in “The Voyage of Theseus” briefly introduces the concepts of “Uppercase” and “lowercase” goals.

Blundercheck

The Voyage of Theseus

AI bros assault me on a regular basis. A deluge of grant money has made them religiously concerned about existential risk. So, when I share that safety is my primary research interest, they naturally switch into bible thumping mode. I bail, unceremoniously, as fast as I can. Even my thoroughly Canadian etiquette isn’t enough to stop me. Why? The hit rat…

Read more

a year ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Timber Stinson-Schroff

Briefly, “Uppercase” goals refer to the aspiration of a brand or initiative to become a widely recognized, household name within a category (like “Kleenex”). In contrast, “lowercase” initiatives aim to change how people think, behave, or organize without necessarily relying on a prominent brand or idol. They often deliberately avoid strong definitions or labels for as long as possible1:

If you are trying to change the way people think…or behave…or organize, you want to be lowercase. Uppercase movements are contingent on the reputation of an idol or brand. A successful lowercase strategy should avoid definitions and titles and labels for as long as possible.

Timber acknowledges that neither “Uppercase” or “lowercase” are inherently bad or good, and as so often, “YMMV”:

There’s no right answer – nor are these things […] mutually exclusive – it’s just a contour of the landscape that you should consider.

I believe, however, that aspiring to be “Uppercase” carries a significant risk: the means can become the end itself, effectively turning “Uppercase” into “Cargo-culting.”

This occurs when the desire for status or recognition (the “Uppercase” aspiration) overshadows the actual “building of the thing.” New startups, for instance, frequently claim they want to become “the next [insert your current favourite brand or industry idol],” but this well-intentioned signalling and “fake-it-till-you-make-it” mentality can devolve into mere hand-waving, hoping for a desired outcome to magically manifest, rather than focusing on solid development. This fits the classic definition of a cargo cult, where rituals are performed with the expectation of a specific outcome, without understanding the underlying mechanisms.

Looking at the mechanics of 'Uppercase' cargo-culting, it's clear that VC money plays a pivotal role, particularly in the tech industry. As Meredith Whittaker said in an interview a few years ago2: “[T]he venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype.”

In a somewhat related train of thought, the research into “The Politics of Partial Success”3 by Dan Bretznitz and Darius Ornston offers another compelling example of the “Uppercase” versus “lowercase” dynamic. Their work examines the (often partial) success of innovation agencies, particularly concerning their profile, prestige, and funding versus their actual agency in driving radical innovation.

They found a relatively straightforward relationship: highly visible ('Uppercase') innovation initiatives, which attract significant political and economic interest and increased funding, often experience a capture of their resources, limiting them in their capacity for radical innovation. Conversely, “Schumpeterian development agencies” (SDAs), which are peripheral and often low-profile (“lowercase”), have more agency to pursue radical innovation, but often at the cost of being marginalized and underfunded.

Their research suggests a trade-off in politicized environments: you can either have significant agency (and pursue radical change) at the price of being marginalized and potentially underfunded, or enjoy increased visibility (and more resources) at the expense of your agency. But you can hardly have both.

The core question to ask (and outcome to work towards) should be: “Do I have and will I continue to have interesting, engaging, and joyful conversations with this partner?”

Looking at James Carse's work, one could also phrase it as: “Can I maintain joyful ‘infinite play’ in conversation with my partner?”

In “Human – All-Too-Human”, Nietzsche wrote about marriage1:

406,

MARRIAGE AS A LONG TALK—In entering on a marriage one should ask one’s self the question, “Do you think you will pass your time well with this woman till your old age?” All else in marriage is transitory ; talk, however, occupies most of the time of the association.2

This reminded me of ’s brief note about the secret to a happy marriage, which nicely made that point, too:

I think this beautifully illustrates the essence of “infinite play” in their conversations, a key concept James Carse explored in “Finite and Infinite Games”:3

Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.

Reading ’s (as always, beautiful) piece “On feeling connected” made me think about an important point on “applications first” versus “principles first” thinking and practising.12

Escaping Flatland

On feeling connected

Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled, 1966…

Read more

2 years ago · 162 likes · 21 comments · Henrik Karlsson

When reading Henrik’s piece, I was immediately reminded of Adam Grant and his book “Give and Take”3. It is, for what it is, excellent too. But somehow, as much as I tried, pitching it against Henrik’s post felt wrong. There seemed to be an elegance and beauty in Henrik’s argument which, I felt, could not be matched by whatever Grant had written.

And then it dawned on me: what fundamentally sets “On feeling connected” apart from “Give and Take” is the fact that it explores the principle of giving (and it’s practising, to become effective4), whereas the latter (true to its nature as a business/self-help book of sorts), is much more concerned with the application of giving. But why does this matter? It is nothing new that self-help is often about quick fixes, i.e. about applications, and it is quite obvious that “principles first” requires some extra work if it is to be applied to real-world situations.

Yet, there is a fundamental difference between the two, and it concerns the temporal aspects: While both application first and concrete fielding of principles first thinking can help you in the short term (and even will generate direct returns in the long-term), it is principles first thinking which really prepares you for the long run.

It is the mastery of the principles and their practising which is timeless, and ultimately prepares you for whatever will come down the road.

While “applications first” often offers considerable benefits in the short term (and is hence of particular interest for business and self-help books and substacks), “principles first” is the thinking that offers both long-term and transferable insights — at the “cost” of having to think more about it and training its applications by thinking for yourself, in the relative context, but with a view to future, oblique opportunities to apply it.5

And this is why principles first matters.

Henrik himself makes a great example in his article of what this could look like, concretely, when he talks about “practising” the principle of giving. He calls this a “nice little mental trick” 6:

[What] people who see giving as an act of potency realize is that this feeling of a loving connection is something you can produce yourself. If a feeling of connection to the world and other people is a kind of wealth, it is a wealth you don’t need to inherit or earn. It is more like you are the federal reserve and you can just print that stuff.

…

It is a nice little mental trick.

What follows makes the point of the principles behind this, and shows us quite practically how mastering the principle of giving does not only generate “short term” returns (a joyous feeling, a connectedness with yourself and the world) but ultimately prepares us for an entirely different field of application, potentially far down the road, and triggered by circumstances we can neither imagine nor fathom:

Because at some point, sooner than you would wish, life will turn into a catastrophe. People you love will die. You will get chronically ill. There will be violence. And at that point, you might not make it unless you can generate this kind of generous love that connects you to the world and gives it meaning. Frankl and Antonovsky both made this observation about concentration camps.

And this capability is something no self-help or business / management book like Grant’s with its “application first” thinking could achieve in the same way.7

Independently, I had a foray into Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on Difference (and his ideas of analytical empiricism and creation), by proxy of two excellent articles over at The Collector³, and I was mulling over a concept for a new initiative where change – and how we think about bringing change (and difference) into being - are of central importance.

Reading and thinking through all of this sent me down rabbit hole and made me wonder

• if the case method and the “conventional scientific research methodology” as described by Roger Marting could be seen as Deleuzian and Hegelian respectively, and then

• if Dave Snowden ever thought of his “Vector theory of change”⁴ as being decidedly Deleuzean in nature, and

• whether the philosophical underpinning between the Vector Theory of Change and traditional Theories of Change is that of a Deleuzian versus Hegelian approach to “Difference”.

As Linda Doyle writes in the Cynefin Co’s explainer on the Vector Theory of Change:

Traditional theories of change typically involve envisioning an end point, then working backwards to identify each step that must be achieved in order to realise the end goal, with rationales and assumptions identified at each step.⁴

Looking at this in terms of difference, this approach is more like difference as negation, difference only seen as the relation to two identities (the end point y in relation (and negation) of the starting point y), the relation of x to the y. Which is arguably Hegelian in its nature, as the end state can only exist in its difference to the start state. Or, as Choudhary writes:

Within the same identity are two elements (thesis and antithesis) which are extremely opposites to one another such that their differences can be eliminated to create a “superior” unity (the synthesis).⁵

The Vector theory of change, on the other hand, is arguably much more Deleuzian in its philosophical underpinning. As [[Monisha Choudhary]] writes, Difference and Repetition⁶, Deleuze’s magnus opum is about “new modes of thinking and becoming are developed through difference and repetition.” (emphasis mine)⁵

As Choudhary exlplains further:

the Deleuzian philosophy of difference is a philosophy of change – a change which occurs by difference and repetition.

For [Deleuze], repetition is a function of time and as well as an embodiment of time itself.⁵

Looking at the Vector theory of change in this way, we can see that the iterative approach to change and thinking of the change as a vector (or rather, its differential dx), fits very well with the idea of Deleuze’s difference-in-itself, and that the theory supports the becoming of a new target state through difference and repetition.⁷

To me, it seems that one could well look at the Vector Theory of Change this way. And of course, I secretly wonder if that idea of a Deleuzian vs. Hegelian approach to Complexity has not even more to it.

