Invert, always, invert
anup.io
anup.io
Surprise seems to be one of the most important ingredients to getting things to spread (I won't quote the academic or anecdotal research of that here.) So I use this inversion analysis often in thinking about coming up with ways of surprising people. My most successful example of this:
I was originally thinking, "How can I get more customers?"
Inverting it I came up with, "How can I lose more customers?" (A different inversion from the OP's but an inversion nonetheless).
Using that as my base I came up with this funny campaign where I tried to figure out how to fire more of my customers. What if I could fire the worst of my customers. So I invented a honey pot website called trickajournalist.com where I described some software you could signup for to spam journalists. And then I used the list of people who signed up for that and banned them from using my product that had an email newsletter component. We didn't want spammers.
It was a nice media/traffic win for what we were doing. And it all came from inverting what we originally struggled to answer.
P.S. If you're interested more in the whole trickajournalist.com thing, the original site is dead now, but some articles about it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/02/27/trick-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathankontny/2018/03/08/reddit-...
A bad actor towards spammers and a bad actor towards your legitimate customers are not the same thing.
A bad actor towards spammers, is being a good actor towards their legitimate customers.
"Treating journalists like suckers" or "stalking them" isn't the same demographic as "folks who are disgruntled with journalists".
And really, what "expense"? They weren't outed. They lost nothing but possible future use of an email tool we produced (we found no current users signing up for trickajournalist.com).
And as for the intent of the site. It was a lot of things. But first and foremost it was to raise an awareness of how bad email has become. People are doing awful things with email. All the automation, cold email targeting, etc. I wanted to put some satire out so maybe some folks operating sites might take pause at what they're offering, and who they're offering it to. I wanted to raise a novel method of how to deal with things like this. I wanted to raise how easy it is to promote awful tools like this was even when ads are supposed to be human moderated on a lot of places.
Spam is out of control. After we launched our bulk email tools, we immediately saw bad actors. So this was one novel attempt at filtering them out. If someone were awful enough to signup for a tool that had the copy and intent of the trickajournalist.com website had, they shouldn't be using our email tool. We didn't publicly shame them or make their lives any worse than they might already be. They just couldn't use our tool.
There's no negative consequence to just signing up for TrickAJournalist; only a negative consequence for attempting to sign up for Highrise while already having signed up for TrickAJournalist.
Someone who just literally wants to "trick a journalist", once, might sign up for TrickAJournalist; but such a person has no reason to also to use that same email address to sign up for the B2B CRM software Highrise.
Someone who wants to send knowingly-spammy bulk emails while purposefully dodging spam filters, would sign up for TrickAJournalist (which claims to be exactly for that); and also would sign up for Highrise, since it has bulk emailing capabilities and likely also has positive spam-filter cachet from all the legitimate uses other companies put it to.
As an aside, the main reason I didnt follow these links and find out for myself is because this is in part satire but mostly a marketing scheme to advertise Highrise. Sorry, I dislike these sort of tricks, it makes me feel manipulated. And I prefer not to add my traffic to such endeavours.
And come on, spam is hardly an unnoticed issue which one meeds to raise awareness for.
Someone should create something like Grammarly or Medium's community-editor feature, for email campaigns. "Before you hit send, get a first impression on your campaign from 10 random beta readers from our community." Then give the beta-readers a prominent "this looks like spam" button to press.
Probably it wouldn't give any different of a response than a regular spam filter; but I imagine that most ad people will think of "it went into the spam filter" as a technical problem, rather than a problem with their messaging. Whereas, if real humans tell them the campaign looks like spam, maybe they'd listen.
This always seemed like a powerful quote to me, not least because I seem to be able to keep finding new applications for it.
[1]: https://readwrite.com/2014/05/29/jeff-atwood-stack-overflow-...
What was the yield on that?
The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours,
Whilst spending days reading an agreement?
Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday. Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety rated car.
So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when you can afford in order to minimize those risks.
My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.
The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles.
Your problem is just a little more meta.
I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.
Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.
At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof.
Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens.
It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.
At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that routinely pop up:
- Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused).
- Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god, sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of packaging from falling into food while opening is surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt. creating debris :)
- doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties that may ensue
- furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move, where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries)
- risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is the strain-relief properly done etc.)
