Wisdom in diagnosis, then, involves not only deep knowledge about human biology and an understanding of the array of diseases that plague humankind but also knowledge and understanding about how the mind works in coming to conclusions. Discerning when these biases are operating in our minds is called metacognition, the ability to think about our thinking. The attribute of humility is embodied in the concept of metacognition; we recognize that our minds are imperfect, that there are limits to the validity of our assumptions, that we are subject to biases, and that therefore we must have the sharp sense to doubt our judgments and question whether we considered everything that should have been considered.

From “The Best Medicine” at In Character, by Harvard’s Jerome Groopman, M.D.

The essay focuses on the effects of cognitive bias in medical diagnoses (and why they’re bad). The practice of monitoring biases is important for any type of decision. It’s an essential aspect of open/conceptual’s “meta factors” discipline.

Designers and marketers (not to mention politicos and entertainers) have become adept at manipulating these biases in consumers and users, but I wonder how many are aware of how their own biases may affect the design process itself — or simply the question of which problem to solve…

Here is the book the launched the “heuristics & biases” paradigm and here is a list of cognitive biases that have probably influenced things you’re working on right now.

If you want some practice, try joining the discussion at Less Wrong for a few days.

Related posts:

1. Meta Factors

[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.]

This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual.

As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that spontaneously occurred to me after a a long period of germination. I didn’t sit down and decide “ok, I’m going to articulate the mission now,” but the connotations are nonetheless intentional and specific.

“Designing” deliberately refers to “design thinking” as practiced by the firms like IDEO and promoted by leading consultants and educators. This has been a part of Open/Conceptual’s foundational background since the start, if not earlier.

Design and design thinking, of course, have their own methodologies; roughly speaking (according to my own interpretation), they come down to a fusion of art, science, and commerce:

• Art: Aesthetics and emotions are essential; also, the process is open to spontaneous insights and inspirations.
• Science: It’s a social, reiterative process that assumes imperfection, fallibility, and continuous improvement through observation and experiments.
• Commerce: The ultimate test of merit is, “Are people willing to spend their time, attention, energy, and money on this?”

What’s missing is the Civic element…

While I don’t deny that design can improve (and has improved) things in civic and social domains, I think there are some important ways the civic sphere is inaccessible to current design methodologies — starting with the fact that design tends to be oriented around specific projects and objectives, while civics is endless; it lacks any ultimate & agreed-upon objective.

So that’s kind of where Open/Conceptual comes in: at the level of epistemology, or meta-methodology: the objective is to design an ultimate objective... keeping in mind that “design” infers that the process is reiterative — an endless succession of improving-but-still-imperfect results — i.e. we have to accept we won’t ever arrive at (or even articulate) “the” objective, but it’s the process of working it out that matters.

To put it another way, this is a philosophical enterprise: an attempt to do philosophy — not via weighty tomes full of impenetrable prose, but by modeling it into organizations and institutions that generate analogies and metaphors.

It’s kind of a microcosm for how we should try to conceive and organize the rest of our world. As I wrote last year:

Open Conceptual is where we end up by thinking creatively about everything — or at least that’s the objective. But the notion that creative thinking leads someplace is just a metaphor. We don’t really go anywhere: we grow: we cultivate creative mastery and freedom — which brings us back to the first meaning: Open Conceptual is the enterprise led foremost by creative thinking.

Exactly where it leads is impossible to know at this point, but generally, it’s the best way to go (I mean “grow”), because as long as we’re working this way, we continue to learn — we continue to stay informed and in practice so we’ll be competent and resourceful enough when genuine opportunities and challenges emerge.

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Won’t lie.

When you package seminal books in a design-conscious concept, I turn into a total sucker.

The latest set to catch my eye is the Penguin Magnum Collection (just a UK & Australia thing?), featuring six narrative non-fiction classics updated with iconic cover photos. [via CR via BMD]

A couple of them are on my to-read radar (not exactly on my to-read list). If I saw these seven or eight years ago I might’ve given into the craving to buy; I’d have those barcoded spines planted on my bookshelf, looking at me every day, reminding me of my transaction.

I’m glad I’ve outgrown that impulse.

But now I have a new impulse: making this stuff…

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I liked this idea of “four layers of design” proposed by Bill Buxton, Principal Scientist for Microsoft Research, in his recent BusinessWeek article:

• design awareness
• design literacy
• design thinking
• design practice

The gist is that everyone in the product development process should be aware of design concerns and should actively cultivate a design vocabulary, working towards habits of thinking through design strategies (which anyone can learn with dedication); design practice requires more training and experience.

It was enough to get me thinking… I liked where it led but it seemed a little thin — not much substance to really make use of it.

So I started to break it down a little more, multiplying the distinctions, trying to make them more objective and concrete, generalizing the process beyond design, making a framework for “stages of learning” in general.

Here’s what I’ve got (until it gets better):

1. interest
2. engagement
3. appreciation
4. comprehension
5. articulation
6. utilization
7. adventure
8. reorientation
9. creative freedom

There’s a pattern: three sets of three. I adopted it from The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead (one of my favourite philosophers; the book was introduced to me in a upper year undergraduate course on the philosophy of education).

Basing it on Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), Whitehead suggested there’s a “rhythm of education.” It starts with a stage of romance in which the student is excited by novelty, followed by a stage of precision in which analysis and formulation occurs.

Most of what we would call education happens in the stage of precision — but the first stage is actually just as important. Without first going through a stage of romance to get a general sense of the subject matter “it is simply a series of meaningless statements about bare facts, produced artificially and without any further relevance.”

