Podcast appearances and mentions of Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton has had a 50+ year romance with human aspects of technology, interaction design, telepresence, multi-modal adaptive designs, access, and the nature of innovation. Morphing from musician to designer/researcher he has practiced his craft at the University of Toronto, Xerox PARC, Alias Research, SGI and Microsoft Research. Awards include four honourary doctorates, co-recipient of an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievement, ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, and Fellow of the ACM. In Dec. 2023 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. Writer, speaker and consultant, he is also an Adjunct Professor, University of Toronto, and Distinguished Professor of Industrial Design, TU/Eindhoven. He is currently largely occupied curating his collection of over 900 artifacts documenting the history of interactive technologies. Outside of work, he has a passion for his family, books and the outdoors.

Nick Fink is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research in Seattle through his company, Craft & Rigor.   Listen to learn about: Core disciplines of UX design What is interaction design? What does it mean to be a UX designer today? The challenges UX and design face in today's business environment   Our Guest Nick Finck is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. He strives to improve people's lives through crafting well-designed experiences that matter. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research through Craft & Rigor in Seattle. Before this, he was in design and research leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Ubermind, Deloitte Digital, projekt202, and his own agency Blue Flavor. Nick's contributions to the UX community go far and wide. He is an experienced public speaker and has given over 102 talks in 10 countries. He has helped countless industry professionals and career transitioners as a design coach and mentor. Earlier in his career, he was the publisher of Digital Web Magazine, an online magazine for web professionals   Show Highlights [02:44] Nick takes us in the wayback machine, back to dialup days and his start in web development. [03:53] Moving from web development into web design, and following that thread into interaction design and UX. [05:53] Nick talks about creating his model highlighting the core disciplines of UX. [07:27] Starting off with user research and understanding your users. [07:53] Communicating through content. [08:12] Adding structure and organization. [08:41] Designing user interactions based on user behavior. [09:38] Evaluating the work. [11:29] Changes Nick would make to his model today. [13:41] What's happening in UX design today. [15:39] What does it mean to be a UX designer today? [16:02] People are often confused as to what UX design actually is. [16:50] How the confusion has fractured the UX community. [20:45] UX and design teams. [21:12] The concept of design maturity. [23:04] There is a lack of resources and transitional roles for a designer's career path into management. [24:56] Nick's “Big Wheel” analogy for design in organizations. [26:00] You probably don't have enough designers. [27:02] There is more to UX than UI design. [27:46] The disappointment of companies not giving UX design the time and space it needs to really shine. [28:34] You cannot do effective UX design without user research. [30:41] Form ever follows function. [31:55] UX is about helping users solve problems. [32:40] Dawan talks about how Indi Young approaches user research. [33:07] Understanding someone's purpose as the starting point for design. [34:10] Nick shares an example from his work on the importance of understanding someone's story and journey. [38:23] A Miro Moment. [40:51] Things Nick wishes companies knew about UX. [41:08] UX is not just about the product. [42:54] Rethinking how your company operates and taking the time to examine legacy tech and processes. [44:45] Bill Buxton's talk about technology and innovation in technology. [47:06] Nick's advice for company executives when it comes to design. [48:49] Where to learn more about Nick and his work. [49:31] What Nick does in his business advisory consulting work. [52:34] Sharing what a “yes” would look like to plant the seed for future change.   Links Nick on Twitter Nick on LinkedIn Nick's website Craft and Rigor on Twitter Design Career Network, How to build a well-rounded, effective design team User Defenders Podcast: 036: No Designer Left Behind with Nick Finck Bill Buxton at TechFest 2013: Designing for Ubiquitous Computing     Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like UX + Into, Through, and (Almost) Out of Design with Kara DeFrias — DT101 E103 UX + Navigating Rough Design Waters + Design Leadership with Dennis Lenard — DT101 E82 UX Research + Research Teams + UX Camp DC with Glennette Clark — DT101 E80

Nick Fink is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research in Seattle through his company, Craft & Rigor. Listen to learn about: >> Core disciplines of UX design >> What is interaction design? >> What does it mean to be a UX designer today? >> The challenges UX and design face in today's business environment Our Guest Nick Finck is a design and research leader with over two decades of experience in the industry. He strives to improve people's lives through crafting well-designed experiences that matter. Nick currently consults and advises businesses on design and research through Craft & Rigor in Seattle. Before this, he was in design and research leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Ubermind, Deloitte Digital, projekt202, and his own agency Blue Flavor. Nick's contributions to the UX community go far and wide. He is an experienced public speaker and has given over 102 talks in 10 countries. He has helped countless industry professionals and career transitioners as a design coach and mentor. Earlier in his career, he was the publisher of Digital Web Magazine, an online magazine for web professionals Show Highlights [02:44] Nick takes us in the wayback machine, back to dialup days and his start in web development. [03:53] Moving from web development into web design, and following that thread into interaction design and UX. [05:53] Nick talks about creating his model highlighting the core disciplines of UX. [07:27] Starting off with user research and understanding your users. [07:53] Communicating through content. [08:12] Adding structure and organization. [08:41] Designing user interactions based on user behavior. [09:38] Evaluating the work. [11:29] Changes Nick would make to his model today. [13:41] What's happening in UX design today. [15:39] What does it mean to be a UX designer today? [16:02] People are often confused as to what UX design actually is. [16:50] How the confusion has fractured the UX community. [20:45] UX and design teams. [21:12] The concept of design maturity. [23:04] There is a lack of resources and transitional roles for a designer's career path into management. [24:56] Nick's “Big Wheel” analogy for design in organizations. [26:00] You probably don't have enough designers. [27:02] There is more to UX than UI design. [27:46] The disappointment of companies not giving UX design the time and space it needs to really shine. [28:34] You cannot do effective UX design without user research. [30:41] Form ever follows function. [31:55] UX is about helping users solve problems. [32:40] Dawan talks about how Indi Young approaches user research. [33:07] Understanding someone's purpose as the starting point for design. [34:10] Nick shares an example from his work on the importance of understanding someone's story and journey. [38:23] A Miro Moment. [40:51] Things Nick wishes companies knew about UX. [41:08] UX is not just about the product. [42:54] Rethinking how your company operates and taking the time to examine legacy tech and processes. [44:45] Bill Buxton's talk about technology and innovation in technology. [47:06] Nick's advice for company executives when it comes to design. [48:49] Where to learn more about Nick and his work. [49:31] What Nick does in his business advisory consulting work. [52:34] Sharing what a “yes” would look like to plant the seed for future change. Links Nick on Twitter Nick on LinkedIn Nick's website Craft and Rigor on Twitter Design Career Network, How to build a well-rounded, effective design team User Defenders Podcast: 036: No Designer Left Behind with Nick Finck Bill Buxton at TechFest 2013: Designing for Ubiquitous Computing Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like UX + Into, Through, and (Almost) Out of Design with Kara DeFrias — DT101 E103 UX + Navigating Rough Design Waters + Design Leadership with Dennis Lenard — DT101 E82 UX Research + Research Teams + UX Camp DC with Glennette Clark — DT101 E80

Original text from Macworld, February 1991, page 73. Macworld published a correction confirming the Outbound 2000 series was indeed FCC-certified for home use. If you're just gagging to experience the IsoPoint/TrackBar, you can buy one today from Contour Design! HCI guru Bill Buxton on the IsoPoint. Contour Design on YouTube is all RollerMouse, all the time. Ad for the Outbound 2000-series notebooks, and another where they push the Outbound's upgradability advantage to PowerBook shoppers. Outbound 2000-series notebook reviews: [Dec 1991, Sep 1992]. MacUser only did capsule reviews of the 2000 series. :-( March 1993 obituary for Outbound. September 1993: PerFit service and upgrades available. Enjoy some gorgeous photos of the original Outbound Laptop System and 2000s from applerooter.net.

Bill Buxton is driven by his curiosity, imagination, and his need to embrace the human how of technology and change. As an advocate for innovation and design, Bill is a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, author of Sketching User Experiences, and an award-winning visionary that the Hollywood Reporter named him one of the ten influential innovators in Hollywood. He sits down with Joe Jackman to discuss the ethical decisions that lead technology, powerful design thinking that breaks away from the status quo, and his advice to young men and women as they embark on innovating the future. Get inside his human-centric belief system that has changed the way we think about technology and its impact on our lives. 