1. Martin, Roger. 2023. ‘Ways of Understanding’. Medium (blog). 16 October 2023. https://rogermartin.medium.com/ways-of-understanding-4a4284087d3a. ↩︎

2. In short, the case method is analytical and distills a theory, starting with observations, whereas the conventional scientific method is synthetic and starts with a hypothesis which is then underpinned by (synthetic) empirical research that attempts to prove - or disprove - this hypothesis. ↩︎

3. Understanding Gilles Deleuze and the Concept of Difference by Luke Dunne and Gilles Deleuze: The Philosophy of Creation by Monisha Choudhary. ↩︎

4. Doyle, Linda. 2021. ‘Change & Complexity:  Vector Theory of Change’. The Cynefin Centre. https://thecynefin.co/VTOC-paper-2022. ↩︎ ↩︎

5. Choudhary, Monisha. 2022. ‘Gilles Deleuze: The Philosophy of Creation’. 21 August 2022. https://www.thecollector.com/gilles-deleuze-philosophy-of-creation/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

6. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. ↩︎

7. One could argue that the moment in which a target state of a change initiative in a complex environment has been reached, the system itself has changed again, so we will never be in a desired target state, but will perpetually be in a state of becoming. ↩︎

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.

(1/2)

— Dr. Jabe Bloom (@cyetain) August 24, 2021

Hunting down the source of that fantastic quote lead me to a wonderful essay by Audre Lorde: „The Master‘s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master‘s House“ where I found a follow-up paragraph to the one  @cyetain‘s quoting. It’s beautiful and powerful at the same time:

Within the interdependence of mutual […] differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

(Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, Calif: Crossing Press, 2007, p. 111)

It also reminds me of  @AntoniaPont‘s „A Philosophy of Practising“ with its beautiful treatise of „practising“ who writes the following on „difference in itself“:

[The] aim would be to think difference on its own terms.

This new thought of difference – difference in itself – does not find and name what is different between existing concepts. It is a concept in itself. Arguably, it designates the name of how we can begin to think that which hasn’t been imagined yet, the mechanism for change that isn’t modification within an existing regime.

(Pont, Antonia. A Philosophy of Practising: With Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 2021., p. 105)

Obviously, it‘s a bit of a stretch to simply compare and link these two trains of thought on „difference“. Yet, „thinking of difference in itself“ in the context of Audre Lorde‘s quote leads us to the question what „difference in itself“ means for creativity and the power this „raw connection“ creates: „the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.“ (Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 111)

Many individuals are uninformed about the energy consumption needed for water heating. Usually, 16% of a household’s energy usage is attributed to heating water, primarily for showering and bathing. In contrast, cooking and lighting account for about 5% of a household’s energy needs.¹

We recently replaced an old, fully electrical hot water boiler with a much more energy efficient heat-pump based hot water boiler from Oekoboiler. While we’re only just starting to measure and compare the energy consumption, it is clear that the reduction will be substantial.²

This post, however, is about a small side-project I started over christmas, using a virtual Shelly device to monitor and optimize our Oekoboiler’s energy consumption with the SolarManager system for PV energy consumption optimisation.

I call this “ Oekoboiler Shelly”.

What is Oekoboiler Shelly, anyway?

Oekoboiler Shelly is a versatile virtual device that emulates the functionality of a Shelly 1PM device, but with added capabilities for connecting to a Oekoboiler heat pump boiler via its cloud API. This allows for the retrieval of real-time data on water temperature, enabling external systems such as a Solar Manager to optimize PV power consumption by controlling the Oekoboiler’s PV Ready function through a PV relay ( Shelly 1 or Uni).

Oekoboiler Shelly also retrieves data about current power consumption from a Power Meter device and the current relay status from the PV relay device it controls.

This information is then used by the Solar Manager by configuring one or different Shelly 1/PM devices:

• optimised heat pump control via the ”PV-Ready” or “SG-Ready” function (relay/0),

• power consumption (meters/0), and

• hot-water temperature readout (ext_temperature).

A typical use case might be hot water production via the Solar Manager’s Hot water / 1 Step ON / OFF device using a Shelly 1PM as ”Device (Relay)”.

This will then allow you to measure and optimize your Oekoboiler’s enerygy use. It will be displayed as follows, with the current water temperature, current and overall power consumption for the past 24h, and optimization control (”PV-function”).

Typical readout

Once properly configured, Solar Manager will hence display the current warm water temperature along with the detailed graphs for all the devices you have configured.

Typical output generated by the virtual device at the /status endpoint looks as follows (simulating a Shelly 1PM):

{
  "time": "20:10",
  "has_update": false,
  "ram_total": 1513185280,
  "ram_free": 786624512,
  "uptime": 3988,
  "relays": [
    {
      "ison": false,
      "has_timer": false
    }
  ],
  "meters": [
    {
      "power": 3.07,
      "is_valid": true
    }
  ],
  "tmp": {},
  "ext_sensors": {
    "temperature_unit": "C"
  },
  "ext_temperature": {
    "0": {
      "hwID": 0,
      "tC": 59,
      "tF": 138.2
    }
  }
}

Requirements

It is essentially assumed that you know what you’re doing when using this software.

In terms of dependencies, you need

• node (>=v16 will do) and yarn

• a server to run the software on

• a PV and heat pump boiler system to feed / control with this software

Use

To run it, install the dependencies (running yarn will do, as does npm if you wish) and define the following five environment variables:

• OB_USER_MAIL: your Oekoboiler E-Mail

• OB_USER_PASSWORD: your Oekoboiler Password³

• OB_DSN: The Device Serial Number (DSN) of your Oekoboiler⁴

• OB_MYSTROM_METER: The MyStrom Switch used as a power meter for the Oekoboiler

• OB_SHELLY_SWITCH: The Shelly 1 used to control the Oekoboiler’s PV function

• OB_LISTEN_IP: The IP address to bind to. Useful if you plan to run multiple fake shellies on the same machine with multiple IP adresses

You can do so:

• by putting them in a .env file whill will be loaded by dotenv, including its variations on how to get to the file,

• by using the systemd service (with the provided .service file), and, if your systemd is recent enough (or backported), use it’s encryption capability,⁵

• or simply by defining them in the shell environment, optionally using something like 1Password CLI to securely pass them to the script.

Once you’re set-up, just run the binary from the working directory to test it:

bin/oekoboiler-shelly

From there, include the appropriate device in Solar Manager, namely any of those that either measure tempeerature or power, or control a device via a 1 Step ON/OFF relay, based on the Shelly 1/PM devices, depending on your needs and use cases.

What is a heat-pump boiler, anyway?⁶

A heat pump boiler is a type of boiler that uses a heat pump to generate heating energy. Instead of using a fossil fuel (such as gas or oil) to produce heat, a heat pump boiler uses electricity to power a heat pump. The heat pump then transfers heat from the surrounding air or ground to the water, which is used to heat the home. In this way, a heat pump boiler can be an energy-efficient alternative to a traditional boiler, as it can reduce the amount of fossil fuels that need to be burned in order to generate heat.

The ratio of electricity needed to the energy taken from the surrounding air or ground in a heat pump system is known as the coefficient of performance (COP). The COP is a measure of the efficiency of the heat pump. In general, the higher the COP, the more efficient the heat pump is. A heat pump with a high COP will use less electricity to generate a given amount of heat than a heat pump with a low COP. The COP of a heat pump can be influenced by a number of factors, including the temperature of the surrounding air or ground, the size and type of the heat pump, and the efficiency of the system components.

Disclaimer

I am not affiliated to Oekoboiler, MyStrom, Shelly, or Solar Manager. This project was born out of necessity:

• Our PV plant was not yet optimized for self consumption of PV power,

• I knew Solar Manager could work with temperature, consumption, and the “PV function” of a heat-pump boiler ,

• I had already used both a Shelly and a MyStrom device to partially use their information to control the Oekoboiler’s heating cycle when excess solar power was available, and

• since the Oekoboiler uses a cloud service with a reasonably simple and publicly documented API, I could put together a small, prototype API client to read out the current temperature.

It stands on the shoulders of others, notably alexryd/fake-shelly, NorthernMan54/homebridge-connex as well as shawnjung/homebridge-plugin-dimplex-connex who all served as inspiration or provided critical pieces needed to stitch this together.

You use this software at your own risk.

1. See for example the Amphiro FAQ ↩︎

2. Oekoboiler’s have a phenomenal coefficient of performance (COP) of over 4.2. In comparison to our old, pure electrical hot water boiler, we need less than 20% of the energy needed previously. ↩︎

3. If you are concerned about passing your Oekboiler credentials to the service, you can create another account with whom you share (read-only) access to the Oekoboiler data. ↩︎

4. The DSN is displayed in the Oekoboiler App or you can run the example code in the Oekboiler API Repository. ↩︎

5. In fact, I learned about many of sytemd’s capabilities, including System and Service Credentials, through this project when I was looking for a safe(r) way to provide the necessary credentials to the service. ↩︎

6. Text written with the support of ChatGPT. ↩︎

Reading more, knowing less

During that process, I changed from using Pocket for reading & highlighting articles on the web to hypothes.is as an open annotation system, and from just a bunch of PDFs somewhere on my Computer to using Zotero as a sort of inventory manager (The beta has a slew of new features, including a new PDF reader which keeps annotations outside the PDF, making them accessible programmatically), and to using Readwise to somehow keep track of all those highlights and (so I hoped), retain better what I read through repetition. I also built some custom scripts to bring my hypothesis annotations into Zotero as notes (to have a backup), and I wrote a custom script to sync PDF annotations from Zotero into Readwise automatically¹.

This worked quite well it seemed: as can be seen from my Readwise statistics, I read more and highlighted more.

I also set up an export of my Readwise highlights (and the few notes I added) to Roam and, later, Obsidian. But beyond the pure numbers, I found myself (still) struggling to remember a lot, if not most, of what I’d read. Although it was now easier to come back to the highlights, and while I was encouraged by others’ re-discovery of reading, something felt amiss. There was too much information, but too little knowledge.

