How to think well in the Information Age

19 mental heuristics

I’ve noticed that a certain style of thinking is very important for product strategy and concept innovation in digital media. This way of thinking has been called, broadly speaking, “Perspectivism.” I associate it with the best thinking in any discipline, but particularly philosophy, physics, machine learning, statistics, macro economics, ecology, management and organization sciences, and General Systems Theory.

And if I were to throw caution to the wind, and try to articulate its chief characteristics, I would make a stab with the following set of points:

1. Taking the Observer, his situation and purpose, into account, as opposed to assuming that the observer plays no role in the construction of our world.
2. Seeing things as matters of perspective, rather than absolute truth or reality
3. Reasoning in a relativistic, contingent, provisional, and probabilistic way
4. Keen awareness of the inter-dependence of things, rather than their dependence or independence
5. Facility in (dis)solving problems or goals by reframing them
6. Avoiding reification: seeing processes as processes, and relations as relations — rather than as things
7. Focusing on differentiation, rather than definition
8. Construing things as “open” (or “living”) systems, not static or mechanical “closed” systems
9. A preference for dialectic, synthesis, and dialogue, as opposed to argument and proof
10. Facility in “fuzzy” set theory and logic, as opposed to more limited, classical, Aristotelian methods of reasoning
11. Organizing things as holonarchies (nested series of part-whole relations) as opposed to hierarchically
12. A concern for and sensitivity to differences of logical class, type, and category, as opposed to everything as a matter of re-arrangement of physically primitive elements (behaviorism, reductionism, physicalism)
13. Influencing indirectly through feedback loops rather than controlling directly through goals
14. Understanding the interaction between things as hermeneutic: as acts of informing and being informed as opposed to physical movements of energy or objects.
15. Facility with optimizing sets of inter-dependent variables, as opposed to holding all constant but one and maximizing it
16. An emphasis on criteria, fit, appropriateness, consonance and coherence, as opposed to Truth or Right
17. Sensitivity to the transmission of emotion, particularly as stimulating the oxytocin, dopamine, and testosterone physiological circuits, is the foundation of human communication, group formation, and sociality, as opposed to a byproduct or special topic of discourse
18. Translation of information architecture and usability into ideas about choice architecture and automatic thinking (behavioral economic concepts) vs mechanical structure and time-and-motion steps
19. Construing the environment and what’s in it creatively: within the constraint of what’s possible, meaningful, coherent, and successful; drawing the boundaries between systems and environment to fit your purpose appropriately, as opposed to construing the world “as is.”