Creating a Quality Mindset: the news, negativity, finding rays of hope, and building good software
Or, lessons from the James Webb Space Telescope
If it bleeds, it leads
In August 2017, I stopped reading the news. I deleted apps, unsubscribed from emails, unfollowed podcasts, and canceled subscriptions.
Earlier that month, I’d sat through Peter Diamandis’ keynote at the Gartner Group’s Catalyst conference, where he pointed out what had been evident for some time: news publications preyed on our negativity bias with an overwhelming stream of horrifying and titillating news designed to addict readers and increase revenue. He went on to demonstrate that, beneath the flood of war and catastrophe, smart people were doing innovative, positive work that benefited the world in unprecedented ways. All you had to do was focus your attention on that stream of information, and the outcome would be a whole new mindset.
As a skeptic and pragmatist who sometimes trends toward pessimism, his thesis captured my attention.
I turned to his Tech Blog, which focuses on exponential technologies and how they create abundance, as my sole news source. I later added a subscription to The Information, a publication run by professional journalists who do actual fact-based reporting on the tech industry. More recently, I included The Neuron, Superhuman, and One Useful Thing to keep track of all things AI. I read the Ageist and sometimes listen to the Huberman Lab Podcast to get information about health and longevity.
From the Abundance360 blog, I learned about vertical farming and how companies like Plenty and Aerofarms were increasing food production by 350x, using as little as 1% of the resources of traditional agriculture. They were also figuring out how to produce food supplies that didn’t require 1500-2500 miles of travel to reach population centers.
Meanwhile, researchers were busy creating self-healing solar panels from nanomaterials and inventing nanobots that attack cancer cells. A pair of designers based in Washington and South Africa collaborated virtually to produce cheap, open-source, 3-D-printed prosthetic hands for children.
These stories are about good humans working hard to improve the world around them. They inspire hope and optimism, inform using facts, and eschew opinionated sensationalism. They remind us to pursue quality in our daily endeavors and work with purpose.
Redemption and the James Webb Space Telescope
And then, on December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope launched. Amid a sea of bigotry, nationalism, trolling, and conspiracy theories, JWST stood as a testament to the power of science and the value of global collaboration. The telescope uses infrared technology to look into the depths of space and show scientists previously unknowable facts about the universe.
JWST uses four instruments to capture images: NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera), NIRSpec (Near Infrared Spectrograph), MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), and FGS/NIRISS (Fine Guidance Sensor and Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph). Suddenly, we can see thirteen billion years into the past and directly observe phenomena about which we’d previously only theorized. The power of these instruments and their potential to support innovative science reduces astrophysicists and astronomers to tears, and the images they produce astonish.
(Images courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/)
Rays of hope in engineering feats
If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend watching Netflix’s documentary about JWST’s development and launch.
The JWST team’s engineering feats seem fantastical but result from a focus on precision, quality, and perseverance. Successfully launching and deploying the telescope meant overcoming 344 single points of failure. The telescope’s deployment had 144 release mechanisms that all had to work perfectly. Backups and redundancies didn’t exist. So, the team tested and practiced contingency plans for two years. JWST would essentially be a $9.7B piece of junk floating through space if anything went wrong.
Even though you know the outcome, the documentary is a cliffhanger. As the telescope slowly unfolds itself, deploying a solar array, a sun shield, and the hexagonal segments of the primary mirror, the tension mounts.
“I hope it works!” I shouted more than once.
Full deployment and positioning into orbit took about a month, followed by several more months of calibration and fine-tuning. On March 11, 2022, JWST captured its first NIRCam image and was ready for full scientific operations by July.
It has been a steady stream of scientific discovery and startling images ever since.
Infrared astronomy and inspiration
Whenever I need a pick-me-up, I carve out a few moments to linger on the JWST website and the Flickr photo albums. The universe’s vastness is somehow soothing, and the flood of science inspires me.
JWST always delivers positive news.
