Who uses Thortspace and Why do they use it? (Personas)
“Whereas the times implore our true involvement, the blades of every crisis point the way … I would that it were not so, but so it is. No one ever made music out of a mild day.”
~Mary Oliver
Thortspace enables breakthrough thinking wherever and whenever you need it most.
Thortspace makes solving problems easier by tackling two of the main obstacles we face when we try to tackle a problem:
(1) Information overload — for example, when I was an undergraduate student I was expected to read and understand about 15 more books every week, and
(2) The 3-slot working-memory problem — roughly speaking: the more components there are to a problem, the harder it is to solve. Conceptualising knowledge into chunks helps with this, but it isn’t always obvious what the chunks should be… That’s where Thortspace comes in. Thortspace is “cognitive lego”. It allows you to play with ideas so as to clarify them and organise them into multiple alternative meaningful visual structures.
In what follows I identify a number of personas of people who may benefit from Thortspace, and their existing pains and potential gains from using it.
Students:
- EXISTING PAINS:
“I am overwhelmed with confusing information that I am supposed to assimilate and understand. Every week I have to read 15 books and write 3 essays.”
“Studying is lonely. Even if I do it in public spaces like the college library, between lectures and tutorials I am still kinda ‘on my own’ in developing my understanding of the materials.”
“I make mind-maps, but I find when I’m learning about new topics I need to have already done the mind-map before in order to know how I should make it. I often have to re-do my mind maps several times to work out how they should be. And lots of times items on branches belong in lots of different places and I have to duplicate information, then if I update it I have to update it in multiple places.”
“Writing is kinda boring.”
“My mind is cluttered.”
“I don’t have all the skills that I needed to do sketchnoting effectively. And sketchnoting doesn’t allow me to play around with different ways of thinking about something. Or only by re-drawing the whole thing, over and over.” - AVAILABLE GAINS:
“It would be great if there was a way I could put all my ideas for an essay down somewhere quickly, and gradually organise them as I’m going along. Even better if that somewhere was some kind of visual virtual environment.”
“It would be great if the development of my understanding could be done with other members of my study group, so we could all work on it together.”
“Google docs is good, but pretty quickly one passage of text looks like another passage of text and one document looks like another document. I need to integrate visual cues into the information that will help me remember all the information and visualise how it all fits together.”
“It would be great if studying could be more fun. Then I might actually look forward to doing it, and not need so much will-power to make myself sit down and study… and then maybe I would get better results and be more successful.”
For Personal problems:
- EXISTING PAINS:
“When I try to think what to do about it all, my mind just goes in circles, and I don’t get anywhere… I just make myself depressed.”
“Sometimes it helps writing things down, but I end up with a lot of very confused writing, that doesn’t make a lot more sense than it did when it was whirring round my head.” - AVAILABLE GAINS:
“It would be great if there was a way to visually organise all the conflicting thoughts and ideas I have about how I should deal with … XYZ.”
“Don’t under-estimate the utility of listening. There’s very many people who never have anyone listen to them ever, and it’s really hard on them. They can’t sort out their minds without talking [to someone], because that’s how most people think. In fact that’s really how everyone thinks, although some people can also think on their own. It’s very rare. Mostly we think by talking. So, don’t under-estimate the utility of listening. It’s ridiculously helpful to people.” ~ Jordan Peterson
Project designers, team leaders and teams:
- EXISTING PAINS:
“In the early stages of a project there is a lot of uncertainty, complexity and confusion. It takes a lot of effort to align all the stakeholders around something they can all agree about. In the first instance it isn’t even obvious what all the stakeholders do agree about, what any of the agendas are, or what the individual intentions add up to in aggregate.”
“Team members, often with the best intentions in the world, tend to do their own thing, and go in different directions from each other. Sometimes these different directions and subtly different, and sometimes they are blatantly different. It is hard from an individual’s point of view to get a perspective of the role that their contribution plays in the whole of a given endeavour.” - AVAILABLE GAINS:
“Thortspace enables teams to integrate the individual thinking of each of the team members into a coherent whole, enabling alignment and coherent action.”
“I am integrating Thortspace, OneNote, and Pinterest to map, track, and share my projects.” See https://www.facebook.com/groups/thortspace/permalink/1720387834676079/
Mapping Contentious Issues and Debates:
“Part of the difficulties being articulated here are a consequence of the linearity of the space inside which the conversation is being conducted.
“Linear conversations make it harder to ignore or work around less constructive contributions. And linear hierarchies become increasingly hard to follow as the number of sub-levels goes up : presumably why Facebook only allows one sub-level.
I think #ignoring people is a very useful skill. To a large degree people act on the basis of what gets them attention, irrespective of whether that is praise or hostility.
So the best approach is to ignore what you don’t like … arguing with it has the #counter_intuitive effect of that they give you more of it.
Of course there are some behaviours that #can’t be ignored – if people pee in your swimming pool too often you probably need to stop them coming.
That is why groups need to have a small set of clearly defined #rules so that everyone knows what does or doesn’t count as objectionable in a given context. (Some clubs you get thrown out of if you don’t pee in the pool.)
To make it really kind to people, a series of three official (and possibly public) #warnings can be given to people breaking the rules. Then it comes as no surprise to anyone when they get banned – perhaps for a time-limited period of say 6 months, if you want to be really kind, and depending on how much effort you have available.
An alternative approach is just to have a #second, possibly secret, group that runs parallel to the first, and people who behave well in the first group can be invited to join it.
