Week of 2022-06-06
Where I turn to analogies to describe different mindsets from which an organization’s vision could be perceived, and journey bravely into the midst of the wild world of Midjourney.
… which, according to Midjourney looks like this:
Blueprint, Compass, and Remodeling
Reflecting on some vision work that I’ve been doing recently, I am realizing that I can inhabit two different perspectives, two different mindsets to approach a vision: vision as a blueprint and vision as a compass.
With vision as a blueprint mindset, I tend to treat the imagined future as a sort of grand schematic of what needs to be created, an architectural plan to be executed on. Taking this mindset feels very clarifying. I can start staking out the ground and budgeting resources, I can plan timelines and craft processes around it. Vision as a blueprint can be an amazing source of organizational coherence. Provided the communication limits have been overcome, it can serve a clear intention that the team checks their work against. Metrics are easier, because they measure completion of the work, captured by the blueprints.
With vision as a compass mindset, my perspective shifts. I no longer see the vision as a grand plan, but rather as one potential future among many other possibilities. The only thing differentiates this particular potentiality from others is that it has some properties that I hold as valuable. These properties can come together in other combinations, forming a different vision, but this is the one I was able to discern while staring into the future. This mindset encourages me to remain open to the outcomes and allows a lot of flexibility in how to get there. Compass points toward something, but doesn’t plot the path. It is okay to deviate from where the compass arrow points for a little while, to walk around obstacles or explore unexpected treasure troves. When in this mindset, I tend to seek “preferred adjacent possible”: what is the change I can make today to things I am doing now to orient toward the vision?
Both mindsets have unproductive extremes. When in the blueprint mindset, I can fall into the NIH trap (or its cousin, “second system” trap), deciding that it will be easier to just start making the future from scratch. As an engineering lead, I might be tempted to start a new team that follows the vision’s blueprints, separating it from the team that maintains the boring old present. This can work pretty well in environments where the blueprints can predict the future with reasonable accuracy. After all, many engineering artifacts are based on blueprints. However, the environments that shift and change can invalidate the blueprints mid-build, turning the whole enterprise moot. By assuming predictability of the environment, viewing vision as a blueprint can lead to blind spots that doom it.
On the other side of what increasingly looks like a spectrum, the compass mindset can get me in trouble with its flexibility. Especially in large organizations, if everyone is walking around obstacles and exploring interesting caves, the path to vision may fail to converge. Worse yet, the sense of divergence itself can get rather uncomfortable. With the answer to “where is this all going?” getting blurry and anxiety rising, the organization may tip into the traps of adversarial adaptation variety. By assuming unpredictability of the environment, viewing vision as a compass can doom it by decohering the organization.
To help navigate this spectrum of mindsets while avoiding the extremes, I came up with this analogy of remodeling. Think of it as a third mindset that straddles the other two. Remodeling a house is usually a rather weird hybrid of the certainty of knowing what we want and the unpredictability of what will be uncovered during the remodeling process. The wall we thought was load-bearing may turn out to be free-standing, the beams in the attic may have all rotted out (true story!), yet tearing out the scuffed and dented linoleum reveals beautiful hardwood floors. When we remodel, we have to dart back and forth between the blueprint and the compass mindsets. We have to continuously reinterpret the vision as new evidence is uncovered.
Additionally, we are rooted in what’s possible. When we commit to a remodel, we don’t start from scratch. We think in diffs. Where will this beam have to move? What additional foundation will have to be poured? Where will the new window be cut in? When we think in diffs, we need to also consider what stays the same. Which parts will we find unchanged after our vision comes true?