Return to the basics

It was probably when going through Tiago Forte’s “ The Throughput of Learning” for the n-th time when I remembered Jens-Christian Fischers mention of the Zettelkasten:

I have just added Permanent Note #25 to my Zettelkasten. (shoutout to @beauhaan and the @RoamBookClub for the inspiration). Some observations on the last weeks 1/

— Jens-Chr. Fischer @jcfischer@social.invisible.ch (@jcfischer) June 11, 2021

While digging deeper into these (rediscovered) ideas of the Zettelkasten, the idea of the permanent note, and obviously many references to How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, I came across two things that unlocked two “Aha”-moments:

• an additional perspective on the “ seek > sense > share” and the value of writing while re-reading; and

• the idea of the Reference/Literature note;

The way we create knowledge is through reading (seek), thinking (sense), and writing (share).

The first² “Aha” occurred when I read Sascha Fasts’s article on The Barbell Method of Reading. In it, he describes a very practical and – if you think about it – very obvious approach to reading and note-taking:

Reading is the most efficient way to create an influx of information that can transform into knowledge. […] True reading is not a passive process in which you just create an influx of information. It consists of deep processing, thinking and writing on what you have read and interconnecting it with [what] you already know. […] Only the three parts combined, reading, thinking, and writing, produce a true change in your brain and make you a better thinker. To write about what you read is important even if you don’t aim to write books on something. Still, you have to write if you want to think properly. Still, you have to write to process information properly.³

A key element here is the difference between #information and #knowledge. Reading and highlighting creates the influx of #information. Knowledge is only created once this information is processed and anchored in our #PKM.

In other words: the way we create knowledge is through reading (seek), thinking (sense), and writing (share).

With my approach, I was creating a lot of information (highlights), and also re-reading a lot (by gong through the highlights with Readwise’s spaced repetition). But I only occasionally created real knowledge (writing about what I read). This is in principle OK: not every highlight deserves a note. Yet, the way I moved information around lead to a system where the knowledge (my notes and thoughts in relation to the highlights) became entirely buried in the sea of information I’d created.

The concept of the Reference/Literature note (and how many of the tools get it all wrong)

The second insight and “Aha” moment was when I came across a number of articles that talked about using Zettelkasten with Roam or Obsidian (or other) tools, and the many ways we can get our highlights into these.

In the Zettelkasten method, a Reference and/or Literature note captures your thoughts about a piece of literature you’re reading. In its most basic form, it is just about highlighting and adding some notes and maybe adding some tags as well⁴, and obviously a reference to the original source. You could create separate notes for every highlight/note combination, but you could also create one big literature note per book/article with all the highlights (and note) in one place.

With my setup (annotations synced to Readwise and then moved to Roam or Obsidian), a literature note would be based on a highlight (e.g., in Zotero or hypothes.is), and an additional note I wrote.

It could also be a note I add to a highlight in Readwise while reviewing, and it can obviously contain tags as well. But it would never just be a note with a highlight.

The problem was: all these (practical) tools⁵ for getting highlights and notes into a Zettelkasten naturally take the highlight as the “atomic” piece you would want to capture. Again, an obvious revelation in hindsight, but something that actively impedes you from realizing the true value of knowledge work.

Putting it together, for now …

Some people are impressed if someone reads three or four books a week. They think “Wow, he surely knows a lot.” I don’t share this opinion. To me, it is just a testimony of their shallowness in processing. This is fine if you don’t care. If you read for fun, go ahead and do it. But don’t try to impress anyone with things you don’t have invested energy into. – Sascha Fast, The Barbell Method of Reading

Obviously, one can not simply say that “reading—thinking—writing” equals “seeking—sensing—sharing.” Both the activities and the framework are much richer than that. Yet, looking at the two together helped me uncover the deep flaws I’d built up in my #PKM habits.

• While I regularly reviewed my highlights, I had concentrated on re-reading a lot (review 10 or even 15 highlights per day as a means of memorization) instead of re-reading less but with the intent of creating knowledge by systematically adding my thoughts (or discarding useless highlights);

• I was lured by the easiness of moving my highlights from Readwise to other tools for further processing and had drowned the scarce knowledge I had created in a vast sea of (mostly useless, because unprocessed) information.

While I’m still far from having changed my habits as much as I should have, there are a few changes I have implemented already:

1. I reduced the number of items I review per day in Readwise to four. This allows me to concentrate on either adding/expanding the highlights systematically with a note or discarding the highlight quickly if it doesn’t “ring a bell”.

2. To make my emerging Zettelkasten more useful while I build up a habit of going from a collection of “Literature notes” to “Permanent notes”, I added a “Zettelkasten” mode to one of the Readwise ↔ Obsidian plugins which will only mirror Readwise highlights that have a note associated to them, decluttering my Zettelkasten Archive⁶ and allowing to more easily discover connections between my reading.

Interestingly, since implementing these changes, I have already found that I

• More often create links to existing concepts and ideas in the notes of Readwise highlights I review;

• even start adding more notes while reading altogether;

• more systematically go back to articles and even books to re-read and annotate the highlights I’m puzzled about while reviewing in Readwise; and

• was encouraged to write down this journey as one way to strengthen the habits and the knowledge found while implementing these changes.

1. I might publish these some day, right now, they’re quite rough, built on existing scripts from others, and not really production-ready. ↩︎

2. Actually, the second, but it’s the more important one ↩︎

3. The Barbell Method of Reading ↩︎

4. If you’re interested, the Zettelkasten community has extensive discussions about the practical aspects. ↩︎

5. Readwise’s export functionality is the most prominent here, but even the community built Obsidian plugins (as one example) just blindly assume that one would want to have all highlights in a Zettelkasten/Obsidian/Roam/Notion database, irrespective of whether they have a note associated or not. ↩︎

6. The great thing (in my view) about the Readwise Mirror plugin is the fact that one can set it up in a way where it’s possible to refetch all the Literature notes into a subfolder while keeping any other notes outside this. ↩︎

The old era: UX, UI, IA (and more)

I had started a blog in 2003 as a “side project” to my daily work, but it was more of a “pet project” to post interesting things, some code I’d written, and reflections on things not directly related to work. When I changed jobs in 2004, entering the world of consulting and project work for “online businesses”, keeping up with the tools and means of knowledge management, intranets (Web 2.0, anyone?), social media and the latest technologies became crucial to be able to better support our customers.

Naturally, with the experience we had at my workplace, the teams moved forward, tested new ways of shatibg best practices and experiences, communities of practice, internal blogs and link-lists and of course wikis for seeking, sensemaking and sharing. At this time, sharing my thinking with peers at work was very natural and easily done — in fact, it was highly encouraged and even lead to an appearance at a very renowned conference at that time, the EuroIA in Paris in 2010⁴.

The new era: a careful, gentle advance at the government

When I changed to my current role with the government, this all changed. Not only do I operate in a more political and diplomatic environment, the way a (our) government works, a careful, gentle culture related to noevlty and innovation⁵ or the tools we can (and can not) use but also the very varied domains our sub-organizations work in make it hard(er) to embrace the kind of “ seek > sense > share” loops I was used to.

So while I continued to post interesting articles and links (sometimes with, more often without my own thoughts) on social media and use the experience and knowledge gained in the years in private companies in new ways, the “internal” knowledge management changed dramatically. Exposure of my thoughts and ideas (inside the organization) is almost zero these days, and much of what I come across is shared either through 1:1 conversations (which provides fewer feedback loops than CoP’s or internal blogs), or by integrating it piece by piece in my work (reports, guidelines, presentations, policy work, e-mails, and of course discussions), all in the hope that it will be reflected upon, fed-back to me, and eventually integrated in the collective thinking (if its seen as a worthy contribution to how we work or think about different topics or make policy).

Outlook

The “old days” with a relatively narrow area of topics I have to be knowledgeable about are gone.

This was and is not necessarily bad. In fact, the environment I’m working in can be quite complex, touching everything from technology, to business and economics to policy making (and politics) and diplomacy, and it means working with a broad variety of stakeholders on a daily basis. It is in fact an environment that has its own speed at which new things can emerge, settle and be picked-up by others.

Now, after now more than 9 years in my current role, I perceive a renewed and remarkably articulate interest of myself in all things PKM, knowledge management. As the organization, our environemnt any myself have changed over the years, it seems like it might finally be the right time to go back in order to shape the future and catalyze my experience of yore and my new knowledge together to the benefit of the organization, and ultimately, the citizens we serve in government.

In hindsight, I find it quite fascinating how dramatic this change was and how a remarkably long time it took for me to grasp the “new stuff” enough to finally get back and start connect it with the “old stuff”. I am curious to see where this journey will lead me to.

