Hello again everyone! I’m still deep in the project I’ve been mentioning for, well, really almost the past 9 months. But it really has turned up all sorts of interesting rabbit holes about the nature of legal research. And I am close to returning from some of these with new insights.
But this morning, I thought I’d offer you my reflection on useful ways of thinking about projects.
A perennial favourite is Professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s Four Ways to Scale Up: Smart, Dumb, Forced and Fumbled1. This is his table:
I think it’s always wise to aim for a smart scale-up, and my own experience supports this.
Another matrix was inspired with a discussion with a good friend about Richard Hamming’s definition of science and engineering, paraphrased here as:
Science: if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it
Engineering: if you don’t know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it
My addition? If you think engineering is science, and science is engineering, based on those definitions, you’re likely involved with a fair amount of paper (to put it gently). My friend’s rephrasing was: “If you know what you’re doing, but I don’t, you shouldn’t be doing it.” Excellently cathartic. Iykyk.
But this leads us to the following matrix-style simplification of the world. Where the diagram above talks about carrying out the project, this one relates to charting a course - entirely tongue in cheek of course!
To phrase it more formally: how does one make judgments about viable directions in business, engineering, and science, from a position of relatively less expertise? This same position is usually accompanied by a plenitude of experiences in other areas. Allocating the funds that are crucial to having skin in the game is often the battling ground for this question. Can one ever align incentives and disincentives to facilitate better alignment of fund disburser and fund disbursee?
My goal in recent years has been focussed on education, so that we can get into the upper half of this 2x2, and into the upper right quadrant of Prof Flyvbjerg’s matrix. One continues to dream!
P.S. I had insisted on attributing my friend, who is possessed of immense perspicacity, but they prefer to remain anonymous. The offer remains open!
Flyvbjerg, Bent, 2021, "Four Ways to Scale Up: Smart, Dumb, Forced, and Fumbled," Saïd Business School Working Papers (Oxford: University of Oxford).
Please attribute credit to: Ian Chai and anonymous legaltech collaborator.