Now, you may be wondering why I have called you all here today.The reason, of course, is this week's episode of Nerds Amalgamated. This time, the Nerds discuss the hidden genetic code in POLG. Not PUBG, POLG. And these hidden genes aren't blue. Check out the full article, it's a hell of a read.The Australian Parliament is taking a look at regulating lootboxes. This will get the Libertarians wound up. But will the Australian government actually listen to their committee this time, or will Professor and DJ get to complain about politics again?DJ thinks Mrs Doubtfire will lose her charm on Broadway. But anyone who can pull off an 18 second sex change has to be fun to watch.This week's game section involves Professor gushing over Black Mesa and DJ taking a hike in Walking Simulator.As always, stay hydrated and don't get COVID-19.Overlapping Coding Sequence -https://bmcgenet.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12863-020-0828-7?fbclid=IwAR3qh1R84zySNlOSui0duObYGZ7IL7dilCynYFSmZPshoA-811ngh4xeLSIAustralian Parliamentary committee’s recommendations in protecting the age of innocence -https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-03-06-australian-parliamentary-committee-recommends-loot-box-regulationMrs Doubtfire on Broadway - https://comicbook.com/irl/2020/03/09/mrs-doubtfire-broadway-musical-first-look-preview-photos-rob-mcclure/ Games PlayedProfessor– Black Mesa – https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/Rating – 10/5DJ– Walking Simulator - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1214280/Walking_Simulator/Rating – 4/5Other topics discussedE3 2020 cancelled - https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/03/11/e3-2020-reportedly-cancelled-due-coronavirus-concerns/Tom Hanks & Rita Wilson tested positive for Coronavirus- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/tom-hanks-coronavirus-actor-and-wife-rita-wilson-test-positive-in-australiaUniversity student goes to nightspot after being tested positive for Coronavirus- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-11/coranavirus-queensland-uq-student-went-to-brisbane-nightspot/12047000Rugby fan tested positive for Coronavirus - https://www.foxsports.com.au/rugby/super-rugby/teams/melbourne-rebels/melbourne-rebels-rugby-fan-tests-positive-for-coronavirus/news-story/40b2f35674ef83f349b269ccbf50f069Vacanti Mouse (The Vacanti mouse was a laboratory mouse that had what looked like a human ear grown on its back.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_mouseMutations on flies…legs-on-the-head fly- https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/body-altering-mutations-in-humans-and-flies/Protecting The Innocence report- https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/committees/reportrep/024436/toc_pdf/Protectingtheageofinnocence.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf Plain tobacco packaging (also known as generic, neutral, standardised or homogeneous packaging, is packaging of tobacco products, typically cigarettes, without any branding (colours, imagery, corporate logos and trademarks), including only the brand name in a mandated size, font and place on the pack, in addition to the health warnings and any other legally mandated information such as toxic constituents and tax-paid stamps.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_tobacco_packagingNBA 2K20 filled with loot boxes and slot machines- https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/28/20837104/nba-2k20-myteam-loot-boxes-ball-drop-triple-threat-slot-machines-trailer-pc-xbox-one-ps4-switchTeam Ninja confesses that microtransactions are involved in changing hair colour in Dead or Alive 6- https://www.bleedingcool.com/2020/03/09/team-ninja-admits-hair-color-microtransactions-in-dead-or-alive-6-were-bad/British parliamentary committee recommends banning loot box sales to children- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-09-11-parliamentary-committee-recommends-banning-loot-box-sales-to-childrenEA calls its loot boxes are ‘surprise mechanics’ in British parliamentary committee - https://www.polygon.com/2019/6/21/18691760/ea-vp-loot-boxes-surprise-mechanics-ethical-enjoyableEA’s CEO Andrew Wilson compares loot boxes to baseball cards- https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2019/06/20/ea-loot-boxes-discussed-by-the-companys-ceo-andrew-wilson/List of Disney animated to live action remakes- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_live-action_remakes_of_animated_filmsRob McClure (American actor. He is best known for his roles in musical theatre. He won a Theatre World Award and was nominated for the 2013 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance in the title role of the musical Chaplin. In 2019, on Broadway, he played the role of Adam in Beetlejuice, the Musical, his seventh Broadway production.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_McClureMore promotional pictures of Mrs Doubtfire the musical- https://ew.com/theater/mrs-doubtfire-broadway-rob-mcclure-first-look/Max Von Sydow played as Liet Kynes in the 1984 Dune movie- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_secondary_characters#Liet-KynesThere is no vitamin C in Ribena proven by school kids in New Zealand- https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/no-vitamin-c-in-ribena/news-story/d0b544dc3a2dada6e6cd42a41ea87090Chuck Norris facts (satirical factoids about American martial artist and actor Chuck Norris that have become an Internet phenomenon and as a result have become widespread in popular culture.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts#Prominent_mentionsDNA (Red Dwarf episode, the episode revolves around the genetic engineering technology that the crew discover.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_(Red_Dwarf)Red Dwarf: The Promised Land (upcoming 2020 British science-fiction comedy television film and the thirteenth installment of the British science-fiction sitcom,Red Dwarf.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf:_The_Promised_LandRed Dwarf : Back to Earth (three-part miniseries continuation of the British science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf. It was the first television outing for Red Dwarf in over ten years, and features the characters Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Lister.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf:_Back_to_EarthDave Lister interview by Absolute Radio about new Red Dwarf series- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ciigJ6RBIRed Dwarf (US pilot episode for an American version known as Red Dwarf USA)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf#U.S._versionLancing with Myself (TNC Podcast)- https://thatsnotcanon.com/lancingwithmyselfpodcastScared Sh*tless (TNC Podcast)- https://thatsnotcanon.com/scaredshitlesspodcast Shout Outs 7 March 2020 – Earl Pomerantz passed away - https://variety.com/2020/tv/obituaries-people-news/earl-pomerantz-dies-dead-mary-tyler-moore-show-1203527993/Earl Pomerantz, an Emmy-winning television writer who worked on numerous sitcoms over the years, died Saturday. Over the course of his career, Pomerantz wrote scripts for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Rhoda,” “The Tony Randall Show,” “Phyllis,” “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “The Cosby Show,” which he also ran for a period of time. He also was creator and executive producer on “Major Dad” and “Best of the West” and served as a creative consultant on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Lateline” and “According to Jim.” He won two Emmy Awards, one in 1976 for serving on the writing team of “The Lily Tomlin Special” and another in 1985 for “The Cosby Show.” In what would end up being Pomerantz’s final blog post, the writer expressed gratitude toward his audience. Titled “Intermission,” the post says the following: “Troubling eye problem. Can’t write. Be back when I can. In the meantime, thanks for the company. I’ve never had more fun writing. So long. And as The Cisco Kid used to say, ‘See you soon, Ha!'” He died at the age of 75. 8 March 2020 – Max Von Sydow passed away - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/movies/max-von-sydow-dead.htmlMax von Sydow, the inimitable screen actor who starred in classic films like The Seventh Seal and The Exorcist, has died. The actor, who was born Carl Adolf von Sydow, studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre before becoming an internationally renowned star. He changed his name while serving in the military prior to acting school, fashioning himself after a flea named Max that he had played in a sketch. Von Sydow would go on to have a career that spanned more than six decades. He was an actor’s actor, starring in offbeat sci-fi like Dune, horror classics like The Exorcist, and adult dramedies like Hannah and Her Sisters. He earned two Oscar nominations along the way: a best-actor nod in 1989 for Pelle the Conqueror, and a best-supporting-actor nod in 2012 for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. But the prestige performer never shied away from mainstream fare either, playing memorable roles in projects like Flash Gordon and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as TV hits like Game of Thrones—on which he played the omniscient Three-Eyed Raven. “You see, I had an odd upbringing,” von Sydow once said. “My father was a scholar, a professor in the town where I was born, and his subject was folklore. He was a master at telling stories, folktales, and adventures. I was very shy as a child and heard more fairy tales than the average child because of my father. I think this and my shyness prompted my imagination and led to an interest in make believe.” He died in Provence at the age of 90. 9 March 2020 – World record Smurf gathering – https://comicbook.com/irl/2020/03/09/smurfs-world-record-gathering-france-coronavirus/Over 3,500 people dressed in blue met up in Landerneau in the western part of France to smash the previous world record set last year in Germany. 3,549 Smurfs fans showed up for the record-breaking event on Saturday. The event came in just under the wire in terms of social gatherings as France banned gatherings of more than 1,000 people. For Smurfs fans, however, the threat of the coronavirus wasn't ever a real concern. Last February, a gathering of nearly 3,000 Smurfs fans came together in Lauchringen, Germany to break the 2009-set record of 2,510 people dressed as Smurfs. With the German group's world record being short-lived, it remains to be seen if another group will make the attempt again in 2021 with an even larger gathering. "We figured we wouldn't worry, and that as French people we wouldn't give up on our attempt to break the record," one Smurfs fan said. "Now we're champions of the world." "There's no risk, were Smurfs" they added. "Yes, we're going to Smurferize the coronavirus."Remembrances10 March 1982 – Minoru Shirota - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_ShirotaJapanese microbiologist. In the 1920s Shirota identified a strain of lactic acid bacteria that is part of normal gut flora that he originally called Lactobacillus casei Shirota; it appeared to help contain the growth of harmful bacteria in the gut. The strain was later reclassified as being Lactobacillus paracasei Shirota. He founded the company Yakult Honsha in 1935 to sell beverages containing the strain, branded Yakult. He died from dysentery at the age of 82 in Tokyo Japan. 10 March 2012 – F. Sherwood Rowland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Sherwood_RowlandFrank Sherwood "Sherry"Rowland, American Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research was on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. His best-known work was the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion. Rowland theorized that man made organic compound gases combine with solar radiation and decompose in the stratosphere, releasing atoms of chlorine and chlorine monoxide that are individually able to destroy large numbers of ozone molecules. Rowland's research, first published in Nature magazine in 1974, initiated a scientific investigation of the problem. In 1978, a first ban on CFC-based aerosols in spray cans was issued in the United States. The actual production did however not stop and was soon on the old levels. It took till the 1980s to allow for a global regulation policy. Rowland performed many measurements of the atmosphere. One experiment included collecting air samples at various cities and locations around the globe to determine CCl3F North-South mixing. By measuring the concentrations at different latitudes, Rowland was able to see that CCl3F was mixing between hemispheres quite rapidly. Rowland and his colleagues interacted both with the public and the political side and suggested various solutions, which allowed to step wise reduce the CFC impact. CFC emissions were regulated first within Canada, the United States, Sweden and Norway. In the 1980s, the Vienna Agreement and the Montreal Protocol allowed for global regulation. He died from complications of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 84 in Newport beach, California. 10 March 2012 – Bert R. Bulkin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_R._BulkinBertram Raoul Bulkin, American aeronautical engineer who participated in the first United States photo-reconnaissance satellite programs and is best known for his role in building the Hubble Space Telescope. He was assigned to the company's proposal to build the Support Systems Module or basic spacecraft for the Space Telescope or Large Space Telescope (ST or LST; later renamed the Hubble Space Telescope or HST). Early on, observers noted the design continuity between the systems modules for the Hexagon and the LST. Bulkin described the April 24, 1990 launch of the Hubble Space Telescope as "like watching your mother-in-law go over a cliff in your brand-new Cadillac." Asked at the time of the launch what scientists hoped to see with the new instrument, he said simply, "God." As director emeritus of scientific space programs for Lockheed, Bulkin served on several national scientific advisory committees, including panels for three of the four space telescopes in NASA's Great Observatories Program: the Hubble, the Chandra, and the Spitzer. He died from a heart attack at the age of 82 in Lodi, California. Famous Birthdays10 March 1923 – Val Logsdon Fitch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Logsdon_FitchAmerican nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry. He participated in the drop testing of mock atomic bombs that was conducted at Wendover Army Air Field and the Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station, and worked at the Trinity site, where he witnessed the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945. He was born in Merriman, Nebraska. 10 March 1940 – Chuck Norris - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_NorrisCarlos Ray "Chuck" Norris, American martial artist, actor, film producer and screenwriter. After serving in the United States Air Force, Norris won many martial arts championships and later founded his own discipline Chun Kuk Do. Norris is a black belt in Tang Soo Do,Brazilian jiu jitsu and Judo. Shortly after, in Hollywood, Norris trained celebrities in martial arts. Norris went on to appear in a minor role in the spy film The Wrecking Crew. Friend and fellow actor Bruce Lee invited him to play one of the main villains in Way of the Dragon. While Norris continued acting, friend and student Steve McQueen suggested to him to take it seriously. Norris took the starring role in the action film Breaker! Breaker! which turned a profit. His second lead Good Guys Wear Black became a hit, and Norris became a popular action film star. Norris would go on to star in a streak of bankable independently-made action and martial arts films, with A Force of One, The Octagon, and An Eye for an Eye. This made Norris an international celebrity. In the 1990s, he played the title role in the long running television series Walker, Texas Ranger, from 1993 until 2001. Norris made his last film appearance to date in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables 2. In 2005, Norris found a new fame on the internet with Chuck Norris facts became an internet meme documenting humorous, fictional and often absurd feats of strength and endurance. Although Norris himself did not produce the "facts", he was hired to endorse many products that incorporated Chuck Norris facts in advertising, the phenomenon resulted in six books (two of them New York Times Best Sellers), two video games, and several appearances on talk shows, such as Late Night with Conan O'Brien where read the facts or participated in sketches. He was born in Ryan, Oklahoma. 10 March 1949 – Bill Buxton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_BuxtonWilliam Arthur Stewart Buxton, Canadian computer scientist and designer. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. He is known for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field. Buxton's scientific contributions include applying Fitts' law to human-computer interaction and the invention and analysis of the marking menu (together with Gordon Kurtenbach). He pioneered multi-touch interfaces and music composition tools in the late 1970s, while working in the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto. In 2007, he published Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta. 10 March 1956 – Robert Llewellyn - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_LlewellynBritish actor, comedian, presenter and writer. He plays the mechanoidKryten in the TV sci-fi sitcomRed Dwarf and formerly presented the TV engineering gameshow Scrapheap Challenge. He also presents a YouTube series, Fully Charged. Llewellyn's involvement with Red Dwarf came about as a result of his appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performing in his comedy, Mammon, Robot Born of Woman; this show was about a robot who, as he becomes more human, begins to behave increasingly badly. This was seen by Paul Jackson, producer of Red Dwarf, and he was invited to audition for the role of Kryten. In the early days of Red Dwarf he would arrive to do makeup many hours before the rest of the actors; however, that changed as time progressed as his fellow actors "have a little bit more help in the makeup department than they used to". In an interview with The Skeptic Zone, Llewellyn mentioned that he needs a special pair of glasses to be able to read the script with the Kryten mask on. In Red Dwarf, he worked hard to get the more technically difficult lines right because the show tried to be factually accurate in reference to scientific theories. He was also the only British cast member originally to participate in the American version of Red Dwarf, though other actors such as Craig Charles and Chris Barrie were also approached to reprise their roles. He was born in Northampton,Northamptonshire. Events of Interest10 March 241 BC – Battle of the Aegates: The Romans sink the Carthaginian fleet bringing the First Punic War to an end. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_AegatesThe Battle of the Aegates was a naval battle fought on 10 March 241 BC between the fleets of Carthage and Rome during the First Punic War. It took place among the Aegates Islands, off the western coast of the island of Sicily. The Carthaginians were commanded by Hanno, and the Romans were under the overall authority of Gaius Lutatius Catulus, but Quintus Valerius Falto had the battle command. It was the final battle of the 23-year-long First Punic War between Rome and Carthage. The Roman army had been blockading the Carthaginians in their last strongholds on the west coast of Sicily for several years. Almost bankrupt, the Romans borrowed money to build a naval fleet, which they used to extend the blockade to the sea. The Carthaginians assembled a larger fleet which they intended to use to run supplies into Sicily. It would then embark much of the Carthaginian army stationed there as marines. It was intercepted by the Roman fleet and in a hard-fought battle the better-trained Romans defeated the undermanned and ill-trained Carthaginian fleet. As a direct result, Carthage sued for peace and agreed to the Treaty of Lutatius, by which Carthage surrendered Sicily to Rome and paid substantial reparations. Henceforth Rome was the leading military power in the western Mediterranean, and increasingly the Mediterranean region.10 March 1972 – Silent Running came out in theatres - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_RunningSilent Running is a 1972 environmental-themed American post-apocalyptic science fiction film. It is the directorial debut of Douglas Trumbull, and stars Bruce Dern,Cliff Potts,Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint. The plot according to IMDB "In a future where all flora is extinct on Earth, an astronaut is given orders to destroy the last of Earth's botany, kept in a greenhouse aboard a spacecraft." Douglas Trumbull says that he learned how to be a director while working on this film, as he had no training or experience in the job. Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, credits Silent Running as a major inspiration for his show. Bruce Dern plays a botanist in this film. His daughter Laura Dern plays a paleo-botanist in Jurassic Park.10 March 2000 – The Nasdaq Composite stock market index peaks at 5132.52, signalling the beginning of the end of the dot-com boom. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASDAQ_Composite#Dot-com_boom_and_bustThere were multiple things contributing to this Dot-com boom and bust. Some optimists thought the internet and World Wide Web would be more significant to business than any kind of Industrial Revolution in the past, possibly enabling us to achieve a Technological Singularity. More pessimistic types were concerned that business would require massive technology replacement to achieve Y2K compatibility. The 2000s (decade) brought a mix of pessimistic news stemming from the Early 2000s recession, the September 11 attacks and the impending Afghan War along with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Follow us on Facebook - Page - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/ - Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/440485136816406/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094 RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rssInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/nerds_amalgamated/General Enquiries Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.comRate & Review us on Podchaser - https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/nerds-amalgamated-623195

QRCA book review editor Kay Corry Aubrey interviews Bill Buxton who is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology.His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, filmmaking and music. Buxton’s research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology-mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. He is helping to bring design to an equal footing with technology at Microsoft. His recent book, Sketching User Experiences, was recently named by Strategy+Business Quarterly as, “the best innovation book of this year.”

Is there a morality to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton about his thoughts on what software can do and what our responsibility as software creators is. Bill talks about Melvin Kranzberg's Laws of Technology, starting with the idea that technology is neither good nor evil, nor is it neutral. Ultimately software is a tool, and people decide how that tool is going to be used. We shape tools, but tools ultimately shape us as well. It's always wise to check in on what your shape is. Lots of great thinking!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

Is there a morality to software development? Carl and Richard talk to Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton about his thoughts on what software can do and what our responsibility as software creators is. Bill talks about Melvin Kranzberg's Laws of Technology, starting with the idea that technology is neither good nor evil, nor is it neutral. Ultimately software is a tool, and people decide how that tool is going to be used. We shape tools, but tools ultimately shape us as well. It's always wise to check in on what your shape is. Lots of great thinking!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

  The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius famously exhorted his pupils to study the past if they would divine the future. In 2018, we get the same advice from a decidedly more modern, but equally philosophical Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher in the HCI group at Microsoft Research. In addition to his pioneering work in computer science and design, Bill Buxton has spent the past several decades amassing a collection of more than a thousand artifacts that chronicle the history of human computer interaction for the very purpose of informing the future of human computer interaction. Today, in a wide-ranging interview, Bill Buxton explains why Marcel Proust and TS Eliot can be instructive for computer scientists, why the long nose of innovation is essential to success in technology design, why problem-setting is more important than problem-solving, and why we must remember, as we design our technologies, that every technological decision we make is an ethical decision as well.

Bill Buxton has spent a long career across the spans of the professional workforce. Currently, he is the chairman of Vistage, one of the top leadership development organizations in the country. Bill was one of the few to leave his rural midwestern town, and has since worked across myriad professional industries. We talk about the philosophies of great leadership, the importance of self-development, how to give and take advice, how to lead the best leaders, and much more! And perhaps my favorite single quote from any prior interview: "Leadership is not what you say, it is not even what you do, and it is certainly not what you say you do. Leadership is the consequences of what you say and do."

In this episode, Kat Holmes, principal designer, and Bill Buxton, principal researcher, discuss design philosophy and why they believe the next breakthrough in tech will be a reinvention of the relationship between our devices.

