'm interviewing people for some kind of role, often, you know, involved in the hiring process, usually for senior people, one of the questions I ask is-- one standard question is,“What book have you given away or recommended more than any other book?” Right?
00:08:50.788 --> 00:08:53.068
'Cause that really says something about the person.
00:08:53.708 --> 00:09:00.599
And, um, for me, that book is Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, right?
00:09:00.599 --> 00:09:10.719
Which is very deeply related to the Crawford book, but in a more abstract, back to heady, maybe a book that we don't wanna get too much into the content of.
00:09:13.328 --> 00:09:24.899
But, I, I interacted with Chris back in 1987 when I was started writing my first-- my, my very first book, the book I really wanted to write, which was on information architecture.
00:09:25.239 --> 00:09:30.438
And it was just before, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web came out, I think.
00:09:32.979 --> 00:10:00.318
And I was, you know, trying to, you know, take all of my experiences at Virtual Vineyard/wine.com and the design and development of the shopping cart and moving people through information spaces, and I started scanning the literature of people who had written really potent things about wayfinding and game design, and stumbled not intelligent enough to have read his book, but intelligent enough to have found him and reached out and talked to him about stuff.
00:10:00.318 --> 00:10:02.328
So what a neat guy, too.
00:10:03.109 --> 00:10:03.469
Yeah.
00:10:03.793 --> 00:10:04.913
Incredibly thoughtful
00:10:05.458 --> 00:10:12.798
yeah, really, really, just… One, one friend of mine says, “Just an incredible specimen of humanity,” you know?
00:10:13.530 --> 00:10:21.791
Well, and to locate folks who might not have heard of Chris, was one of the original Atari game designers,
00:10:21.828 --> 00:10:21.839
Mm-hmm.
00:10:22.480 --> 00:10:22.831
right?
00:10:22.860 --> 00:10:26.821
And we're talking for the original home computer, so not the 2600 console.
00:10:26.821 --> 00:10:30.201
I think that he was working, exclusively, if I'm not mistaken, with the 8-bit computers, the Atari 400 and 800.
00:10:30.250 --> 00:10:50.331
So, and I'm calling that out because, even though by today's standards those systems look incredibly limited, they were very powerful computers at the time, right?
00:10:50.331 --> 00:11:00.500
So the sort of games that he was talking about here, Energy Czar and Eastern Front 1941, would not have been possible on something like the Atari 2600.
00:11:00.660 --> 00:11:06.280
But even so, like, he had to deal with these constraints.
00:11:06.530 --> 00:11:11.900
And it feels like we should have an episode devoted solely to these kind of career-changing books.
00:11:12.490 --> 00:11:18.691
Finite and Infinite Games is one of mine as well, but to your point, it does feel really abstract.
00:11:19.350 --> 00:11:22.931
The, um… it’s a book, it’s a philosophical book, right?
00:11:22.931 --> 00:11:24.711
It’s a book on how to see the world.
00:11:25.201 --> 00:11:38.568
The reason why The Art of Computer Game Design had such an impact on me that I bought that book Because I wanted to learn how to learn how to make better computer games.
00:11:38.928 --> 00:11:47.158
I heard someone say once that, us, Gen Xers are the first generation that grew up with computers as playthings.
00:11:49.078 --> 00:11:51.091
Mm-hmm.
00:11:51.091 --> 00:11:51.100
Mm-hmm.
00:11:51.178 --> 00:12:00.089
I got involved with computers very early on, and I got involved in computers because I loved video games, and I wanted to make video games.
00:12:00.719 --> 00:12:11.229
And I would go to computer stores and look to see what I could-- what information I could get.
00:12:11.229 --> 00:12:12.389
There was obviously no internet.
00:12:12.629 --> 00:12:15.458
What information I could get to help me make better computer games.
00:12:15.889 --> 00:12:33.058
And this book had, you know, the title of it, “The Art of Computer Game Design”, like it seemed-- I thought like, “Oh my gosh, this is what's gonna teach me how to make better sprites and, you know, my thing is going to be much more attractive and colorful,” because I had this naive understanding of art and design.
00:12:34.188 --> 00:12:54.485
And I started reading this book and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, there's no source code here. It’s only ideas.” And these were ideas that, um, that were about how to approach the craft of of designing computer games.
00:12:54.485 --> 00:13:04.926
And for him, as you heard in that passage, the craft of designing the game was intimately tied to the craft of programming the game.
00:13:04.926 --> 00:13:06.926
He saw them as one and the same, right?
00:13:06.933 --> 00:13:07.104
Mm-hmm.
00:13:07.696 --> 00:13:21.375
A few years ago, I'm sure you remember, one of the incendiary topics among designers was whether designers needed to learn to code.
00:13:22.336 --> 00:13:24.926
I don't think that people talk about that much anymore.
00:13:26.096 --> 00:13:38.066
My position on day one has always been that it is critical for people who design anything to understand the capabilities and constraints of the systems that they're designing for.
00:13:39.385 --> 00:13:47.196
And for me, it hasn't even been a question about whether designers of software need to learn to code.
00:13:47.696 --> 00:13:50.316
I consider it essential.
00:13:50.456 --> 00:13:53.285
Like, it's, like, it's, it's not even a question.
00:13:54.605 --> 00:14:24.666
and it has and that has been informed by this book, and it's one of the reasons why I got so heavily involved with artificial intelligence when it became clear that that was where things were going because, this book implanted in me the idea that if you are to design anything, you have to have intimate knowledge of the material, and you only gain that knowledge by building things
00:14:25.173 --> 00:14:41.212
I'm so curious what your perspective on craft, design, and implementation is in this era of AI, generative AI, and the ability to build things by thinking about them where our constraint is our imagination now
00:14:41.792 --> 00:14:42.601
Yeah, it's tricky.