1. Editor’s note: I followed the PKM workshop in 2020 already. However, due to the pandemic, me fiddling with my blogging toolchain (I reworked my setup from the ground up based on Harold’s course), this post never made it to my blog. ↩︎

2. Dave Snowden provided an excellent definition of sensemaking over at Cognitive Edge: ‘Sensemaking is the ability or attempt to make sense of an ambiguous situation.’ ↩︎

3. Personal Knowledge Management ↩︎

4. It sure was fun to revisit my presentation on Start your IA with Mobile from 10 years ago. I think at that time I didn’t even realize what privilege it was to speak along esteemed UI, UX and of course IA practicioners like Johanna Kollmann, Peter Boersma, Martin Belam or Oliver Reichenstein. ↩︎

5. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about innovation in government and I have posted a few thoughts already. But it’s a journey that has just begun, and a broad domain of its own. ↩︎

While originally a compliance feature in Microsoft Exchange or the Enterprise Plans of Google Workspace, retention policies are also very useful in automatically decluttering your mailbox after a set time:

• To delete messages with order receipts after a number of years;

• To automatically delete newsletters after a few weeks or months; or

• To automatically move read messages to your archives after a few days or weeks

Unfortunately, no such feature is available in the former free G Suite tier or Gmail, and no add-in has been published in the Marketplace that would allow one to achieve this in Google’s free products.

Google Scripts to the rescue

Luckily, with the Google Script environment, one can rather easily build such a functionality and integrate it into Gmail.

After the n-th time being frustrated with the lack of this feature, and inspired by Gmail Automation: 5 Useful Google Scripts to Automate Your Gmail, I wrote some code that

• lets you define any number of policies that either delete or archive a message threads after a number of days have passed since the last message sent/received in that thread; and

• lets you apply these through filters or manually to message threads

Building your E-Mail retention policy automation

With the Gist published here, you can implement this for your Gmail / Google Mail accounts as well:

• Go to Google Scripts and create a blank project (make sure you are logged into your Google account);

• paste the code (below) (and modify the policies as needed);

/****
 * This Script will apply different e-mail policies according to a defined set of labels
 * Actions:
 *  - Delete: will delete (move) the message thread to the trash (unless starred)
 *  - Archive: will move the thread to the archive
 *
 * New policies: To add a new policy, add a new entry in the "policies" map
 *
 * When executing the action, the corresponding label will be removed. This will speed up the
 * processing of messages considerably (otherwise, the messages would be reprocessed on every run).
 * Starred messages will not be deleted.
 *
 * By setting a timed trigger, you can execute the script in regular intervals (e.g. every 30 minutes)
 * Create a filter that will apply a specific label automatically to the filtered mail and
 * your mailbox will unclutter itself automatically.
 *
 * Inspired/adapted from https://www.maketecheasier.com/google-scripts-to-automate-gmail/
 */

function applyEmailPolicy() {
  var policies = {
    // Archive Policies
    monthArchive: {
      label: "Archive After 30 Days",
      days: 30,
      action: "archive",
    },
    weekArchive: { label: "Archive After 1 Week", days: 7, action: "archive" },
    biWeeklyArchive: {
      label: "Archive After 2 Weeks",
      days: 14,
      action: "archive",
    },

    // Delete Policiess
    monthDelete: { label: "Delete After 30 Days", days: 30, action: "delete" },
    yearDelete: { label: "Delete After 1 Year", days: 365, action: "delete" },
    decadeDelete: {
      label: "Delete After 10 Years",
      days: 3650,
      action: "delete",
    },
  };

  for (var policyKey in policies) {
    var policy = policies[policyKey];
    Logger.log("Applying E-Mail Policy '" + policy["label"] + "'");
    var label = GmailApp.getUserLabelByName(policy["label"]);

    if (label == null) {
      GmailApp.createLabel(policy["label"]);
    } else {
      var delayDays = policy["days"];
      var maxDate = new Date();
      maxDate.setDate(maxDate.getDate() - delayDays);

      var threads = label.getThreads();
      for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
        if (threads[i].getLastMessageDate() < maxDate) {
          switch (policy["action"]) {
            case "delete":
              if (!threads[i].hasStarredMessages()) {
                Logger.log(
                  "Deleting Thread '" +
                    threads[i].getFirstMessageSubject() +
                    "'"
                );
                threads[i].removeLabel(label);
                threads[i].moveToTrash();
              } else {
                Logger.log(
                  "Skipping Thread '" +
                    threads[i].getFirstMessageSubject() +
                    "'"
                );
              }
              break;
            case "archive":
              Logger.log(
                "Archiving Thread '" + threads[i].getFirstMessageSubject() + "'"
              );
              threads[i].removeLabel(label);
              threads[i].moveToArchive();
              break;
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

• run the script manually and Gmail will

  • ask you for the permissions needed to work properly (it grants your script read/write access to your mailbox which is needed to move / delete the messages); and

  • will create the labels for each policy you defined (which is needed if you want to apply them to messages afterwards)

• set a trigger (Resources -> Current Project’s Triggers -> Add one now) to run it at the preferred interval; and

• create filters in Gmail/Google Mail that set policies when specific messages arrive

Once you’ve labeled a number of messages, you can manually run the script again and check the logs to see if the messages are found and moved to the trash or the archive.

Caveats

• Please note that threads with starred messages will not be deleted by this script – starring them is an easy way to ensure important messages are not deleted accidentially;

• If you label messages / threads older than thirty days with a delete policy, they will immediately be deleted upon execution of the script – there’s no way to retrieve them afterwards, so be careful when applying a delete policy in bulk!;

• The archive policy will move them from the inbox to the Archive;

Credits

Inspired and adapted from Gmail Automation: 5 Useful Google Scripts to Automate Your Gmail

“The need to communicate at any time depends on the system concept in effect at that time.”

As I will try to argue in this post, this can be a problem, especially when we look at how we bring change to our systems: in this case, the right kind of communication accross two distinct subsystems is essential for our change initiatives of any sort to succeed–or else, we will fail.

Let me elaborate.

Working in the system – working on the system

While we might look at our systems from the perspective of multiple, but similar, subsystems, almost any organization or reasonably complex system¹ can actually be seen as a system comprised of two very distinct functions or subsystems²:

• One big part of the system where the “value creating” work happens: the place where we work in the system, and

• One smaller part where work on redesigning the system for the future: a place to work on the system

Illustrated (simply), our organization thus looks as follows:

In business or in government, in software development, in art or at home: Our everyday work is – usually – a kind of working in the system, within structures and processes, with objectives, doctrines and beliefs that define the boundaries of what seems possible and what not.

On the other hand, if we want to change how we work, we undertake to work on the system³, often somehow redesigning it “from the outside.”

And from a distance, all seems good. Two clear subsystems with very distinct functions, two clear mandates.

But it’s not: if we look closer, there’s no overlap between working in and on the system. In fact, they barely touch each other. They’re just two very distinct subsystems of the same overall system⁴. I think this is a problem, and one that is grossly underestimated.

To live in two subsystems at the same time

But why is this a problem?

I think that meaningful change can only happen if at least part of the organization masters the paradox of living in two places at the same time. Or, if we take the above image again: we need overlap between “working in the system” and “working on the system”⁵:

Luckily, I’m not the only one to think so. In an older blogpost on sense-making tools, Harold Jarche quoted Daniel Dennett⁶, where Dennet notes the necessity to know the tradition before you can break it (highlights mine)⁷:

When an artistic tradition reaches the point where literally ‘anything goes’, those who want to be creative have a problem: there are no fixed rules to rebel against, no complacent expectations to shatter, nothing to subvert, no background against which to create something that is both surprising and yet meaningful. It helps to know the tradition if you want to subvert it. That’s why so few dabblers or novices succeed in coming up with anything truly creative.

Following Dennet’s observation, and looking at my personal experience so far, I would argue that every successful attempt at disruptive / substantial change implies that one simultaneously has deep (personal!) insights into the system and needs to be able to live outside the system (or at least at its edge) in order to redesign (change) it.

In other words:

In the long run, we can only bring meaningful substantial change to a system if we’re at the same time part of it and working from its edges to redesign it.

It may sound intuitive and logical, but it isn’t. It matters more than we might think and many failed projects, reorgs or change initiatives are a testament to this.

The surprising amount of detail of reality

It probably becomes more clear when we look at another extreme of “working on the system”: management consulting. Looking at our illustration, consulting is the epitome of “detached” change. When outside consultants are hired, they will inevitably operate from beyond the edges of the system, with only very little overlap, and almost certainly no overlap with the people working in the system.

While there is undoubtedly lots of useful, helpful and appropriate consulting happening in the world⁸, there is also lots of anecdotal evidence how external consultants completely messed-up change initiatives.

In fact, even consultancies like McKinsey admit that being too detached from “working in the system” can create trouble:

Relying on a small team of smart folks to design the details is even more hazardous. When the new organization launches, it will be the employees who determine whether it will deliver value by working (or not working) in new ways and with a different boss (or a different boss’s boss’s boss).

The reason for these failures: The amount of detail that matters when dealing with reality, and where these originate from.

In “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”, John Salvatier writes:

The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success. […] You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them.

The details that matter when working on the system are almost exclusively details from within the system. And you can only know them with sufficient accuracy if your knowledge about the system is deep. As Dennet put it⁶:

If you want to subvert the system, it helps if you know the tradition.

Dependency

Now that you’ve heard my argument so far, you might argue that it should be sufficient to create just enough functional overlap between the two subsystems to bring these detailed insights to the table. Just a bunch of staff who work on both sides of the schism. And to some extent, you might be right.

But in the long run, you will need much more than “just” some function overlap. What you are striving for is an approach where your redesign is constantly informed by all the relevant but intricate details of the current system–its communication structures probably first, but also the details of operations, details of the infrastructure and all the quirks that matter more than you can imagine.

In the words of this already famous XKCD cartoon: You want to particularly know about “this project some random guy in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.”

