
Structured Thinking vs. Going With The Flow - adamsmith
http://adamsmith.cc/structured-thinking-versus-go-with-the-flow
======
bane
For a number of years I worked in a field that didn't _require_ highly
structured thinking, but if you could do it you could quickly rise to the top.

One of the difficulties in structured thinking in a team environment is the
burden of selling the benefits of your model to others. For every hour you
might spend reasoning about a problem, you had to spend 2-3 hours selling that
reasoning to other people: on your team, in the larger organization, and
outside of that organization.

More often then not people were receptive to the concept of it, but when the
models got too complex they would dismiss it and fall back to simpler, less
useful models, or just "go with the flow" and wing it.

It's a shame really, because I often found myself either working alone on a
hard problem or with one or two interested acolytes when more manpower would
have definitely been useful.

~~~
wtracy
Could you tell us about what field this was? :-)

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bane
It was a competitive analysis field.

~~~
javert
I'm really curious about your answer, but I literally don't know what that
means, and Google is not helping.

Perhaps you give some examples of fields that are competitive analysis fields?
Or define "competitive analysis"?

~~~
bane
Anything where you analyze a field of competitors. For example, competitive
supply chain analysis where you study a competitor's supply chain to try and
figure out various things about them. Can they lower their prices? Do they
have alternative suppliers for xyz component? What happens if that component
goes off the market and how does it impact their bom? How is that component
shipped? What's the expectations of them keeping up with the state of the art
for this product? etc. You can also do a human version and look at _who_ in
organizations are doing this and if you have enough information about their
social network can sometimes predict behaviors of an organization like what
suppliers they're likely to go with.

There's lots of data providers for this kind of thing, and anything from press
releases to shipping manifests can be used.

There's a bunch of versions of this field and they can be interesting. But
they're usually not known outside of the firms that really engage in them. If
you're smart about it you can build very structured frameworks and plug in the
information and get some insight out of it. Or you can just read lots of press
releases and go with your gut like a glorified hedge fund manager.

On the tech side you find lots of opportunity to model things and use NLP
tools, mapping tools, that sort of thing.

~~~
javert
Thanks for your explanation, that's fascinating.

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erikb
In my experience most people are bad at both, it's just that they think they
are one or the other.

Also I would suggest another approach at becoming better: Instead of mastering
both styles (which is impossible for most people) it might be better to focus
on one style and look for ways to drag the problems that are better solved
with the other style back to solutions you already can apply. Stupid example I
created just now: Instead of trying to go more with the flow when meeting
friends a planner could spent more time before meeting friends to plan and
prepare different options. The solution is still not as optimal as for a go-
flow-guy, but it is possible to get around it without your friends realizing.
On the other hand a go-flow-guy that is writing a master thesis might be
better to plan for a very small topic and go for more iterations with the
professor to get to a decent paper in the end. In both example I probably fail
to show that the guy is actually applying his own style to a problem that is
not meant for this style, just that he is more creative and willing to put in
more energy to get to the same end result then the person with the other
talent.

If you look closely at medium level chess players and kungfu arts then you see
that they are also doing something like this. They learn a small set of skills
that all focus on very few basic concepts and try to solve other problems by
moving the situation back to their comfort zone or putting in more effort.

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brezina
having been adam's co-founder (xobni) and having lived with him for many years
- this article describes one of the things I most like & respect about adam.
He is incredibly structured in his thinking about everything in life. I
brought much more of the go with the flow skills, but highly respect & learned
much from his structured approach. His Wiki of Structures for various fields
of thinking is linked at the bottom and a must browse
[http://wikilogic.org/index.php/Home_Page](http://wikilogic.org/index.php/Home_Page)

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ckluis
I think the Six Hats Method of meeting organization could be applied to
thinking which allows for some free form and some structured thinking.

I highly recommend it. It's an old book, but a good one.

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soneca
> _Very few people are really skilled at both. But as I mentioned in the
> introduction, you can be one of them if you practice with new experiences,
> and reflect on when you over- vs under-think through decisions._

So he suggests you should use structured thinking to be good at "going with
the flow". With that implying that someone that is good at going with the flow
to start won't be able to be good on both.