Speaker: Bill BuxtonIn 1991 Mark Weiser published what is now a classic paper, The Computer for the 21st Century. In it, he laid the foundation for what has become known as Ubiquitous Computing, or UbiComp. Ironically, by having the word "Computer" in the singular, the title of his paper is at odds with the content, since the whole point is that we will not have just one or two computers; rather we will have hundreds, and deal with hundreds or thousands of others as we go about our day-to-day lives. Furthermore, despite such large numbers, our interactions with these devices will be largely transparent to us due to their seamless integration into our environment.This is a vision that I played a part in shaping, and one that I still believe in. But by the same token, we are now into the second decade of the 21st century, and such transparency and seamlessness is largely still wanting. The 5-10 minutes wasted at the start of almost every meeting while we struggle to hook our laptops up to the projector is just one example.In this talk, I want to speak to this problem and how we might adjust our thinking and priorities in order to address it, and thereby accelerate the realization of Weiser's vision.I will argue that a key part of this requires our focusing as much on machine-machine as we do on human-machine interaction. Stated a different way, I believe that social computing is at the core, but social computing amongst the society of appliances and services – perhaps even more than the society of people. (Obviously the two societies are interwoven.)In sociological terms, this brings us to ask questions such as, "What are the social mores within the society of such devices?" How to they gracefully approach each other and connect, or take their leave and disconnect? How to they behave alone vs together? The point to emphasize here is that besides aggregation and disaggregation, it might be even more about the transitions between one and the other.As with the society of people, appropriate behavior is largely driven by context: social, cultural, physical, intentional, etc. This helps tie in notions such as foreground/background interaction, sensor networks, ambient intelligence, etc.In general, this talk is as much (or ore) about asking questions as it is about answering them. It's real intent is to say that we need to go beyond our current focus on individual devices or services, and look at things from an ecological perspective. The accumulated complexity of a large number of easy to use elegant devices still surpasses the user's threshold of frustration. Our current path of focusing on individual gadgets, apps and services, just transfers where the complexity lies, and increases it, rather than reduces it overall.My hope is to frame and stimulate a conversation around a different path – one where more of the right technology reduces overall complexity while geometrically increasing the value to the community of users.

Prof. Bill Buxton is both a critic and a visionary in the world of computer technology. He predicts the demise of personal computers as he foresees more people and households will be using smaller hand-held devices. He comments on the animation industry in Canada and of the need for more funding for research. (Originally aired June 1998)

Prof. Bill Buxton is both a critic and a visionary in the world of computer technology. He predicts the demise of personal computers as he foresees more people and households will be using smaller hand-held devices. He comments on the animation industry in Canada and of the need for more funding for research. (Originally aired June 1998)

Recently, UX legend Bill Buxton was in town and stopped by to share what he's been up to. In this video, he discusses how integrated devices with things that "just work together," UX, and touch might all be in our lives to a much larger degree in the near future. This is a short conversation with Bill where he touches on his thoughts about the next version of Surface, UX, and the new UX Lightning series at MIX11, which he compares to "speed dating." Bill also drops an interesting nugget—he's used nothing but slates/tablets since Nov 2002, and he even wrote his popular book on a tablet!Relevant links:John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)Bill's blog Bill's book, Sketching User ExperiencesSurface v2 Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

Recently, UX legend Bill Buxton was in town and stopped by to share what he's been up to. In this video, he discusses how integrated devices with things that "just work together," UX, and touch might all be in our lives to a much larger degree in the near future. This is a short conversation with Bill where he touches on his thoughts about the next version of Surface, UX, and the new UX Lightning series at MIX11, which he compares to "speed dating." Bill also drops an interesting nugget—he's used nothing but slates/tablets since Nov 2002, and he even wrote his popular book on a tablet!Relevant links:John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)Bill's blog Bill's book, Sketching User ExperiencesSurface v2 Follow us on Twitter @SilverlightTV or on the web at http://silverlight.tv

In 1986 Bill Buxton gave a unique perspective on the WIMP interface by anthropologically reconstructing the human from the computer with its hard- and software interface. This Homo WIMPi had "a well-developed eye, a long right arm, uniform-length fingers and a "low-fi" ear." Given the progression in interfaces in the last 25 years, the reconstructed human may need to change as well. In this hands-on, plenary workshop, we will try to reconstruct our users based on our new touch, gestural, speech and other natural user interfaces. Based on this reconstruction we will discuss what paying more attention to the body language implies for designing user interfaces that are easier to learn and use.