Architectural heuristics as a practical help

What we therefore need is a heuristic that will help our redesign projects to surface any such crucial detail without involving everybody who’s working in the system to be equally part of our working on the system initiative.

One such heuristic is Christopher Alexander’s principle of structure-preserving transformations (something I’ve already written about in my post on the future of government.

In the words of Nikos A. Salingaros:

This idea of design–as “transformation” using an adaptive process–is very much at the heart of […] Christopher Alexander’s work. Through that adaptive process, we generate a form that achieves our “preferred” state. But at each step of this transformation, Alexander says, we are dealing with a whole system–not an assembly of bits. (Design for a Living Planet, Chapter 20) ⁹

Altogether, there are five “architectural design heuristics” that we can consider⁹¹⁰:

• Step-wise: Perform one adaptive step at a time.

• Reversible: Test design decisions using models; “trial and error”; if it doesn’t work, un-do it.

• Structure-preserving: Each step builds upon what’s already there.

• Design from weakness: Each step improves coherence.

• New from existing: Emergent structure combines what is already there into new form.

Put together, they form a kind of dance that we can teach in our organisations–and if those working in the system learn to dance with the system, then the details needed to work on the systems will emerge naturally–and beautifully.

A problem to solve before we start redesigning our systems

Every meaningful organisation redesign (or change of a system in the broader sense) needs both: deep and well-founded insights and experience from working in the system, and the levers at the edge to effectively change/redesign it. Ideally, both are tightly intertwined.

Yet, many, if not most, traditional organizations are not designed this way, and this is particularly true for bureaucracies–even if they sport an innovation lab or department. There are many accounts of what happens if you can’t manage to juggle of working in the system while at the same time working on it from the edges. Just two examples:

• Simone Bahn in HBR which cites “Lack of Alignment with the Business” as one major reason why Innovation Lab initiatives fail,

• IMD on change initiatives that don’t take off because senior management abdicates its responsibility to drive the process, instead of “[remaining] fully engaged throughout the transformation process, even as they continue to run the business” (highlight mine)

It takes a deliberate attempt at working towards a state where one sustains the ambiguity of doing both at the same time. What we need to learn then, is how to work in the realisation of an existing architecture–where we fully experience its shortcomings (and advantages)–and how to bring this detailed knowledge to the redesign and change we want to bring to the system (architecture) in meaningful ways.

The concepts embedded in Alexander’s thinking, the idea of heuristics that help us discover the relevant details buried deep inside our systems are my attempt to look at the problem and to think about approaches to help people working on the system to also live (or work) in the system.

Conclusion

How we manage to effectively live in the two subsystems of our system at the same time is thus the problem to solve–even before we should think of how to redesign the system.

To sum up my argument:

• Many complex human systems can be seen as comprising of two distinct subsystems with the following functions: Working in the system and working on the system

• In order to be effective in our work on the system, we must learn to live in both subsystems at the same time

• The reason for this is the surprising amount of detail of reality which requires us to be rooted deeply in the details of the system if our redesigning of it can be effective

• Eventually, our redesign attempts need to become aware of all critical dependencies which are often buried deep in our systems and organizations¹¹

• Architecture, and more precisely, Alexander’s principle of structure-preserving transformation and other heuristics can provide us with some initial “tools” to tackle this problem, as function overlap (in itself) is probably not enough to achieve

• Therefore, before we start redesigning our systems, before answering the (undoubtedly important) question on how to redesign a system, we inevitably must solve the problem of working in and on the system at the same time

The solutions to the conundrum presented here are at the same time simple and complex. Simple because most people intuitively understand its importance if they start thinking about – complex because there’s no one single answer and because the systems we want to change are complex themselves.

Epilogue

I’ve been ruminating quite some time about this and writing the article took much longer than anticipated. Many–if not all–of the things I wrote down have most probably been seen and written by people far better in bringing it to paper than me, so forgive me if I repeated the obvious. For me it was (is) important, as two relevant things happened while writing this:

• I’ve had a number of discussions or interactions with people about to engage in change initiatives (IT, business, organizational development – you name them) or summing up past experience. In almost all these discussions, “working in the system” and “working on the system” were things that obviously were treated as a disconnected thing.

• Danny Bürkli started to work on a talk on ’new forms of organization in public administration (as a response to a changing environment)’ and shared a lot of his thoughts on Twitter.

Loved all the generous responses to the question below. Thank you.

Here's the current structure of the argument on "new forms of organization in public administration (as a response to a changing environment)" (subject to - *a whole lot of* - change)

[Thread]

⬇️ https://t.co/hnQz0HlbGy

— Danny Buerkli (@dannybuerkli) August 23, 2020

The material Danny has compiled (both his own and from comments) is impressive. The whole thread contains 20 or more references to books and thinking about this. And all of them are fantastic. Yet, when going through them, something felt missing. Part of it can be explained by Simon Parkers’ argument which I picked up in a post of my own: we still mostly debate agile and design thinking and tools and instruments when debating the future of government. But as Simon wrote: “[P]ublic service isn’t really about services, but about highly complex problems.”

I am convinced that our thinking about the future of government (or any reasonably complex system) should not only include new forms of organization, new tools and instruments, more Agile or SAFe or ITIL or Kanban. It must rather go back and acknowledge the amount of detail that matters in solving the complex problems we face in these systems – and the necessity to get this knowledge from working in the system while working on the system.

1. While a car is also a system, it’s not a complex, but merely a complicated one. We can, as Nikos A. Salingaros⁹ wrote, “take the parts of a car apart and put them back together, and the car will run all right.” ↩︎

2. Obviously, this is a very simplistic model, but it should suffice to illustrate the idea, and it is applicable to many different systems (see above). ↩︎

3. In business we call this innovation. When talking about organizations, it’s called organizational development. When we talk about software systems, it’s called refactoring and in art its called creativity. And if you redesign yourself, we call it self-help or self-actualization. In every domain, you will find tons of information about how to work on the system and redesign it. Just two classics from the business world: Schumpeter with his Creative Destruction which describes the “process of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” ( Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy), and Clayton Christensen in his Innovator’s Dilemma – broadly arguing that an incumbent company must, in a sense, be ready to disrupt itself to survive, by redesigning itself (from the edges). Whereas on government, Danny Bürkli recently compiled a monster-thread on literature and some thoughts on new forms of organization in public administration (as a response to a changing environment). ↩︎

4. In an organization, you might have the organizational development department besides all the other departments, probably buried deep down somewhere, but still a mostly separate function. Or when working on new products, you have the innovation department that’s operating completely disconnected from the rest of the organization. ↩︎

5. I won’t even go into starting to discuss agile both in software engineering or in organizational development. All this certainly has its merits but it’s a downstream problem to the issue discussed here. ↩︎

6. Dennett, D. C. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, 2014. ↩︎ ↩︎

7. In the post, Harold introduced the term of “JOOTS”, coined by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s meaning is to “ jump outside of the system” (as opposed to “thinking outside of the box”). It is basically a thinking tool that can very well be applied to a context in which you want to create meaningful change. ↩︎

8. For example, coaching-like consulting or support with change-/innovation-process knowledge can be very useful to an organization wishing to train and develop new change-skills on the job, things that usually apply to “working on the system”. ↩︎

9. “Ch 20. Alexander’s “Wholeness-Generating” Technology.” In Design for a Living Planet: Settlement, Science, & the Human Future, 198–208. Design for a Living Planet: Settlement, Science, & the Human Future. Levellers/Sustasis Press and Vajra Publications, 2015. (Original Publication: Metropolis Mag, 24 Oct 2011) ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

10. Every single one would have deserved their own blog post, but my writing’s just too slow and bad to deep-dive into these. Yet. ↩︎

11. There are some hilarious (or sobering, depends) stories on these dependencies to be found in the comments on the comic on Twitter. Well worth the time. ↩︎

The months, even years before, as his body became weaker and weaker after a seemingly small and silly injury from the pinch of a car door, he used to tell my mother, and my siblings and me, that “he had lived his life, had not too many big regrets. That he was ready to go.” And as painful as this affirmation was, on the one hand, it was at the same time reassuring to know that he was truly at peace with his — not always easy — life. Luckily, his mind was clear until the end, and while we saw the physical decline, we could indeed share a few more years with him, revelling in memories, and expressing our appreciation and gratitude for the years we’d shared.

Despite my intention to offer a eulogy at his funeral, I backed off in the few days after his death — although I had collected and thought a lot about the things I would want him to be remembered for by others and particularly myself. Somehow, it did not feel right.

This all changed, though, when recently, I came across an article by John Salvatier titled “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”. Incidentally, John had written it only three months before my dad’s passing. And reading it was the trigger for something that had waited too long to be written by myself and delivered. But finally, here it is. A eulogy for my dad, and a testament to his legacy.

Of things, small and inconspicuous

My father was a modest, unassuming man. Because he was barred from the opportunity to study, he learned the profession of a gardener and, after some years of travel and work abroad, he, together with my mother, raised a family somewhere in the Swiss countryside. By all measures, their life (and so ours) was anything but spectacular.

Mom and Dad, the day of their wedding, anno 1969

During his professional and personal life, he not only acquired an incredible knowledge of botany, including the Latin names of flowers, shrubs and other plants known and unknown to me, but also of the fauna and geology. What he pursued, he pursued silently, but with much dedication and love. Although he usually worked long hours rather far from home, he shared his passions with us kids as much as he could, especially when gardening at home, when hiking in the mountains or when sharing anecdotes about his time abroad.

