First principles thinking consists of deriving things to their fundamental proven axioms in the given arena, before reasoning up by asking which ones are relevant to the question at hand, then cross referencing conclusions based on chosen axioms and making sure conclusions don't violate any fundamental laws. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle (more)

Grad School/Certification for doctors (healthcare)

actually, you can never model/build a whole system, just the part of it that matters (more)

A root cause is an initiating cause of a causal chain which leads to an outcome or effect of interest. Commonly, root cause is used to describe the depth in the causal chain where an intervention could reasonably be implemented to change performance and prevent an undesirable outcome. The term root cause has been used in professional journals as early as 1905, but the lack of a widely accepted definition after all this time indicates that there are significantly different interpretations of exactly what constitutes a root cause. The two biggest differences in viewpoint regard the possibility of an outcome having more than one root cause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cause (more)

A pre-mortem, or premortem, is a managerial strategy in which a project team imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization.[1][2] The technique breaks possible groupthinking by facilitating a positive discussion on threats, increasing the likelihood the main threats are identified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-mortem (more)

Martin Cagan on some guidelines for doing Product Management in an Agile Software Development process. Rapid cycling of ProtoTypes before the Iteration starts. As a product manager/owner, your main responsibility is to come up with useful and usable prototypes and user stories that your team can build from. Replace heavy PRDs and Functional Specs with ProtoTypes and User Story-s. (more)

Martin Cagan on the Wicked nature of Product Discovery. During your initial user discussions you find that users aren't as excited about the idea as your management was, and/or you struggle to come up with a ProtoType that users can figure out, and/or the users aren't excited about the ideas in the prototype when they test it. But the time is up, the engineers are ready, and the result is that during the next three to six months, engineering proceeds to build that same unusable and unexciting product that you saw in your prototype, and you ship, and then your management is of course disappointed in the results... But they do need to get past this. Product organizations need to come to terms with the fact that the product invention process is fundamentally a Creative process. It is more art than science. I prefer to think of this phase as "product discovery" more than "requirements and design.".. the perceived constrained (bottleneck) resource in just about every software product organization is the engineers, and the thought that an engineering team might be sitting around with nothing to do but play Foosball just drives management nuts. Ironically, it is precisely this reasoning that leads directly to wasted engineering resources. Realize that almost every company does this discovery process I've described here, instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, they use the full engineering team for full release cycles to build the software that is then QA'ed and deployed into production systems. This is why it typically takes so many companies three or more releases over one to two years to get something usable and useful. They are using the engineering organization to build a very, very expensive ProtoType, and they use their live customers as unwitting test subjects. (more)

Steve Blank model of Start Up success (more)

In system design, a fail-fast system is one which immediately reports at its interface any condition that is likely to indicate a failure. Fail-fast systems are usually designed to stop normal operation rather than attempt to continue a possibly flawed process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast (more)

Attempts to think about Systems And Games. (more)

A political system is a system of politics and government. It is usually compared to the legal system, economic system, cultural system, and other Social Systems. However, this is a very simplified view of a much more complex system of categories involving the questions of who should have authority and what the government's influence on its people and economy should be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_system (more)

R and D center created by DEC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Systems_Research_Center The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Bob Taylor, who left the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) of Xerox PARC after an internal power struggle. SRC survived the takeover of DEC by Compaq in 1998. It was renamed to "Compaq Systems Research Center". When Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002, SRC was merged with other HP corporate research labs and relocated there. After Taylor's retirement (1996), the lab was directed by Roy Levin and then by Lyle Ramshaw.

Alvin Roth uses the mathematical tools of Game Theory to find fixes for big, broken systems. Over the last 20 years he has pioneered a branch of economics known as Market Design (marketplace). Among Roth's accomplishments: designing networks for kidney donations and creating elegant systems that enable huge urban school districts to optimally place multitudes of students among hundreds of schools. (more)

Gordon Brander: Building new weblike things. Consider how we might build new open systems with weblike characteristics. (more)

Cedric Chin: Cognitive Flexibility Theory: The Rules. (more)

GeePaw Hill has TweetStorms about a RAMPS (Rhythm, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose, and Safety) (Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose) model of Software Development team Motivation: make great software by making great teams. (more)

In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world.[1] The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a PC; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The EMT considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including a physical level. The EMT was proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in "The Extended Mind" (1998). They describe the idea as "active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis (more)

James Fallows updates his overview of the Personal Knowledge Management/PKM/PIM market from April. I hadn't realized that Scope Ware had closed down. (more)

Gary Wolf profiles Howard Rheingold. Reed College, InstituteForNoeticSciences, WELL, Xerox PARC, Tools For Thought, Virtual Reality, Virtual Community, Electric Minds. The first promoters of online communication harbored serious hopes that these new technologies - modems, bulletin boards, internet sites - would contribute to the resolution of social problems. By reducing the cost of publishing and by shielding appearance, accent, and other particulars of identity, online technologies might prove an antidote to prejudice and chauvinism. Rheingold shared this idealism and presented it forcefully.

Visakan Veerasamy had some interesting tweets: it’s possible to take a long/extended view such that the bites (Twitter nuggets) constitute a much bigger web of threads. The platform definitely isn’t optimized for this but it’s very possible... How do you read books other than one word at a time? I think the difference is that books are discrete linear packages, while the web is continuous & omni-directional. Focus is a function of frame; books are pre-framed; operating in the web necessitates holding your own frame... Been reflecting on this for some time, this idea that the web destroys people’s ability to focus on something like reading a book. Sometimes I suspect people have it sort of backwards. Focusing on a single self-contained experience to me is sometimes kind of like eating baby food.. As I get older and my mind-palace gets larger and more comprehensive (with other people’s ideas) I get less & less casually-randomly interested in books written by other people. I am currently most intrigued by the books that exist only in my imagination; that’s my primary focus... I change frames a LOT – but because I keep track of a lot of them (my various twitter threads, for example), I can always go back and pick up where I left of, and over time this builds an immense, intricate extended-mind-palace. (Hypertext) (more)