From Mystery to Heuristic to Algorithm to Code

Rotman Magazine Winter 2009

Roger Martin

Advancement of Knowledge

Over the course of time, phenomena enter our collective consciousness as mysteries – things that we observe and that intrigue us, but that we don’t yet understand. For instance, the mystery of gravity once confounded our forefathers: when they looked around at the world, they saw that most objects, apples famously, seemed to fall to the ground quickly; but others didn’t, such as birds; and some fell but seemed to take forever, like leaves. In art, there was the long struggle to understand how to represent on a two-dimensional surface what we saw in front of us in three dimensions. Music continues to be a mystery that confounds most of us: what patterns of notes and sounds are enjoyable and make listeners feel contented or inspired?

We start out with these mysteries, and at some point, because they intrigue us, we put enough thought into them to produce a first-level understanding of the question at hand. We develop heuristics – ways of understanding the general principles of what were heretofore mysteries. Heuristics are rules of thumb or guidelines for solving a mystery by way of organized exploration of the possibilities. So why do things fall down? We develop a notion of a universal force called ‘gravity’ that tends to pull things down. In art, we develop a notion called ‘perspective’ that guides our efforts to create renderings that appear to the eye to have three dimensions rather than two. What kind of music do people like to listen to? We learn about chords, and then create song types like ballads, or folk songs, or the blues. By following a set of guidelines, we increase the likelihood of creating something that people will enjoy listening to.

The application of heuristics doesn’t guarantee success: it simply increases the probability and/or speed of getting to a successful outcome. Heuristics represent an incomplete-yet-distinctly advanced understanding of what was previously a mystery. In any given field, some people remain stuck in the world of mystery, while others master its heuristics. The difference between them is the difference between one-hit-wonder Don McLean, composer of “American Pie”, and Bruce Springsteen, whose eight number-one albums have sold 120 million copies worldwide. For McLean, the mystery remained just that: he came up with a single inspiration that created one random event – for several decades the biggest selling pop song of all time. Yet he failed to produce another hit of any consequence in his entire career. In contrast, Springsteen developed a heuristic – a way of understanding the world and the people in it – that enables him to write songs that have great meaning to people. His mastery of heuristics has allowed him to generate a steady stream of hits over a 30-plus-year period.

In due course, increased understanding can – though in many cases it never does – produce an algorithm: a logical, arithmetic or computational procedure that, if correctly applied, ensures the solution of the problem. With gravity, great scientists like Sir Isaac Newton studied and experimented long and hard enough to create precise rules for determining how fast an object will fall under any circumstance. In the late 1970s, musical innovators like British techno-music guru Brian Eno experimented with the human heartbeat and determined that songs with a synthesized heartbeat as their rhythm track are instinctively enjoyed by listeners, no matter what score you add on top of the heartbeat. That enabled bands whose songs he produced to experience consistent success. The end result of such algorithms is not always positive, of course: this discovery also led to electro-pop and eventually to sham bands like Milli Vanilli, who lip-synched recorded music onstage until caught in the act by an unsuspecting audience. And in art, we eventually got paint-by-numbers – the ultimate algorithm.

In the modern era, a fourth important step has been added to the sequence of mystery to heuristic to algorithm: eventually, some algorithms can be coded into software. This means reducing the algorithm – the strict set of rules – into a series of 0’s and 1’s – binary code – that enables a computer to produce the desired result. In the case of gravity, the fact that we had an algorithm for ‘how things fall’ meant that Honeywell engineers could program aircraft with autopilot, enabling a plane to ‘fall’ from the sky in the controlled fashion that we want it to, so that it lands in exactly the right spot. At the coding level, there is no longer any judgment involved: the plane lands on the basis of computer instructions that are nothing but a series of 1’s and 0’s, because our understanding of gravity has moved from mystery to heuristic to algorithm to code.

The Creation of Value in Business

With the sequence of mystery to heuristic to algorithm to code in mind, we can consider the question of how value can be created in business. The answer is, in two fundamental ways: first, value can be created by operating a business within a single knowledge category; I.e. either by running a heuristic, an algorithm, or code; and second, value can be created by instigating a progression along the sequence of knowledge from mystery to heuristic, heuristic to algorithm or algorithm to code. To illustrate the two types of value creation, let’s explore McDonald’s Corporation. In 1955, at a time of the emergence of the freeways and beach culture in Southern California – a unique and leading-edge environment within America – the McDonald brothers stared into the face of a mystery: how and what do Californians want to eat in this emerging cultural environment? After thinking about it for sufficiently long and experimenting based on their ideas, they created a format for answering that – a heuristic – which was the quick-service restaurant with a limited menu for fast turnaround of the food ordered and time-saving devices like the three-at-a-time milkshake maker.