00:14:42.631 --> 00:14:58.201
My takes on this are informed by the work that, uh… Well, one thread is the work that Jolie Forlizzi and her colleagues in Carnegie Mellon have done.
00:15:02.272 --> 00:15:12.625
They wrote a paper, I'll link in the show notes, where they talk a-a-about AI as a material of design and a tool for design.
00:15:12.625 --> 00:15:32.845
I'm not using the language right, there are, like, several ways in which it can be approached, So one of the curious things about AI, but I think it's also true of other computing technologies, design, and it is a tool of design.
00:15:33.239 --> 00:15:38.859
Having a material is not the same thing as having a tool, and in this case, the same thing can be both.
00:15:39.359 --> 00:15:40.839
So that's, that's a little tricky.
00:15:41.078 --> 00:15:52.764
But the other thing I will say is, if you think of AI as a tool to help create a new system, write software or design software or what have you.
00:15:54.534 --> 00:16:08.225
I see it as a tool as being part of the continuum from working with the kind of bare metal up higher levels of abstraction, right?
00:16:08.225 --> 00:16:13.288
So the first computer programmers had to literally flip switches to turn bits on and off.
00:16:13.339 --> 00:16:15.168
Mm-hmm.
00:16:15.168 --> 00:16:15.219
Mm-hmm.
00:16:15.304 --> 00:16:31.195
Very quickly, people realized that you could layer on abstractions like assembly language and higher-level programming languages like C and interpreted languages.
00:16:31.774 --> 00:16:34.794
And then, you know, there are other abstractions that you layer on top.
00:16:34.825 --> 00:16:45.544
And when I'm working with something like Claude Code, it feels like the latest iteration in that stack of abstractions, where, like, now I'm not even dealing with the source code.
00:16:45.835 --> 00:16:49.625
I'm, you know, I'm interacting with a thing in English, right?
00:16:50.004 --> 00:17:03.995
Uh, and it is taking care of the source code in much the same way that you write source code in Swift or C or something like that, and then use a compiler to turn it into something that's closer to the metal.
00:17:04.518 --> 00:17:12.057
Yeah, I had a bun-- Did you know the, the term Atari is, is actually, the word Atari is a term of art in the game of Go?
00:17:12.615 --> 00:17:15.455
Yeah, that's-- I think that that's why they named the company that, right?
00:17:15.977 --> 00:17:17.217
Yeah, I just learned about that.
00:17:17.267 --> 00:17:26.856
Uh, we have family in town, and one of our-- Craig, who's, uh, you know, in the extended network of family, is an expert.
00:17:26.997 --> 00:17:39.326
Like, like really, like he's like apparently one of the people that was involved in the making of, um, AlphaGo calls him to moderate games in Go or to witness games.
00:17:39.326 --> 00:17:46.696
I don't know exactly how that works, but I thought that was interesting, in bringing us all the way back around to… I-- Have you seen AlphaGo, the movie?
00:17:47.298 --> 00:17:47.979
No, I have not
00:17:48.517 --> 00:17:50.557
Oh, it is totally worth watching.
00:17:50.567 --> 00:17:56.326
Like it-- There's-- Anybody, anybody listening to this should just go watch AlphaGo.
00:17:56.376 --> 00:18:04.977
It is totally amazing, and it came out a long time ago, but it was really about, that development effort and how it landed, and it's totally cool.
00:18:11.557 --> 00:18:45.876
Um, but it reminded me… This discussion reminded me of this concept, whereas English or our language, maybe not just English, but at least for us, English, as it relates to Claude and some of the other AI systems, is, you know, this l-l-- The-- Our, our spoken language has become the interpretive language that we're using to communicate with the computers now, and it reminds me of something my friend Dan French.
00:18:45.886 --> 00:18:46.866
He's a rhetorician.
00:18:46.866 --> 00:18:48.737
He has a PhD in rhetoric, of all things.
00:18:48.737 --> 00:18:49.406
It's crazy.
00:18:49.416 --> 00:18:54.576
He's also a, an award-winning stand-up comedian, based in Austin at this point.
00:18:54.586 --> 00:18:59.836
But he's-- he talks about language being the first prism, you know, where like a prism where you look through it and it breaks up into the different colors.
00:18:59.846 --> 00:19:06.287
And but, you know, I don't have the best hearing, and when he first mentioned it, I thought he said language is the first prison, you know?
00:19:06.777 --> 00:19:42.176
“Wow, I guess both things are true.” Because the abstraction layer or the interpretive layer that we're programming these systems now is the language that is both its constraint and limitation and also an infinite palette of opportunity to communicate what we imagine is possible in these systems today.
00:19:44.184 --> 00:19:46.944
You know, before we go down the path, because I’m worried that
00:19:54.701 --> 00:19:56.171
And not get back to craft.
00:19:56.578 --> 00:20:03.479
Well, craft and also I have in the back of my mind what does this mean for gaining traction?
00:20:03.489 --> 00:20:08.419
Because it might sound like I'm talking exclusively about developing or designing software,
00:20:08.969 --> 00:20:09.388
Mm-hmm.
00:20:09.909 --> 00:20:10.638
And I'm not.
00:20:10.709 --> 00:20:22.219
Because for me, I took the lesson from this book, this particular… And I have that image of these two athletes in different disciplines handcuffed to each other.
00:20:22.229 --> 00:20:23.919
It's such a powerful image in my mind.
00:20:24.838 --> 00:20:35.949
And I think that that applies this notion that you should really get hands-on with whatever field you're acting on.