Natural User Interface (NUI), is one of the favorite flavors du jour in certain interaction design and user experience circles. The term signals a change from the Graphical User Interface (GUI), that has been prevalent since the early 1980s. In many ways, that is good - not that the GUI is going to go away (any more than the QWERTY keyboard) - but progress does, as they say, progress. And just because there was a great idea that took hold, does not mean that that is all that there is. But beyond the name, what is this new thing? The answer depends on who you ask. Ask enough people, and you will see that it can mean anything – which means that it might mean nothing. According to Bill Buxton, the many views means that there is a lot of diverse conversations accompanying them, and he sees that as healthy. Complacency is rarely a worthy aspiration for design. But out of the collective conversations one would hope that there is some convergence, insight or growth. The purpose of Bill's talk is to throw his own thoughts into the fray. Taking his cue from the term itself, he’ll start like a good naturalist, and strip the term bare, and build from there. Starting with diving into the essence of the term natural.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel magical. 00:00:18 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about the product, it’s about music company and a small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Nicholas Klein of FIMA. Hey there. And Nico, I know you have been working from Europe with a US centric, maybe even a San Francisco-centric team for a few years. How do you find that experience of having the evening be your team time? 00:00:48 - Speaker 1: I think that looking at the upside of I haven’t set an alarm in the last 2 years to get up for work. I think that’s definitely on the plus side of this, but I like to kind of like keep my Friday evenings free, that kind of like gives me a little bit of like time of just spending a normal week evening, I would say. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the uh there was a nice thread recently about some Europe to US times and I think on the Europe side, the trick is, of course, you are giving up a lot of your evenings, but you gotta make some room in there for a social event, be, you know, be able to have dinner with friends or whatever here and there, and yeah, I agree, no alarms slash morning is more free form is a huge benefit. So for me, very well worth the extra cost of maybe needing to be a little more on my game in the evening than I would normally need to be. And let’s hear about your career journey a little bit, so I think you have quite a bit of interesting milestones along the way, including Sketch Runner and artifacts, which we talked about a little bit with Jason Wa recently here on the podcast, and I think it’s how I first discovered your work. Love to hear the steps that brought you along the way here. 00:02:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I studied interaction design in Schwebmund, and it’s a tiny, tiny school in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere in Germany. So I studied interaction design and I think what was very interesting kind of like studying interaction design was that you get taught these like behemoths of tools. So you get taught Flash, you get taught Illustrator, you get taught Photoshop in like classes, and you never really think about kind of like manipulating those tools themselves. And interaction design in general was really interesting because it was just about the relationship of humans to technology and application design, kind of a concrete UI design was one part of this. And I’ve never really thought about kind of like, hey, I’m learning how to design software. And tools are just software that is also being designed somewhere far, far away, but on a hack day in Hamburg where we were working on sketch plug-ins, kind of like started and like I continued to working with the team in kind of like designing and building sketch runner, and there was a plug-in with which you kind of like can still like insert components and apply styles from like a command like spot like UI. 00:03:09 - Speaker 2: I remember using this a little bit back in my sketch days, and it was quite remarkable to me at the time to bring a command line interface to a design tool. I feel like nowadays command palettes are fairly common and power tools, maybe superhuman, and some others. There’s an article from Repole where they describe a little bit the rise of the command palette, and the command lines traditionally uh kind of engineering centric, I don’t know, Unixy particular kind of power user making its way into much more of these tools, but I feel like Sketch Runner was a little ahead of its time insofar as bringing that to a design tool. 00:03:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was fascinating. We’ve seen that like this aspect of I know the name of the command and originally it started with finding a way to make plug-ins more easily kind of like executable. That was the start during the hack day, like, hey, there are so many plug-ins being built for sketch. How can we make them more accessible and faster to kind of like execute? And then it kind of like we realized there are so many features that we can add on to this. And the moment that was like really exciting for me was that I was still studying in Schwabsmund. And I saw someone from the Airbnb design systems team talk about sketch runner kind of like on a meet up and then kind of like also tweeting about this. And I was just like, holy shit, this is really happening right now. And so at that moment I realized that like, hey, there is a potential for changing design tools. They’re also just software that are to be designed basically, and that kind of like got me hooked into design tools. After graduation, I was an intern at Shopify. And continued working on sketch plugins there. I was building Polaris telescope. It’s kind of like a tool from within Sketch, you could kind of like see the documentation for the design system components. 00:04:56 - Speaker 2: These were internal kind of plug-ins or tools at. Shopify or something for release to the outside world. 00:05:02 - Speaker 1: It started as an internal tool, but then since like Shopify is a public design system and is being used by third party people to design applications for the Shopify platform, we also kind of like made it available publicly. And during that time, I applied at FIMA. And one nice story was that at the end of my internship at Shopify, I had this option of going to FIMA and starting an internship there or staying at Shopify full time. And I remember my mentor telling me to kind of like take the job at Sigma because it was like, yeah, this is more interesting to you, you just kind of like go there and that was a nice kind of like end for this work at Shopify was very kind of like welcoming to let me go, if that sounds right. 00:05:43 - Speaker 2: That’s great, and this was early days for Figma, right? Pretty small team. I mean, I think nowadays it’s a giant in the design space slash startup space, but maybe this was a little riskier of a jump to go to this smaller, less proven team at the time. 00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think Stigma definitely hasn’t caught on as kind of like a major tool in the space at that time. Um, when I joined, we were, I think around 35, maybe 40 people in San Francisco, and that was it, like that was the whole company. And I think we’re now at above 250, but I’m not exactly sure when that is. I’m coming up on 3 years now, and it’s been fascinating to see. The change in the company itself or kind of like seeing it grow, but also just in the product and in the acceptance of the product in the market. Kind of like seeing how many people and how many companies have switched entirely of using FIMA, it’s still kind of like mind blowing that this actually has happened over the last years and yeah, it’s great to be a part of that. 00:06:42 - Speaker 2: Also seems fun to maybe grow in your career along with the company and see those, yeah, that rapid evolution, that hypergrowth over time can be nerve-wracking at times, at least in my experience, but also potentially really rewarding experience. It’s certainly a great learning experience. 00:06:59 - Speaker 1: Definitely, definitely, especially this aspect of Getting things kind of like onto a roadmap and actually making that happen. When you’re studying, you’re kind of like greenfield projects and you can like imagine the most beautiful things, but then when you’re building a product, you have to kind of like find a way for this to actually happen. It’s been interesting. I’ve been working on mostly focused on prototyping things and it’s been interesting that kind of like slowly we’re getting into this position where it’s like less features are immediately clear of what should happen, kind of like coming next. But it’s the things we’ve been talking about 3 years ago are slowly coming to the space where now they are actually being shipped, and we can now stand on top of them and look even further. And that’s pretty exciting to see that like these wild thoughts are now becoming reality, and now you’re thinking newer wild thoughts and I like that. 00:07:53 - Speaker 2: How do you find designing for designers? On one hand, maybe that sounds great cause you can maybe introspect your own needs a little bit, but on the other hand, it sounds miserable because they’re incredibly fussy. 00:08:05 - Speaker 1: I actually love it cause imagine the case where kind of like I would now just be a designer, basically, and I would like have all these ideas of how this design tool could be better. I kind of like love working for designers because seeing what they do. With the features that you imagine, is so much cooler than the feature itself. So kind of like building things where other people can build things, it’s just really rewarding that on one hand, and then the other hand is that having designers and user tests, but also kind of like having designers design features for you. Because I really want this feature. It is amazing. Just today, I’ve seen a tweet thread about how comments in Figma could work and it’s just amazing of how much detail and how much love people put into these ideas of helping us improve our product essentially. 00:08:54 - Speaker 2: And speaking of that, I’ll also throw out, you are a new user and customer, so thank you for your business. That came to mind because, yeah, you’ve given us really great long detailed feedback along the way, both in the forms of concrete suggestions, you know, it could work like this. But also I think cause you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that, sometimes more the why, like what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, what’s the feeling you’re having when you go to do a particular thing and you get this particular result, and I think you, you started with us around the time of the beta, and you know, then it was a pretty rough around the edges thing and you saw the potential, but it didn’t really Fit into your flow, but you gave us great feedback anyways and kind of check back periodically and eventually became something that hopefully fits into your creative workflow a little bit. 00:09:38 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it’s amazing. Like, I’ve been using it a lot more recently, especially since the alpha of like the 2D canvas. That has really changed the game for me, but I think especially kind of like seeing new too of like from a more, I would say maybe more research experiment to actually kind of like, hey, this is a day to day tool for me. And what I love a lot is how the relationship to the device changes based on the input. Just through using a pencil, it’s just a significantly different experience, a far more intimate experience really with the device, because it really feels like just I’m writing on paper. Paper with superpowers, right? Like I can drag things around and I can really easily switch my tools, and so I love using it. It’s really great. 00:10:22 - Speaker 2: Awesome, thank you, and thanks for the new marketing slogan. We might need to swap that out on the website. People with superpowers. So our topic today is collaborative creativity. And this is something, you know, Mark and I have been talking a lot about, we’ve been talking about a lot of the team because as we think about sort of multi-user features and when or if those make sense for you, and in general, I think the incredible collaboration features that are in a lot of the current, let’s say, suite of tools that a lot of folks in the tech world use, that’s Figma, of course, but it’s also something like Notion, Google Docs going back a little bit further, maybe something like Air Table, and so then you have this question about like how does solo work work or how do we sort of interleave together the solo time and then the working with others, you know, pairing or whatever you wanna call that, there’s feedback cycles and all that sort of thing. So to me it’s a very vast and interesting topic and I know you have a pretty developed, it seems to me from our conversations in the past on it, you have a pretty developed or rapidly developing, let’s say thesis on this, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you think about collaborative creativity. 00:11:31 - Speaker 1: I think it’s interesting also kind of like tying back to how you introduced me in the beginning, that this is a topic I’ve ultimately been working on for a couple of years now, on and off really. But my bachelor’s thesis was on this aspect of personal creativity and knowledge management, and I think at the core it’s kind of like, where do ideas come from and how could computers be set up to support these. But then recently kind of like flipping a lot more around this value of iteration, as kind of like working on Figma as a design tool, but also the value of collaboration and the combination of those two. And I think that the concept of collaborative creativity includes all of those aspects and kind of like brings it together. And I think it’s interesting that really fruitful moments where working together with other people, those memories just always kind of like relate to being together in the same physical space. And being able to work on top of each other’s ideas really fluently, and because we trust each other, we can like figure out a problem that we have in our heads really, really quickly. And this kind of rapid iteration, this rapid building on top of each other’s ideas is, I think, at the core of collaborative creativity or is collaborative creativity itself. 00:12:45 - Speaker 2: So, give us some examples of collaborative creativity. There’s obviously like, I guess what you described there is sort of being with your colleagues, you know, in a meeting room, brainstorming on a whiteboard, but how do you see this, especially in the modern distributed world. 00:13:10 - Speaker 2: What I’ve recently seen on Twitter a lot, it’s also funny but like I’ve seen these things on Twitter, but like these TikTok remixes, and I think just recently there’s this like sea shank, the sea shanty TikToks, those are great to describe what those are in case you haven’t seen them is basically people singing these songs in harmony, but they do it by one person records singing. And then the next person essentially layers their singing on top of that video, and you see all the faces and hear all the voices together, but of course it’s a very much an asynchronous process in many cases I think these people didn’t even necessarily know each other. 00:13:37 - Speaker 1: And I think that’s just so fascinating because it’s really good and I think it’s a different example. So while this collaborative creativity in the whiteboarding space feels more like an immediate way of collaborative creativity, this is definitely, it’s still the same core idea. It’s just kind of like happening asynchronously. And I think those tools like TikTok allow for this to happen because I’m able to build on top of your idea. I’m able to take your idea and not necessarily manipulate. directly, but adds to it, which creates this fascinating effect. 00:14:10 - Speaker 2: I feel like that takes us to the whole realm of sort of maybe like remix culture, certainly open source is very much built on that as well. And of course a lot of discussion, maybe not so currently, but maybe in the last decade about kind of copyright law and how that in many ways interferes with this potentially great remix culture. You had DJs and that sort of thing. You see that in the spectrum of collaborative creativity. 00:14:36 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely. I think it’s an important aspect, and we’ll get later in more detail to this that like the ultimate or kind of like original owner of ideas should be in full control over what others can do with this, essentially. I think that’s a key part of establishing trust in such a kind of like network of people who could work on the same thing. And I think that that’s one aspect of how to kind of like establish this way of working. 00:15:04 - Speaker 2: I mean, idea ownership is so fuzzy, even if you leave the realm of, I don’t know, public copyright, intellectual property, whatever. I think even on a team making a shared document, in most cases the teams I’ve been on, I and others on the team feel sort of uncomfortable doing heavy edits to someone else’s documents unless they were very specifically invited. You know, you can leave comments, maybe you can make a little fix, good suggestion changes, you can add something to the bottom, but you have this sense of like, OK, they own this and you don’t kind of want to mess it up. You feel like you’re a guest there, even if it’s in a team workspace, just sort of an interesting, I don’t know, we have this innate sense of ownership, I think, over ideas or a creative output, which may or may not be logical, but nevertheless seems to be part of the human experience. 00:15:52 - Speaker 1: I wonder how much of this ultimately comes back to the tools themselves too, in the sense that what I’ve seen happening in teams using FIMA a lot, that kind of like allowed this very immediate way of collaboratively iterating on the same space that person A creates an idea, creates a couple of marks for this. Person B comes in and takes kind of like the second. and explores the second mark further. Person C kind of like uses something else and kind of like just draws out their their direction of this. And at some point, maybe some person zooms out and sees the connecting dots between of those and kind of like puts these things together. And I think at that point. What has happened is that people inspired each other, but it’s very, very fuzzy of kind of like who had the key spark of it. And so I think at that point what we’ve seen happening, that’s actually really fascinating is that the culture of teams changed towards a culture where it feels more like our ideas over my ideas. Where just because the tools are not just because of those tools, but also because of the tools, it enabled people to take that ownership less seriously, because they realized if we take that ownership less seriously, we can actually arrive at better solutions down the road. 00:17:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. And even speaking in terms of just coming back to the more just brainstorming in a group verbally or whatever, one of the ways I know the best collaboration, some of the people that I’ve worked with over many years, including Mark here, is that often it’s just not really clear exactly as you said, where the idea came from, and every so often I feel like I catch it in the moment happening. There’s one case I remember of, we’re trying to, I think it was actually just a debugging kind of scenario pair programming kind of thing. And the way we found the idea that ultimately was the breakthrough was actually one person said something and I misheard them. I was like, oh, that’s brilliant, that’s totally it. And, you know, they respond with, oh no, that wasn’t what I was saying, but now that you mentioned it, and so, wait, whose idea was that exactly? Clearly it was the product of our back and forth to claim that was one person’s idea would be, I guess, like a pointless endeavor to try to assign it to a single name. 00:18:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely the case that creativity, whether it’s among multiple people or with yourself over time, is a very iterative process that involves taking a lot of ideas, remixing them, borrowing stuff, eliminating stuff, adding variants, exploring, playing. I know there’s something you’ve thought a lot about because I’m curious if you have more theories on how this works. 