Like the vertical farmers and 3-D printing dudes, the telescope’s astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists report weekly about discovering twelve billion-year-old organic molecules, discovering the oldest and most distant galaxies, witnessing stars form and galaxies collide, and watching the weather patterns of exoplanets. JWST revealed that some of those very old, very large galaxies formed sooner and faster than should be possible according to our cosmological models. Perhaps we are on the verge of discovering new fundamental truths about the universe, akin to discovering gravity or the formation of the theory of relativity.
Watching JWST succeed hardened my arguments against minimum viable products. “Surely,” you think, “you aren’t proposing to compare the needs of enterprise software development to the quality and resiliency requirements of a six-meter space telescope?”
I am not.
Developing a quality mindset
I am describing mindset formation, an oft overlooked precursor to doing anything well. In the same way your bike goes in the direction you look, your actions and decisions follow your mindset.
If you set out to build something of poor quality, you will. A mindset presupposing failure will inevitably produce failure. I’ve never bought the notion that failure is the best way to learn; it is simply one way. We also learn through repetition, completing tasks, setting and achieving goals, and succeeding in the tasks we set for ourselves.
The research about the best way to learn is conflicted but consistently reports a diversity of techniques. Most papers reach the obvious conclusion that “There’s more than one way to do it.” I say obvious because skills acquisition is contextual and personalized, so of course, there will be variety.
Focus your mindset on quality, and you will produce something of quality. In JWST’s case, the team formed their mindset on achieving perfection, the furthest end of the quality spectrum. Most of us will never develop products where the stakes are so high as the space telescope’s, but most of us do (should?) have a mandate to build something better than passable or merely good.
The unwarranted belief in MVPs is responsible for a majority of the poor quality software we encounter in the world.
For years, the California DMV’s website provided a way to change your address online. Unfathomably, the website couldn’t display your current address on your profile, and you had to change your ID and vehicle registration addresses separately. They had to build an entirely new product to solve their MVP deficiency. They recently introduced a “new” MyDMV, partially replacing the “classic” MyDMV, so I can now see a redacted version of my current address. But the site is still a mess, and the functionality is incomplete, including stealthy redirects into the “classic” portal to complete certain core tasks.
Two different financial institutions provide mobile apps that don’t have an option to view all my transactions. One of those apps recently added a link to see all transactions but only displays the last thirty days' worth. If I want to accomplish the simple task of seeing all transactions, I have to log in using a browser, where I find a dozen additional features necessary to complete basic tasks.
I’ve used an app that requires parents to provide their financial information to a financial aid application aggregator but forces them to log in and submit the information as if they were their child. The experience is so bizarre that the app warns that it will take several hours to complete the workflow, which, in all honesty, shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. I imagine they either researched how parents would want to interact with the app and ignored the feedback or never bothered to ask at all.
These are examples of poorly executed MVPs, insufficient testing, and teams with no real clue about what ‘minimum’ or ‘viable’ means. They are the outcome of a failure-as-learning mindset. Producing more successful outcomes is as simple as changing the mindset formation question from “How do we learn from failure?” to “What does good look like?”
Because I know something about technology and building products, friends and family often ask me to explain their baffling experiences interacting with subpar products. My standard response is, “It’s not you; it’s the software.”
It doesn’t always help to be right.
Rocket science
“We aren’t doing rocket science.”
True.
Most of us don’t have to build to the tolerances of a finely tuned space telescope. However, when you’ve been building enterprise software long enough, witnessed how systems are assembled and watched as aggregations dissolve into cascading errors, it’s useful to remember that quality matters.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t learn from our mistakes or that mindset alone eliminates errors. A failure is an obstacle to reaching your outcome, a problem to identify and solve. A quality mindset steers us from deciding, “Well, this thing we built is good enough for now.” On the other side of that conclusion lurks the dreaded ‘tech debt,’ the enemy of both perfect and good.
I also do not suggest that every software project should err on the side of flawlessness and perfection. That’s clearly not the case, and most of us never see the likes of a $9.7B budget. Raise your hand if you’ve made do with $970K or even $97K.
Where you focus your attention, where you place your emphasis, and how you form a mindset around success, quality, and failure might make all the difference to your customers, your product, and your business.