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the depth of social problems is largely derived from the “stickiness” of power. Power is the ultimate positive feedback loop: simply put, people in positions of power use their positions of privilege to stay there.

The Systems Work of Social Change

Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici

Explore v.s. Exploit: Finding Solutions Quickly Can Get You Stuck in a Local Optimum Transcript: Speaker 1 So when I started doing the work in AI, one of the really, very, very general ideas that comes across again and again in computer science is this idea of the explore, exploit trade on. And the idea is that you can't get a system that is simultaneously going to optimize for actually being able to do things effectively. That's the exploit part. And being able to figure out, search through all the possibilities. So let me try to describe it this way. I guess we're a podcast. So you're going to have to imagine this usually I wave my arms around a lot here. So imagine that you have some problem you want to solve or some hypothesis that you want to discover. And you can think about it as if there's a big box full of all the possible hypotheses and all the possible solutions to your problem or possible policies that you could have, for instance, Your reinforcement learning context. And now you're in a particular space in that box. That's what you know now. That's the hypotheses you have now. That's the policies you have now. Now what you want to do is get somewhere else. You want to be able to find a new idea, a new solution. And the question is how do you do that? And the idea is that there are actually two different kinds of strategies you could use. One of them is you could just search for solutions that are very similar to the ones you already have. And you could just make small changes in what you already think to accommodate new evidence or a new problem. And that has the advantage that you're going to be able to find a pretty good solution pretty quickly. But it has a disadvantage. And the disadvantage is that there might be a much better solution that's much further away in that high dimensional space. And any interesting space is going to be too large to just search completely systematically. You're always going to have to choose which kinds of possibilities you want to consider. So it could be that there's a really good solution, but it's much more different from where you currently are. And the trouble is that if you just do something like what's called hill climbing, you just look locally, you're likely to get stuck in what's called a local optimum.

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

DEEP Framework: Documenting Decisions, Events, Explanations, and Proposals in Your Org Summary: The DEEP framework emphasizes the documentation of decisions, urging the recording of the rationale behind business and general decisions. It also stresses the importance of documenting events such as meetings and town halls, highlighting the need for summarization. Furthermore, the framework encourages documenting explanations, especially in the context of onboarding, as they often involve repeated material. Lastly, it emphasizes documenting proposals or ideas, allowing individuals to present their rationale to others and providing time for considered reactions. The acronym 'DEEP' serves as a reminder for teams to consider the documentation created within their workflow. Transcript: Speaker 1 So I came up with an acronym as well, and I call that acronym deep. I think you'll identify with some of these. So deep for decisions, if there's ever a decision, then you should record the rationale for it. And we've talked about it endlessly on our tech radar's decision record systems. But I extend that to business decisions as well and general decisions as well. So similar format. Then there's events. So you have a town hall, you have a meeting, all of those are events, right? And you better document them for the benefit of other people. And when I say document, I mean, summarize, sure, you can have a recording or snippets of recordings if they are useful for people, but the summary is the more important thing. Then there's explanations, and I found these very useful in the context of onboarding, because there's a lot of explainer material that gets repeated in onboarding. And those are definitely great candidates for documentation. And the last one is proposals. And I called that proposals, but really I'm trying to talk about things like ideas. So let's take an example. I want to use this new library on my project. I have a certain rationale for it. Let me write down the thought process. What value is it going to bring? Let me present it to everyone. Everyone has the time to consume it. Oftentimes we go into decision making with a lot of cognitive load, where, you know, Ken explains in rapid fire things that he's been thinking about for the last 15 days. And now I have to consume it in the next 30 minutes and give Ken a year or nay. It's really difficult because Ken's done all the deep thinking, I need the time to process it and writing gives me the time to process it, right? And I can also not give knee jerk reactions, but considered reactions. So proposals, and that starts to include design documentation, idea papers, any kinds of proposals that you make on the team. So that acronym deep is a good trigger for teams to kind of hold on to and think about what is the documentation we're creating in the flow of work.

Asynchronous Collaboration — Getting It Right

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

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