Bugs Mapping - April 2019
[Note: the exercise was originally conceived to map hamming problems. However, when I do the mapping, I tend to quickly 'expand the picture' to also cover other, related (but not necessarily hamming-level) bugs. Which is why I renamed my exercise into (simply) 'Bugs Mapping'.]
Bugs Mapping Exercise
I really like the approach of mapping and modelling my bugs as an interconnected system. I think my mind largely works like this to start with, but last weekend, I had a first go at making this mapping explicit.
The exercise starts with prompts to identify potential hamming problems (and other bugs). In the following a collection of hamming questions and prompts I came across over time: (I'm not claiming any authorship over the following list of questions.) [I want to keep expanding this list (and other prompt lists) over time and collect them in a central location.]
What are the most important problems in my life? Which problems in my life are the largest order of magnitude? What changes could I make that would result in a 100x or 1000x increase in either personal satisfaction or positive impact on the world?
Rate-limiting steps: What’s the limiting factor on my growth and progress? What’s the key resource I have the least of, or the key bottleneck that’s preventing me from bringing resources to bear?
What am I not allowed to want? What do I feel I’m “not allowed to care about,” or that I generally don’t think about because it feels too big or impossible?
Genre-savvy: If my life were a novel, what would be the obvious next step? Where is the plot dragging, and what do I need to do to move the story forward? Imagine yourself as the hero in a science fiction story. What are the obvious things the hero needs to do/learn/get better at? What are the obvious things that currently prevent the hero from living up to their role? If you imagine yourself in 10 years, NOT having reached your goal, what were the reasons for this?
Pica: What sorts of goals am I already pursuing, but in a bad/convoluted/ inefficient/distorted way?
Advice to yourself: Imagine looking at an identical copy of yourself. What does your copy need, what is ‘wrong’ with it, what doesn’t work the way it should?
Focusing: If I say “Everything in my life is fine, and I’m on track to achieve all of my goals,” what feels untrue about that? What catches in my throat, that makes it hard to say that sentence out loud? What feels most alive to me right now? Alternately, what feels most endangered?
Doom: Ask your friends or colleagues (or anyone else who's judgement you trust or who's perspective might be interesting) what you Hamming Problem is.
Next, you proceed to map the bugs you identified and indicate their relationship to each other by drawing arrows/edges between the nodes. Arrows can point away from the node, pointing into the node, or pointing in both directions (indicating a mutually reinforcing bug-duplex; more on this below). The arrows can be 'positively reinforcing' or 'negative reinforcing'.
[I suspect it could be valuable to further elaborate on different ways bugs can interact with each other, and thereby extending the usefulness of bugs mapping exercise. I intend to simply play with and explore this informally (when doing the exercise for myself), at least for the time being.]
I ended up producing several 'maps' - one (pretty chaotic) trying to capture all/as many bugs as I could and a few other ones, zooming in on a particular topic area or axis at the time. I found it very useful to try doing this exercise several times after each other, while varying venture points or framing. I like to imagine my 'bug-ecosystem' as a high-dimensional complex space, where different cross sections produce different 'screenshots' of the same network.
What do I find particularly valuable about the Bugs Mapping?
For one, it makes self-reinforcing, detrimental (or conducive) links or cycles between multiple bugs more salient. (I was usually aware of these interactions before, but seeing them appear on paper seems to have some added value to the way I can track these cycles in real life.)
Also, it becomes easier to think more creatively about all the possible intervention points and possibilities to tackle one or several bugs. The interesting thing about vicious bug cycles is that you can intervene at many different points. To think of possible interventions, I look both at the bugs themselves and at the connection between bugs.
Furthermore, it is a good way for me to 'get an overview' of a(aa)ll the things I (so desperately) need to work on (!), which is a good (although partial) remedy against overwhelm and confusion (to be treated in more detail in a future post).
(Finally, the exercise inspired a (at this point in time still vague) mental model which I'm planning on exploring in a future post. It's about a way to categories/describe different bugs through a quality I call 'depth'. Later more.)
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Prague, April 2019 - Connection