00:18:27 - Speaker 1: One thing that during our bassists thesis and also kind of like now getting back to this a lot, is this concept of bisociation from Arthur Koestler, and it’s essentially this idea that Any form of kind of like creativity, be it like humor or science or art or conflict just I would also just include problem solving, is this aspect where you have a spark that ultimately originates from two orthogonal kind of like planes of thought or two orthogonal kind of like spaces of ideas, and because they meet. They create a new thing or when they meet, they create a new thing. It’s slightly different than association, which just means the connection between those two things, but that the connection itself is a new thing, existing from two independent frames of thoughts. That’s like at the core of where ideas come from. 00:19:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I even go so far as to say, or maybe I’ve heard creativity defined as connecting unrelated ideas, but maybe where this fellow Arthur Koestler, I guess his last name, where his work maybe it’s this idea of two different frames or two different domains where it’s an unexpected connection, and in fact one of the things that I think I see written in kind of like how to have good ideas type. Books like Steven Johnson’s works or whatever, is often about people who are in different domains. They work in one field, for example, and then they go to solve a problem in another field and they’re able to apply ideas that are commonplace in one field in this new place, and that’s that weird intersection that produces something truly new. 00:19:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think part of the challenge here is the ideas need to be primed in a sense to be joined or synthesized. So that’s why things like chewing over ideas, discussing, debating, remixing, these are all different ways to basically ruminate on the content, and by doing so you sort of prepare it for synthesis with another idea. 00:20:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that was one of the things that was also really fascinating to read through, is basically kind of like debunking this myth of this eureka moment. Whereas like, you expect this eureka moment to be this like singular entity where everything kind of like goes from 0 to 100 and it’s like all kind of like falls in place, but then you look closely at these stories around Newton and around Darwin, and you kind of like see that they have had their theories around for years before this, and they were really close. And so it’s not that in this eureka moment everything fell into place. It’s just maybe this last thing connected. But 95% of this idea was likely existing already or of this theory or of this concept. 00:20:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and a sort of corollary of this is that you can’t stare at something too hard. Like if you just sit down and think really hard about a particular idea or even a particular problem, you’re likely to be too constrained in your thinking, you’re get a sort of tunnel vision that obscures these other ideas that you need to connect in. So you really have to step back, chew on some other domains, chew on some other topics, and then hope that eventually it will sort of pop out as a synthesis with your other problem domain. 00:21:24 - Speaker 1: There was some interesting research we’ve read into and if there’s any kind of like neuroscientists there and I’m like representing this inaccurately, let me know, but that basically you have a set of stacks of possible kind of like positions for thoughts or snippets of thoughts, and between that stack you can create connections. And if this is a new connection, that would be considered an idea, and you do that in your subconscious all the time. But basically, when you’re staring at something for too long, all of your stack will be kind of full with all the things you’ve read and worked on. And there is a point where you just don’t see any new angles on this content, cause like the stack is the same things since 3 hours, but then you go outside, you summarize these stacks. They become kind of like less defined and more blurry, and then you see a dog walking around and some other things kind of like are popping up, and suddenly they’re like, oh, I could connect those two together, because suddenly you are free of these distractions. That’s the perfect shower moment actually fits perfectly into this. Because in the shower, there’s just not a lot of things you can do in the shower. You’re kind of like just naked there and alone with your thoughts, quite literally. 00:22:37 - Speaker 3: Rich Hickey makes a similar point in his talk, hammock Driven Development, which I very highly recommend. 00:22:44 - Speaker 2: I’ve probably recommended it on this podcast before, Mark, it’s always tricky because I think you’ve mentioned that enough times now. I’m probably gonna stop putting it in the show notes. OK. But clearly I can see it’s a high impact piece, so everyone should go and read it. 00:22:56 - Speaker 3: He makes the point, there’s also a sort of priority que element to this, which is you have end domains that you’ve ever thought about, but to pick a number, the top 7 that you’ve thought about most recently are sort of candidates for this background mind synthesis to happen. That’s not exactly true, but there’s a sense of the things that you’ve chewed on more recently. are more likely to be part of a synthesis of an idea. And so part of the work is actually to constantly shuffle your priority cue around by changing the ideas that you read about or think about together in time, and eventually you kind of find the right combination of 7 things in your head in the shower and out pops the shower idea. 00:23:31 - Speaker 1: I think this is great. Yeah, there’s a ton of approaches on how computers, but also just processes and behaviors can support this concept of by association, kind of like make the right content available at the right time is something where I think all played with of recommended content, right? But also. As a way to structure your research in a different, more natural way, ultimately follows the same goal. It’s about kind of like making the content, the knowledge that you have available at the right time, so it can be in your head, so you can connect it to other things, to new ideas. And I think that’s also where I would place muse into the space, that kind of like it’s a space primarily for kind of like maybe marinating on your ideas and exploring it maybe in different ways. Here’s a PDF, here’s a video of someone explaining this. How do you see the role of muse in this personal creative process? 00:24:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, that’s certainly exactly how I use it. I feel like one of the cornerstone maybe features we introduced was the excerpting, which the idea of pulling out pieces. This isn’t quite a remix, it’s almost the reverse of that. It’s almost like a deconstruction, and for me I often have successive stages of that, which is, OK, I’ve read a few books on a particular topic. Now I wanna go and kind of apply that knowledge to a domain. And I’ve got my Kindle highlights and I’m pulling those, and there’s a pretty easy way to pull that in this PDF to muse and then I’ve sort of got those there and I can go through it and then I can pull out of my highlights, sort of like highlight my highlights or something like that, but I exert out the ones I think are most relevant. And then importantly order them, so they’re sort of near each other in different combinations, or do a little bit of the affinity mapping thing or something like that, push it around, but yeah, part of what I’m trying to do there is boil down to some components that hopefully for me will add up into a call it a new idea or a strategy for whatever problem I’m specifically trying to solve in the moment. 00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I think this fits into what we learned during our special the well. We interviewed an historian and she had a word document, which was, I think, up to 300 pages long, and it was just a glossary of words and references to other places where she’s read about these words in other books and other sections. And just that document alone, it was just 300 pages of references to other content. And just seeing that and how people use even a very simple tool like Word basically for something like this knowledge management task, like this humongous knowledge management task was pretty inspiring too. 00:26:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting spectrum here with tools for thought in terms of how explicit they try to make these connections and how much the tool is actually designed to output those. So Muse is, I would say on the end of the spectrum, it’s more like you’re meant to marinate with your content, then it’s swimming around in your head and out are gonna pop new ideas from your head. And that’s good for like intuitive domains and coming up with new ideas and brainstorming and things like that. But then when you’re writing a history paper, for example, you need extremely specific documented references, and so there it’s more important to have a very explicit trace of every connection that you might have made in the past so you can substantiate all your claims and have all your sites. And I think both of those things have their place, but I think it’s important not to confuse their purposes. I think you can’t force having new ideas by kind of structuring all your stuff in a graph or something. And conversely, if you try to intuit your way to a history paper, you’re gonna have a bad time. So I think that both of those extremes have their uses. 00:27:10 - Speaker 1: Definitely, I think that another thing that fits into this is how can you frames of thought come into your mind, kind of like diving more more deeply into iteration itself. I love this model, this, I think it’s a mind sketch model from Bill Buxton that is kind of like outlined in sketching User Experiences. It’s an amazing book. My roommate recommended it to me because he did his bachelor’s thesis on how to prototyping tool, and he basically gave this to me, I think 1 year ago or something, after I was already working for nearly 2 years on prototyping at Figma, I hadn’t seen that book before. And then when I read this, like a lot of what is today originates from this book. And the core process of federation is this aspect that you create something, you externalize something. Because you externalize this knowledge, you can now take a step back and evaluate what you’ve created and learn from it. 00:28:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and in Buxton’s model, that’s the sketch. And when he talks about making a sketch that has this very, it’s not just a pencil on paper or that has a particular line width or something like that. It’s specifically that it is a very rough and purposely Not complete, leaves a lot to the imagination, maybe raises more questions than answers, but it is this externalization that then you can step back from. You can both share it with others, but even just yourself, you can step back from, you can look at it, kind of look at it from different angles, squint at it a little bit, and it will reveal new things that that same idea just purely in your mind might not. 00:28:45 - Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly, and I think that’s just amazing that that’s possible, that we as humans are capable of doing this, of externalizing our own ideas and then gaining new knowledge because we’ve done that. Like, where does this information come from? 00:28:59 - Speaker 3: I think there’s actually a lot going on there, right? Because some of the knowledge you get from the process of actually having to externalize it, cause you’re changing the format basically, and that involves processing of everything. You’re also learning by looking at it and seeing, for example, the empty space, which wouldn’t have been present in your associative mind. And you’re also learning at it by being able to show people. You’re also learning by being able to refer to it later in time, and you’re also freeing up space in your mental priority queue because you no longer are subconsciously thinking, I have to remember this, I have to remember this. So it seems like a simple thing, but there’s so many different ways in which you’re learning just by doing the simple process. 00:29:34 - Speaker 1: What I love is, or also where the core of my thesis is placed around is essentially, what are the models now with collaboration that fit into this? Cause you mentioned it that collaboration can help with this process as well. And of course I can show it to someone and they can kind of like communicate things back to me, and they can talk about this and directly give me some kind of advice on how to change things. But I think it’s interesting to look at it more closely on collaboration through creation, or communication through creation or manipulation, essentially, that if I create something and let’s say I create a file, I create a design file, and I sent this design file to you, and now you have a copy of this design file, and you make changes in this design file and send it back to me. Or I just kind of like take a screenshot and send it to you and you scribble on top of that screenshot and send it back. That’s the first step, kind of like the first model of collaborative iteration, and I would call it kind of redundant collaborative federation, cause we duplicate these objects, and because we’ve duplicated these objects, we can collaborate on those, and I think that has been in a lot of times the way we just collaborated on nearly anything in the digital space. Like duplicating things in the digital world is slightly harder. But in the digital world, it has been like this since email basically existed. 00:30:55 - Speaker 3: And I’m curious if you see that as a strictly inferior form of collaboration or if it’s more like a different mode. So to my mind, to my hand here. I feel like that’s one of a few possible modes of multi-user collaboration and it has its uses. So for example, when Adam and I are writing, we’ll often have a draft and we’ll send a bunch of other individuals their own unique copy of the draft so they can be able to write whatever they want and they’re not getting groupthink by seeing everyone else’s comments. And then we take all those comments and we synthesize them in another draft, and then you might go into another type of collaboration, which is everyone’s looking at the same document and making real-time edits because you’re kind of converging. It’s a different use case. 00:31:31 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely, and I think that that was one of the big steps basically that for me at least internally you kind of like wrapping my head around this, is not looking at these different modes of collaborative federation as good or bad, but it’s just solving different types of problems, solving different kind of like steps in the process essentially cause what you’re saying is totally right, like what this redundancy also helps is comparison. And when we talk kind of like more detail about these like open canvas tools like Figma. What happens a lot of times just inside of those is redundant iteration as well, right? Like I’m duplicating this frame, I’m just not changing this frame because I need the ability to compare this. What you’ve kind of like mentioned is the need for different audiences of people ultimately, and different audience levels have to respond to the relative content level inside of there. If there’s a lot of work in progress comments. That you don’t want leadership to see, you might want to bring this into a different document where there’s an empty collaborative space. So that definitely makes sense. I think it just solves for different purposes. 00:32:36 - Speaker 2: That potentially could take us to a whole other space or a whole other discussion topic, which is feedback, what is feedback, how to give good feedback, how to solicit good feedback. Probably we don’t wanna, uh, get too diverted on that, but it, it comes to mind because talking about the different audiences, if you’re presenting something to your boss, to a client, or to anyone where you know their time and attention bandwidth is limited, and you want to get there. Like big picture view on things or just kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down, or keep them in the loop. And that’s different from, here’s my teammate, we’re both collaborating on this thing and we want to really go into all the fine details together. You’re just seeking something different from the feedback and being aware of what it is that you’re seeking in that feedback loop can help you have the right format or the right level of detail. 00:33:25 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that for a tool or for a creative tool, essentially, it is important that people are in control. Like this is kind of like looping back to what we’ve discussed at the start, that people can be fluently moving between the different ways of collaborating, and that they kind of can invite the stakeholder with certain permissions, and the client with certain permissions, and the teammate. And I think the question is kind of like, can this still happen in the same space, although those people have different permissions. 00:33:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something that I feel like we’re still organically discovering as tool makers. So if you go back to the before times where everyone was emailing attachments to each other, that worked very well for the what you call redundant collaboration use case. You just send someone a copy and they can do whatever they want, and then we’re done they can send it back. But then if you want to have a Shared unified state somewhere, that’s really hard in that world. And then we got this whole world of new tools including Sigma and Google Docs, and that makes the real-time synchronized shared collaborative space, first class, but I feel like sometimes it actually makes it hard to do the individual private collaboration, often just because it’s really hard to make a copy of stuff. I feel like in Google Docs, for example, just to make a copy of a document is a bit of a heavyweight operation, it takes a few seconds and makes weird names and so on. One of the reasons I think it happens more often in Figma is that it’s very easy to make a copy, especially if you’re doing a very lightweight copy on the same canvas, you just highlight command C, V, I think, and that just pops out a new version, then you can kind of scribble on that and then go back and do your merge later. Another tool example here would be Git, which I feel like has its UX challenges, but it does get this right. Well, plus GitHub. It didn’t have this before GitHub. You know, the local Git gives you the privacy to do whatever you want and mess with stuff, and then GitHub provides the unified central state. 00:35:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that I would categorize all of those into kind of like restricted collaboration or restricted collaborative federation because they somehow constrain how the different people can manipulate these shared objects. Either they kind of like restricted through having a private copy first that you need to kind of update manually or through kind of like enabling people to limit someone’s access in there. One thing that I’ve seen quite often now is that in Google Docs and in paper, the like, is that people create their kind of like appendix, trash, don’t look below here. Yes, these kind of spatially close areas because it maps toigma too. I was like, here’s my trash area, don’t look at these things in here like, like, like please don’t, these are bad ideas. There’s an interesting aspect there that I would love to dive deeper into at some point around like, why can’t we let those things go. Oftentimes you don’t look at these things, but you kind of still want them to be there. You want them to keep them around because in the case you need them. You feel really bad if they’re gone. 00:36:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, old notebooks is the same way. Even older muse boards for me in a lot of cases are things that are mostly just historically interesting. Every once in a while it’s kind of cool to be able to reference it, but the reality is, you want that end thing. You usually don’t need any of the steps that led up to it. Get history. the same thing. Like you could probably for almost any project, go in and chop off all the Git history from, you know, prior to a week ago, and it wouldn’t really make any difference for any day to day work, but yet there’s that feeling of something lost, something important that every once in a while it’s nice to be able to reference. 00:36:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I feel like there’s that temporal angle of eventually you might want to archive something, but I also feel like there’s sometimes a tooling limitation where, especially in these modern apps, they’re very oriented around enterprise work groups, and so if you want to have a personal space, it’s a little bit unnatural, you either need to go out into your my driver. Something which is a whole ordeal, or you need to effectively carve off your own little personal space within a document by hitting enter 10 times and saying mark notes and typing below that. And one of the things we’ve explored in the lab and with views is, can you make that more fluid by making the transition between the personal and the collaborative space much more seamless. The analogy that I always come back to is the university department. where you have a private office and you have your faculty lounge, and you can take a few steps over and back and you can bring your papers over and back and you can check out the whiteboard across the hall. And that’s sort of very seamless collaboration, where it’s all the same office building, it’s just different zones are demarcated slightly differently, and it’s very lightweight to move in between them. That’s the kind of vibe I’m hoping for with digital tools. 