process

I've previously talked about how the size of your blocks determines how productive you are. In a nutshell, someone who builds a shed by planting trees to grow into lumber and mining the ore to make nails is going to be much less efficient than the person who buys a kit and assembles it from Home Depot. In this piece, I want to look at the size of blocks from a process design or work-flow standpoint. This is probably going to be a little abstract because it can apply to a number of different areas on many different levels. Regardless of what you do, you are responsible for creating processes and work-flows. These may be as simple as working out the process for cooking dinner or as … [Read more...] about Boxing Things Up

Psychologists have been doing some experiments with chimps and young children looking for differences in the way they solve problems. In one of the experiments, they gave chimps a clear box containing food. The scientists showed the chimp how to open the box, but included several steps that were obviously unnecessary. When the chimps were left alone with the box, they retrieved the food imitating the method they had been shown. However, the chimps eliminated the unnecessary steps. The scientists then tried the same experiment with 3 and 4 year olds. Unlike the chimps, children imitated the entire sequence of actions they had been shown, including the unnecessary steps. This is an … [Read more...] about Chimps and Children