This heuristic created sizable, though by no means enormous, value for the McDonald brothers: they went on to open additional outlets, and by the time an investor named Ray Croc approached them to buy the chain, they had four very successful outlets and were making a handsome return. Croc bought their fledgling chain and saw that he could drive the McDonald brothers’ heuristic to an algorithm. He figured out exactly how to cook a hamburger, exactly how to hire people, exactly where to set up restaurants, exactly how to manage stores, and exactly how to franchise them. Under Kroc, nothing was left to chance in the McDonald’s kitchen: every hamburger came out of a stamping machine weighing exactly 1.6 ounces, its thickness measured to the thousandth of an inch, and the cooking process stopped automatically after 38 seconds, when the burgers reached an internal temperature of exactly 155 degrees.

Kroc created value by driving a heuristic to an algorithm, and then additional value by running that algorithm and building McDonald’s into a global firm of leading size and scope. Thus he demonstrates the two forms of value creation: progression along the sequence of understanding – in this case from heuristic to algorithm – and running one stage – the algorithm.

Education, IT and Cognitive Empathy

I often review the video featuring Sir Ken Robinson calling for education to broaden it’s focus to highlight and foster more creative aspects of humanity. Traditional didactic models of education are becoming less useful, particularly when new technologies are dispersing social and intellectual capital in such a way that nearly everyone (in developed countries) can have access to it. Following the article on Microsofts School of the Future, please offer some thoughts on these questions. In this new environment, what knowledge and expertise do traditional educational institutions and teachers serve up? What is the role of the teacher?

Teachers need a different set of skills to function in a new learning environment where students often have superior expertise with the tools of knowledge acquisition. Teachers need to develop enhanced ‘cognitive empathy’ and function as ‘friction-reducing’ facilitators of knowledge acquisition. They need to be able to quickly diagnose a student, inspire exploration and discovery, and provide a nudge in the right direction to get past obstacles.

We need to develop programs that prepare educators for teaching in this environment. Otherwise, the asymmetry between current methods of learning and current (outdated) methods of teaching will continue to lead to degraded value of classroom education and missed opportunities to maximize our knowledge capital.

Microsoft’s High School of the Future

In the following story, Eric Lai writes about his impressions from Microsoft Corp.’s School of the Future Summit held late November of this year in Seattle.

There were plenty of school principals and teachers sharing their experiences building innovative new schools that use technology to empower kids so that they can learn online or at their own pace, to satisfy their own intellectual curiosities and passions.

Apart from a speech by Microsoft’s general manager for US education, Anthony Salcito, demonstrating Microsoft technology such as its PhotoSynth photo-stitching software and its Surface tabletop computer, the conference was otherwise largely free of Microsoft sales pitches.

One attendee Eric spoke with in some depth was Rosalind “Roz” Chivis, principal of The High School of the Future in Philadelphia that is a collaboration between that city’s school district and Microsoft.

At the two-year-old school, where all 750 students tote around Gateway laptops, project, rather than subject-based learning, is the standard. Colleague Julie Sartain profiled it in January, calling it “the most wired school in America.”

Chivis set the tone by introducing herself as “Chief Learner.” It’s all part of seeing her job as “terminating” problems that prevent her teachers being effective and students from learning, rather than being a top-down manager.

Hopeless hippie talk? Not coming from the African-American Chivis, who has been in education for three decades, was a former assistant superintendent in Philadelphia, and was willing to share some of the problems they’ve solved and tradeoffs they’ve made.

For instance, having teachers assign cross-disciplinary projects rather than the same old English, Math and Science curriculums may mimic real life better, but it initially created problems such as how to enter grades into the central database, which would’ve hurt students’ chances of getting into good colleges. That has since been fixed.

Or take the School’s policy on social networking sites. “Our kids use MySpace and FaceBook,” she said. But using a content filter or firewall to block pornography, besides presenting a tempting target for hackers, would’ve interfered with students downloading and using JPEGs for class projects, she said. So the School is instead looking at technology that will let teachers view Web traffic in real-time instead.