00:20:37.328 --> 00:20:49.558
It's something that I've taken to heart whatever I'm doing, and I don't remember which CEO it was would do things like rotate through the call center, like receiving support calls.
00:20:50.648 --> 00:20:52.328
I'm a big fan of that kind of thing
00:20:53.058 --> 00:20:53.348
Totally
00:20:53.578 --> 00:21:00.618
where it's like you're, okay, you're going to be making decisions about how this organization is structured.
00:21:00.929 --> 00:21:04.888
Maybe you're going to be making decisions about how the service is going to be provisioned.
00:21:05.368 --> 00:21:14.519
Um, it behooves you to really get close to the ground to understand really what is going on.
00:21:14.519 --> 00:21:15.509
You know who is great at this?
00:21:15.519 --> 00:21:16.239
Walt Disney.
00:21:16.929 --> 00:21:17.098
Mm-hmm.
00:21:17.288 --> 00:21:29.709
When they designed Disneyland, he, they-- After that park was opened, he didn't stay in his office in Burbank and issue commands from there.
00:21:29.729 --> 00:21:31.608
Like, he walked the park, right?
00:21:32.078 --> 00:21:46.378
And he would note where people were queuing, where they were getting hot, where people were dumping, I don't know, I'm making stuff up, but like popcorn boxes or what have you, right?
00:21:47.278 --> 00:21:59.848
And he would direct the shape of the environment through what he was observing on the ground and, you know, and was very close to the construction of that thing.
00:22:01.659 --> 00:22:20.298
And I think that the quality of our decisions is different if we're acting at a very abstract or removed place from where the decisions are enacted.
00:22:21.419 --> 00:22:25.489
Uh, I think it's very important to be very close to the action.
00:22:25.909 --> 00:22:32.318
That doesn't mean don't delegate and do all the stuff yourself because you obviously cannot do that.
00:22:33.028 --> 00:22:41.138
I think you should be very careful to not detach yourself from the reality on the ground.
00:22:42.068 --> 00:22:44.888
That's the lesson that I took from this chapter of that book.
00:22:45.020 --> 00:22:47.201
And, and it's 100% spot on, right?
00:22:47.230 --> 00:22:56.830
I mean, the reason that I'm a player coach as an executive coach, and I really work in product design, development, IT, you know, security.
00:22:56.961 --> 00:23:02.570
I work in all these areas, not in finance typically, not in marketing and sales, right?
00:23:03.381 --> 00:23:19.080
And by player, it is to actually get hands-on and to be involved in the conversations, the decisions, the activities, the commitments, and dealing with the implications of all of that.
00:23:19.520 --> 00:23:26.500
Because going in and standing outside of it, arms folded and telling people what to do doesn't work well.
00:23:26.871 --> 00:23:33.980
It, it certainly-- At best, it works slowly, and at worst, it makes a m- a m- it mucks things up, right?
00:23:34.010 --> 00:23:46.421
And the way to be good is to really be hands-on, but not necessarily be so hands-on that you're trying to do everything all at once all the time Yeah, that's the delegation thing.
00:23:46.421 --> 00:23:58.891
And it's something, frankly, if, if I were to call out like the dark side of this, I think that I've had trouble in my career delegating stuff because I have this attachment to understanding.
00:23:58.891 --> 00:24:04.550
I, frankly, I also get joy out of, like, learning new things And, and doing things.
00:24:04.621 --> 00:24:09.901
Um, but it is a potential risk, right?
00:24:09.941 --> 00:24:22.750
That, uh, to your point, you want to have that hands-on understanding about the areas that you're going to be deciding on, but you also don't want to take on the work yourself.
00:24:22.750 --> 00:24:29.290
And I'm wondering, again, with the spirit of slapping snow chains on it, you are a player-coach.
00:24:29.340 --> 00:24:34.971
Do you have any suggestions for me on how one might strike that balance?
00:24:34.980 --> 00:24:36.520
How I might strike that balance?
00:24:37.181 --> 00:24:41.361
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lean on a saying that I picked up along the way.
00:24:41.520 --> 00:24:50.951
Rather than trying to talk about delegation, there are lots of different ways of, you know, Michael Hyatt, and there are lots of people who have good models for delegation.
00:24:50.951 --> 00:25:02.820
But the saying that I learned was, “Being clear is kind. Being unclear is unkind.” And the job of the leader is to be clear.
00:25:03.701 --> 00:25:07.790
And there are tools for being more clear versus less clear.
00:25:08.270 --> 00:25:12.510
Precision questioning and answering from Dennis Matthies’ work.
00:25:13.070 --> 00:25:19.701
The desired outcome model, which is documented in my book from the field of neuro-linguistic programming.
00:25:20.230 --> 00:25:26.121
The work that Scott Selhorst is doing on problem definition and problem framing.
00:25:26.631 --> 00:25:40.111
There are ways of increasing the fidelity of what you're communicating to be more clear with people and more on the nose, as they say in the movie industry, and less vague or ambiguous or, you know, hand-wavy.
00:25:50.618 --> 00:25:52.098
Being clear is kind.
00:25:52.598 --> 00:25:53.939
Being unclear is unkind
00:25:55.134 --> 00:26:04.565
And now that you've brought up communication, I'll say one of the tricky things about this is that you don't want to-- When you communicate with your team members, you don't want to step on their toes, right?
00:26:04.565 --> 00:26:17.704
Like, uh, one of the risks of understanding of the craft is that you can end up, like, over-managing or micromanaging.
00:26:18.285 --> 00:26:20.744
Um, you don't want to do that.
00:26:21.434 --> 00:26:30.454
But also, if you do understand the minutiae of the systems that you're talking about, you can talk much more credibly with your team members
00:26:30.997 --> 00:26:31.376
That's right
00:26:31.775 --> 00:26:36.515
They'll realize that you're not, you know, you're, you're saying the things that you're saying because you understand the system.