In other words, precision without romance… sucks. (See my yin yang post.)

The third stage — the synthesis — Whitehead called the stage of generalization: “a return to romanticism with the added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique.”

Think of learning to play guitar. The stage of romance involves starting to love certain songs, heroizing the talents of favourite players, playing a lot of air guitar, etc. The stage of precision involves actually getting an instrument, playing scales, learning theory and technique, etc. The stage of generalization involves performing with others, writing your own songs, etc.

Getting a little more complex, Whitehead suggested that these stages continuously reoccur, with cycles-within-cycles (and with life being one “grand cycle” from the romance of childhood, through the precision of later school years, and the generalization of adulthood).

So I broke these stages down so that each stage of the cycle is its own cycle, making nine stages altogether. I prefer to use “passion, discipline, and fruition” rather than “romance, precision, and generalization.” Here’s how it breaks down:

1. Interest (germinal passion)
2. Engagement (deliberate passion)
3. Appreciation (masterful passion)
4. Comprehension (willful discipline)
5. Articulation (precise discipline)
6. Utilization (realized discipline)
7. Adventure (willful extension)
8. Reorientation (critical assessment)
9. Creative freedom (masterful fruition)

(I’m going to use learning to play guitar as an example throughout.)

When we talk about learning we tend to focus on the middle three stages: comprehension, articulation, and utilization — aka, rudiments & fundamentals, theory, and practice (usually all at once). That kind of education is fine if you’re just looking for a mediocre, good-enough degree of mastery. People who truly excel at something start learning well before their formal lessons, and continue long afterwards.

I’m not saying you should have to excel at what you’re doing. If you’re not interested, don’t bother (though I do hope there’s something you’d at least like to excel at)…

Interest: this is the stage when you start to notice something grabbing your attention. If you’re walking along and your eye is caught by a concert poster, or if over the din of a party you notice a conversation about music and are spontaneously drawn into it, or if you find yourself remembering guitar parts and humming them throughout the day.

Engagement means deliberately acting on interest. After seeing that concert poster you actually go to the concert, you participate in conversations about music, going out of your way to be in places (with certain people) where those conversations are most likely to occur, and listening to songs over-and-over — trying harder to hear the guitar parts more exactly.

Appreciation means starting to get a sense of quality. It means developing a “taste,” but more importantly it means knowing who the experts are. At this stage your own judgement isn’t very trustworthy, so the focus should be on working out whose knowledge you trust. You’ll idolize, say, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. You’ll read Guitar World (or something) religiously while exploring the rest of the magazine rack, devouring knowledge and exploring the field. You might be settling on a teacher, a mentor, bandmates, and a circle of like-minded student-friends.

Comprehension: once you’ve acquired a sense of what you like and who to trust, you can start to put it all together (which is what the word comprehension essentially means: “grasping together”). It’s important to get a sense of something whole before starting a systematic course of study, otherwise most of what you learn will seem irrelevant and will quickly be lost. You won’t know everything, but when something new comes along you’ll know roughly where to put it or where to look for more background (even a baroque harpsichord piece might sound familiar).

Articulation: usually the most hated of all stages of learning — all of the classification and theory and memorization of rules, etc. That’s all that needs to be said about it for now.

Utilization: it’s probably impossible to go through any of the first stages without using or applying knowledge in some way, but at this point it becomes the primary focus. Hard work has already been invested and is starting to pay off.

Congratulations, you’re a guitarist! You have a regular gig with a cover band, making decent money — relative to amount of work you (don’t) do. You also teach lessons and work part-time in a guitar shop. All of your income is from music — most of which you invest in gear to record all the songs you’re writing. In the technical sense of the word, you’re a professional.

But you still have a lot to learn — starting by unlearning most of what you already know…

Adventure: Find challenges — and not just the technical kind. Sure you can thrash better than anyone else you know, but how’s your tone? Can you move people emotionally or simply make them say “wow” for five minutes? Do non-musicians listen to you? Are people humming your music throughout the day? Is your original work distinctive and original, or is it derivative and contrived?

This is where big investments in the first few stages start to really pay off. If you started playing guitar because you hoped to be the second-coming of Dimebag Darrell and you’re whole education was about learning Dimebag’s technique, then eventually that’s going to generate constraints — likewise if you concentrated too much on emulating Stevie Ray Vaughan or Andres Segovia or whoever (though you could do a lot worse, no doubt). The broader the better.

Reorientation is like discarding your old maps and theories and finding your way around with just your wits — covering everything again from the ground-up. Make your own trails, leave your own landmarks, draw new maps and theories to include what you’ve learned and what you want to teach others.

The adventure stage was about wandering and discovering new challenges and opportunities. The reorientation stage is sort of the same but it introduces the element of discipline, making adventure more systematic and articulate.

Creative freedom means you’re no longer constrained by habits or limited knowledge. When something new comes along — a new style or technique — you have enough knowledge to have a conversation about how it developed, and you can accommodate it into your own music and master it with a little bit of practice.

It also means you’re free to decide not to learn something; you’re able to explain why you don’t like it or why it doesn’t fit in with what you do. Not only do you know all the experts, you are an expert.

Most importantly, with creative freedom, it’s still fun (you’re still interested and willing to be engaged) and this passion generates enough energy to continue investing in new fields — the business side of it, for example.

Because through it all you’re not just learning how to play guitar (or how to be a designer, or whatever), you’re learning how to learn, how to be disciplined, how to be engaged, how to articulate what you know, how to go beyond that through adventurousness, how to recognize challenges and opportunities, how to live a fruitful and fulfilling life.

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