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Storybook. Not Technical. Disappointing

Revisado: 01-30-25

I've listened to 5 hours and haven't learned a single thing about 'the science of complexity' except that maybe it has something to do with increasing returns in economics. It's focused on specific people and their careers so far.

If you're looking for a storybook maybe you'll enjoy it. If you actually wanted to learn something you may be disappointed.

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Thoughtful, yet exhausting use of questions

Revisado: 04-05-24

Worth listening, but many 'essays' are just rapid fire thought provoking questions with no answers.

It can feel like long list after long list (as long as 101 questions/statements). There's no time to process and reflect. To really get anything to stick, be prepared to pause often, or get the hard copy to go back to.

I would've rather had more thoughtful commentary and fewer questions.

Great questions though, just hard to get the full potential if you're listening in the car and can't journal as you go.

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Terrible as audiobook

Revisado: 08-25-22

The first couple of chapters were reading command line instructions and lines of code out loud - syntax and all. Not suited to audio as all.
Audiobooks can effectively cover programming topics, but this is not one of those audiobooks.

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Artfully woven stories, not quite user-friendly

Revisado: 08-18-22

If you are open to a long, winding, artfully crafted story about some of the key designers in the last 100 years, and where the direction of design is going in the future, you will enjoy this book. I didn't even know I would be interested in such history, but I did listen all the way through because it is written and narrated so well.

I wouldn't say this book is written to be user friendly - you couldn't easily jump in and quickly understand any given usability theme it explores. I'd often forget what theme any given Chapter was about. It's not super focused, it's more like a piece of art. The masterful storytelling builds from chapter to chapter, pointing back to previous characters. The narration is incredible, too.

It is definitely worth listening to, though I would have preferred a shorter version. I would've preferred a book that condenses the principles and focuses more on the framework of 'rule's mentioned in the subtitle, with the stories as the side-dish of each chapter. A bit misleading, publishers.

Not what I was expecting, but a great book.

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Essentially how to have better meetings

Revisado: 08-18-22

This book could have just as easily been titled 'How to have better meetings', 'How to be more persuasive', or 'How to win at office politics'.

Get people to advocate for you. Build relationships prior to meetings. Understand your internal stakeholders. Turn your camera on for web meetings. Sure, all of this is important, but none of this is specific to design?

On the upside, it makes it useful to a large audience, but I expected it to be focused specifically on communicating about design thinking and principles, not how to communicate effectively 'generally'. Disappointing.

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Grating to the rationale, secular person

Revisado: 07-12-22

I don't doubt the bible has great wisdom for the modern world, but I couldn't enjoy this book with all the irrational, self-blind, and/or ignorant statements. Secular minds, look elsewhere.

There is a whole section on science that is poorly done and includes statements along the lines of 'science can never explain the origin of life'. The author needs to do a quick Google for abiogenesis and acknowledge that science has brought forward probable mechanisms and insight into this area, and that he is disconnecting many readers here.

The author claims to take a literal interpretation of the text, while simultaneously indulging in interpretation of words. For example, to be rationale and literal (as the author proposes) we would interpret 'day' as 24 hours given the context of 'there was evening and there was morning', yet the author is fine to interpret this as an expression of speech such as 'this day and age'. To me, the author is the same as the secular person who is ready to accept some level of metaphor and expression of speech (non-literal interpretation), he just won't admit it.

I wish this book was more about the wisdom of the book, and less the authors attempt to prove he is rationale and/or the bible can have a 'literal' interpretation. I'm sure he could succeed at the former, but he pretty quickly came short at the latter.

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Straw man arguments and handwaving

Revisado: 01-02-22

There are some good starting points, and I appreciated the encouragement to visualizing a story map through the use of real cards, but the continuous one-sided thinking and apparent self-contradiction was disappointing.

A main premise of this book is that your team should stop trying to build better documentation, and simply have conversations to build shared understanding. The author quickly elevates conversations to a mythical cure-all status, just to concede that we might have to document our conversations ('vacation photos') and add descriptive pictures to later jog our memories, though he never explains or points to this apparent self-contradiction.

In effect, the author seems to assert that if we just don’t call it documentation (but rather new Agile terms), and keep as simple as is feasible (i.e., pictures of our meeting notes/drawings on a Confluence page), then it will be useful and Agile. But whatever we do, we must not call it documentation.

The author asserts that documentation is fundamentally flawed because two people can read the same document and have different understandings. The author proposes that the answer is, simply (the author tends to trivialize all problems with humor), to have conversations between people to reach a shared understanding. The author doesn’t address the fact that conversations suffer from the same problem as documentation. In reality, people have conversations and come away with different understandings all the time. People forget or modify their once-held shared understandings all the time.

This self-contradiction really becomes apparent when the author starts to acknowledge that we might need some ‘vacation pictures’ of our whiteboard drawings and other notes to jog our memories. Or that we can point to or hold up our ‘story cards' and wave them around emphatically to remind our team members of previous meetings. It seems obvious to me that documentation also serves the same purpose as something to point to, yet the author just glosses over this by saying you might hurt someone if you waved around a document.

It seems to me that the author’s suggested collection of story cards, meeting artifacts, and pictures that are saved later is exactly the simpler, dare we say better, documentation that the author simultaneously advocates is not needed.

Sure, we can all agree that teams often fall into the trap of trying to (mis)use documentation to create shared understanding, and skip having the real conversations. But this seems to me only evidence of a fault in the approach, it doesn’t diminish the potential value of having things written down to circumvent the limitations of human memory and cognition. The author’s rallying behind the value of conversations and shared understanding is totally warranted, but there is no meaningful analysis to the limitations of the suggested approach.

By the time he gets around to lecturing that we shouldn’t have meetings (because they are unproductive) and we should call them workshops instead (because that’s where the real work gets done), I couldn’t listen anymore.

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mostly buzzwords, almost no insight

Revisado: 06-24-21

I struggled on to the end of the book, which I regret. The 'new framework' never came. No epiphanies. All the content in this book could be summarized by 'visualize your work' and ' integrate your tools' as possible by scale.
The whole book uses examples of companies that already are successful in value flow, yet the author claims his ideas are new. Author continually says the old management/production frameworks won't work, but lean and agile underpin all his ideas.
All delivered by the voice of a dramatic used car salesman.

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