00:26:36.924 --> 00:26:39.454
So, uh, that's something to aspire to.
00:26:40.345 --> 00:26:42.615
Anyway, I was very excited to bring this to you.
00:26:42.615 --> 00:26:44.255
It's a special book for me
00:26:45.164 --> 00:26:45.454
I love it.
00:26:45.484 --> 00:26:48.555
I'm actually gonna go dig up-- I'm, I'm sure they're still available new.
00:26:48.595 --> 00:26:52.234
I'm probably gonna go get myself a copy just to have it on my shelf to take a look at
00:26:52.957 --> 00:26:55.186
Yeah, if, uh, do get it as in physical format.
00:26:55.227 --> 00:27:00.346
I bought it as a Kindle e-book a few years ago, but the formatting is not very good on Kindle.
00:27:00.843 --> 00:27:01.093
Okay
00:27:01.497 --> 00:27:05.287
So if you find it as a physical book, snatch it up.
00:27:05.336 --> 00:27:06.176
It's really great.
00:27:06.176 --> 00:27:09.906
I mean, the references have aged obviously, but I think the principles stand
00:27:11.164 --> 00:27:11.375
All right, man.
00:27:11.375 --> 00:27:12.664
It was really, really great to see you.
00:27:12.674 --> 00:27:15.615
Thank you so much for bringing Chris Crawford back into my life
00:27:16.111 --> 00:27:17.401
Awesome catching up as always
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.889
it is critical for people who design anything to understand the capabilities and constraints of the systems that they're designing for.
00:00:09.208 --> 00:00:17.018
And for me, it hasn't even been a question about whether designers of software need to learn to code.
00:00:17.518 --> 00:00:20.138
I consider it essential.
00:00:20.278 --> 00:00:23.109
Like, it's, like, it's, it's not even a question.
00:00:38.234 --> 00:00:38.654
Hey, Jorge
00:00:40.380 --> 00:00:41.109
It's good to see you
00:00:42.031 --> 00:00:43.642
Yeah, it's, it's always a pleasure.
00:00:43.762 --> 00:00:46.171
I'm glad we get to continue this conversation
00:00:46.822 --> 00:00:53.192
Well, I'm hoping that we will talk about heady subjects.
00:00:53.192 --> 00:01:02.231
I-- We've had a couple of episodes where we've gotten into, like, capitalism and stuff, and I'm like, “Oh my gosh.” So I brought what I hope to be kinda lighter reading today.
00:01:02.421 --> 00:01:03.051
Oh, awesome.
00:01:03.192 --> 00:01:03.551
All right
00:01:03.841 --> 00:01:08.111
But it's actually, I'm gonna say it's lighter reading, but I think it's an important subject.
00:01:09.621 --> 00:01:18.721
Without telling you what this is, I'm gonna say that this is a bit of text that is very important to me.
00:01:19.227 --> 00:01:19.347
Hmm
00:01:19.611 --> 00:01:33.611
It is from one of the books that has most influenced my career, one that I read as a kid, and which I haven't revisited in many years, but the ideas in the book stayed with me.
00:01:33.611 --> 00:01:36.412
And this is one of the ones that I keep bringing up in conversation.
00:01:36.412 --> 00:01:39.992
I thought, “I'll bring it to the, the conversations with Harry.”
00:01:40.569 --> 00:01:41.290
I can't wait
00:01:42.022 --> 00:01:50.453
All right Games must be designed, computers must be programmed.
00:01:51.103 --> 00:01:57.414
Both skills are rare and difficult to acquire, and their combination in one person is even more rare.
00:01:58.174 --> 00:02:06.614
For this reason, many people have attempted to form design teams consisting of a non-technical game designer and a non-artistic programmer.
00:02:07.634 --> 00:02:14.813
This system would work if either programming or game design were a straightforward process requiring little in the way of judicious trade-offs.
00:02:15.633 --> 00:02:22.794
The fact of the matter is that both programming and game design are desperately difficult activities demanding many painful choices.
00:02:23.734 --> 00:02:29.433
Teaming the two experts together is rather like handcuffing pole vaulter to a high jumper.
00:02:29.883 --> 00:02:34.933
The resulting disastrous performance is the inevitable result of their conflicting styles.
00:02:36.104 --> 00:02:49.764
More specifically, the designer-programmer team is bound to fail because the designer will ignorantly make unrealistic demands on the programmer while failing to recognize golden opportunities arising during the programming.
00:02:51.054 --> 00:03:02.623
For example, when I designed the game Energy Czar, an energy economic simulation game, I did not include an obviously desirable provision for recording the history of the player's actions.
00:03:03.443 --> 00:03:09.463
During the final stages of the game's development, virtually everyone associated with the project suggested such a feature.
00:03:10.454 --> 00:03:15.183
From technical experience, I knew that this feature would require an excessive amount of memory.
00:03:15.973 --> 00:03:24.493
A non-technical designer would have insisted upon the feature only to face the disaster of a program too big to fit into its allowed memory size.
00:03:25.533 --> 00:03:29.324
Another example comes from Eastern Front 1941.
00:03:30.403 --> 00:03:38.913
While writing the code for the calendar computations, I realized that a simple insertion would allow me to change color register values every month.
00:03:39.734 --> 00:03:43.843
I took advantage of this opportunity to change the color of the trees every month.
00:03:44.443 --> 00:03:52.723
The improvement in the game is small, but it cost me only twenty-four bytes to install, so it proved to be a cost-effective improvement.
00:03:53.324 --> 00:03:56.623
A non-technical game designer would never have noticed the opportunity.