For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of life.
[edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See also [1].
I have had moments where I felt I was almost loosing it because I was just constantly thinking about some (in hindsight minor) issue. And I then start to meditate just to stop the thinking. I don't know if that helps or if there is a natural cadence to it but I do get better after doing that for some days usually (10-15 min here and there, I used the free tier of HeadSpace during 1 period as well). I should just also meditate regularly to see if my general mood improves. From everything I read, it should.
I am about to go camping, that will help, although I'm already getting pissed (and finding nice ways to express said emotion) at that fictitious family with the bluetooth speaker on all day in the spot next to me. What a waste of thought. Just stop brain.
Like if I’ve finished the code for v1.6 and am ready to ship it to customers, I feel great. When I actually send it to customers my anxiety kicks in thinking of all the support requests and criticism I’m about to get.
> Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Really answer the question. Something like “at 10pm I’ll go over and ask them to have it off by 11pm. If it’s not off by midnight, I’ll make a noise complaint”. Or “If it’s too loud, I’ll ask them to turn it down a bit.” Or “I’ll trust myself to make the right decision if that happens.” Then consider it resolved. Write it down if that helps.
- I tried something similar to this Negative Thinking Analysis Form [1]
- In my experience this takes a lot of time, when you try to do it right. You really have to let a thought sink in for a long time to actually find out where it is distorted. And it sometimes even takes longer to find the underlying thought behind a series of thougts and worries.
- But once done the thinking is usually over and sometimes I learned something about the beliefs that underpin my thinking.
[1] http://discoveryoursolutions.com/toolkit/negative_thinking.h...
"How can I guarantee that I will spend absolutely all of my time grinding on projections of the future?"
Using your example, you haven't decided to restructure your roof, so there is nothing actionable you can do right now WRT your neighbor, so don't worry about that.
The thinking being that some (all?) of the side assumptions your brain is fixating upon developing responses to, could in fact be erroneous. By experimenting with adopting a "noob" mindset, you create the opportunity for new experiences to emerge which may well be more successful.
Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020.
But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc.
It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.
I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?
It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
I'm sure the two of you can come up with new adventurous things to do and the will to do so now you've identified the problem.
Yes, true. Would have been nice if we hadn't been like that before the pandemic, though. :)
This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
I very much like the idea
May I ask what situations do you have in mind?
> influencing my personal live negatively.
What if everyone else is crazy not you
> Managers and Supervisors: To lower morale and production, think of the worst boss you’ve had and act like that. Be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work. When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible.
> Employees: Be forgetful. Clumsy. Work slowly. Think of ways to increase the number of movements needed to do your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one; try to make a small wrench do instead of a big one.
> When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
> Apply all regulations to the last letter.
Admittedly, some of the techniques—like releasing a bag full of moths in a movie theater to disrupt enemy propaganda—are oddly specific and not easily inverted.
Rather than trying to generate hypothetical ideas for "how can we make our search better", we spend a lot of time analyzing our data to find where we are failing. Many of our biggest relevance improvements have come from tracking and understanding the types of queries where we consistently fail to generate results or user engagement.
I think it is a very effective approach, but can require some discipline and perspective. When you spend so much time focusing on the failures of your product, it can create this internal perception that the product is constantly failing and broken. So you do need to actively remember what you're doing well and how far you've come as a team/product.
When it comes to zero (or near-zero) results, I've had good results using this to identify gaps in the current product offering and what visitors are expecting to be there. Two examples:
1) A seller of custom prescription glasses: top two search queries were "contact lenses" and "sunglasses". They didn't offer the former, they did sell sunglasses (most frames could take a tinted lens as an option) but didn't make it obvious with design, content, or marketing.
2) A seller of cabinet hardware (pulls & knobs): a large proportion of their top 10 search terms seemed to have a door hardware intent. Adding this missing category boosted sales without additional marketing dollars spent (the customers were already there and just bouncing when they realized the site didn't carry what they wanted).
These are all ways to focus on understanding failures instead of trying to optimize successes, which is often finding the local maxima.
This sounds a lot like the 6-sigma approach of driving improvement by focusing obsessively on eliminating "defects".