My intuition is that this combination of thinking in diffs and reinterpreting the vision creates a bit more space for thriving in uncertainty while still imposing the boundaries of the blueprints. I’ve been looking for an example of a remodel mindset, and found myself coming back to the I/O talk that year that my colleague Alex Komoroske and I gave back in 2012. We pretended to come from the future, describing how the Web development will look like. Now that that future is in the past, it is easy to see that the vision was reinterpreted throughout the journey. Most of the technology bits we demonstrated evolved significantly in their syntax and names. However, if you look at them now as they ship in all browsers, you can clearly see the ancestral resemblance. Similarly, we thought in diffs. The talk didn’t propose a brand new language or dramatically different new ways of building Web applications. We just moved some walls and added a kitchen nook, leaving most of the sound foundation intact – making the vision more relatable and easier to reason about.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/06/06/blueprint-compass-and-remodeling/
Midjourney
I recently got an invite to play with Midjourney, one of the AI-generated art tools out there. It has been a fun adventure, and I am learning a lot. Here are some insights that goofing around with Midjourney produced.
First, I am very impressed with how they leaned into the power of Discord. Until this point, I suspected, but didn’t fully grok the importance of Discord as a developer platform. Midjourney relies on it for authentication/authorization, key workflows, cross-ecosystem reach, and obviously, community-organizing.
When I joined Midjourney, I was dropped into a Discord server alongside other newbies. Operating Midjourney is super-simple: just type the “/imagine” command with a prompt of your choosing into the channel. The result is a four-panel set of choices, arranged in a 2x2, with choices (as buttons) to create more variations for each choice or upscale them. This creates a rather simple, yet effective mechanism of steering: I can either tweak my prompt or iterate on the variation.
I found myself swimming in generated art, prompts constantly produced by my fellow mid-journeyers. The creativity was all abuzz and inspiring, with some folks trying to prevent their “Kermit meets the Governator” from melting , and others zeroing on just the right kind of perfect dystopian landscape. For some reason, Midjourney excels with post-apocalyptic and gothic art, as well as other kinds of unsettling visage.
Once I used up my allotted free computing power, I decided to subscribe, and found that once I became a paid user, I gained my personal Midjourney bot to interact with privately. That was a rather clever move: using Discord infrastructure to create tiers within the community. All in all, the way Midjourney uses Discord has that “just enough” kind of feel for this sort of a project. I can easily imagine myself trying to write a standalone PWA (or cross-platform app), struggle with authentication and ACL design, etc. It sounds like Midjourney folks asked a reasonable question: “do I need any of that?” – and gained strong community management tools in the process.
Second, after running up quite a bill with different prompts and steering the variants, I am hopeful that this kind of generative art is on its way to be the new creative medium. With Midjourney, I have this intuition that I am witnessing the birth of the next TB-303, a crappy toy bass synth that redefined dance music. It is usually these simple toys that dramatically lower the threshold of entry for people to create new, interesting things – and serve as catalysts for the new wave of cool stuff that inspires generations to come.
It is not a stretch to imagine that muzak and clipart will be generated using this method in the near future. “Want 5 hours of chill lobby jazz? Here it is.” It only takes a bit of squinting to see tools like Midjourney do a half-decent job here. What also seems likely is that in addition to prompt-tweaking and choosing four variants, there will be demand for more nuanced sculpting and crafting, guiding the generated art tooling. And once that becomes available, it is inevitable that new forms of art will emerge. I can’t help but be excited about the possibilities here.
To convey what I was seeing, here are some actual journeys to give you a sense of this tool. I asked Midjourney to imagine “What Dimitri Learned”. Initially – and somewhat in line with my expectations of its biases – Midjourney went straight into the Game of Thrones fanfiction territory:
Umm… Maybe save that one for when I decide to write a young adult novel? Imagine that, “What Dimitri Learned” is a fantasy novel about a forlorn young protagonist with a budding fire-starting superpower. Yeah. So I tweaked the prompt to be a bit more upbeat. Here’s the “What Dimitri Learned, optimistic” outcome:
Nice! But still, the 18th century Eastern Europe feel was not quite what I was looking for. After playing quite a bit, I ended up with this second-generation variant of “What Dimitri Learned, futuristic, optimistic”:
Alright, this I can get behind. A bit too techno-futuristic for my taste, but I’ll take it. To give you a sense of how this particular journey in the visual eigenspace progressed, here’s a handy chart:
The whole experience felt like a glimpse of something much bigger. There are definitely terrible downsides, and even thinking about them makes the hair on my neck rise. There are also possibilities for something beautiful. It is so uncanny how these two always come in pairs.