00:03:57.193 --> 00:03:59.674
Neither would a non-artistic programmer.
00:04:00.698 --> 00:04:03.237
I am 100% certain I've not read this
00:04:03.667 --> 00:04:05.537
I would be very surprised if you had.
00:04:05.546 --> 00:04:15.086
It's, first of all, it may be clear from the references to, memory limitations, and he even said, like, 24 bytes, right?
00:04:15.556 --> 00:04:22.747
It may be clear that we're talking about personal computing, uh, in, like, very early on in the history of personal computing, right?
00:04:23.526 --> 00:04:35.177
So this is a book called The Art of Computer Game Design by, I, by Chris Crawford.
00:04:35.562 --> 00:04:36.062
That's right
00:04:36.247 --> 00:05:01.706
People who are listening to the podcast might not see this, but I'm holding up for Harry to see a copy of the book, which is inside a Ziploc bag, an ancient Ziploc bag, because this is my original copy, which I acquired shortly after this book came out.
00:05:02.997 --> 00:05:09.956
This book was published in, I believe it's 1984.
00:05:10.576 --> 00:05:15.487
Yeah, so the copyright is 1984, so the pages are yellowing.
00:05:15.627 --> 00:05:20.507
It's not, it's, you know, it's the kind of paper that degrades, and I wanna protect it.
00:05:20.646 --> 00:05:27.807
It's very precious to me, if for no other reason because it's inscribed to me by Chris Crawford.
00:05:28.146 --> 00:05:48.377
Uh, I had the great privilege of inviting him to speak at a conference where I was the program chair, and I told him, “This book changed my career, and I would love for you to inscribe it,” and he wrote,“Jorge, look where this got you.” Which is awesome, right?
00:05:48.786 --> 00:05:54.076
Uh, but anyway, th-this book changed the course of my career.
00:05:54.117 --> 00:05:57.651
It, um- I'll say this.
00:05:57.651 --> 00:06:11.334
I bought it not understanding what it was, and I read it, and then I reread it, and I must have reread this book maybe a dozen, maybe a couple dozen times.
00:06:11.345 --> 00:06:12.754
It's a short book.
00:06:13.415 --> 00:06:31.884
But it opened up to me a completely different understanding of design, computer programming, and games, something that I was very interested in as a kid.
00:06:31.894 --> 00:06:39.605
All three of those things I was interested in, but I was more interested in games and programming, and this book kind of opened me up to design as well.
00:06:40.130 --> 00:06:47.920
But I'll say I wanted to bring this particular piece here because he's talking about two things that are very important to me.
00:06:48.620 --> 00:07:00.512
One is the power of constraints and the fact that constraints are our friends, and that's something that I learned in architecture school.
00:07:01.793 --> 00:07:20.372
I think that when we start out, I think we naively understand constraints to be problems to solve, when in reality, constraints are opportunities to do things in different ways, in ways that might even be better.
00:07:20.963 --> 00:07:23.273
Um, so that's one thing.
00:07:23.302 --> 00:07:50.093
And the other thing is, what I took him to say here, and this is something that again, was formative for me, was it's very important for you to understand the constraints of the system you're working with if you want to have creative control over those constraints, and you can only get acquainted with the constraints of the system by going hands-on.
00:07:50.892 --> 00:07:51.103
Mm-hmm.
00:07:51.523 --> 00:07:54.012
And he's talking there about craft.
00:07:55.622 --> 00:08:04.843
The relationship between craft and constraints is what I wanted to, to bring to the table here, because I think it's an underappreciated subject when talking about gaining traction
00:08:06.199 --> 00:08:09.649
Uh, I l- I mean, I don't even know where to start.
00:08:09.858 --> 00:08:12.918
I mean, let me just… I have so many different thoughts.
00:08:13.319 --> 00:08:28.079
The first thought I'll just share with you, the one that popped into my head, is that we could have a whole episode on, you know, what is the book that's changed the trajectory of your career, right?
00:08:28.538 --> 00:08:33.458
And I mean, just talking to people that we know, all of us have books like that, right?
00:08:33.458 --> 00:08:50.788
And, and in fact, weirdly, like when I'm interviewing people for some kind of role, often, you know, involved in the hiring process, usually for senior people, one of the questions I ask is-- one standard question is,“What book have you given away or recommended more than any other book?” Right?
00:08:50.788 --> 00:08:53.068
'Cause that really says something about the person.
00:08:53.708 --> 00:09:00.599
And, um, for me, that book is Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, right?
00:09:00.599 --> 00:09:10.719
Which is very deeply related to the Crawford book, but in a more abstract, back to heady, maybe a book that we don't wanna get too much into the content of.
00:09:13.328 --> 00:09:24.899
But, I, I interacted with Chris back in 1987 when I was started writing my first-- my, my very first book, the book I really wanted to write, which was on information architecture.
00:09:25.239 --> 00:09:30.438
And it was just before, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web came out, I think.
00:09:32.979 --> 00:10:00.318
And I was, you know, trying to, you know, take all of my experiences at Virtual Vineyard/wine.com and the design and development of the shopping cart and moving people through information spaces, and I started scanning the literature of people who had written really potent things about wayfinding and game design, and stumbled not intelligent enough to have read his book, but intelligent enough to have found him and reached out and talked to him about stuff.
00:10:00.318 --> 00:10:02.328
So what a neat guy, too.
00:10:03.109 --> 00:10:03.469
Yeah.
00:10:03.793 --> 00:10:04.913
Incredibly thoughtful
00:10:05.458 --> 00:10:12.798
yeah, really, really, just… One, one friend of mine says, “Just an incredible specimen of humanity,” you know?