There are certainly huge wins that can be obtained by identifying and eliminating bugs or corner-cases with undesired behavior. But it's scary to imagine a world where this is used as a replacement for innovative thinking - ie, "how can we make our search better". If Steve Jobs had focused all his proverbial efforts on minimizing flip-phone defects, the world would have missed out on the smartphone revolution.
There is still a lot of room for creativity once you've identified a class of problematic queries too. Especially as a search engine becomes more sophisticated, how you solve clear query failures can be a lot less straightforward, and clever features or machine learning are many times needed.
I will say there are clear exceptions to this inversion rule too. For example, we switched to a Learn-To-Rank system for our core ranking in the past year and we couldn't necessarily point to it clearly being the solution for problematic queries we were seeing, but it proved to unlock a ton of value and drive a lot of relevance improvements and surprising benefits in ways we couldn't necessarily predict for our specific use case and users.
I still do not understand why people consider smartphones revolutionary. It is revolutionary that everyone has one on them at all times, but the gadgets themselves aren't all that.
I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk, and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature ideas.
Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend that should go away.
Isn't that where domain expertise comes in? It sounds pretty sensible and important to me to try to imagine various realistic failure modes and preemptively try to prevent them. To not let the website go down, pre-empting hard drive failure or DDoS makes a lot more sense than worrying about network cables spontaneously disintegrating, or the outbreak of nuclear war.
Edit: I'm not downplaying the importance of prevention
Seems to me that bugs is then a high risk in that project. And to prevent or reduce the number of failures, the project needs an auto test suite
Typically, everyone's excited at the start of a project and people are reticent to share their fears (especially if there are bosses around).
A pre-mortem gives them the mental freedom to share their fears as they are asked to imagine they are in a future where the project has turned out to be a disaster).
The last thing you want to do is the first thing you should do
> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?
Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)
Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.
So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?
You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?
I think this works anyway. Another example:
Goal: Fly to Spain
Question: How do I fly to Spain?
The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)
("How do I not not fly to Spain?")
How do I not lose money? - Don’t gamble.
How do I not not make money? - Take more risks.
A true inversion with a negative works better than the not-not structure, and it is easier to wrap your head around.
The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?". Your result would be "how do I avoid not keeping my pilots alive?", which is just the original question.
Pretty much that, except in any long-standing industry, it's framed as "what does kill pilots?" and "Lets study the last few decades of pilot mortality data and identify causes". Safety standard improve one Air-crash Investigation at a time.
"The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" by Sidney Dekker is probably where to start with that field.
Wald instead flipped it and recommended armor be added to the areas with less or no combat damage on returning airplanes because the shot-up areas were the parts of the plane that COULD withstand damage, since the plane had made it back.
If you want to be in Spain, why aren't you there right now?
In general, instead of "how do we achieve $X?" the inversion is "what is stopping $X?" or "what would cause $X to fail?".
If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill you.
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
But this insight won’t be in any book. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that’s a good thing.”
- What’s in focus? (What’s out of focus?)
- What’s in light? (What’s in shadow?)
- Where is the light coming from? (Where is the light not coming from?)
- What’s in the foreground? (What’s in the background?)
- Positive space / negative space
Similar things end up happening in audio. You want to set up a microphone to record something, it’s usually better to point the microphone away from the noise that you don’t want, instead of towards the sound that you do want. When you’re EQing, you usually want to remove unwanted frequencies rather than boost wanted frequencies. Etc.
Surveying an area I’m familiar with from a weird perspective always sparks new ideas for me because I almost always also see something new in that familiar place because of the positioning.
In doing so, it helps me unblock other thought processes.
In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet, the high level system functions are considered and a Functional Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those functions failing. Then one can add requirements and architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment is developed.
In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.'
Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly 'about face'.
The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left side is visible, i.e. on the outside.
Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
"Man mus immer umkehren"
with
"One always has to return"
Another thing we could do is write a feature request — which often over-specifies what should be done in a classic up-front design way — like a bug report, which usually only specifies a goal which we can't yet achieve, rather than how it should be achieved.
Yet another thing which would be interesting is TDD-style tickets. Rather than simply explaining the happy path to a goal they could explain the various things which could prevent someone from reaching that goal: invalid inputs, missing permissions, inaccessible dependencies, missing UI, etc.
