March, 2004 - There is no box

I have an engineer who works for me. His responsibilities include ensuring design consistency and best practices across the components in the system. We establish design guidelines and rules for the team to apply in their work, and he performs the grunt work of reviewing and editing everyone’s designs. He is well suited to the role, because he is very methodical, and he has an affinity to documenting and following rules.

Engineering can be divided into two different modes of operation: manufacturing and invention.

I use the term manufacturing in reference to ordinary development. That is, designing based on a strategy of incremental improvement over past designs. This strategy has served the Japanese well in automobiles and consumer electronics. A disciplined approach to engineering with focus on continuous improvement and attention to market forces is the key to success in manufacturing. Manufacturing is about quality of implementation. Manufacturing is about applying best practices and quality process.

Invention is completely different. Invention is not about responding to market demand. It is about using imagination to create new markets, where they never existed before. Invention requires innovative thinking to formulate new ideas and different (hopefully better) practices. Invention is not about applying today’s best practices and rules to incrementally improve. Invention requires the understanding that today’s best is flawed and impeding progress towards a superior possibility that may be highly risky, unproven, and difficult to achieve – but worthwhile to pursue, because it would be revolutionary.

A business needs disciplined engineers, who are skilled at manufacturing. This is where the money is.

My grunt is definitely a manufacturer, not an inventor. He has mediocre design creativity, because he is unable to intuit across a mass of contradictory information and conflicting motivations (resolving the forces), while paying attention to detail. He needs rules to govern his thinking and everyone else’s. Without rules, he is unable to function. He has no intuitive understanding of good design principles. He follows the rules.

An inventor (and every good designer) does not follow the rules. He does not break the rules either. He defines the rules that are appropriate, and he uses them to aid his thinking. Above all, he uses his brain to produce good designs, given the facts in evidence. He leads, where few have the courage to follow.

I am currently reading Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. I have just completed the first part of the book, which is a lengthy introduction. The author felt a strong need to prepare the reader’s mind for thinking about the universe differently from whatever misguided education and personal experience was filling his head.

Perhaps if I had not already read The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, I would have needed this preparation. However, being already convinced that space and time are invalid concepts for properly describing reality, I felt perfectly at home with the author’s perspective.

Something I was unprepared for was the realization that objectivist epistemology may be overly constrained by its man-qua-man perspective. Scientists, who practice the Scientific Method, impose constraints on their thinking by considering themselves an objective observer. Those who do this cannot effectively practice the science of cosmology, because no such artificial (mystical) separation can be established between observer and universe.

Only man-qua-man can allow himself to be so easily fooled into thinking the world is as he himself sees it, and be convinced that this is an accurate view of reality. Only man-qua-ordinary-man would so easily accept space, entities, and their attributes to represent the true state of things, while changes in state are viewed as snapshots in time. Most men still believe that reality is organized into a three dimensional grid representing space, and an extra dimension of time. Even their inability to sense these alleged characteristics does not bother them. Ask them to show you space and time one day, and see how far they get trying to use existents to describe non-existents.

Man-qua-ordinary-man is in fact a mere fool. In order to understand cosmology, we must become man-qua-universe and think likewise.

[It might seem strange that a software architect would spend so much effort on cosmology. Cosmology and software architecture are actually similar. Cosmology and software architecture are both about studying the universe. Just as every ordinary cosmologist has failed to gain a proper understanding of the universe, by being unable to accept that he himself cannot be separated from it as objective observer, ordinary software architects are in the same bind.]

Insights into innovation