00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that would be amazing. Like the current solution basically in Figma is that like drafts or new files always open in drafts and drafts are private by default. So that creativity as an intimate process can start in private, because oftentimes there’s a ton of internal barriers in your head of like, is this really a right idea? Do I want to share this? There might be kind of like external barriers of a culture in which kind of like bad in quotes, bad. Ideas are shut down from the beginning, or you’re fearing being judged for those ideas or just sharing those ideas in general. And I think there’s a ton that like how this flow can just feel a lot more fluent as you described. I could imagine like news sports, basically, this is my private news board and we can be together in the same news port, but down here, like inside, I’m zooming into this space, that’s my office space, right? Yeah, exactly. This is new. Because office space, you’re just technically not allowed to go in there. I think there’s a ton of fun stuff of how the interface paradigms will change the relationship of how we look at these digital collaborative spaces and how we also kind of find ourselves leveraging the cultural habits that we have with shared physical spaces and bringing them into these digital spaces. If you’re in an office building, it seems like decades ago that you’re like in an office building, right? But like you have this cultural understanding that you don’t go into someone else’s office, especially when there’s other people sitting in there. You just wouldn’t do this, right? And in digital spaces, it feels different, but I’m interested to see kind of like how this will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years. 00:39:28 - Speaker 2: I think learning from the physical spaces and the social cues and all that that we’ve built up over a very long time and trying to bring some of that to digital. is certainly a rich well to tap. I also feel like sort of video chat and screen sharing and things around the live synchronous video and audio might also have some clues for us. One to me that’s pretty telling is the screen share stuff, which of course is just huge for a distributed team, and I’ve gotten pretty handy with setting up my screen in a particular way so that I’ve got a window to share that’s kind of the right size and orientation, so it’ll look reasonable on most people’s desktops. But then if you actually have a multi-window flow, you wanna show, now you kind of need to share your whole desktop, and for some reason that seems way more intimate. I don’t even have, like, I don’t know, text messages going to my Mac, so it’s not like someone’s gonna see a personal message come in on my notification center, I don’t think, but still there’s this. that that’s a much more really letting someone into your private space, which is kind of interesting. And then, of course, there’s all the stuff around. If you have other devices that you need to show like an iPad, or you’ve got an external camera that’s showing, which we often need for showing a person actually using the iPad with their hands. So I feel like there’s a lot there that affords opportunities, but also we need to adapt to and how we think about collaboration and privacy and synchronous and asynchronous for how we work together in, let’s say the modern virtual office. 00:40:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve mentioned this theory before that a lot of collaborative and social technology first appears in games. And according to that theory, within a few years, professionals will need to use OBS to do exactly that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with OBS, but it’s a program for streamers to basically render their stream from a bunch of different windows and graphics and stuff and kind of. Deposits it all together into whatever they want to present. And I actually know some professionals who do use this for things like teaching classes where you need to composite a bunch of stuff together. Well, the best program in the world for that is what streamers use. So just use that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that or a technology like that becomes standard in the same way that microphones and ring lights and all that stuff did become standard for office workers. 00:41:37 - Speaker 1: Zoom definitely, I think there’s Studio Beta, which is I think basically like Snapchat like filters for Zoom, and I think there’s some feature in there that look like integrate kind of like a PowerPoint slide presentation, right, into your background and maybe key things out or something. And I think that’s a start in this. I think you’re totally right that like these things will just become a lot more accessible for day to day work of kind of like creating these mixed media streaming environments. One thing I’m really interested in though is this aspect of kind of like what makes this work ultimately in the end, like, what is the oil for this collaborative iteration process of we are improving each other’s idea really work, and I think that there’s a bunch of things to dive into in this aspect around the culture for collaborative creativity. Cause we’ve touched on it a little bit, but this aspect of people can feel comfortable sharing bad ideas, essentially, is what at the beginning of an iterative process, right? Like the ideas you’re going to share are not ideal. And if we look at collaborative iteration and we see that there’s value in bringing people together that trust each other, what cultures would we have or kind of like what cultural shifts would need to happen for this to become more fluent. 00:42:55 - Speaker 2: Well, trust certainly seems like a huge part of it, and that’s how you actually build trust on a team, you know, it’s one thing if you’re longtime friends or longtime collaborators, but when you have particularly, for example, a fast growing company, as we were talking about earlier, and you have essentially relative strangers, maybe from different backgrounds that come together, it’s probably even harder when you have less or no in person time. In the world we live in now. And so, is that something software can solve at all or is this purely a classic human management problem and we need to like do exercises where we fall backwards into each other’s arms in order to be able to make a a shared document uh together successfully. 00:43:34 - Speaker 1: I think it’s actually kind of like interpersonal maturity and interpersonal relationship that we have to learn through the tools. Tools can give us guardrails. Like, if I know that this is a production thing, this is the thing that is used in production, I’m definitely going to kind of like use GitUp and will restrict the access to this and maybe only allow me to merge things into the main branch and like have these guardrails and structures in place so that collaboration can also grow in this environment. But then separately, being together in the same file at the same time. At any point in time, you could hit command A, select everything and hit the delete key and just get rid of everything that’s there. Yet we still don’t do it. So the tools still allow this. They still allow fucking up each other’s work. So the fallback has to be a cultural way of working together. But one thing that we’ve seen with Sigma is that Sigma grows rapidly inside of a company once you invite other people, and they kind of, they invite other people, they create content, they invite other people, so it’s beautiful to see that. But then separately, one thing that at the beginning seemed kind of like independent of all of this was that like Halloween 2019. I’ve seen a lot of people dressed up as figma cursors for Halloween. And I was like, why is this happening, right? Why are you dressing up as feeling my curses? Why do people have kind of like group costumes where everyone is a thing about curses and they’re just like roaming around this like space. And it’s been fascinating looking back at this, because I think looking at the culture and looking at the tools, is that what FigMA had enabled for these teams was that they trusted each other, and now they were able to build on top of each other’s ideas in a far more efficient way than they’ve ever done before. And it might have even helped them to establish these cultures in the first place. To be like, now that we are in the same space, this maturity of how we work together becomes more important. We see how beautiful it is when it works, and now we actively want to work towards this, so that it’s not kind of like, oh yeah, this is like randomly happening, that I’m able to have another idea because you’ve had an idea and put this down and shared it. It’s not serendipity, it’s actually something that we can actively to work for. And so I believe that like the tools that open up these collaborative processes actually can incite a change of making cultures more inclusive and more open and more respectful to work with, and especially getting rid of the Steve Jobsmith of like, hey, good feedback is like direct feedback, right? Like this is dog shit. It’s not gonna help you in the long run build better ideas or come up with better ideas. 00:46:17 - Speaker 2: On the feedback side, I feel like the culture, it’s culture, it certainly is trust, but when I’m working with a new person, whether it’s on a writing project, something product design related, or even things externally in my personal life, you know, collaborating with a cohabitation partner on Decor, for example, I feel like when you’re first doing a project together, you’re first exploring that part of a relationship with someone, a new colleague, whatever it is, and I’ve sort of learned to prime people a little bit though, like, if you share something with me, I’m gonna give you tons of feedback, usually. Like, often I’ve gotten the feedback on my feedback that it’s sort of a fire hose and can be overwhelming, and I’ve actually learned to even try to trim it down a little bit to like the key points. But that’s also because it’s kind of a golden rule thing, that’s what I like to receive. And in particularly I like really stream of consciousness feedback. I don’t want you to do my thinking for me. What I want you to do is react. I want your hot take, I want your snap reaction of this made me feel like this, and this made me feel Like this, and this made me angry, and this made me happy, and this made me confused. And, you know, it’s not to say that every single point of feedback is something I’m gonna do something about, but that overlaid with feedback from others is how I get a picture of how something I’ve created is. Perceived or potentially could impact an audience, but that’s not necessarily maybe how others work, and maybe they’re surprised by that in both directions. So I really try to establish that up front. You share the thing with me, I’m gonna give you this style of feedback, and likewise, if I’m sharing a thing with you, this is what I want, is this kind of heavy feedback. 00:47:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think like getting everyone to share these thoughts in the first place, I think is going to be a big change instead of companies where with tools like FIMA, people now have the ability to communicate visually. Anyone in the organization now basically has the ability to communicate visually. But that they are actively actually doing this and using this requires them ultimately to put down ideas that they might not be sure about at that point. And that might be common for designers, right, to kind of like share early thoughts. But if we talk about kind of like PMs or engineers who may have a design idea, or an architecture idea of how something could work, maybe slightly differently, or if the user flow kind of like breaks off here and goes to the path, those things can be amazing ideas even if they’re just shared in the form of a diagram, or a little scribble, or a little kind of like, I don’t know, just like jotting on something, yeah, but those people have to also feel comfortable in sharing this in the first place. And if you’re an engineer in a company or if you’re a PM in a company and you might not be sure of how this design tool space is owned by the designers, right? Can I use this? Does that make me a designer? If that makes me a designer, are other people like annoyed that I call myself a designer, like, there’s nothing about this. It’s just kind of like a core skill of being able to communicate visually, and it can help discussions, especially if that happens in spaces where other people can take those visual objects. And immediately iterate on them. Like we’re still in this concept, we’re still in a space where people can work on top of these ideas again. But I think the key barrier that we’ve often seen is that people kind of like are a little bit shy of sharing this idea in the first place, cause they might feel that, oh, this like, will shine badly back to me. And I think that’s a call for designers essentially of sharing the bad work more openly. We have a design work in progress channel and it’s fascinating to see how much is like work that’s just happening is visible there. Although it’s not always polished, although it’s not always kind of like perfect, it’s so just like, you see that these things are happening. And it has become kind of like one of the most active channels because it established a culture of a different kind of critique, not this culture of kind of like, hey, we shouldn’t ship this, right? Like if you share something in this official design critique channel, you might get feedback of like, hey, maybe we shouldn’t ship this. This is not up to our quality standards. But then it’s like work in progress channel where the quality was just said very differently. The feedback is a lot more of like, yes and style, of like, oh yeah, we could do this too, or like, hey, this could fit into this project that I’m working on, and it feels very different culturally. 00:50:25 - Speaker 2: I have the sense, maybe it’s a stereotype or just reflects some of the designers I’ve worked with over the years, but the designer archetype for me is someone who is much more likely to want to stay in their ivory tower longer and kind of really polish something until everything is completely perfect and without any conceivable critique, and maybe to a straw man a little bit like a delicates. Flake, where when someone says, you know, I don’t completely 100% like this, they’re very upset and maybe engineering types, again, this is perhaps just a stereotype, but are more likely to be a little more willing to take feedback on work in progress. I don’t know, do you think that’s accurate? Is that an outdated point of view, or is that accurate, but something you think you and your team are working to change with your product? 00:51:11 - Speaker 1: I’m lucky that I can say that it’s like outdated for me, that the people that I work with are at least kind of like don’t show this kind of behavior that significantly, at least. I think it definitely exists. It definitely exists. I remember reading the first comments of Figma being published on design and use. If this is the future of design, I’m like changing careers. And I even remember the video, I think. It was like from Sandwich video, this like first initial teaser ad of route Pigma when it first launched, and I remember kind of like it showing a use case where someone just moved something like 10 pixels. Some senior designer moved something 10 pixels and it’s like, oh yeah, I just tightened it up a pitch. And I’m like, if this is the future of collaboration, I wouldn’t be sure if that would have worked. But I think this aspect of once you feel the value of other people adding freely to your ideas, and at the same time also being respected for the things that you’ve done, and you realize that you can now take from all of these ideas and you can like combine them into new ideas, and those are maybe your ideas again, that feeling of being able to tap into everyone else’s mind. I think it is amazing. And one thing that comes to mind is something that started very early on at FIMA that ultimately kind of like kicked off this value of collaboration or this thinking about the value of collaboration a lot more for me, because I initially joined Figma because I liked the components overriding behavior. I was like, hey, this is cool, like I can overwrite more stuff than in sketch. So I got intrigued by that, but then I joined Figma and I was working on the common pins and I just like outlined a couple of the states that we need for common pins. And we joined into the design grid. There’s just a couple of people. Dylan was also working joining Design grids at the time, that was kind of like how small the company was. And then we just for 15 minutes just riffed on top of each other’s ideas. And then I went back from this design grid room with this file in my computer that everyone literally around that has something to do with design at FIA at the time worked on. And it was an amazing feeling because I’d sat there, I was like, there’s so many good ideas in here. And the beautiful thing was that they were not named. I wasn’t even sure who created which parts in this document, and my role as a diner was then to look at these things and see kind of like, how can I combine them into something that is most promising. And so coming back to your question, I hope that this experience pushes people towards working more in the open. Because they see the value of this open iteration, they see the innovative value in being able to tap into other people’s minds, cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel magical. 00:53:57 - Speaker 2: It’s really powerful, and yeah, it’s kind of vulnerability, but then if you open yourself to that, it’s simultaneously open yourself to it with a team of other people who are doing the same thing, and then have that experience of the shared mind and how much more powerful that is, then maybe that. Charges you up to see the value of it and be more open in the future. Whereas maybe if you get the reverse experience, if you try to open yourself that way, you don’t have the right team or the right culture or the right setting, and you get shut down or you feel rejected or something like that, and then that’s maybe a negative feedback cycle of the same kind. 00:54:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and this is also one of the underlying motivations of why I’m trying to build this model on top of the core aspect of what thought or creativity is for a single mind. That, you know, creativity is pushed through having a diverse set of thoughts in your head, and that the question is, how can these diverse set of thoughts come into your head, and that at that point, you realize that like if other people share their bold ideas and if you’re comfortable sharing their wildest dreams, even though they might be kind of like going against company policy or something, that those things can be the missing spark that someone else needs. And so that because this is tied to kind of like the core aspect of creativity in the mind, you can’t really argue with this. And so that I hope that through this and through experiencing this and the tools and the products that we build, that companies see the value in an open and inclusive design process where people can feel safe of sharing ideas and do not have these experiences that you describe. And I hope that in the next 50, 100 years or something. That’s just seen as an old way of working if you don’t allow people to work like this together. 00:55:40 - Speaker 2: I feel like I can see a parallel there with open source, and in fact the style of working in public with strangers on a code base over time or relative strangers, and that in turn fed back into even private collaboration on code, which is there’s just a different perspective or a different way to be creative, maybe, but you have to bootstrap and do it. So maybe you’re helping do that for design and maybe even the larger world of technology. 00:56:10 - Speaker 1: I think the beauty in this too is that I think it could help design, elevate from being seen as this thing that people do in making things pretty, to be a lot more focused on an aspect of problem solving, essentially, that problem solving in an open solution space. We just don’t have any idea of where to go next or how to evaluate your idea in the beginning, that design can kind of like feel bigger than that, and because it feels bigger than like UI design as we know it today. That through that it becomes more inclusive too, and people might identify more with, hey, I also work creatively. I also iterate on my ideas. These

