Big ideas and the reality of ambiguity

One of my favourite books of recent years has been Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine; it turns out that he made some of it up. To be honest, I don’t really care; it’s a great book, there is lots of value in it, I’d still recommend you read it, and I for one know that you shouldn’t let a few facts get in the way a great story if telling it is going to get your point across.

The thing I find more interesting about the Lehrer coverage, and as highlighted in Andrew Price’s article linked above, is how the publishing world is obsessed with “big theories” – the Gladwellisation of the world, if you will; in a complex, ambiguous and ultimately fairly scary world, people are looking for big, simple ideas to make sense of things. That kind of scares me.

I know from all the years I have worked in IT that many folk crave a single process, a best practice, a silver bullet, for how to engage with people, define requirements, deliver systems and services and so on. The further I get into my career, the more I believe that such things don’t exist. You can, for example, study every thing that Steve Jobs ever did, turn it into a grand theory, and still probably not achieve anything with it (other than publishing a book about your musings on the big idea you’ve developed from analysing someone else’s actions in hindsight). It’s about learning in context, not the transfer of end actions to different situations.

Success, undoubtedly, comes from talent, dedication and insight. It also comes from serendipity and being in the right place at the right time. Engineering those latter factors is definitely possible, but it that’s about how to deal with the complexities and ambiguities that rear their heads, rather than doggedly sticking to a particular ideological position (the Chancellor of the Exchequer should, in my humblest of opinions, take note).

The problem is that, on the (virtual) shelves of bookshops across the globe, there isn’t space for a book entitled “It’s a mad, bad scary world and essentially you’re on your own, matey”. So I’ll not bother writing that one for the time being…