Also, students can bring cellphones to the school, but they may not use them. Those who do have their batteries confiscated. “Because we are in the inner city, our challenge is if there are gangs that get into an altercation, they might use the cellphone to call for backup,” she said, adding that the policy so far has “worked very well. Kids get the message after they tire of paying $15-20 every time for a new battery.”

That does seem to be a good compromise to the policy in force at New York City public schools, where students are not allowed to bring cellphones into the school. As a result, some students are taking their cellphones over to local deli shops, called bodegas in New York, where they can have them stored for $2 or $3 a day.

On whether online learning encourages cheating or plagiarism by students, Chivis disagreed. “We did have one instance where a student was clearly getting help from a dad or some other older relative,” she said. That was dealt with. “It’s the only instance. I would like to think it’s not a problem. And we use other technology to spot plagiarism.”

The High School of the Future is still traditional in many senses. Teachers still appear to have more control over classrooms than some advocates of “disruptive education” such as Michael Horn probably like.

And while there are few textbooks as most of the material and coursework is online, kids still physically come to the school and work in classrooms, unlike virtual schools such as the Florida Virtual School, which served 64,000 high school students nationwide last year, or the e4 Academy run by the Clear Creek public school district near Houston, Texas.

“I do think distant learning can be just as rich, but it depends on how the course is structured and it depends on the learner,” she said.

Original Post: December 3, 2008 - 3:21 A.M.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/philly_microsofts_high_school_of_the_future

• TAGS:e-learing, Education, Microsoft, Microsoft Surface, photosynth, School of the Future, virtual learing

• IT TOPICS:Government & Regulation, Windows & Microsoft

Do schools today kill creativity? (Sir Ken Robinson)

Education guru Sir Ken Robinson makes a profound case for nurturing and employing the gift of the human imagination wisely. In order to avoid some of the direst challenges facing mankind, and to embrace our full potential, we need to see our creative capacities for the richness they are, and see our children for the hope they are. In short, we need to re-think the fundamental principles on which we educate our children. This is a humorous, moving and inspiring presentation on the need to embrace, facilitate and empower human creativity.

Innovation Nation and other great books

I have borrowed the following list from John Kao’s blog, www.innovationation.org. John in turn reproduces the list from Business Week’s innovation section, run by Bruce Nussbaum. Bruce Nussbaum has selected John Kao’s book “Innovation Nation” as one of his recommended ten-best books on innovation.

John Kao is a fascinating speaker and a recognized thought-leader in the field of innovation. I will include more of his work and ideas here on upcoming UltraFuture blogs.

Below is the full list of innovation ‘must-reads’ from Newsweek:

1. The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin.
2. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw.
3. Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? Seth Godin.
4. The Design of Future Things by Don Norman.
5. Innovation Nation by John Kao.
6. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
7. The Future of Management by Gary Hamel.
8. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
9. The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.
10. Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See, by Andrew Burroughs.

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A New Mantra for Creativity

William McDonough Interview - Massive Change

A New Mantra for Creativity

Executives should apply the “Order of Magnitude” rule to any problem that demands a creative solution

by Bill Buxton

In 1992, having recognized that display technologies were going to evolve — fast — Bill Buxton and a team at the University of Toronto built the Active Desk, a precursor to today’s touch screens.

Let’s start with a basic question: What differentiates the professional designer or innovator from the person who has one great idea (no matter how profitable)? For me, the difference is the same as that between the musician with a string of successful recordings, and a one-hit wonder. Yes, the latter demonstrates an act of creativity combined with execution. But the former is like the Duracell bunny - the creativity keeps going and going and going.

There is something to be learned from the ability of such serial offenders to exercise repeatedly their creative skills on demand without waiting for divine inspiration. Despite a problem that is perhaps not that interesting, they can nevertheless manufacture all the inspiration needed to complete the task at hand every time. That is their job. That is what “professional” means to them.

So how do they do it? Let me say straight off, I would be a fool and lose all credibility if I suggested I knew, or that there was a simple single answer. On the other hand, I’m eager to share one technique I have resorted to on many occasions when I was up against the wall with “idea block.” It is something that I call the “Order of Magnitude” rule, which reads as follows:

If something changes by an order of magnitude along any meaningful dimension, it is no longer the same thing.