What's preventing me from being richer, more powerful, more famous?
Perhaps you'd give up privacy, autonomy, free time. That might be all it takes to realize that happiness and performance are not always, or even often, the same.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
What does this say about the tractability of enumerating possible failures? :P
That is:
Standard: Start with standard, commonly applicable piece of advice. Lists of these can be found many places (for example, "to achieve success, avoid failure").
Paradoxical: Reformulate in terminology that's opaque, paradoxical, jargony and truncated (OPJART!)
Fixation: Claim that's always true, that it's best thing since sliced bread. etc. Your audience will recoil but some of them will work and realize there's some good advice in your stream of jargon. And having worked at getting this understanding, they will value it more and be happy to endorse the exaggerated value you're assigning to your jargon and your point, which is, indeed, something that is true moderately often.
STA-PAR-FI! This phrase can launch a thousand consultancies.
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umkehren
Edit: fixed typo.
It also seems the common english translation: https://www.google.com/search?q=invert+always+invert
To be fair though:
While his Wikipedia entry has the sentence:
> He is said to have told his students that when looking for a research topic, one should 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), reflecting his belief that inverting known results can open up new fields for research, for example inverting elliptical integrals and focusing on the nature of elliptic and theta functions.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi#Scien...
The attributed source for that, a paper from 1916, differs in the translation:
https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1916-23-01/S0002-9904-1916...
> The great mathematician Jacobi is said to have inculcated upon his students the dictum: Man muss immer umkehren. One must always seek a converse, turn a thought the other end to.
https://dict.leo.org/german-english/umkehren
It seems to have a strong sense around "returning to a previous place / state", not just "turn around". Which is where the mathematical use of "invert" comes from, because an inverted function swaps the domain and range. But also words like "repent" being a possible translation; to repent of your actions and thus (ideally) return to a previous state of innocence.
"If something can go wrong it will go wrong."
There are earlier references - but Murphy's Law is associated with high g-force testing just after WWII. The team used Murphy's law to anticipate every possible failure and prevent it before the experiment ended in death. There is nothing like death to sharpen your focus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_linear_program
https://web.stanford.edu/~ashishg/msande111/notes/chapter4.p...
* Herta Herzog laid the foundation for the basis of modern media psychology, but simply inverting.
What do media do to people --> What people do with media.
This shifts focus from strong media influences to human being an active consumer of media.
* In statistical testing is fundamentally based on the principle of inversion, if the resulting statistic can be used as an evidence to reject the null or favour the alternative.
It (inversion) is one of the most powerful methods of mathematical discovery (or invention) ever devised, and Abel was the first human being to use it consciously as an engine of research. "You must always invert," as Jacobi said when asked the secret of his mathematical discoveries.I would apply the 80/20 rule from both directions (so in theory perhaps spending up to 40% effort) to get the best chance of success. And really, you can't invert without first knowing enough about the problem you're trying to solve.
(admittedly that's a bit anecdotal, maybe someone with more knowledge can give better details on that statement)
And probably life itself.
Good article from Nassim Taleb [0] relating to rationality/irrationality and survival...
"survival comes first, truth, understanding and science later"
which would seem to relate to a the simpler model for AI centered around preventing disaster being more robust than trying to solve some form of maximization while risking ruin.
In some ways it is arguably better to be paranoid/"irrational" about risk than try to be perfectly sufficiently rational
"I have shown that, unless one has an overblown and a very unrealistic representation of some tail risks, one cannot survive –all it takes is a single event for the irreversible exit from among us. Is selective paranoia “irrational” if those individuals and populations who don’t have it end up dying or extinct, respectively?"
[0] https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rational...
EXAMPLE: Instead of doing a full-blown NDA, parties could agree, in an email exchange, that Party A will keep Party B's confidential information secret in accordance with the [name] Confidential Information Clause — presto, an enforceable NDA (in most jurisdictions).
I'll be posting the whole thing online for free under some kind of Creative Commons license, in part for my students, and in part in the hope that if people start to use it, eventually I won't have to spend so much time reviewing random contract language for clients.