Unfortunately, the only passions I truly share with him are a love for the violin, for travel, foreign countries and cultures, and for reading: I have not yet become interested in botany as much as he did. And although I enjoy and cherish the wilderness of the mountains and Switzerland’s breathtaking views, or the intricate details of fern or the wild tenderness of orchids, I have yet to develop the same dedication and passion for flora and fauna as he did.

And yet: in the last years of his degrading health, when I was trying to boil down what I cherished most about the things I learned from him (and told him so), one thing consistently came to mind: my dad’s peculiar attention to the seemingly inconspicuous, almost unimportant, details of life and reality around him.

Often, when we came across a plant or an animal (mostly birds) or some seemingly random stone, he would share an anecdote or a bite of knowledge with us, or he would point out something small he’d noticed along the way. Sometimes, we couldn’t understand his excitement. And his almost childlike curiosity to perceive more of the reality around him seemed almost boundless.

Yet somehow, he’d passed this curiosity, this love for inconspicuous, seemingly unimportant detail on to me. For a long time, I was not aware of this, but later I found myself noticing the odd snail on the road, a pattern of clouds nobody else seemed to care about, or a funny coincidence of two events that I’d noticed. And when I eventually did realize I’d inherited this “urge” to notice small, unimportant things, I was at times struggling with it — especially as others would see this urge as slightly, if not outright, annoying and distracting from “important things”.

But there it was, and it would not go away. And the more I became aware of it, the more I thought about it, and the less I finally managed to care what others thought about it, the more I somehow sensed that this urge to notice small, unimportant things about reality was probably one of the lasting legacies my father had left with me.

Only that it was a nebulous, almost an anecdotal legacy: I somehow could never really pinpoint “why” it was important. Until I came across John’s article and the following passages:

[If you wish to not get stuck], seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built.

If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived. This instantly struck a whole violin of chords with me.¹ Finally, I can not only subtly sense the legacy— but see through it, and, more importantly, name it:

What my father taught me is this: to relentlessly seek detail I would not normally notice about the world. To notice the unexpected and to perceive what I have not yet perceived.

And while I will continue to annoy the people around me with my stubborn, relentless curiosity about the “unimportant” details of reality and life, I will now do so with an even deeper appreciation for the legacy my father left me.

In loving memory of my dad, Werner Richard, 1931–2017. I will forever be grateful for his presence in my life.

Epilogue: “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”

In “ Reality has a surprising amount of detail”, @johnsalvatier writes about the stunning amount of detail we have to care about in solving any reasonably complex problem:

“The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understanding for success.”

Yet, despite their importance, we often don’t perceive these important details as the critical element they are, as “[important] details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them.”

So, how to avoid getting stuck because of details we can’t yet see?

“This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. […] The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. […] As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.”

Today, I still notice details about the occasional snail, or a pattern of light, a surprising coincidence of events — and I enjoy each and every one of these discoveries.

But more and more, I also realize how this helps me tremendously with my work, and personal life:

• The ways a colleague works and processes information,

• The ways they react when information does pique her interest — and the reasons for their reaction,

• Details in a negotiation which, if noticed, can open a door to a compromise — or break the deal if they are not seen,

• Small changes in the language of partners which hint at upcoming changes in policy or strategy,

• Small, but consistent patterns of behaviour of colleagues, friends, and family which can hint at underlying unease or communications problems

If I can seek these patterns and details consistently, my work, and my interactions with the human beings around me become much more effective, but also more appreciative, empathic and kind.

I think this alone is worth being the “odd guy” who notices things no one else cares about.

21.7.2020: Edited for some linguistical clarifications

1. The violin is the instrument both my dad and I love/d and play/ed. Another passion we shared. ↩︎

In fact, it was so good, it sent me down a rabbit hole and prompted me to write this post, theorizing on the following:

Good policies create “places” worth living in.

So, here are some ideas on how to approach policy design with insights from architecture and systems thinking, and how this might lead to better policies.

Public service is about highly complex problems

In his article, when talking about agile and design thinking in government, Simon sums up nicely what I somehow always felt but never could articulate, and definitely not so succinctly:

A lot of people have gotten stuck [when applying agile and design thinking in government]. They […] discover powerful ways to create human-centred services, but then cannot understand why the world isn’t changing. The answer is simple: public service isn’t really about services, but about highly complex problems.

Once you look at it this way, you can recognize that many innovation initiatives in government stop exactly there: With new innovation methods, agile project management. Of course, I’ve been guilty of that innovation frenzy too, and mileage certainly varies wildly across initiatives. You need tools — methods and management practices — that help civil servants and their organizations break out of old habits, that help them redesign services that work and appeal to citizens. But these are not enough.

So how can public service approach these highly complex problems? What would public service have to look like?

A new purpose for public service?

In the article, Simon does an excellent job in describing many of the changes we are about to witness, and why systems thinking concepts might be a natural next step after agile and design thinking. And he outlines a proposal for a new purpose for future government:

“Government should aim to maximise self-organisation.”

This struck a second chord: Here in Switzerland, policy and governance are generally understood to be about creating good (excellent) boundary conditions — and to let the people and organisations then fill the space that these boundary conditions create with life; to use it for their goals and ambitions (or needs). “Adult-adult mode”, as Simon also calls it.

(N.B.: I have yet to hear someone argue that the public management approach in Switzerland “maximises self-organisation”, but there is something to that idea — some similarities, but also some differences. I won’t go into these today.)

I also couldn’t agree more with Simon that the 12 leverage points of Donella H. Meadows provide a lot of food for thought to think about the “Where” to intervene in the system.

Yet, both the concept of systems thinking and the idea of leverage points say little about “How” governments could aim to maximise self-organisation.

Where agile and design thinking are both practical methods, systems thinking is obviously a concept, a school of thinking and a way to look at the world — and so it needs its own practical language, methods and heuristics when applied to a system like a government or the “results” this government produces through its policymaking.

How to support people and organisations in self-organisation

This is where Simon’s article struck the third chord with me: Assuming there is some consensus on the “Why” — that governments should aim to maximise self-organisation — the question we then must ask is the following:

How can governments (or civil servants, to be precise) design policies and policy interventions in a way that optimally support people and organizations in maximising their respective amount of self-organisation?

I don’t have much of an answer yet to this “How” (and I am looking for any hints and inspiration and food for thought), but my fascination with architecture — and its approach to design — has recently led me down a rabbit hole of thought, which I already wrote about elsewhere.

There, I argued that architectural patterns and theory of architectural design might serve as inspiration for tackling policy design and the kind of complex problems public service deals with.

In a nutshell, I think that Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties of well-architected systems are a high-level pattern language that we can use when working on policy design. And so we can apply them when thinking about how governments can optimally support the aim of maximising self-organisation — both within the public service (the bureaucracy) and when the public service is designing policies and policy interventions.

I am deeply convinced that precise, well-crafted language has the power to transform systems at large, even defying strategy, structure and even culture.

By using the fundamental properties as such a shared and precise language — by defining carefully what the language means when used in policymaking — we might have a very powerful instrument at our disposal, one that can help with better policy and systems design.

But what can we do now?

To this point, we have, together with Simon, been looking at a potential “Why” of future governments — the proposed aim to maximise self-organisation; and we have had a peek at “How” this could be achieved, potentially, by using the pattern language of Christopher Alexander’s fundamental properties as a new tool in our design of policies.

What we haven’t answered yet is the “What” that inevitably follows these two questions: What could we do now?

A natural answer (one, I must admit, that I’ve entertained as well in the past) could be to disrupt the state, to “tear bureaucracies apart” — or, as Schumpeter declared for economics: to transform the state through creative destruction.

But is it a good answer? Rainer Kattel (among others) doesn’t think so, and personally, I concur.

In his article on the Entrepreneurial State, Kattel outlined that for the state to become more agile or innovative, it is indeed popular to call for the disruption of said state. But also, that this is indeed not a new idea:

“Today’s popular call to disrupt the government through innovation is, to say the least, as old a hat as that on the head of a Renaissance soldier of fortune in an Uccello painting.”

But ultimately, he concludes that

“Capacity for innovation in bureaucracy is about having the space — skills, networks, organisations — for both agility and stability.”

And this nicely resonates with Simon again and the take-way from his debates with Enspiral:

“[Y]ou should not and cannot strive for structurelessness in organisations and society. The attempt to dismantle hierarchy often leads to new, secretive hierarchies emerging behind the scenes. The state is a hierarchy and there are some good reasons for that. Let’s not try to deny its essential nature.”

Fourth chord. But: no answer yet on how can we achieve this agility and stability. No answer how can we honour these essential structures of the organisations we’re working with and bring meaningful change to them.

Structure-preserving transformation

I would propose that one approach is to again look at Alexander’s work, specifically at his concept of “structure-preserving transformations” that he offers in “The Nature of Order”.

Nikos A. Salingaros, in Design for a Living Planet¹, writes the following about this approach to design:

“This idea of design — as “transformation” using an adaptive process — is very much at the heart of […] Christopher Alexander’s work. Through that adaptive process, we generate a form that achieves our “preferred” state. But at each step of this transformation, Alexander says, we are dealing with a whole system — not an assembly of bits.” (Design for a Living Planet, Chapter 20)

Besides building on the fundamental properties, I think that Alexander’s adaptive approach of “structure-preserving transformations” offers a real answer to what we can and shall do when thinking about optimising self-organisation through the lens of the fundamental properties: to start with a (simple) system and change it in a way that preserves the structure of the previous step.