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: My experience as a team lead is that if your team is aligned going into a project, you get this incredible execution. It’s fun to do, you know, maybe hard work, but you’re all rowing in the same direction, you’re seeing those results when you put the pieces together, they’re all harmonious. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam. So Mark, it’s been snowing recently here in Berlin, quite cold, and of course I need to not only walk a dog 3 times a day, but now take my daughter to Kita, which is kind of a daycare kindergarten thing in the stroller. So spending a lot of time in the cold these days. How do you feel about kind of places with the full 4 seasons, which I think you grew up in the kind of East Coast United States versus the West Coast or perhaps more southernly lifestyle that is Yeah, I’m a huge fan of the Four Seasons, probably because it’s what I grew up with. 00:01:02 - Speaker 2: Actually, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, now I’m in the inland Pacific Northwest, and it’s just beautiful in the winter with the snow on the evergreens, and it’s very quiet and peaceful. I’m a big fan. 00:01:16 - Speaker 1: I certainly find that change of the seasons just keeps life interesting in a way. There’s something about the passage of that day night cycle. And there’s a similar thing with the 360 something days around the sun, and these quarters, essentially, they each have their own distinctive look and feel, right? The blooming flowers of spring, the high sun of the summertime, the rich autumn leaves in the fall, and then winter with it’s cold and snow and people wanting to stay inside and stay warm and cozy. I don’t know, there’s something about that cyclical aspect that works for me somehow. 00:01:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you’re not only enjoying the current season, there’s an element of anticipation for the next one. So now we’re looking forward to, OK, we’ve shoveled the driveway enough times, we’re looking forward to the snow clearing out, and then perhaps it’ll get hot again, but then once it’s 90 degrees and smoky, you’re like, oh man, I can’t wait for the winter when it’s just cold. So around and around it goes. 00:02:15 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leadership. I thought this would be a fun one because this is something both you and I have spent a lot of time on in our careers. I’ve been in some way or another leading sometimes reluctantly or with some surprise, small teams for over 20 years now. You’ve done quite a bit of that in your career also, and it’s come up a little bit recently in terms of our work on use for teams, in terms of the kinds of people we’re seeing that see the need for this product, we can talk about that. A little bit later, but as always, we like to start with basics. What is leadership? What does that word bring to mind for you? 00:02:51 - Speaker 2: I’d probably say creating an environment where the team achieves success. Now, you can unpack every word in there and it would be a whole podcast in itself, but I think the main idea there is that ultimately you’re accountable for results, that’s why you’re there, and you can’t do it directly, so you have to build the team and create the environment such that it happens. 00:03:13 - Speaker 1: I suspect a lot of people who are successful at being leaders do come to it, not from the perspective of, I just wanted to grow up and be the boss, you know, as a kid I always dreamed of being the one in the corner office or something. I don’t think that happens too much, but rather that you have some end you want to achieve, something you want to do in the world, and in the process of trying to do whatever that thing is, you realize, oh, I can’t do this alone. I need the help of others, and then that leads you to attracting those others to try to help you with that, and that of course leads you into team building and pretty soon you find yourself in this role of a leader. Another piece of your definition here is the team, and I think implicit in that is the assumption that there is a team, right? And that’s not something that comes from nowhere. I mean, maybe you get hired into some kind of leadership or management role and you inherit a team. But at least in my thinking, kind of coming from the more entrepreneurial perspective, or even if you are hired into a role, you’re often expected to build a team. And so essentially the pragmatically we can say hiring, but even more broadly, you can say the identifying what kind of people you need to achieve your ends, figuring out where to find those people, figuring out how to attract them, you know, what do you have to offer them that would make them want to join up with whatever it is you’re trying to do and Help you achieve the end, and then the onboarding process, as we talked about in our hiring episode, which is a way bigger deal than a lot of people make it. You don’t just hire someone and then they’re suddenly a fully functioning member of the team. There’s this long process that could take many, many months or even up to a year, I think, where someone can find their place and brings their unique skills to the team in a way that Enhances it, and more than offsets the cost of just having one more person around that needs to be in the loop communication wise, as well as the actual just cost of their salary or fee or whatever. 00:05:11 - Speaker 2: Yes, recruiting team is perhaps the most important aspect of leadership, especially in our domain, and I think that also leads into the ongoing personnel management. There’s a great document called the Netflix Culture deck, which we definitely linked to, and one of the insights from that was that. The things that your company values is not what you put on the plaque in the lobby. It’s what you hire for, it’s what you promote, it’s what you reward, and as a leader, you’re gonna be doing a lot of that and therefore creating and disseminating what are in fact the values of the organization. So by that channel and by other channels, I think setting the values of the group is very important. 00:05:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would list setting vision and values as one of the top jobs of a leader. There’s obviously many leaders in an organization, particularly as it grows, but here, if we think of a small team, you know, something like the Muse team, for example, that, you know, less than 10 people, there’s probably sort of one person who’s mainly responsible for sort of leading the overall thing, and In that case, yeah, the setting of the vision and the values, the ongoing understanding of the values, which, as you said, are less what you write down or claim are your values and more what you live every day, and it’s partially determining what those are, which sometimes flows out initially from kind of some of the personal values of the founders. Obviously the vision is something that evolves over time as you get better understanding of the problem and work the idea maze. 00:06:41 - Speaker 2: And this matter of vision is very interesting to me. I think there’s a piece of vision, which is setting out someplace in the distant future, like you go and you sit and you think real hard and, OK, this is where we should be. That’s kind of the easy part of vision. I find that the harder part, and where the rubber really meets the road is conviction and belief. It’s actually incredibly hard to believe in something for the amount of time and the amount of work it takes to accomplish great things. Because if you don’t believe in it, why shouldn’t anyone else? So there’s a lot of, basically emotional work you gotta do to get out there and put yourself out there and put your beliefs out there in front of the team. 00:07:19 - Speaker 1: Believing and especially believing in something that is in the beginning, a true article of faith, something you believe in, but you really have no evidence for it, and part of what you’re doing in the entrepreneurial journey is creating that evidence. And we talked about this with Mario from the generalists when he was on the podcast. We’re talking about narrative and part of the job of a leader, especially a CEO is to create a narrative that captures that vision that is a dream, but an inspiring dream and feels achievable, and there’s a version of that that can become, you know, we’re talking here about faith and belief and narratives and all this starts to sound, you know, a little bit like cult leader like and indeed you can go off the deep end with that, and that is how you get some of these maybe bad examples of companies that seem to suck up all these resources and build this big internal culture of what turns out to be pretty false belief around some cult of personality. That’s like a far extreme, maybe failure case, but there’s a middle ground where you take a visionary, you know, take a Central, kind of almost mythological figure in our field now, which is Steve Jobs, and he would create that reality distortion field, tell that big story, inspire people, and then be able to make that thing come true that seemed impossible at the start. The balanced version of that is the belief, the faith, believing in front of the team, believing in front of the outside world and especially doing that when the going gets rough. It’s easy to believe in time when things are going well and everything’s up into the right. It’s harder to do that when you’re struggling for some reason or other, and there’s always moments of struggle in every company’s story. 00:09:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’s also easy to have conviction in a way that’s basically a fantasy. And again, we come back to the importance of results and accountability. The real reason it’s important is that the variance in human performance and achievement. Potential is enormous, and often people don’t realize it. Perhaps it’s because they’ve never seen it, they’ve never had anyone that believed they could achieve at a higher level, and the responsibility with vision and belief and foresight is believing that the team can operate at a higher level, and then seeing that they do, in fact, achieve that level. You gotta do both parts, right? It’s not enough just to say, you know, I believe we can do amazing things. Well, sure, don’t we all? But it’s taking the team there and really achieving it. OK, well, let’s pull out Adam Wiggins trick here and refer to one of the items from your crou lessons for leadership. I think the document was pull link to it. But one of the things that I remember was make it concrete. So, let’s talk about some concrete leaders that you’ve looked up to or learned from. 00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Well, certainly offhand, I think of people who have been leaders to me, which includes someone like Byron Sebastian, who we hired to be the CEO at Hiroku, and I learned a lot from someone like Ida Tin, who’s the founder and CEO of Clue, and, you know, these were both people that just inspired you, but also made you feel like they personally cared about you because in fact, they did. And they did for everyone that was on the team, and made it possible for me to do great, great work with under the umbrella of the leadership they were providing. But I think it’s interesting here to look at maybe public cases, people who are famous enough or maybe just got around to writing their autobiographies that you can sort of reference. We’ve mentioned Steve Jobs already. Bill Gates is another, obviously many folks have questions about maybe some of the ruthlessness he exhibited back in his Microsoft days, but you know, each in their own way, Gates and Jobs, maybe they had some. Problems with being a little too tyrannical in their own way, but this incredible drive, the vision, the unwillingness to compromise and shaped the computing industry of their eras in their own vision of how they thought things could be better, you know, Bill Gates believed in a computer on every desk and he achieved that, and Steve Jobs put a computer in everyone’s pocket and made design a household word. But those are sort of obvious cases. I was just flipping through some of the Books I’ve read, particular biographies or autobiographies, and it’s interesting to look at folks maybe outside the tech field as well. One that comes to mind right away is Ruth Handler. She co-founded Mattel, the toy company, and invented the Barbie doll, and also did other entrepreneurial things in her career, but obviously that was the big success, and there’s an excellent biography about her called Barbie and Ruth, the story of the world’s most famous doll, I’ll link that in the show notes. That is a good example of someone who, I guess maybe more an entrepreneurial leader who’s someone who looked at the toy industry as it existed at the time, looked at the dolls that kids, especially little girls were playing with and said, I think there’s a better way here and ended up not only inventing a new product, but founding a whole company around that and that, you know, company went on to essentially change the, the whole industry to match that vision for that better way. Some other examples there are Bill Walsh, who’s, I think, a coach of some MA football team, and he wrote a book called The Score Takes Care of Itself and the Philosophy of Leadership, lots of interesting stuff in there. That’s kind of what we’ve been talking about already, setting vision and values, you know, we came into kind of a struggling team. And did a bunch of things there in terms of setting a new precedent for how they would collaborate together and what kind of standards they would have, many of which was unrelated to, seemed unrelated directly to just playing the sport. A lot of it was about how they hired people, how they kept their facilities, how they treated each other, that sort of thing. So maybe that comes back to your point about kind of environments. And then the last one I’ll name is, it’s actually more of a book that covered a few different folks in the television industry, which is called Difficult Men, and this is about showrunners, which showrunners are sort of leaders of these within the media industry, but they’re not like film directors, which are sort of these, you know, one off two hour things and they’re not. Directors of individual episodes, they are owners of these big epic stories like I think a few that were profiled here is like The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and these are long, long projects with big teams, lots of writers, lots of directors, etc. but of course they’re quite a bit more involved at every level compared to conventional TV. It’s very interesting to read about how they do things and actually one of my takeaways from that book was, and indeed is in the title there is that people with strong vision can often also be very difficult. In fact, they can be, again, I used the word tyrant earlier, I think that people often use that to talk about Steve Jobs style and you see a lot of that with these folks. Now, one exception I do want to point out there is the showrunner from Breaking Bad, who apparently was kind of the sweetest, kindest person and ran the show there and all of that without all of that kind of classic intense boss stuff, which I like that a lot because it shows it can be done and there’s probably a conventional, probably pretty masculine way of kind of leading that is sometimes based on intimidation and I don’t know, various traits that I find not that compelling. But in any case, these TV shows, which are huge artistic efforts, big budgets to manage and over a very long period of time, right, like something goes for 78 seasons, there’s obviously all the build up before that, pilot episodes and things like that. And so, yeah, I don’t know if it’s quite right to say that I look up to any one of these showrunners specifically or see them as Great role models, but just that there’s good patterns across them. These are people who managed to make something unique in the world through organizing a lot of resources and people, which is something I find inspiring. 00:15:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that domain is incredibly rich, TV and movies, because it’s one where there’s this very complex multidisciplinary, creative, high risk project, and there aren’t that many great analogies, I think, to software development. It’s kind of a weird thing, but perhaps actually the closest is making a movie or a TV series. So I think there’s a lot we can learn from those domains. And by the way, This is a pet peeve of mine, you know, people always say, oh, you can’t estimate a software project. There’s no way to know if it will ever, you know, work or when it will be done, you know, you can’t say anything about any of that. I don’t know, man, people estimate complete movies with thousands of people literally filmed all over the world. I don’t know. I sometimes I don’t believe you when you say you can’t estimate a 5 person software project. 00:15:51 - Speaker 1: Do you have anyone that either you’ve worked with personally or is a more public figure, like one of the ones I’ve named there that you find inspiring or anti-examples, people you think that are not effective leaders or have traits that you think are counterproductive. 00:16:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve certainly worked with a lot of different leaders in my times and feel like I’m developing notions based on those experiences that I try to give things more time and distance before I really weigh in. But what I’ll mention is Peter Van Hartenburgh at the lab. I’ve worked with Peter in several different domains, and he’s someone who’s just like a magician with getting the right team together and getting that alchemy happening. And I don’t know how he does it. And frankly, it’s often pretty messy. Leaders have different styles, but man, somehow people show up and they start doing amazing stuff. It’s really amazing to watch. 00:16:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Peter the great one, he comes to mind for me as well, and also to your point about styles, he and I could not be more different. I’m all about like structure and clarity and so on, and he has this more, you know, warm, but also kind of loose and flowing approach, and indeed we have together been in kind of like co-leadership positions, maybe I’m, you know, leading on the product and design side and he’s more leading. Engineering team to take one example, and there’s ways those styles don’t really fit together, but then when I’m just watching him do his thing and see the results that come out, it’s just undeniable that he’s got something that really works, even though it’s kind of a mystery to me because I come at it from such a different perspective. 00:17:22 - Speaker 2: And I also look a lot to history. I feel like in the case of historical figures, we have more distance and perspective. Often there’s a lot more data, and because the stakes were often so high, often indeed existential, it really lays everything bare, right? Like there’s no excuses, there’s no ifs ands or buts, there’s no mitigating factors, you know, kind of it is what it is, and it’s settled on the world stage and that’s that. Whereas, you know, if you’re a leader at a big company, is what you’re doing working well because the company is doing well or, you know, whatever, it’s kind of hard to tell. You need more time and perspective and distance. So one example for me is George Washington, who is an incredible example of, well, a personal character, but also B, this idea of vision and belief, you know, believing that you’re going to create a country contrary to the global superpower and, you know, fight a revolutionary war with farmers and merchants, it’s just an incredible story. 00:18:21 - Speaker 1: And one of the things I love about the Washington example as well is he did what was needed in the moment, right? There was fighting a war, but when the war was over, he didn’t try to continue that because he was pretty good at being a general. He moved into a new kind of leadership position, which was being the president of a young nation and trying to preside over building up a government and building up good processes for this new democracy. Something I at least aspire to do in my own. Kind of career as a team lead, which is do what the situation demands, do rise to the moment of what this exact team, this exact company or organization or situation calls for, which often means doing things way outside my comfort zone or having to educate myself about stuff that I have not done in the past, and it would be easier to stick to a thing I know, a skill set I already have, but that’s not what’s really needed in the situation. 00:19:18 - Speaker 2: Another reason that I like to look to history, is that I feel like much of leadership is made in the small details, and unfortunately, we don’t have the small details, we don’t have access to the small details for most contemporary leadership cases. Like the CEO of Microsoft, you know, we don’t really know very much about how he operates unless perhaps you work directly with him at Microsoft. But if you go back to the historical examples, we have, you know, basically all their papers, we’ve triangulated massively. There’s all these different angles that we have on it. We’ve collected all the accounts and you get a richer sense of how they operated day to day. So it’s not about just making a few big decisions and that’s it, even though when you zoom out, you’re seeing this huge global event. It’s really about the individual interactions you have each day, you’re hiring and firing decisions, who you promote, who you don’t, you know, how you motivate the one guy who’s struggling. That’s the really rich texture that I think you need to be able to develop a good sense of leadership. And unless you’re lucky to have a few of those in your life, which I think to varying extent, we’ve been lucky to have that, but there’s this, this incredibly rich historical bounty that we have if we’re willing to go back and look at it. 00:20:26 - Speaker 1: Now going back to a word I think you’ve used a couple times here so far is accountability. I feel like that’s an important one to zoom in on. What does accountability mean in the context of the leader’s job? 00:20:40 - Speaker 2: I think it ultimately means that your success is measured by whether your team achieves the goals that you set out to accomplish. And what’s tough about that is that that being accomplished or not is going to be a function of all the work that the individual people on the team do. So you basically, you’re not directly pulling these levers, that would be responsibility in the management language, right? Like you’re the person actually doing the frontline work, but you still need to be accountable for the results. The sum of all that happens rolls up to you. 00:21:11 - Speaker 1: Roll up is a good word for it, because I think the accountability or holding the organization, the team accountable is a combination of the leader themselves feeling accountable for the overall results, separate from any individual domain that a person might be responsible for, and that includes we just don’t have someone that owns a particular domain, that’s a big gap for us, and we need to do something about that because you’re accountable for what’s there overall. But then there’s also a holding people on the team accountable, and hopefully the team holds itself accountable. Individuals do, and they make commitments to each other and want to keep that commitment in terms of what they’re going to deliver and so forth. But I think the leader’s job is to be accountable themselves, and maybe that somehow goes up to, you know, if you’ve got a board of directors or shareholders or something like that, but in the end, it probably boils down to also just like, if your company fails, you know, that was fundamentally, that was the leader. Failing more than anyone else, but then that also gets echoed back into holding team members accountable, or if you have whole teams that are sort of under your, again, umbrella of leadership that you’re saying like, OK, look, I don’t necessarily know every detail about how you do your work. I trust that you know your skill and your craft better than I do or ever. Well, but look, we need to deliver X and here’s the resources we have to do that. And if you don’t think we can accomplish that, we need to come up with a different plan, for example, and then kind of keeping again coming back to that, repeating yourself and the reminders, not just forgetting about it, but coming back to it to say, OK, how are we doing on this? 00:22:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think there’s a related idea in there of standards. I think an important role of a leader is setting the level of standards within an organization and holding the team to that, and it’s not as easy as it sounds because, of course, we would like to have infinitely high standards and to see. Everyone reaching them, but what happens