Thinking Style

Ever try to design something based on product marketing literature?

That is what I am doing right now at work. I am not saying this is something that everybody must look at me respectfully. What I am trying to say is precisely how this work drives me crazy.

My mind cannot work in an unstructured manner. But things do not always have a framework. I have been thinking about it for a long time. Finally I realize it is simply because I always try to work in the Lego mode. In other words, I try so hard to gather the pieces, build up something with those pieces collected and make sense of what it is about.

What is the strength of this thinking style? It is very powerful when you need to come back and work on a different configuration of the same pieces. In fact, it is so powerful that I stick to this thinking style for more than 10 years.

What is the weakness of this thinking style? Well, you name it. The Achilles’ heel of this thinking style is the inability to recognize the situation once the pieces are not gathered complete.

99% of humanity activities are about managing risk, going against the God. What differentiate a high risk activity to a low risk activity? It’s the cost! How do we calculate the cost? It’s the amount of uncertainty within a boundary. Who draw the boundary? That is anything outside the Lego pieces.

Mind the word “outside”. Therefore in order to manage risk, one has to switch in and out of the Lego pieces and redraws the boundary all the time. This is extremely painful if you have a structure already built using the existing Lego pieces.

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God bless me!