The Leaflet #130: affordances, prototypes, slaying software Goliath
Affordances
Good design of objects and UI takes advantage of affordances. Psychologist James Gibson came up with the term and defined it this way:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. ... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.
Examples abound. A handle on a mug is an affordance. It makes a hand-shaped hole with an insulated arc that’s sitting next to very hot stuff. You see the handle and it makes sense to reach for the handle instead of the body of the mug. On your computer screen, a button changes color when you hover over it. This tells you “hey, this button is clickable.”
When you’re the leader, you very often encounter people not doing stuff you want them to do. This will really bug you when the stuff we’re talking about is stuff everyone here on the team agreed we’d do. It will puzzle you when the stuff is a customer or community member not doing things that they said in a focus group or casual conversation they really wanted to do. What gives?
The answer here might be that you need an affordance. Make it easy for your people to do the thing by making it intuitive to do that thing when the time comes. Don’t put a reminder in a standard business envelope (which reads as “this is trash, throw me away”; send a postcard instead (a postcard is the mail without the envelope). If the goal of your retreat is for people to build trusting relationships, don’t sit them in rows of chairs facing a giant projector screen for hours. If you want people to follow a particular financial policy, don’t bury the policy ⅔ of the way through the .pdf of the employee handbook.
-eric
Prototyping to end a leadership team tug-of-war
I give leadership advice for a living. That means I’m often talking to people who are part of leadership teams at their organizations. Maybe this is weird or wrong, but I found this part of being a leader one of the worst parts. This was true even in cases where I admired, respected, and enjoyed the other people on the leadership team (lucky for me, this has been most cases). We’re all badasses here – why is this not working???
A reason this has been hard for me is these teams tend to have the least-defined decision rights and processes of any team. When there’s one boss and a bunch of reports, things can be relatively clear even without clear definitions. Leadership teams, though, tend to be teams of peers and can also be places where the members want to take a break from being the big deciders all the time. So the hierarchy is still there but it’s sorta on pause and the resulting politics are stuttering and strange.
This is a lot of words to say: I got frustrated by how little leadership teams got done and how long we got stuck in unresolved debates.
A path out of such debates is a prototype. Build and test some version of a proposal that’s under consideration. Make it as quick and dirty as your context requires. Using an LLM or coding agent can be great for this – you might learn everything you need from something that stands in rather than stands out.
A thing I like about the prototype path is anyone can suggest it and, thanks to our LLM friends, almost anyone can own it. When you pitch a prototype, you might find that the rest of your leadership team is grateful to you, no matter how crummy or cool your prototype ends up being, because you ended a debate without anyone having to lose face.
-eric
If you run a non-profit, you’re no longer at the mercy of your software
Some of the work I enjoy most is with the lil Davids of the social change world. The 5-person non-profit slinging rocks at the meanest giants they can find.
The Davids that inspire me most have become elite slingers. They have developed good aim and damaged many an ogre. But these same Davids are often annotating receipts by hand because the HR software only accepts this one weird file type that they don’t have a license for the native software of that makes it and also that one spreadsheet tab is broken because that really smart woman from the local university who built it well she was only here for that one summer and then someone deleted the contents of that cell by accident dear god above why is the world like this we have this heap of lethal stones and these artisanal leathern slings and rotator cuffs like whoa and do you KNOW how many giants are gnawing the sleeves off their tunics just the other side of that hill, hungry for Davidian gristle? We definitely don’t have time to fix this, so let me see here, $9.58 for gas for travel to semi-annual team dinner, yep.
Listen, Dave. You aren’t at the mercy of your software anymore. Not even the cuddly-interfaced non-profit-marketed software. If you’re having to do something manual, if there is tedious repetition, if one of your programs doesn’t talk to the other one – that can be fixed and fixed cheap. You can do it yourself with Claude Code, or you can hire a college student to fix it for you with Claude Code, or you can apply to have Anthropic give you $10,000 so that they can also give you someone to work for you for a year to fix it.
The meme two years ago when generative AI was taking off was a thing about computers getting to do all the art and the humans being stuck with the spreadsheets. Flip that, David. The bots haven’t been trained to make great art. But damn can they make some software.
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Octogenarian Bob Dylan on being an octogenarian:
You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
Guy who eventually cut stuff out of paper Henri Matisse on what he was up to:
I do not paint things, I paint only the differences between things
Poet Victor Hugo on the loss of life in war:
Fugitives, wounded men, and dying,
In caissons, stretchers, and sleds, overloading
The bridges, falling asleep by the ten thousand,
Woke up, hundreds, or less.