All of that having been said, one of the difficulties for collaborative thinking groups is knowing #what the rules should be ahead of time. Hence my comment down below about the inevitable failures that arise from thinking inside a linear space. Thortspace overcomes these inevitable failures.
- EXISTING PAINS:
“It’s infuriating when I can’t find a way to bridge that gap between my point of view and others whose opinions I respect.”
“Even discussing issues with people who I have a lot in common with, I find myself in arguments that either get nowhere or spiral out of control and into insults or else everyone just walks away feeling hopeless but managing to avoid coming to blows. Surely there has to be a better or way of making progress on contentious issues?” - AVAILABLE GAINS:
“By integrating all of the thinking and insights and opinions and links to factual resources, Thortspace enables participants on spheres about contentious topics to arrive at viewpoints that include and transcend all the other viewpoints.”
Knowledge Curation:
- EXISTING PAINS:
“I have tried del.icio.us, and a load of other curation systems. None of them quite seems to leave me feeling on top of things.”
“I just have too much information being thrown at me all day every day. I need a way to organise that information, as I am going along.”
“I need to a way to organise information where everything just turns out OK. It needs to be OK if I don’t get the categories right the first time.” - AVAILABLE GAINS:
“The intention that has driven a lot of the design of Thortspace is so ‘I don’t have to get […. X,Y,Z,whatever ….] right the first time’. That is why we have arrangements (so you can try it multiple different ways and see what each way gives you), that is why we have category sets (not just categories), that is why we have spheres* (so you can start from anywhere, and you don’t need to know where it was that you started from until afterwards), that is why we have links between spheres (so you can put together a network of thinking made up of previous thinking), that is why we have Journeys (so you can extract particular sequences of thought from existing content), that is why we have paths (so that you can add and explore structure afterwards, and don’t have to know ahead-of-time what that structure is going to turn out to be), that is why we have automatic coagulation of thorts (so that the locating of thorts into groups can be easily revised). (* Well and also spheres are cool.)”
Children
Children love to play and learn by playing. This makes Thortspace an ideal environment in which to experiment with letters, numbers, pictures, structures, relationships, and technology .
There are more examples of how this can work here:
Clever people in general — Thortspace makes clever people even cleverer
- EXISTING PAINS:
You know how it is when you’re a clever person… you have a hundred and one things that you are thinking about. How can you move forwards on all those different leading edges of your thinking in the most optimal way? - AVAILABLE GAINS:
Thortspace enables you to offload your very capable brain of all the things it is thinking about, leaving space for that massive brain-power to focus on one thing at a time, while not sacrificing any of the very many things that you are thinking about. Go for it, Smarties !
Entrepreneurs
- EXISTING PAINS:
When you’re working hard on transforming the world (and that includes when transforming the world means “cleaning your room”), everyone has got plenty of advice to give you. The trouble is that all that advice is pulling you in as many different directions as you have advisors. And then on top of all that you have this “small voice somewhere beyond the cortex … whose mere whisper is enough to silence and army of arguments”.
“Somewhere beyond the cortex is a small voice whose mere whisper can silence an army of arguments. It stands in final judgment as to whether we have demanded enough of ourselves and, by that example, have inspired the best around us.”
~ José Ortega y Gasset or David Halberstam (?) … I’m not sure who said it. I was almost certain it was Ortega y Gasset but then I went looking for an attribution and couldn’t find one.
- AVAILABLE GAINS:
There are various fallout benefits of using Thortspace — such as information transfer and presentation, visual storytelling, knowledge organisation and management, knowledge persistence systems, insight harvesting, and so on. But the ultimate target is transformational, not conceptual; to enable the designing of our world.
Summary
(1) The primary use case for Thortspace, as I see it, is #alignment.
This can be on an individual level, so I can stop arguing with myself about what I should be doing, which project I should be working on, and what actions would make the most difference to those projects.
Or it can be at a team level, so **we** can stop having to argue with each other about all of that. Building on this we have #integration, ie. how any particular alignment can be made to integrate with other alignments.
(2) Then the secondary use case, as I see it, is #transformation. Ie. thinking that doesn’t merely lead to new conclusions but additional to any other outcome brings about an alteration in the being of the thinker or thinkers who are involved in that thinking.
(3) Then the tertiary use case, as I see it, is #clarity. Ie. how the whole smorgasbord of competing thinking about some subject fits together to make a coherent whole.
(4) Then the quaternary use case, as I see it, is #existence. How, having done a bunch of thinking about given matter, can that thinking be preserved in a form that can continue to provide perspective as any given project unfolds.
Summary
For small business owners:
(1) Increase your creativity
(2) Discover actionable insights
(3) Improve your individual level of performance
(4) Align your team around a shared understanding of what your business or project is aiming at
For students:
(1) Learn and comprehend new topics more quickly and deeply
(2) Improve your ability to recall specific relevant information
(3) Realise interconnections between large amounts of less familiar information
(4) Supports the methods and insights described by the “Learning how to Learn” course on Coursera — transition between focus mode and diffuse mode thinking
For problem solvers:
(1) Clear your mind — free up your working memory
(2) See the big picture — see the wood for the trees — “meta thinking”
(3) Be gifted with surprising insights you never expected
For communicators:
(1) Present new information and insights in an innovative, compelling and impactful way
(2) Create and deliver journeys through insights to arrive at revelations
(3) Move easily from thinking to presenting
For project managers:
(1) Move easily from thinking to doing
(2) Integrate the “Why?” into the “How?”
(3) Take control of your own perspectives enables you to act more effectively
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