The current corpus includes clauses for confidentiality; consulting services; software warranties and disclaimers; limitations of liability; terms of service; payment terms; referral payments; channel partnerships; consulting services; indemnity ground rules; and other things.
I'm trying to follow (part of) the Unix philosophy: Each clause should do basically one thing, and do it well, with as few dependencies as possible (maximize orthogonality).
The materials also have numerous planning checklists for spotting issues that can come up.
The clauses incorporate typical wish-list items that work for both sides. In a prior life, I was the general counsel for a software company, and customers' lawyers liked that balanced approach very much because it reduced their workload; our sales people likewise liked the fact that the balanced approach helped get us to signature sooner, without screwing around with anatomy-measuring, "art of the deal" game playing.
The clauses are extensively annotated with citations to real-world cases where problems arose — sometimes, big problems — explaining how the clause language seeks to avoid the problems, again in ways that work for both parties.
For improved readability, I'm using Python-like indentation to avoid long, wall-of-words paragraphs of dense legalese. (That's proving very popular with my clients' business people.)
HERE'S THE QUESTION: Apropos of the "Invert" subject of the posted article, should this contract framework be positioned as:
1. a vitamin — "balanced, readable terms to help you get workable contracts to signature sooner,"
or
2. aspirin - "learn from others' failures by adopting the [name] framework in your contracts."
All input gratefully received.
Think of the user's experience and come up with the key questions your audience will need to ask to get the job done like you outlined above and create an easy to use user flow with modern UI controls and basically reduce, anticipate, and outsource the complexity at all stages. What are the most common workflows you can automate with a wizard of questions? Think completing your taxes with Intuit type of experience that has come a long way to be user centered and anticipate answers to all questions they might have and ask.
It'll be an online book, in vanilla HTML with some CSS styling and just a bit of Javascript (to show/hide commentary).
Your basic one liner might be something like "Create real, legally valid contracts over email"
Expanding on that you could say "Use our standard library of legal clauses to build your own contracts in a safe and legally defensible way. Each clause is designed to serve a single purpose and offer each party fair, battle-tested legal protections. The library itself is free, open source and licensed under the Creative Commons. It can be used by simply referencing the clause by name in any document, even email. Every clause is annotated with plain English explanations, so it is easy for all parties to understand what your contract says. Go _here_ for a quick tutorial on how to use library, including a primer on the top N most important clauses for business deals"
Later you might want to explain why you made this "I/we made this because we spent thousands of hours reviewing the same boilerplate contract language, fixing the same mistakes and watching the same disagreements play out between the parties. Taking a good idea from software engineering, we set out to create a trusted standard library for building legal contracts that would solve these problems once and for all. The library was created by professional contract lawyers and academics with decades of experience, so every word is backed by mountains of case law and legal precedent. We're confident that the library can be the legal backbone of your next deal."
Exactly — thanks!
Inversion seems like a misnomer and is easily conflated with the logical/mathematical meaning.
[1] - Competing Against Luck - https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...
Solving smaller problems in the service of the bigger one is as powerful as flipping the problem upside down.
Edit: sorry, didn't mean to volunteer anyone else! Just ask those of us who make ourselves available for it, you know us as the people who are constantly warning doom.
What if I started with “ what are some of things preventing adoption?“ Would I be incorrectly inverting? But you did say always invert.That is, the benefit is not focusing on (not (not A)) instead of A -- with the right choice of A you can flip those, but rather when everyone is thinking about A, see if a double inversion offers new solutions. My 2c
Munger spots binary hierarchical oppositions, such as between forwards and backwards, seeking and avoiding, or intelligence and stupidity, and displaces the privileged term, what we take implicitly to be primary, by inviting us to consider the secondary term in its own right, as another endpoint of the same relationship.
(Is this process somewhat like Category Theory's displacement of objects by consideration of the arrows between them? Attacking problems by inverting to generate coproblems?)
Inversion: what can makes this project not finished smoothly
My answer: if my boss died
Me: ...
Edit: and that's why coronavirus is so devastating to businesses. Primarily because it's probability is so small with high severity and it's out of our control.
* On a side note, I really have thought about it once, that my ex boss's diet is so horrible I'm afraid he will caught a disease. Thankfully it didn't happened in my 4 years of working there.