is if you set the standards too high, that is, you know, of course, if they’re not possible to accomplish, or it’s just the team members don’t believe they can do it, or they don’t feel like they have the support to do it, or they don’t feel like they’re gonna be rewarded if they do do it. Not only are you not reaching the level that you had set as a leader, you’ve lost credibility. So, You need to find the right balance of raising the standards such that the performance of the organization increases but not trying to raise it so high that you detach from reality. Again, I think this is so important in our domain because the level of variance is enormous, and I think people still, even though we have now several decades of experience and Making software. I think people still underestimate a lot, but it’s possible, how fast it’s possible to move, how high quality the software can be, how fast it can be, how reliable it can be, and so on. And so I still think there’s a lot of work left to be done as leaders in this area. 00:24:05 - Speaker 1: Um, one example that I read just recently is Patrick McKenzie and his nonprofit Vaccinate CA, which was basically a kind of information website for availability of vaccines first in California and later in the rest of the United States during our recent pandemic, and he wrote up a in his His usual sharp and humorous style, the full story of their experience and spinning up this nonprofit, the work that they did, and then eventually shutting down when they weren’t needed anymore. But that concept of what’s possible and what standards we hold ourselves to, I feel like permeated the story because there it really was about speed. And they’re doing kind of like a low tech, fast, but accurate thing that would ultimately result in their organization’s mission, which was to get more shots in arms. And so Patrick as a leader in this case, was holding his organization to the standard of speed because that was just everything in this case, getting this information, getting accurate information out to people as quickly as possible, getting the website built and the infrastructure that went with it. And that that sort of was in contrast to what, for example, is pretty commonplace in, let’s say government organization or even government contractors who are used to long cycles and a lot of process, and he came in and said, no, what’s important here is to do it quickly, and holding his team to that standard through a set of sort of practices allowed them to accomplish things that no one else could. But importantly there, and I think in most cases, as you said, it’s the trade-off of what standard are we holding ourselves to in the context of how that helps us achieve our mission. It’s not that we want to, for example, make the most beautiful design possible just because, just because we want the highest possible standard. There needs to be some reason, something we accomplish with a lot of craft put into the design, or for another organization, it might be. A beautiful design doesn’t matter very much, and we hold ourselves to high standards on other things. For example, safety might be something that an airline wants to hold themselves to a very high standard for. So I think it has to be set the standards in a way that fit with the reality of the world, but also the mission of the company and what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re trying to deliver. Well, maybe now would be a good moment to mention why this topic is on my mind to begin with, which is our team has been working on our new product Muse for Teams, and part of what we’ve done in this alpha program is we have a survey where people can essentially fill it out and describe what they do, what their team is like, and how they idea today and so forth and what their frustrations are, and We didn’t really know what kind of people were going to answer that survey, and indeed we’ve had quite a wide mix, just similar to the new user base, architects, doctors, many students, many professors or other people in the academic space. But one pattern I think that we’ve seen quite a lot of is team leads signing up, and this is interesting because it seems that the problem of, let’s say, a shared collaborative whiteboard or shared documents generally to be a space for a team to idea is something that is a problem that team leads are just Very intimately familiar with, they feel this pain most directly, maybe more than the individuals on the team, and that caused me to be kind of reflecting that, OK, well, why is that? And maybe that’s not a coincidence, right? Part of why I’m driven to build this product is I’m also a team lead, and something that I consider a key part of that job is Yeah, manager speak for this would be alignment, you know, getting everyone on the same page or the basic idea that you can bring together a bunch of amazing craftspeople, but if you don’t agree on what you’re building and what you’re doing here and a direction and you have a meeting and you talk about it, but it’s kind of like subtly wrong and then everyone goes off to their individual things and they’re building stuff. And a week later, a month later, whatever you try to put it together or you come back and look at it and realize you just had all these false misaligned, mismatched assumptions about what you’re really doing there and then that slows everything down and people are demoralized and work has to be undone and so forth, and that my experience as a team lead is that If your team is aligned going into a project, you get this incredible execution. It’s fun to do, you know, maybe hard work, but you’re all kind of rowing in the same direction. You’re seeing those results when you put the pieces together, they’re all harmonious, and I think this is something where the historic solution to this called it alignment problem is these analog tools, right? We get together in front of the whiteboard and we talk about it, we go to the conference room, you know, maybe on a bigger scale, you got the all hands or whatever. But then when you come to remote work, OK, now it’s harder to take advantage of some of those, and I think this is where you have shared documents, you know, I got big into Google Docs basically once I got more into remote teams because that could be a kind of like internal memo. I’ve used email for that, that sort of thing in the past, maybe Slack to some extent or some of that, but I think there’s really nothing like a more kind of free form ideation space, and that indeed seems to be what folks who are Filling out our survey, who are founders or CEOs, particularly of small to mid-size teams, are seeing is that OK, I now have this remote team, we have these time zone differences, we do have all these collaboration tools and different kinds of shared documents, but none of them quite have that same flexibility and kind of all encompassing aspect that you can get out of just physical ideation tools. And as a result, that can be a real impairment for remote team to execute well, and again that moving more slowly and undoing work and frustration as people feel like the pieces don’t fit together. I found that very interesting. I’m curious how you see all that. 00:30:18 - Speaker 2: So we talked a while back about this book called Sketching User Experiences, and one of the key ideas from that book was that the medium that you choose to work in, it sort of tunes your wavelengths that you’re listening into and operating on. So, if you have a very precise medium, you think very precisely and you might therefore lose the bigger picture. If you have an extremely messy medium, you might not get concrete enough. And there’s an important middle there, which he called sketching, which has the benefit of being concreteness, but it’s not about being pixel perfect. And so, one of the original ideas with Muse was that you needed the same thing for, well, ideas, for creative thinking, for planning. It wasn’t super linear, like a text document, it wasn’t. Super mechanical, like a Gantt chart, but it also captured the richness of thinking that people and teams have, it’s multimedia and so on. And so, one of the things we’re hearing from team leads is that According to the medium that they choose, that tends to tune the thinking of the team. So if a team jumps right into Figma, for example, they’re tuned to think about pixels and what’s the radius of this curve and is the shadow rate, or if you jump right into Git and GitHub, you’re thinking, what’s the name of this function be, and so on. Whereas if you center the team around, you know, traditionally it would have been a whiteboard. OK, they’re stepping back a little bit, they’re thinking a little bit more expansively. They’re not worried too much about the details, but it does need to be concrete enough so that you can see where the boxes and arrows are and so forth. So I think the muse does help teams idea on the proper wavelength, if you will, for when you’re brainstorming and forming new ideas and starting to anneal plans together. 00:32:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the sketching user experiences book, which is Bill Buxton, if I’m not mistaken, I’ll link that in the show notes. That’s a great one, a little rambly in a way, but lots of good ideas in it, and he also talks about a sketch as being, it’s not about being a drawing specifically, although it often is, and more that it is a thing that proximates the final shape. So it’s cheap to make, so you can make a lot of them and compare them, but it is, as you said, still concrete and you can look at it and discuss it. And another important quality of the sketch is that it’s kind of vague, which is good in the sense that it invites a lot of interpretations, so you can have this kind of ideation experience, particularly between two or more people where you think, OK, here’s kind of what I’m thinking and you sketch it in whatever medium you’re using and someone looks at that and says, oh yeah, I see that that would solve the problem this way. You say, oh, no, no, that’s not what I was thinking. But wait, now that I kind of look at it that way too, well, that’s an interesting idea. So like, The sort of open to interpretation aspect of it serves as a launching off point for the kind of divergent thinking that you should be doing when you’re in the early phases of a project. 00:33:15 - Speaker 2: And that reminds me of another important aspect of ideas and plans is that it’s not just about the final artifacts. It’s about working through it, but I have one called chewing, and if you’re chewing an idea or a plan together as a team, you’ve, well, digested it better to continue with the analogy, right? Like everyone has a better sense of what’s going on, they feel more invested in it. They’re more aware of the trade-offs that you sort of traverse together and things like that. And so that’s part of the vision with use for teams being multiplayer is that instead of having a team lead, write up a document. And cast it about on the team and everyone going from there, it’s more a matter of the team is building this together incrementally, and not only do they share the artifacts at the end, they share the experience of having worked on it, and are therefore more invested in the final result. 00:34:07 - Speaker 1: And that highlights something that was a major piece of learning for me in my leadership career, which is working through the problem, you know, you start with all the inputs and you think about all the constraints and the opportunities in front of you, and you eventually come up with a solution, which might be a plan of action, it might be a rough design or a vision, it might be specific kind of task assignments, and I would tend to think, OK, well, let me bring this. To the team that I’m working with, because this is the plan, but actually that doesn’t work very well. You need to make the plan together, because otherwise, the people don’t feel shared ownership. They weren’t there for the process of seeing why we’re doing exactly what we’re doing. And in many cases, all the different disciplines you may have on your team and the different perspectives, those need to be folded in. Now, it’s not necessarily designed by committee, there does still need to be kind of a central organizing. single mind that can kind of look at everything and make sure it all fits together holistically, but you do need to take into account, you know, the classic example here would be if designers make a design without consulting with engineers, they’re gonna be unaware of both the limitations and the capability of the technology, and they’re gonna ask to be implemented maybe out of step with what’s possible with whatever technology they’re working with, just to take one kind of classic example. So yeah, that process of planning together as a group. And coming to that, like, this is our shared plan is immensely valuable, and I even resist the urge, you know, I like to think strategically, I like to think about what’s next after we finish this current work and What have we learned and how do we fold that into what our next step should be, but I’ve really learned that, you know, hold off a little bit, do it with the team because we need to all do it together, and it’s that experience of going through it together that is going to make it so that when you go to execute the plan, you can do that far better. 00:36:04 - Speaker 2: And I think the most effective version of this, by the way, isn’t all or nothing. The weakest thing you could do is come up with a plan as an individual and cast it over the wall to the whole team. We understand that’s not very strong. It’s slightly better, but still not very good to jump into a meeting with an entire large team and just start planning from scratch. And then end of the meeting, yes, also a mistake, a mistake, right? And so what actually needs to happen is there’s this very organic process. I use the analogy of the spiral, spiraling outward. So typically, you start with some kernel of an idea, like you have this notion that the team should move in some direction, and then you go and you balance that idea off one or two of your close trusted advisors. These are people who you trust to, you know, give you candid feedback, but also kind of keep the idea private because you’re still in the process of nurturing it. And then you might take that idea which is starting to take basic shape and discuss it with your leadership team. And you do some more shaping there, you gather some more data points, and then you might have each of those managers do a brainstorming session with their team and then take the results back to you. And then you might have, you know, some of the managers talk to each other and then you might develop a draft plan and go message test that with a handful of individual people on the team. And then you might send it out to the whole group, right? This is just one example of how a typical kind of communication development and dissemination process might happen. It has many steps with different size groups with different configurations. So one of the original ideas with Muse was to try to facilitate that better and to create this environment where you can have things that are moving between private, semi-public and public and back, and along the way, accreting information. 00:37:47 - Speaker 1: Indeed, and I feel that also touches on the kind of synchronous versus asynchronous discussion we had in our remote work podcast and certainly has come up a lot on the news for Teams product, which is people have the question, is this mainly for synchronous? We’re all on a call together and we can see our cursors flying around, or is it mainly for asynchronous, we’re gonna Send documents back and forth to each other, and I think some of each is the right answer. I think you get different kinds of ideas, different kinds of consensus and buy-in from each of these, but yeah, I think it’s too, I don’t know, laborious, probably wasteful of time, but also for me as an introvert, I just need time and space to think on my own, and I think many folks. It’s too much to try to kind of think in a group. Now you could bring ideas together and that’s where if you’ve all prepared a bit within the new world, you created boards. We do this exact thing, especially for really significant, you know, bigger planning meetings or just discussions about our future, where we say, look, you should think about this on your own if you can, if you can find the time, you know, write up your thoughts, which is could be just. of bullet points, but it could be a really extensive board. We’ll get all those boards, those kind of individual boards together on one shared board, and then we can go through it a bit synchronously and get to shared understanding and hopefully synthesize all of this together into our best solution. So I think there’s really places for both of those in the ideal work process from my perspective. Well, maybe a good place to end would be books or other resources that have been helpful to us and discovering our own path to leadership and what works well on teams. I think you’ve already mentioned the Netflix culture deck, I’ve mentioned a few books that I’ll link in the show notes. Do you have any that you think we should mention for our listeners? 00:39:37 - Speaker 2: I’d actually re-emphasize the history idea. I think it’s just incredibly valuable. And if I was to give concrete advice, it would be to pick some event or time period that you’re really interested in and try to read a half dozen or a dozen books on that same topic, because again, it’s all about getting that richness of Of historical perspectives and angles and information and really understanding the texture of the day to day decisions. And you can learn a lot of the same things from different periods because people have been and are the same. So just find one that you’re really interested in would be up for reading a dozen books and go for it. If I was to pick some more classic management books, the number one book that I recommend to new managers is Slack. I almost feel like it’s mistitled. 00:40:21 - Speaker 1: I mean, the core thesis of the book is I wanted to briefly interject to point out that this book predates Slack, the software product and is unrelated to it, and instead is about the concept of slack in the system in terms of making your team work at 100% efficiency means there’s no slack in the system and that has all kinds of negative downstream consequences for your business, even besides tired and burned out workers. 00:40:44 - Speaker 2: And if I was to give a bit of an oddball recommendation, I would say principles of product development flow. This is a highly analytical book. It’s a cutheoretic analysis of project management, which I know is quite a ways from what we’ve been talking about today, but there are a lot of important ideas, especially for people who work in engineering type domains. So if you have any affinity at all for that sort of stuff, I really highly recommend it. What about you, Adam? 00:41:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think for me I get the most value out of stories, autobiographical or biographical accounts of the lives of leaders or sometimes teams in a particular high stakes situation. So certainly when you’re talking about history, I think of, I’ve read biographies of Abraham Lincoln, for example, and the challenges of keeping the nation together and everything else going on during his. Presidency. Another one I really like is about Catherine the Great, who was a really pretty visionary and forward thinking leader for Russia at the time and established a lot of precedents, including writing a super long manifesto about sort of some perspective on making Russia into something a step closer to a modern liberal democracy, which is quite interesting. So yeah, when you read these stories, they’re not telling you, hey, Lincoln. was effective because of this thing or Catherine did a good job because of this thing and therefore that’s a lesson you should apply to your leadership. It’s more, I don’t know, just examples and then those may or may not be directly applicable to what you do, but then you can bring those stories to mind sometimes if you find yourself in a dilemma or a circumstance that resembles in some way. What they went through and think about these examples you’ve seen and how they turned out for them and then think, OK, what can I learn from that? How can I apply that to my specific circumstance, my specific leadership style? And I think that tends to work better, or just be more memorable for me maybe than something that’s a little more prescriptive or abstract. But that said, something a little bit more pragmatic. There are the classic management books, take it, for example, high output Management by Andy Grove or Management by Peter Drucker. Although that actually leads me to maybe a final question here, Mark, which is, do you think that leadership and management are synonymous, essentially two words for the same thing, or do they represent different disciplines? 00:43:11 - Speaker 2: I think they’re very closely related. I think management done well, is just a superset of leadership. Now, when people use these two words, they’re often saying management in such a tone that they’re quite dismissive of it and think perhaps these circles do not overlap at all. And, you know, perhaps it’s valid based on their experience with managers, but I think management done well, includes all the aspects of leadership that we discussed, plus you necessarily have the people responsibility. What about you? 00:43:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really was curious about this and thinking about how we would cover this topic. I think of it as a Venn diagram to the point of your circles, and there’s quite a bit of overlap, but they aren’t necessarily quite the same thing. I think of leadership as more of forging a new path, and I think of management as something that’s more continuing or having something operate smoothly. But I think it’s wrong to think that those can be completely separated or unrelated because so much of keeping, whether it’s a business or a property or anything else, kind of thriving is some element of change, some element of reinvention, so there needs to be some forging a new path. If nothing else, just cause the world is changing around you and you need to keep up with that. And similarly, I think earlier in my career, I, as an entrepreneur, I was so focused on the forge a new path side of things that I didn’t give enough weight and importance to the management side, which includes people management, but also includes Yeah, just what it takes to run a business or keep your offices open or that sort of thing. There is this very pragmatic operating element that is part of what I think of it as management and you can’t really build a thing and lead it without some portion of that. So yeah, I don’t know if that’s enough to do a whole podcast on management in the future or maybe the two are So bound up that it’s not helpful to differentiate between them. But for me, I think it was somewhat of an epiphany moment to realize that there is this discipline called management that it is, as you said, maybe it’s a super set of leadership or maybe it’s just an overlapping piece, and indeed that name or term or concept appears in product management, for example, and I think there’s a Subtle meaning to that that is useful to understand, at least for me, when I did start to understand it, also greatly expanded my understanding of what it means to be a leader and how I wanted to grow in my career. So, yeah, it’s a tricky one. 00:45:44 - Speaker 2: Flipping this around, I think it’s the case that one doesn’t need to be a manager to be a leader. Perhaps that’s a good message to close up the podcast with, but this is something that anyone can step up and do. And indeed, it’s the nature of leadership that people aren’t going to give that to you, something that you have to take on yourself and demonstrate initiatives going back to one of our very first points about vision and belief and conviction. 00:46:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to me, that’s actually one of the best moments on a team is when someone sort of unexpected steps up, takes ownership of something, takes the lead on something, and they don’t need to be the boss, and they don’t need to have vested authority. They just see a problem, see an opportunity for things to be better on the team and find a way to lead. In the direction of how that can be improved, and seeing that happen, spontaneously seeing that person grow into whatever that leadership moment is for them is, to me, it’s one of the best parts of being on a team and doing the work we do. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community, the links in the show notes. You can also follow us on Twitter at MA HQ, and Mark, thanks for all the leadership you’ve shown in all the various teams we’ve been on together over the years. 00:47:02 - Speaker 2: Right on, well, learned a lot for you, Adam.