“Complex systems do not spring into existence fully formed, but rather through a series of small, incremental changes. The process begins with a simple system and incrementally changes that system such that each change preserves the structure of the previous step.” (from Wikipedia: The Nature or Order)

Agility and stability

I think the works of people like Christopher Alexander and Donella H. Meadows can offer us great insights and concepts on how to think about the systems and policies we design and interact with, and how we implement our policies.

Personally, I find the idea intriguing of a practical approach using their concepts and language intriguing. From the dancing with the system (Meadows) to the algorithms of “structure-preserving transformation” and the “language” of the fundamental properties we use as the programming language of these algorithms (both Alexander): I think their work can offer a compelling — and surprisingly precise — framework for those working in the public service, for those tasked with creating better policies or working to innovate their bureaucracies.

In the end, a policy can be considered a blueprint for a “place” of sorts. And this place — with its shape and function, with its deficiencies and strengths — is intricately linked to the way its blueprint was created, to the way the policy was designed (A bit like Conway’s Law, but with an architectural/spatial twist, if you like. But I digress).

Once the policy is implemented (when the new “place” is finally brought into existence), people and organizations will start inhabiting the place which the policy created.

If the policy embodies the idea of “structure-preserving transformations”, if it is built on sound principles of architectural design, then this policy will equally honour the past and prepare for the future. The place this creates will offer us both: agility and stability.

A place that is brought into existence through such a well-designed policy will presumably be filled with brimming life, self-organised by its “inhabitants”.

And a system transformed in such a way will indeed become a place worth living in.

The writing here is an attempt to give some much-needed structure to my thinking and solely represents my views. I look forward to exploring these thoughts and threads even more and would love to hear your remarks about that!

This post is a result of the excellent Personal Knowledge Mastery Workshop by Harold Jarche which I highly recommend to everybody interested in better managing their personal knowledge mastery.

References

1. “Ch 20. Alexander’s “Wholeness-Generating” Technology.” In Design for a Living Planet: Settlement, Science, & the Human Future, 198–208. Design for a Living Planet: Settlement, Science, & the Human Future. Levellers/Sustasis Press and Vajra Publications, 2015. (Original Publication: Metropolis Mag, 24 Oct 2011) ↩︎

“Defy the disciplines. In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads.” —  Donella H. Meadows

When browsing my books, I came across my copy of “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, as well as a short german summary of Alexander’s complete work on patterns and of his ideas in “The Nature of Order”— and it struck me that there seems to be an obvious connection between Alexanders work and “Thinking in Systems” by Donella H. Meadows (and the dance with systems that she so beautifully elicits).

And at the same time, it struck me how little I find of either one’s thinking in the two main fields I am usually working in —  innovation ecosystems and bureaucracies.

I have yet to come across literature that either combines Alexander’s work with “Thinking in Systems”, let alone applies both of them to the architecting of (innovation) ecosystems or bureaucracies. And yet I think there’s something about bringing these together. Let me explain why.

“The Nature of Order”: fundamental properties for architecting systems

While “A Pattern Language” has its focus on over 200 patterns used to architect towns, buildings and to be applied to construction in general, Alexander’s work, especially the four-volume “The Nature of Order”, also goes into great lengths to outline general principles of “architecting systems”. Most prominently, this has been through his recent work on 15 fundamental properties of Wholeness (or good architecture)¹ .²³

Alexander’s approach to “architecting” (as a general discipline) but also the 15 principles can be applied in a much broader sense than just “Towns, Buildings and Construction”, and I am by far not the first one to make this observation.

But what I have not yet seen so far is “A Pattern Language” or the fundamental principles appear in the literature about innovation ecosystems, nor on bureaucracies and their reforms.

“Why are the 15 fundamental properties not applied to the design of innovation ecosystems or reforms of bureaucracies?”

I wonder why: If you look at the 15 fundamental properties in the context of innovation ecosystems or bureaucracies (which in itself are also very fascinating systems), you might instantly see how these properties could be applied to the design of either one and probably with a lot of added value.

So let’s first have a short look at the list of 15 properties:

1. Levels of scale.

2. Strong centres.

3. Boundaries.

4. Alternating repetition.

5. Positive space.

6. Good shape.

7. Local symmetries.

8. Deep interlock and ambiguity.

9. Contrast.

10. Gradients.

11. Roughness.

12. Echoes.

13. The Void.

14. Simplicity and Inner Calm.

15. Not-separateness.

Of course, “wholeness” or “gradients” or “local symmetries” are not the language of bureaucrats, nor do they necessarily “ring a bell” with the language of innovation people who are more likely to talk about business impact, the economy and investments, or technology, impact and strategy.

But yet: there is a quality to the language of these fundamental properties that rings a bell with me. And as I recently summarised: “Language eats strategy, structure, and culture for breakfast”.

Let me illustrate this. On “Gradients”, Salingaros, in his “Unified Architectural Theory”[^4] writes :

“Gradients represent controlled transitions. They provide a method of getting away from uniformity, because that is a non-adaptive state.”

Although a spatial principle, it can easily be applied to the design of a programme aimed at transforming an ecosystem, for example by deliberately applying the idea of a “funding gradient” to a programme, or by designing “interaction gradients” into the governance of the various elements of an ecosystem. And by doing so, our system will gain in resilience, will become more adaptive and less uniform.

The same goes for “Levels of scale” or “Echoes.” And we have not even thought about how “Deep interlock and ambiguity” could lead to stronger, more resilient ecosystems if “built-in” from the outset. Again Salingaros:

“Deep interlock and ambiguity are other strong ways of connecting. Forms interpenetrate to link together.[…] Two regions can interpenetrate […] which enables a transition from one region to another.”

Applied to policies governing such an innovation ecosystem, or a bureaucracy, this could mean to deliberately create a certain ambiguity and deep interlocks with goals and objectives, or structures— and thus naturally force the actors of these systems to go beyond their siloes, reach out into the ambiguity and the interlock, creating stronger connections in the process.

“Maybe deep interlock and ambiguity applied to bureaucracies and their was of working could create strong connections between siloes?”

One could argue — and maybe even rightly so — that sound design of bureaucracies or innovation ecosystems will also take care of siloes, of uniformity or agility. But is it really possible, and at what price? Resilience can not be prescribed — nor can we impose our will upon a bureaucracy of silos without forcing our will upon the humans inside these siloes. But we can work with, and transform systems in ways that offer more opportunities for resilience building or cross-silo collaboration.

Says Donella H. Meadows:

“We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. […]  We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them”

Dancing in patterns — dancing with systems?

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on  Unsplash

Although Christopher Alexander would not necessarily approve of this, I think that the 15 fundamental properties in itself are kind of a high-level pattern language — one that can be applied when we “dance with systems”.

Alexander’s 15 fundamental properties are a high-level pattern language that we can apply when ‘dancing with systems.’

And this is where I think we can bring the three worlds together. In an older article on the entrepreneurial state, Rainer Kattel once wrote:

As weird as it may sound, successful governments — entrepreneurial states — manage precisely that: they are able to create space for agility (taking risks and experimenting, responding to new challenges) and providing stability (minimising long-term risks and uncertainty).

and

Capacity for innovation in bureaucracy is about having the space — skills, networks, organisations — for both agility and stability.

This is “systems language” in its fullest. Here’s a thought: what happens if we start to apply Alexander’s fundamental properties as patterns when we design and transformation innovation ecosystems or bureaucracies? Could it help us in designing better versions of these systems, versions that are more resilient, systems that have a higher carrying capacity or more diversity?

At least for me, this is a very intriguing thought.

References

Edited for clarity and augmented with some additional material.

1. The Fifteen Properties Are the Glue which Binds Wholeness Together, http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/fifteen.htm (Accessed 12 July 2020) ↩︎

2. The 15 Properties of Pattern Language, http://www.inverde.net/patterns.html (Accessed 12 July 2020) ↩︎

3. “ ch. 11 (19). Christopher Alexander’s 15 Fundamental Properties.” In Unified Architectural Theory: Form, Language, Complexity — a Companion to Christopher Alexander’s “The Phenomenon of Life: the Nature of Order, Book 1”, 125–130. Portland, Oregon and Kathmandu, Nepal: Sustasis Foundation and Vajra Books, 2013. ↩︎

“Language eats strategy, structure, and culture for breakfast.”

Here are a few of the take-aways from the last chapter of “Thinking in Systems” (Donella H. Meadows) (Which is largely equal to the linked article):

• “We can’t control systems. But we can dance with them”, and so we could & should aspire to become better “systems dancers”

• Information is key, and should be honoured and treated with respect (and distributed generously) Language is more primordial than strategy, structure or culture — in other words: Language eats strategy, structure, and culture for breakfast.

• Concepts (and thus the terms) like a system’s “carrying capacity”, its diversity and structure are often underestimated or not seen, especially in bureaucracies which do not tend to think of themselves as “systems” in the broader sense

• Whatever we build: we should go to great lengths and take great care to include sound feedback policies into these systems, and add these from the beginning — this designs learning into the system

• Resilience, stability, growth or sustainability (in its broadest sense) are more “systems” word to be used bountiful

• Stay humble, stay foolish — and stay a lifelong learner full of curiosity

• Celebrate complexity, welcome it and don’t shy away from it. In fact, once you accept complexity, the only option to deal with it is probably in fact by dancing with the underlying system. And the dance won’t be a well-timed, strict choreography and not even one of the standard dances with its toolbox of dancing steps, but more likely something like improv dance.