00:10:13.530 --> 00:10:21.791
Well, and to locate folks who might not have heard of Chris, was one of the original Atari game designers,
00:10:21.828 --> 00:10:21.839
Mm-hmm.
00:10:22.480 --> 00:10:22.831
right?
00:10:22.860 --> 00:10:26.821
And we're talking for the original home computer, so not the 2600 console.
00:10:26.821 --> 00:10:30.201
I think that he was working, exclusively, if I'm not mistaken, with the 8-bit computers, the Atari 400 and 800.
00:10:30.250 --> 00:10:50.331
So, and I'm calling that out because, even though by today's standards those systems look incredibly limited, they were very powerful computers at the time, right?
00:10:50.331 --> 00:11:00.500
So the sort of games that he was talking about here, Energy Czar and Eastern Front 1941, would not have been possible on something like the Atari 2600.
00:11:00.660 --> 00:11:06.280
But even so, like, he had to deal with these constraints.
00:11:06.530 --> 00:11:11.900
And it feels like we should have an episode devoted solely to these kind of career-changing books.
00:11:12.490 --> 00:11:18.691
Finite and Infinite Games is one of mine as well, but to your point, it does feel really abstract.
00:11:19.350 --> 00:11:22.931
The, um… it’s a book, it’s a philosophical book, right?
00:11:22.931 --> 00:11:24.711
It’s a book on how to see the world.
00:11:25.201 --> 00:11:38.568
The reason why The Art of Computer Game Design had such an impact on me that I bought that book Because I wanted to learn how to learn how to make better computer games.
00:11:38.928 --> 00:11:47.158
I heard someone say once that, us, Gen Xers are the first generation that grew up with computers as playthings.
00:11:49.078 --> 00:11:51.091
Mm-hmm.
00:11:51.091 --> 00:11:51.100
Mm-hmm.
00:11:51.178 --> 00:12:00.089
I got involved with computers very early on, and I got involved in computers because I loved video games, and I wanted to make video games.
00:12:00.719 --> 00:12:11.229
And I would go to computer stores and look to see what I could-- what information I could get.
00:12:11.229 --> 00:12:12.389
There was obviously no internet.
00:12:12.629 --> 00:12:15.458
What information I could get to help me make better computer games.
00:12:15.889 --> 00:12:33.058
And this book had, you know, the title of it, “The Art of Computer Game Design”, like it seemed-- I thought like, “Oh my gosh, this is what's gonna teach me how to make better sprites and, you know, my thing is going to be much more attractive and colorful,” because I had this naive understanding of art and design.
00:12:34.188 --> 00:12:54.485
And I started reading this book and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, there's no source code here. It’s only ideas.” And these were ideas that, um, that were about how to approach the craft of of designing computer games.
00:12:54.485 --> 00:13:04.926
And for him, as you heard in that passage, the craft of designing the game was intimately tied to the craft of programming the game.
00:13:04.926 --> 00:13:06.926
He saw them as one and the same, right?
00:13:06.933 --> 00:13:07.104
Mm-hmm.
00:13:07.696 --> 00:13:21.375
A few years ago, I'm sure you remember, one of the incendiary topics among designers was whether designers needed to learn to code.
00:13:22.336 --> 00:13:24.926
I don't think that people talk about that much anymore.
00:13:26.096 --> 00:13:38.066
My position on day one has always been that it is critical for people who design anything to understand the capabilities and constraints of the systems that they're designing for.
00:13:39.385 --> 00:13:47.196
And for me, it hasn't even been a question about whether designers of software need to learn to code.
00:13:47.696 --> 00:13:50.316
I consider it essential.
00:13:50.456 --> 00:13:53.285
Like, it's, like, it's, it's not even a question.
00:13:54.605 --> 00:14:24.666
and it has and that has been informed by this book, and it's one of the reasons why I got so heavily involved with artificial intelligence when it became clear that that was where things were going because, this book implanted in me the idea that if you are to design anything, you have to have intimate knowledge of the material, and you only gain that knowledge by building things
00:14:25.173 --> 00:14:41.212
I'm so curious what your perspective on craft, design, and implementation is in this era of AI, generative AI, and the ability to build things by thinking about them where our constraint is our imagination now
00:14:41.792 --> 00:14:42.601
Yeah, it's tricky.
00:14:42.631 --> 00:14:58.201
My takes on this are informed by the work that, uh… Well, one thread is the work that Jolie Forlizzi and her colleagues in Carnegie Mellon have done.
00:15:02.272 --> 00:15:12.625
They wrote a paper, I'll link in the show notes, where they talk a-a-about AI as a material of design and a tool for design.
00:15:12.625 --> 00:15:32.845
I'm not using the language right, there are, like, several ways in which it can be approached, So one of the curious things about AI, but I think it's also true of other computing technologies, design, and it is a tool of design.
00:15:33.239 --> 00:15:38.859
Having a material is not the same thing as having a tool, and in this case, the same thing can be both.
00:15:39.359 --> 00:15:40.839
So that's, that's a little tricky.
00:15:41.078 --> 00:15:52.764
But the other thing I will say is, if you think of AI as a tool to help create a new system, write software or design software or what have you.
00:15:54.534 --> 00:16:08.225
I see it as a tool as being part of the continuum from working with the kind of bare metal up higher levels of abstraction, right?
00:16:08.225 --> 00:16:13.288
So the first computer programmers had to literally flip switches to turn bits on and off.
00:16:13.339 --> 00:16:15.168
Mm-hmm.
00:16:15.168 --> 00:16:15.219
Mm-hmm.
00:16:15.304 --> 00:16:31.195
Very quickly, people realized that you could layer on abstractions like assembly language and higher-level programming languages like C and interpreted languages.