I like the name because its acronym, OOM, conjures up the prototypical Buddhist mantra, om. Let’s meditate on it a bit by going back to 1801 and the classroom of Franklin Pierce Nitt, the inventor of the blackboard.

Visual display size shown according to Order of Magnitude physical size changes, growth and investment.

Misses the Point

To understand why this is relevant, first ask yourself what preceded the blackboard. Eventually, you will realize, “The slate.” True enough. And equally true, the blackboard is just a big slate mounted on the wall. In the parlance of today, both use the same chip technology (calcium carbonate), have the same operating system and interface, and you can reuse the user manual! Technologically, there is no innovation here other than the manufacture of a big slate, and the challenge of mounting it on the wall.

But, while that is all true, it also misses the point that despite the lack of technological innovation, there is a plausible argument that the innovation of the blackboard has had more impact on classroom education than any innovation since, including cheap paper (which came in about the 1860s), the PC, and the Internet. The blackboard fundamentally changed the social and physical organization of classroom education, by better supporting teaching and demonstrating to the group, rather than the individual, and by enabling timely support material to be displayed in the visible periphery, while the students worked on their personal slates. And as something that supported a new type of “social network” in the class, it did so because of one or two OOM changes in this case, the dimensions of size and distance.

Now I am guessing that when I stated the OOM rule, you mentally enumerated a number of dimensions along which something could change. You came up with things like “faster,” “smaller,” “cheaper,” “more of them,” “easier to use,” etc. I also guess that “change in distance” was not one of them.

Sweet Spots

Therein lies another valuable lesson: One of the areas where you can leverage the OOM rule is through the creativity and insights that you bring to recognizing or determining nonobvious (but important) dimensions along which something known might change and how it might thereby be transformed.

And notice there is a multiple here. For sure, the rule applies even if there is an OOM change along only one dimension. But as our blackboard illustrates, some of the sweet spots emerge when one considers changes in two or more dimensions.

Despite coming from 1801, this blackboard example leads directly to one of the situations where I have used the OOM rule. Knowing some dramatic changes in display technologies were coming down the road, around 1992 I started asking myself questions like:

-What if screen real estate was essentially free (in the same sense as bandwidth has become)?

-What if we had large interactive displays on the walls everywhere we have whiteboards and corkboards today?

-Echoing the slate-blackboard transition, how will today’s tablet PC relate to a wall-sized stylus-driven display?

-What are the implications when public signage and advertising are based on interactive displays rather than paper or other traditional media?

You can add your own questions to the list. The point is that OOM changes in cost, size, location, number, interactivity, and the like will fundamentally change our relationship to information displays. These changes are at least as profound as those that resulted from the introduction of the blackboard into classrooms. Wall-sized posters on subway platforms are not going to be static or made from paper; they are going to be active. Projection technology is already used in some cities. What about movie posters or bus shelters? How will the impact be different in the home, in a room wallpapered with display technology vs. the office or design studio? How might your mobile phone be used to interact with such displays, so that they go beyond TV or a slide show?

Academy Award-Winning Insight

Having recognized that we were entering a period of transition in display technologies, the challenge was to find a way to gain some insights into the questions above. So at the University of Toronto in the early 1990s, we built something we called the Active Desk. This was an electronic drafting table with a three-foot flat display. You could draw on it with a digital stylus, and in one prototype application, use your other hand to hold and manipulate the graphical objects displayed on the surface. It was smoke and mirrors, but it worked.

What this did was to give us a huge head start in terms of understanding how interacting with a surface of this size was different from conventional displays. For example, pull-down menus did not work well. On the other hand, we refined a kind of gesture-based radial menu that did work with a stylus and large surface, which we called marking menus. What we also found was that these menus worked well on conventional systems as well, with their CRT displays and mouse controls, and gave up to 10 times improvement in menu selection performance.

When I became chief scientist of Alias Research in 1994, these menus became part of the signature user interface for all of our products, including the animation package, Maya, which won an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievement. By asking the right questions, and then pursuing a path to answer them, we not only gained early insights into where things were going, we were able to incorporate those insights into our existing products, thereby both reaping benefits in the short term and preparing a product line for the future. Fast-forwarding to the present, this work also became one of the stepping stones that led to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Surface.

