This episode discusses why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, explaining how striving for 100% leads to unsustainable outlier states. It highlights how setting perfection as a bar can cause commitments to break and plans to fail due to a lack of slack, and offers strategies like building redundancy and planning with slack to achieve goals more effectively without relying on perfection.

• Uncover why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, as it often requires exorbitant, unsustainable effort and creates outlier states that are unlikely to be maintained, referencing the "Wedies effect" where things tend to regress to the mean.
• Learn how planning for 100% utilisation or setting perfection as a commitment can lead to fragility, causing plans to fail when unexpected changes occur or leading to giving up altogether once a "perfect" streak is broken.
• Discover practical strategies to avoid fragile perfectionism, such as planning with slack to accommodate change and building redundancy into your systems and personal commitments for more robust outcomes.
• Explore why actively avoiding requirements or expectations of perfection is crucial, as investing in it can be an exponential or even asymptotic step, leading to an unsustainable and fragile state.

Note: sorry about the plane noise in the background. I decided to publish it, since it's imperfect (and that's kind of making the point!).

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This episode introduces the potentially controversial principle that your system is perfectly designed for its current outcomes, urging listeners to embrace greater responsibility for systemic issues. It explores how to redefine system boundaries to holistically integrate all influencing factors, like talent and organisational processes, ensuring that interventions are effective and targeted.

• Uncover the principle that your system is perfectly designed for the results you are getting, prompting a re-evaluation of what constitutes a "good" system when outcomes are undesirable.
• Learn why arbitrary system boundaries often lead to critical factors, such as talent, being excluded, and how to consider a system's full scope regardless of traditional lines of responsibility.
• Discover how incorporating talent and other seemingly external factors into your system design can lead to more efficient and effective solutions, rather than simply patching symptoms.
• Explore the distinction between judging decisions by their outcomes (resulting) and designing systems that proactively reduce uncertainty and improve the likelihood of success.
• Understand that system thinking extends beyond technical architecture to encompass processes, policies, culture, and interpersonal dynamics, which collectively influence organisational outcomes.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

This episode explores the fundamental mindset of building your vocabulary, extending beyond literal words to conceptual understanding and mental models, and how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be a powerful tool for expanding and refining this crucial skill for career growth, clarity, and navigating disruptions.

• Uncover why building your vocabulary is a fundamental skill that can help you navigate career transitions, disruptions (such as those caused by AI), and changes in roles.
• Understand that "vocabulary" goes beyond literal words to include mental models, understanding your own self, specific diagrams (like causal loop diagrams or C4 diagrams), and programming paradigms or design patterns. This conceptual vocabulary provides access to nuanced and powerful ways of thinking.
• Learn how LLMs can be incredibly useful for refining and expanding your conceptual vocabulary, allowing you to explore new subjects, understand systems, and identify leverage points. They can help you understand the connotations, origins, and applications of concepts, as well as how they piece together with adjacent ideas.
• Discover why starting with fundamental primitives like inputs, outputs, flows, and system types can help you develop vocabulary, and how LLMs can suggest widely used tools or visualisations based on these primitives (e.g., a scatter plot for XY data).
• Explore why focusing on understanding the "why" and "when" of using a concept or tool is a much higher leverage skill than merely knowing "how" to use it, enabling you to piece together different vocabulary pieces for deeper insights.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. Leaving a review on iTunes is the most impactful way to help others find the show. The podcast is also available on Spotify and YouTube.