00:16:31.774 --> 00:16:34.794
And then, you know, there are other abstractions that you layer on top.
00:16:34.825 --> 00:16:45.544
And when I'm working with something like Claude Code, it feels like the latest iteration in that stack of abstractions, where, like, now I'm not even dealing with the source code.
00:16:45.835 --> 00:16:49.625
I'm, you know, I'm interacting with a thing in English, right?
00:16:50.004 --> 00:17:03.995
Uh, and it is taking care of the source code in much the same way that you write source code in Swift or C or something like that, and then use a compiler to turn it into something that's closer to the metal.
00:17:04.518 --> 00:17:12.057
Yeah, I had a bun-- Did you know the, the term Atari is, is actually, the word Atari is a term of art in the game of Go?
00:17:12.615 --> 00:17:15.455
Yeah, that's-- I think that that's why they named the company that, right?
00:17:15.977 --> 00:17:17.217
Yeah, I just learned about that.
00:17:17.267 --> 00:17:26.856
Uh, we have family in town, and one of our-- Craig, who's, uh, you know, in the extended network of family, is an expert.
00:17:26.997 --> 00:17:39.326
Like, like really, like he's like apparently one of the people that was involved in the making of, um, AlphaGo calls him to moderate games in Go or to witness games.
00:17:39.326 --> 00:17:46.696
I don't know exactly how that works, but I thought that was interesting, in bringing us all the way back around to… I-- Have you seen AlphaGo, the movie?
00:17:47.298 --> 00:17:47.979
No, I have not
00:17:48.517 --> 00:17:50.557
Oh, it is totally worth watching.
00:17:50.567 --> 00:17:56.326
Like it-- There's-- Anybody, anybody listening to this should just go watch AlphaGo.
00:17:56.376 --> 00:18:04.977
It is totally amazing, and it came out a long time ago, but it was really about, that development effort and how it landed, and it's totally cool.
00:18:11.557 --> 00:18:45.876
Um, but it reminded me… This discussion reminded me of this concept, whereas English or our language, maybe not just English, but at least for us, English, as it relates to Claude and some of the other AI systems, is, you know, this l-l-- The-- Our, our spoken language has become the interpretive language that we're using to communicate with the computers now, and it reminds me of something my friend Dan French.
00:18:45.886 --> 00:18:46.866
He's a rhetorician.
00:18:46.866 --> 00:18:48.737
He has a PhD in rhetoric, of all things.
00:18:48.737 --> 00:18:49.406
It's crazy.
00:18:49.416 --> 00:18:54.576
He's also a, an award-winning stand-up comedian, based in Austin at this point.
00:18:54.586 --> 00:18:59.836
But he's-- he talks about language being the first prism, you know, where like a prism where you look through it and it breaks up into the different colors.
00:18:59.846 --> 00:19:06.287
And but, you know, I don't have the best hearing, and when he first mentioned it, I thought he said language is the first prison, you know?
00:19:06.777 --> 00:19:42.176
“Wow, I guess both things are true.” Because the abstraction layer or the interpretive layer that we're programming these systems now is the language that is both its constraint and limitation and also an infinite palette of opportunity to communicate what we imagine is possible in these systems today.
00:19:44.184 --> 00:19:46.944
You know, before we go down the path, because I’m worried that
00:19:54.701 --> 00:19:56.171
And not get back to craft.
00:19:56.578 --> 00:20:03.479
Well, craft and also I have in the back of my mind what does this mean for gaining traction?
00:20:03.489 --> 00:20:08.419
Because it might sound like I'm talking exclusively about developing or designing software,
00:20:08.969 --> 00:20:09.388
Mm-hmm.
00:20:09.909 --> 00:20:10.638
And I'm not.
00:20:10.709 --> 00:20:22.219
Because for me, I took the lesson from this book, this particular… And I have that image of these two athletes in different disciplines handcuffed to each other.
00:20:22.229 --> 00:20:23.919
It's such a powerful image in my mind.
00:20:24.838 --> 00:20:35.949
And I think that that applies this notion that you should really get hands-on with whatever field you're acting on.
00:20:37.328 --> 00:20:49.558
It's something that I've taken to heart whatever I'm doing, and I don't remember which CEO it was would do things like rotate through the call center, like receiving support calls.
00:20:50.648 --> 00:20:52.328
I'm a big fan of that kind of thing
00:20:53.058 --> 00:20:53.348
Totally
00:20:53.578 --> 00:21:00.618
where it's like you're, okay, you're going to be making decisions about how this organization is structured.
00:21:00.929 --> 00:21:04.888
Maybe you're going to be making decisions about how the service is going to be provisioned.
00:21:05.368 --> 00:21:14.519
Um, it behooves you to really get close to the ground to understand really what is going on.
00:21:14.519 --> 00:21:15.509
You know who is great at this?
00:21:15.519 --> 00:21:16.239
Walt Disney.
00:21:16.929 --> 00:21:17.098
Mm-hmm.
00:21:17.288 --> 00:21:29.709
When they designed Disneyland, he, they-- After that park was opened, he didn't stay in his office in Burbank and issue commands from there.
00:21:29.729 --> 00:21:31.608
Like, he walked the park, right?
00:21:32.078 --> 00:21:46.378
And he would note where people were queuing, where they were getting hot, where people were dumping, I don't know, I'm making stuff up, but like popcorn boxes or what have you, right?
00:21:47.278 --> 00:21:59.848
And he would direct the shape of the environment through what he was observing on the ground and, you know, and was very close to the construction of that thing.
00:22:01.659 --> 00:22:20.298
And I think that the quality of our decisions is different if we're acting at a very abstract or removed place from where the decisions are enacted.