A Meaningful Discussion

There are huge implications around all of these questions for dozens of businesses that likely don’t think of themselves as in the computer or high-tech business. The OOM rule isn’t going to answer any of them, but in providing a catalyst for asking the right questions, its value is indisputable.

So, when you find yourself staring at the wall, stymied by a problem that demands a creative solution that is eluding you, try a simple exercise. Brainstorm a list of dimensions that could in any way characterize that with which you are concerned. Then, before you start warping your problem up or down any single dimension, add one more attribute to each dimension, namely, the reason you think it is meaningful.

The ensuing discussion of what constitutes “meaningful” will almost certainly help you generate additional items for your list of dimensions. Then start exploring each—alone and in various combinations. The big challenge and opportunity here is in how insightful you are in recognizing the potential implications of such changes.

Not everyone can learn to be a world-class designer, no more than everyone could become a major league pitcher or a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be taught to improve your ability to throw a ball, or understand something about the interior working of the atom. So it is with creativity. There’s no magic formula for any of this, and the OOM rule is just one technique that one can add to one’s quiver. It’s not the full story. But it is a good start.

Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.

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First Annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge

On May 3rd, The Buckminster Fuller Institute announced that Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia submitted by Dr. John Todd has been selected as the winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

Dr. John Todd’s comprehensive design strategy to bring about a carbon neutral world, in the opinion of this jury, best embodies the bold, visionary approach to large scale societal transformation pioneered by Buckminster Fuller. ‘Dr. Todd’s proposal sets forth a profound vision to heal the environmental and economic scars of the Appalachian region and a detailed strategy to build a dynamic sustainable economic basis for lasting renewal,’ said the Buckminster Fuller Challenge jurors in a statement about their decision.

Dr. Todd’s vision sets forth a new theory of ecological design weaving together a set of processes - from restoration of land to geo-sequestration of carbon, to community involvement, to long-term economic vitality - to create a blueprint for a future for Appalachia that envisions a harmonious self-sustaining community. This is one of the only true whole systems projects that is place based but widely applicable. Click here to download the full statement from the jury [pdf].

Allegra Fuller Snyder, Fuller’s daughter, remarked, ‘My father identified himself as a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Scientist. Read more

Think 10X, Not 10%

By Jack Uldrich

April 21 2008 - Cross-posted from www.jumpthecurve.net

One of my favorite quotes comes from Kurt Yeager who once said: “In periods of profound change the most dangerous thing is to incrementalize yourself into the future.” I was reminded of this quote because although I often speak to businesses about the future of technology, I frequently encounter push back from executives who are mostly interested in identifying ways to incrementally improve their businesses or products. In short, they are looking for improvements in the range of 10%.

I constantly remind them, however, that we are no longer living in an era of linear growth - a 10% improvement might have been sufficient to keep them competitive in the past, but it is no strategy if they desire to be in business in 10 years. To achieve that goal, they must be on the lookout for how 10X improvements will transform their business. (Ray Kurzweil, in this excellent editorial , also emphasizes this point.)

To this end, I recently came across a couple of articles that highlight this point. The first addresses how a number of researchers are looking to increase data storage by a factor of a hundred. It is difficult to contemplate how a 100X improvement in data storage might transform education, media, advertising and even health care, but it is imperative that professionals in these fields start thinking along these lines immediately.

Here’s why: according to this recent Technology Review article, a new type of memory technology that uses 99% less energy could be on the market within 18 months. In other words, in the near future not only will your iPod or cellphone be able to hold 100X data (perhaps all of your genetic data), it will also be able to operate using only one one-hundredth of the battery power of your existing device.

Data storage, of course, is just one field experiencing exponential growth - semiconductors, Internet Bandwidth, genomics, robotics, RFID technology, nanotechnology, and even brain scanning technology are all doing the same. With regard to the latter, late last year reseachers at Harvard University announced that they could illuminate brain neurons with 100 different colors a 20X improvement.

Now, you might not think that brain scanning technology will impact your business that much, but I would encourage you to think otherwise. As researchers learn more about how the brain operates you can expect these professionals to also develop new strategies for learning; to create more effective marketing and advertising campaigns; and even to optimize strategies for bolstering people’s decision-makings processes. Bottom-line: If you are just focused on a 10% improvement, you are already behind the curve. You need to learn to ‘jump the curve’ because the future belongs to those people who can think 10X or more.

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