Original link: https://sund.site/posts/2022/essay-2022-12-04/
When Xiang Biao talked about how to do rural surveys in “Using Yourself as a Method”, he said that he had a third uncle who was very proficient in rural social ecology. The third uncle knew what was going on in the village, how the system worked, what the power structure was. Xiang Biao summarized this ability to understand the surrounding environment as a picture :
Drawing this picture is not to reflect the world mechanically, but to accurately reflect the world. What is real precision? The real precision is that you grasp its inner future direction… “picture” has two meanings, one is the current generalization, and the other is the possible future direction.
Similarly, someone who read social media yesterday said that the public often overreacts to what is happening at the moment. Just like stocks go up and down every day, good investors don’t pay too much attention to short-term fluctuations. However, social media will have a collective resonance on hot events, causing everyone to be sensitive to short-term changes and lose interest in the essential reasons why things happen.
This reminds me of the opening paragraph of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” I recently read:
What’s new? This is the question that people are most interested in, but it is also the most irrelevant, and it can be asked endlessly. If you really explore the answer to it, you’ll get nothing more than a bunch of trivial faux pas… I’d rather ask the question, what’s best?
This is a bit like software architecture. We always talk about system models. Is the model a reflection of the status quo? Yes, but not entirely, it is an abstraction of the status quo, something that includes the future.
I think of my former colleague Mr. Zhu who often talks about systematic thinking. For example, I called him once and asked him: How to do a stress test for a high-concurrency scenario? Teacher Zhu first asked me: Which model is your test based on? Is it “phone calls” or “bank withdrawals”?
I asked him how to talk about these two models? He said that “mobile phone calls” means that the number of clients can be increased indefinitely, and the traffic is proportional to the growth of clients; “bank withdrawal” means that no matter how many customers increase, there is only a fixed number of reception windows, and redundant customers can only queue up. The system only opens limited resources, no matter how the traffic grows.
You see, with such an explanation, the picture emerges. This is the fun of chatting with people who understand, without having to spend time explaining the context.
Alan Key said in a technical talk:
You need to solve a context, not just a problem.
We usually encounter two types of problems in our lives. The people working below have not built a picture of the work content, and the people in management above have not built a picture of the ecosystem (enterprise development direction, departmental collaboration, and community operations). And everyone focuses on the problem itself, because solving the problem itself is easy and fast.
On the other hand, this point of view also applies when dealing with people. People with poor emotional control usually overreact to the moment and get angry when they hear what they don’t like to hear or opinions that are contrary to their own. In fact, as long as you maintain a certain insensitivity and observe others from a higher perspective, your mentality will be much calmer.
Going back to Xiang Biao, he said in an interview that China’s low-level society has excess functionality and insufficient ecology . How to understand this sentence? You can easily order takeaway, and the deliveryman can deliver it to you quickly no matter how far away it is. But where did the cleaners in the downstairs community come from? You are not interested at all, and you are indifferent to everything that happens around you.
This is the real reason why Chinese young people have a weak sense of existence in the city. If we don’t integrate ourselves into the context, we can’t build a picture like the three uncles.
Recalling that when I was working in TW, the relationship between colleagues was networked, and HR would ask me for interviews at any time. For colleagues who often helped recruit, HR would also give some small gifts in return; everyone worked on different projects at the same time, independent Connect again. Sometimes I will become an agile coach, and sometimes I will be temporarily pulled to be a consultant. I checked WeChat, and among more than 200 friends, 104 are colleagues of TW.
The relationship is ecological, and everyone has a complete picture of the work environment. In other companies, the sense of responsibility is always emphasized, but the functionality in the work overwhelmingly prevails. Colleagues are organized mechanically to complete tasks assigned by superiors. In this state, it is impossible to talk about collaboration and efficiency.
Shen Yifei talked about work with her husband on her own podcast, saying that the relationship between colleagues is higher than that of friends, because you spend most of the day with colleagues, and efficient collaboration must be based on deep mutual above recognition.
So, should we pay more attention to the people and things around us? It is important to complete the goals of work and life, but just like hiking, if you only reach the goal directly at two points and one line, you are just a passerby, and only by actively exploring paths and forks can you build a complete picture of the surrounding environment.
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