00:22:21.419 --> 00:22:25.489
Uh, I think it's very important to be very close to the action.
00:22:25.909 --> 00:22:32.318
That doesn't mean don't delegate and do all the stuff yourself because you obviously cannot do that.
00:22:33.028 --> 00:22:41.138
I think you should be very careful to not detach yourself from the reality on the ground.
00:22:42.068 --> 00:22:44.888
That's the lesson that I took from this chapter of that book.
00:22:45.020 --> 00:22:47.201
And, and it's 100% spot on, right?
00:22:47.230 --> 00:22:56.830
I mean, the reason that I'm a player coach as an executive coach, and I really work in product design, development, IT, you know, security.
00:22:56.961 --> 00:23:02.570
I work in all these areas, not in finance typically, not in marketing and sales, right?
00:23:03.381 --> 00:23:19.080
And by player, it is to actually get hands-on and to be involved in the conversations, the decisions, the activities, the commitments, and dealing with the implications of all of that.
00:23:19.520 --> 00:23:26.500
Because going in and standing outside of it, arms folded and telling people what to do doesn't work well.
00:23:26.871 --> 00:23:33.980
It, it certainly-- At best, it works slowly, and at worst, it makes a m- a m- it mucks things up, right?
00:23:34.010 --> 00:23:46.421
And the way to be good is to really be hands-on, but not necessarily be so hands-on that you're trying to do everything all at once all the time Yeah, that's the delegation thing.
00:23:46.421 --> 00:23:58.891
And it's something, frankly, if, if I were to call out like the dark side of this, I think that I've had trouble in my career delegating stuff because I have this attachment to understanding.
00:23:58.891 --> 00:24:04.550
I, frankly, I also get joy out of, like, learning new things And, and doing things.
00:24:04.621 --> 00:24:09.901
Um, but it is a potential risk, right?
00:24:09.941 --> 00:24:22.750
That, uh, to your point, you want to have that hands-on understanding about the areas that you're going to be deciding on, but you also don't want to take on the work yourself.
00:24:22.750 --> 00:24:29.290
And I'm wondering, again, with the spirit of slapping snow chains on it, you are a player-coach.
00:24:29.340 --> 00:24:34.971
Do you have any suggestions for me on how one might strike that balance?
00:24:34.980 --> 00:24:36.520
How I might strike that balance?
00:24:37.181 --> 00:24:41.361
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lean on a saying that I picked up along the way.
00:24:41.520 --> 00:24:50.951
Rather than trying to talk about delegation, there are lots of different ways of, you know, Michael Hyatt, and there are lots of people who have good models for delegation.
00:24:50.951 --> 00:25:02.820
But the saying that I learned was, “Being clear is kind. Being unclear is unkind.” And the job of the leader is to be clear.
00:25:03.701 --> 00:25:07.790
And there are tools for being more clear versus less clear.
00:25:08.270 --> 00:25:12.510
Precision questioning and answering from Dennis Matthies’ work.
00:25:13.070 --> 00:25:19.701
The desired outcome model, which is documented in my book from the field of neuro-linguistic programming.
00:25:20.230 --> 00:25:26.121
The work that Scott Selhorst is doing on problem definition and problem framing.
00:25:26.631 --> 00:25:40.111
There are ways of increasing the fidelity of what you're communicating to be more clear with people and more on the nose, as they say in the movie industry, and less vague or ambiguous or, you know, hand-wavy.
00:25:50.618 --> 00:25:52.098
Being clear is kind.
00:25:52.598 --> 00:25:53.939
Being unclear is unkind
00:25:55.134 --> 00:26:04.565
And now that you've brought up communication, I'll say one of the tricky things about this is that you don't want to-- When you communicate with your team members, you don't want to step on their toes, right?
00:26:04.565 --> 00:26:17.704
Like, uh, one of the risks of understanding of the craft is that you can end up, like, over-managing or micromanaging.
00:26:18.285 --> 00:26:20.744
Um, you don't want to do that.
00:26:21.434 --> 00:26:30.454
But also, if you do understand the minutiae of the systems that you're talking about, you can talk much more credibly with your team members
00:26:30.997 --> 00:26:31.376
That's right
00:26:31.775 --> 00:26:36.515
They'll realize that you're not, you know, you're, you're saying the things that you're saying because you understand the system.
00:26:36.924 --> 00:26:39.454
So, uh, that's something to aspire to.
00:26:40.345 --> 00:26:42.615
Anyway, I was very excited to bring this to you.
00:26:42.615 --> 00:26:44.255
It's a special book for me
00:26:45.164 --> 00:26:45.454
I love it.
00:26:45.484 --> 00:26:48.555
I'm actually gonna go dig up-- I'm, I'm sure they're still available new.
00:26:48.595 --> 00:26:52.234
I'm probably gonna go get myself a copy just to have it on my shelf to take a look at
00:26:52.957 --> 00:26:55.186
Yeah, if, uh, do get it as in physical format.
00:26:55.227 --> 00:27:00.346
I bought it as a Kindle e-book a few years ago, but the formatting is not very good on Kindle.
00:27:00.843 --> 00:27:01.093
Okay
00:27:01.497 --> 00:27:05.287
So if you find it as a physical book, snatch it up.
00:27:05.336 --> 00:27:06.176
It's really great.
00:27:06.176 --> 00:27:09.906
I mean, the references have aged obviously, but I think the principles stand
00:27:11.164 --> 00:27:11.375
All right, man.
00:27:11.375 --> 00:27:12.664
It was really, really great to see you.
00:27:12.674 --> 00:27:15.615
Thank you so much for bringing Chris Crawford back into my life
00:27:16.111 --> 00:27:17.401
Awesome catching up as always