Dancing with Systems

This post is part of my #PKMastery journey (Edit: Now with the Oxford comma.)

Smart advice from @hjarche “Strategic Doing comprises 10 skills. The book’s authors state that of 500 projects in one initiative, the most successful teams consistently used eight of these skills, while the least successful used only two.” https://t.co/lpARNFeUwc #futureofwork

— Dany DeGrave (@DanyDeGrave) July 6, 2020

An instant deep-dive where the initial article surfaced a number of highly interesting articles and links about the practice or process of Strategic Doing which I feel can be applied to a number of things I’m involved in. What I find intriguing about the approach is its openness while at the same time having a healthy dose of directionality that helps people navigate complex, chaotic (in the best sense of the word) environments. Being an “action led” approach to Strategy, it should also help bring in people who’re weary of strategy exercises or had bad experiences. Last but not least, I can see how this is an excellent tool to break free from siloed thinking (and doing) in organisations. Some of the things people apply Strategic Doing to:

• building – or developing – local and regional ecosystems,

• creating powerful networks and networks of networks, and

• enabling continuous innovation Interestingly enough, it seems to be something that’s not yet really jumped over to Europe big time. Room for innovation, I’d say, and room for early adopters.

This post is part of my journey into “Personal Knowledge Mastery” (Or #PKM) and the PKMastery workshop led by Harold Jarche.

Edit 9.7.2020: some small additions that got lost when publishing.

• I come across a novel thought, intriguing paper or article in any of the sources I consume (Twitter, LinkedIn, (too many) Newsletters, recommendations from services I use to store and retrieve info in, or through things told/shared by colleagues), or

• I deliberately have searched for the topic because I got a pointer “offline”,

• I then tend to deep-dive down the rabbit hole, and from there collect¹ as many insights I can about that particular thought (usually following links/pointers from the original source), or

• I deep-dive into the author’s “archives” and hunt for and collect more novel thoughts from them, and

• I follow the authors sources (if on Twitter or LinkedIn) and interact with their postings to signal the platform my interest in the topic to bring up more in the near future

• Eventually, long after having gone down a specific rabbit hole, I tend to come back to the material because of a real need. This might e.g. be in a project I’m working on, because of a question that came up, in a discussion where I remember having seen something or because of something else that triggered my memory on “that thing” I came across a long time ago. If needed for some kind of work, I review it again, and if still of relevance “share” it by including/referencing it in my work If that looks like I’m essentially double-filtering and doing the “seek>sense>share” twice, then that’s probably true. The value of this for me is the following: because I interact quickly and repeatedly on novel information when I initially come across it, I more easily remember later on that there “was a thing” about that topic. And because the platforms I use to store information (see below) offer full-text search without a lot of work on my side, I will usually find the relevant bits and pieces quickly once I really need them.

• reshare or even cross-post the initial pointer if I deem it valuable on itself for my network and to leave a trace and signal interest/intent about the topic to the platform, adding a personal comment along the way, and/or

• Save the initial and subsequent website / twitter thread to Pocket to make it searchable, or

• send me a PDF of the article into my mailbox or my computer, and/or

• add it to Zotero when it’s a “proper” scientific article The main value of this approach really lies in accumulating a critical mass of information and pointers and early interactions which help anchor the topic and its concept in my brain so that I know that I know something and will find it again if I need it. This post is part of my journey into “Personal Knowledge Mastery” (Or #PKM) and the PKMastery workshop led by Harold Jarche

1. Collecting in my case means the following: ↩︎

From “regular” stuff …

A while ago, then, I needed a case for my BananaPi. Since the case I had for my RaspberryPi wouldn’t fit, I looked out – and eventually printed – a design from ThingiVerse: It was readily available and was printed within a night and a half…

… to 3D printing’s true value at Home

But recently, when I upgraded the electrical wiring with some z-wave controllers, a small plastic clamp holding the glass of a ceiling-lamp broke. Since this was an IKEA lamp, and long gone from their offering (Ed. at least in Switzerland, see update at the end), getting a replacement for this small plastic part would be impossible. I would have been forced to buy a new lamp, and living with the “planned” obsolescence of this product.

Not anymore. Since I still had two identical pieces, I could simply take one, get it’s shape somehow into some 3D modelling software. And print a new one.

Replacement-as-a-Service: Scan, Vectorise, Extrude, Print

And here I am, with a working (although not perfect) replacement clamp, less than 24 hours after it broke. Getting there was quite easy, and I didn’t need expensive software either:

1. Put the old piece on the scanner to get an image of the outline

2. Clean that outline into a black and white image (Challenge: the piece was transparent)

3. Vectorise it online

4. Convert the 2d vector outline to an extruded 3D model

5. Add some elements that were not visible for the scanner with 123D (Free)

6. Export as STL and Upload to the New Matter Store

7. Print it.  Since this was my first replacement part, it went not that smoothly the first time. In fact, measuring that thing and getting the dimensions of the printed part approximately right was quite a challenge due to the irregular shape and lack of measurement options in the software.

   

   But besides that, the resulting piece is even stronger and sturdier than the original. Although next time, I’ll probably choose another color than pink. :-)

Update 22.1.2016: While I was looking for the name of the Lamp (it’s “LOCK”, which is still available in the US, but not in Switzerland), I also found a (much better looking) clamp on ThingiVerse.

Some impressions from scan to print

Figure 1: The scanned image of the hinge. Figure 2: The cleaned-up and vectorised version that was the basis for the 3D Model Figure 3: The model of the hinge as it appeared in the New Matter Store Figure 4: Printing! From my Phone.

Thanks to some hackers & tinkerers, one can now build her own interactive toys or books. And this is what I did. An interactive treasure hunt for a Kids’ birthday party.

How-to: Background and Codes, Printing

Instead of “double printing” the background and the codes, I used regular paper and adhesive, transparent film ( Folex CLP Adhesive P CL). I printed the codes I wanted to use simply on the film, cut it out and placed these small stickers on the background where I wanted them.

Because the treasure hunt would happen outdoors, I also laminated the whole sheet to make it more robust. The tip-toi pen had no issues recognizing the codes this way.

For printing, I used a Xerox WorkCentre with a high resolution setting and “Transparency” for print strength. As you can see from the last image, the codes are relatively well visible on the stickers. I also tried with a Brother DCP-7030, with mixed results in “1200dpi HQ” mode. Recognition speed and quality is much better with the Xerox, but is OK with the Brother if testing.

I haven’t tweaked printer settings that much, though, just used the standard settings.

The treasure hunt

The treasure hunt itself is very simple. It is essentially a linear, step-by-step game where the kids have to identify a part of the knights armor, and then get a clue where to find this piece of armor. The “piece of armor” is another, smaller printed card with the image of the armor and two images with a hint where to find the next piece.

In order to be able to cheat, one code on the plan increments the steps and thus allows to level up when needed or if the pen has a problem and resets itself.

Useful links

• Folex Adhesive Film

• Tip-Toi Reverse Engineering Projectr on Github

• Tip-Toi Wiki

• Avery-Zweckform Adhesive Labels (I used these for my first attempts to stick codes on existing objects)

Thought - done. You find the Library with the following ID M2kt1U7LL_2rAYMhFKpXAlpyRHZGAjJhz to add it to your projects.

To use it in your code, just call it like this:

JSONPath.apply(obj, expr, arg);

Where the parameters and the return value are as follows:

parameters:

obj (object|array): Object representing the JSON structure.

expr (string): JSONPath expression string.

args (object|undefined): Object controlling path evaluation and output. Currently only one member is supported.

args.resultType (“VALUE”|“PATH”): causes the result to be either matching values (default) or normalized path expressions.

return value:

(array|false): Array holding either values or normalized path expressions matching the input path expression, which can be used for lazy evaluation. false in case of no match.

Enjoy!

One of the first things I stumbled upon was the lack of a persistent and “headless” logging facility. While there is a Logger class, it’s only accessible in the Script Editor and can’t be used for logging triggered scripts. While shopping around for existing solutions, I was quite dissatisfied, as most existing code either was missing log levels or was otherwise not exactly living up to my expectations.

I ended up wrapping log4js into a Google Apps Script, extended by a special logger that writes log entries into a Google Drive file. The whole thing is still quite crude and simplistic, but then I think it’s quick and easy to use.

// Create a text document (.txt or .log) on Google drive and get it's document ID to use it as a log file
var docLogger = new Log4gs.docLogger('some_text_file_id');
var myLogger = new Log4gs.Log(Log4gs.Log.INFO, docLogger.log);

// Output a debug and a info message
// Only the info message will appear in the output,
// as the loglevel has been set to "INFO".
// You can change this during runtime with the
// setLevel method of the logger.
myLogger.debug("Debug message");
myLogger.info("Info message");

One of the great things about Google Apps script is that you can use libraries made by others. So, with no further ado, here’s the Library ID of my Log4gs library: MBYN4JZ76dD6wlzCD41fxa6cLgnzAPoti.

Use the library at your own risk and feel free to comment/suggest on the sourcecode.

As a side note: One of the rather “sad” things about Google Apps Script is the fact that getting code into and out of Projects is a bit cumbersome and either you decide to share your library (as I did) or you go and put all code into a github repository, ending up copying and pasting code forth and back.