I don't think this is true, but only his own mental model playing games with
his writings. But otherwise, very interesting thoughts.

~~~
jakejake
I can't help but be a structured thinker and I have to exert effort to go with
the flow. To be honest I probably rarely, if ever, actually go with the flow.
If you're strategically thinking that you are going to "go with the flow" then
you are actually still using structured thinking. A bit of a catch 22 there.

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MarkHarmon
Adam has put into words the ideas that have been floating around in my head
for awhile, and does so in a very interesting way. Cataloging mental models.
Cool. Very loosely reminds me of Jung's personality archetypes.

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ruang
"Machine learning: Explore vs exploit" -from his wiki

Great way to view "data science". Augemented intelligence will usually beat
artificial intelligence.

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priya_sri
the fundamental blocking issue might be that we all think that 'flow' is not
in our capability, & that it is possible only for a blessed few. I've penned
my thoughts on it in a post I wrote sometime here
[http://priyankasriraghavan.blogspot.in/2013/07/flow-let-
it-b...](http://priyankasriraghavan.blogspot.in/2013/07/flow-let-it-be.html)

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nine_k
I personally find the following lovely:

«Meeting people: use go-with-the-flow when possible, i.e. _unless you really
do need to_ judge/ _understand them_.»

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macrael
I was just talking with my roommate about this last night. I think the most
important realization is that it is impossible to only use Structured Thinking
to make your decisions and that I was wrong to think I ever was. The way I see
it, structured thinking allows you to outline all of the pros and cons of the
various options in front of you (which then drives creatively coming up with
other possible solutions) but that those pros and cons are often not directly
relatable, so your decision as to which pros and which cons you will
ultimately fulfill is impossible to make perfectly "logically" and instead is
made somewhat intuitively. This is "going with your gut" and is a required
part of every decision we make.

Somewhat more concretely: Let's say I'm trying to solve a specific problem for
my product. I want to add a new, already designed, feature to my app. There
are many many different ways this feature can be implemented. Thinking in a
structured way helps us enumerate the various different properties of these
options. It requires logical/structured thinking to work through "if I
implement API expansion only for has_one associations I can do this in the
framework of the rails serializers I am already using" and "if I choose to
accommodate has_many associations as well I will need to rewrite the code that
now uses serializers. If I rewrite that code, I know that it will require more
testing and will probably introduce bugs" So here (obviously incompletely)
logic has helped me think about all the consequences of the various different
options, but there is no way to mathematically relate "increased code
complexity" vs. "solves the problem more completely" vs. "principle of least
surprise" vs. "principle of immediate feedback" vs. "performance" vs. "code
readability" vs. etc. The phrase is, "apples and oranges"

So now that I can make many logical arguments in favor and against a number of
different paths forward, a decision must still be made. And it's hard for me
to see how that decision is "logical" in any meaningful way. We obviously have
heuristics for saying that "in general, something that impacts the user
negatively is more important than the code being ugly" but these hierarchies
are always fuzzy and they shift depending on the situation. Ultimately, when
you choose which path to take, you are choosing which pros and which cons you
believe to be actually most important in this moment.

So, logic is an important muscle to work because being better at it gives you
access to more complete information about what all the possible consequences
of all the possible actions are. But then, going with the flow is also
important to practice, and getting better at it I think really comes with
practice, because the more decisions you make and observe the outcomes of, the
better you will get at having a sense of what the true balance of these apples
and oranges should be.

Sort of an aside, but i've noticed recently that in many of the discussions
I've had at work designing features the arguments rarely become heated because
of the following:

Person Alpha: "Well A implies B implies C, C is bad so we should not do A"

Person One: "Actually A does not imply B, therefore your thinking is wrong"

When someone is wrong in a very discrete logical way, it's easy for the
discussion to adapt and move forward. However, the more common way for things
to get intense:

Person Alpha: "Well A implies B implies C, C is good so we should do A"

Person One: "Well X implies Y implies Z, Z is good so we should do X"

Person Alpha: "Well, C is a more important gain than Z, so we should do A"

Person One: "No, Z is more important than C!"

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emiunet
How do I know which type of "thinking" I have?

~~~
mufumbo
Just check your keyboard.

structured - If you see dirty points showing your hands resting while
thinking.

go with the flow - No dirty points. You usually go to grab a tea or coffee
whenever you want to think more deeply.

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Sirex
Really bad analyse done by a person who haven't even bothered to find about
basic psychological typing systems like MBTI or The big five.

Personally it seems that he describes TI (Introverted thinking) and then label
"flow" as TE (Extraverted thinking) or SE (Sensing Extraverted).

Point being, their exist more then two ways to reason about making decision
and living life. To me the author comes about as extremely self-centred and
self-importante since he hasn't even bothered to look at the field of his
topic.

He totally forgets to take account of feelers, people who make decisions based
on how they will feel or how other people will feel after a decision.

~~~
B-Con
For MBTI, it seemed like more of tenuous a J/P mapping. Structured being J,
"go with the flow" being P. The structured, high-level/multi-level thinking is
more of an extroverted judging function (aka, J-like), whereas the more step-
by-step, adventurous thinking is more introverted judging (aka, more P-like).

However, I do stress that it is a tenuous connection. Neither list is a good
list of J or P, most notably P.

As a side note, I do find it interesting that many attempts to describe
personality or thought process often resemble MBTI in some way.

(I'm a huge MBTI fan.)

