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| A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering? |
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| Berni:
Yeah such "ideas people" are rarely any help at all. It certainly is helpful to discuss a design with someone. I had plenty of good ideas come out of it, sometimes even as just a "rubber duck effect" where in trying to describe the issue you get extra ideas. But when you have someone from outside the field chiming in ideas, you do get outside the box ideas that are instead really difficult to actually implement or are things that you know would perform poorly before even doing any back of the napkin math. Then you typically have to spend a lot of time explaining to them why there brilliant idea is not quite so brilliant. The one good use for "ideas people" is coming up with kickstarter projects to run a invest and disappear scam on. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 01, 2022, 01:13:23 am --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on February 28, 2022, 11:49:53 pm ---Individuals aren't sufficient, except in movies. Teams are necessary ,but why? Multiple things need to happen for a project to be successful, and they require radically different skills - and hence personality traits, and hence multiple people. One way of dividing those up is via the Myers Brigg personality factors. Now while it would be unwise to I think of that as The One Truth, if used wisely there is so e validity to the concepts. Myers Brigg invented eight team roles, each with requiredmstrengths and allowable weaknesses, with the concept that a team need them all to be successful. One person has a primary personality and roles, but can adopt a secondary role. I can never remember the official roles, but I find that alternative team roles are easier to understand and remember. They are: * chairman * ideas man * critic * worker * finisher * communicator * action man One example of an unbalanced team is two ideas men: they would have great fun but nothing would be achieved. Another, of two critics, would result in nothing novel being achieved. The OP's thinking outside the box is the ideas man role. Beneficial in some circumstances, but not sufficient. --- End quote --- You missed out an important word in front of "Myers Brigg" there, "discredited": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28315137 and https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless for example. --- End quote --- Yes and no. I've been through the 16PF test as part of being interviewed for a job and in interview panels. After the interview the "interpreter" explained to the company what it was about, and three friends shared our results. They were all remarkably perceptive e.g. "I hate to sound sexist, but she seems loveable", even though the interpreter didn't meet us. In the interview panels the interpreter gave pointlessly anodyne statements that could have been made by anybody that had met the interviewee for a few minutes - which he had done. Conclusion 1: the results do depend on the interpreter, and aren't as rigorous as claimed. Conclusion 2: the right interpreter can gain remarkable insights. In this case a chess grandmaster, who presumably is used to spotting spatial/numerical patterns. --- Quote ---But every team needs an action man , it's something for the chairman to play with while everybody else gets on with doing what they're told, and the chairman's going to need a bodyguard when the solitary worker realises that he's the only one doing any actual work. --- End quote --- The action man role was "don't know where else to fit them" :) --- Quote ---At the best these methodologies sometimes work by mere coincidence because they make people think about and analyze what they are doing, at their worst they destroy any chance of success by being followed religiously, thereby excluding any exploration of solutions that might actual work but aren't part of "the process". --- End quote --- The "sometimes" had a 100% hit rate, with the right interpreter and right division of roles. I could never understand the standard roles such as "plant". The companies used the interview results sensibly: as a source of questions in the second interview. Otherwise they were ignored. Overall it is very useful mechanism for realising that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and you need to cover one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths. --- Quote ---For a perfect example of this look at the 'agile' development methodology currently being used to destroy productivity and produce half-functioning products in companies around the world. If it makes you think about what you're doing, for whom, how, and why, it's probably good. If however you insist that every 'ceremony' (yes, that's really what they call them) takes place, every piece of work most produce something deliverable in every 'sprint' whoever inappropriate, that you produce a "working" 'MVP' no matter how broken or useless every sprint, etc. then you're on the highway to hell. --- End quote --- Agreed. I too intensely dislike the "magic" and "religion" of agile methods. When they fail and the excuse is that you only used 11 of the 12 principles, it is not a good advert for the methods! Nonetheless, they can have value if they jolt a company out of sclerotic waterfall practices. But overall they are no subsititue for a team of people that know how to create something new. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: Brumby on March 01, 2022, 03:35:59 am --- --- Quote from: Cerebus on March 01, 2022, 01:13:23 am ---..... look at the 'agile' development methodology currently being used to destroy productivity and produce half-functioning products ..... --- End quote --- I've seen some curious "development methodologies" in my time. The one that made me cringe the most was one where a development was passed from one "silo" to the next. Each silo consisted of one or more "specialist" teams that would do their bit and then hand the whole project over to the next silo. I found that term rather appropriate ... it's like a project was lobbed into your arena, you did your bit then chucked it over the wall to the next guy. This completely destroyed any end-to-end monitoring and relied solely on written communication for the job to be done properly. I saw it as a corporate version of Chinese whispers. Fortunately, I moved on not long after I was introduced to the concept. --- End quote --- I've seen exactly that too. Sclerotic and dysfunctional. |
| DiTBho:
--- Quote from: Berni on March 01, 2022, 07:52:19 am --- "rubber duck effect" --- End quote --- Pragmatic Programmer, I prefer the Rubber duck (debugging) effect, a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken natural language. It actually works :D |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: Berni on March 01, 2022, 07:52:19 am ---It certainly is helpful to discuss a design with someone. I had plenty of good ideas come out of it, sometimes even as just a "rubber duck effect" where in trying to describe the issue you get extra ideas. --- End quote --- Yes; I personally have done my best work in a team with only slightly overlapping domains of knowledge and responsibility. I claim it can be synergistic, if there is sufficient trust (so that egos do not become a hindrance) and honest, direct communication. And the rubber duck effect is real: describing ideas in a structured linear fashion necessarily organizes that idea. It is a process that works. The point of my post was combining lateral thinking with logic and hard work can yield brilliant results; but lateral thinking alone, without the knowledge or the hard drudge work going through the steps, is really not useful at all. That is, one cannot use lateral thinking as a shortcut to avoid learning, or to avoid the drudge work. It just doesn't work that way. |
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