Play well at work
LEGO, the game of interlocking coloured plastic bricks, derived its name from an abbreviation of two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning “play well”. While originally conceived as a game for children to “shape their own worlds”, I believe LEGO can also inspire adults to better shape their own digital worlds.
By abstracting our ideas and digital assets (e.g., files) into reusable components, like LEGO bricks, I believe we can learn to “play well” at work. That is to organise things in such a way that it is fruitful for both yourself and your colleagues, both now and in the future.
But what does it mean to organise our ideas and digital assets into reusable components? It means to not think about projects as stand-alone assignments and as the base unit of work, but instead to think about the components which are shared across projects (e.g., datasets) as the base unit of work. In other words it means to move from a project-based mindset, to a component-based mindset.
For example, let’s say you work on a team that performs qualitative research. Your team might typically organise your interviews and reports in a project-based way where each interview and report lives in a single project folder (left-image below). Instead, your team might want to consider organising the interviews and reports in a components-based way, where all interviews are grouped together, and all reports are grouped together (right-image below):
While the idea of abstracting out shared components among projects might seem trivial in examples like this, the power of this idea really comes to life as organisational complexity grows. In a project-based digital world, as the number and size of projects grow, it becomes harder and harder to navigate through the swathes of files and folders should you want to reuse something in the future.
Search has somewhat helped to provide a remedy to the problem of getting lost in a project- based digital world, but it is still no cure. It is still commonplace to fall overboard into the digital sea and drown in the depths of email, instant messages, cloud storage, local storage, and project management tools, all trying to find that one file you you desperately need.
A component-based digital world on the other hand can serve as a buoy to the digital sea. Typically, there are many fewer shared components across projects than there are projects in total. In practice, this means fewer places to search for the file you want, and more intuitive places to look. That is not to say a component-based world is perfect, far from it. Rather, for many situations, it is a better set of compromises.
Implementing this idea in our team
Among many of the products and tools the Strategic Insight and Foresight team makes, we reuse the same data sets and ideas (e.g., geospatial computation techniques) over and over again. In the spirit of a component-based mindset, we created the humaniverse, a collection of R packages (collections of files containing code) that clean and summarise public UK humanitarian data.
By abstracting our work into the humaniverse, a component-based structure, we have all of our previous work available to us instantly at the time of analysis. Better yet, as it is open-source, it is also available to the entire voluntary and community sector (and beyond) to benefit from too. If a data set or computational method we need isn’t available for a project we are doing, we first add it to the humaniverse. That way we know it is available for our future selves and colleagues. This workflow has vastly improved the time we are able to rapidly prototype and deliver.
Should everything be component-based?
Simply put, no. Working this way comes with an upfront time investment cost. Rather than dump everything into one folder with everything where you need it, for now, you are forced to think about design and structure up front. This means it is not well suited for projects with a tight deadline or where the expected future utility of the project is low. But for everything else, and like all sound investments, this upfront investment pays dividends over time. Trying to understand what is worthy of abstraction is nuanced, and comes with experience.
Next time you are working on a project ask yourself: will this hold some value in the future? Am I free of strict deadlines to submit it? If the answer to both of these question is yes, I would consider thinking about which pieces of the work can be abstracted out into reusable components. Your future self and colleagues will thank you for playing well.
