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Last week, I spoke with a business leader who’s excited about AI. But as we talked, it became clear that there’s a wide gulf between enthusiasm and creating value for a particular business. Most people’s impression of AI is based on limited use and media hype. Take the recent Ghibli-fication mania: millions are smitten with the idea of seeing themselves as a Miyazaki character. (I’m one of them!) And it’s understandable: the outputs are impressive. But AI can do more than make beautiful drawings or write compelling essays. As I’ve argued before, these aren’t the best uses for AI. Instead, we should use it to augment our abilities. But how? It’s hard to see beyond the outputs — especially since doing so entails getting more abstract. I’m still thinking about how to explain it, but three ideas are key: Businesses consist of information flows. Information exists to support decisions. Information can be optimized for better decision-making. Let’s unpack them. First, your business consists of information flows. Whatever your business is, it runs on information: how it’s captured, produced, shared, and processed. A proposal? Information. The request behind it? Also information. A standup meeting? An exchange of information. Your business creates value when it uses information effectively. Sure, that’s not the only way it creates value: the things you make and services you provide are key. But information is essential. Why? Because of the second point: information is in service to decision-making. The proposal helps the prospect decide whether to work with you. Research helps you decide whether to enter a new market. The meeting helps determine next steps. Third, information can be optimized. When I say “information,” you may think spreadsheets and databases. But that’s structured information. Most business information — conversations, documents, emails — is unstructured. Consider that meeting. It may have some structure: an agenda, list of attendees, start and end time. But the stuff you care about — what people say — isn’t structured. Even if you transcribe it, you must still think about what it means for you. AI can help tame the messy information flows that make up real work. Efforts to formalize them often kill spontaneity, nuance, and context. And even if they didn’t, there’s so much information that it’s been hard to make sense of it. But now we have AI. Don’t let the charismatic drawings distract you. That’s only a superficial application — and commodifying art is bad for our souls. Instead, focus on using AI for tasks that were previously impossible or impractical: working with vast amounts of unstructured information, playing out what-if scenarios at scale, and augmenting your team’s expertise. Information architects can help. We’ve been mapping information flows and making sense of unstructured information for decades. If you’re exploring how AI could create real business value — not just flashy outputs — let’s talk.
Nicolay Gerold interviewed me for his How AI is Built podcast. Our conversation focused on information architecture – with an interesting angle: Nicolay’s audience consists primarily of engineers developing AI products. What can these folks learn from IA to create better AI products? Conversely, what can IAs learn from engineers? And does information architecture matter at all in a world where these technologies exist? Tune in to find out: Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube
In Episode 6 of the Traction Heroes podcast, Harry and I explored Chesterton’s fence — a simple yet profound idea that has important implications for leaders navigating complex, high-stakes changes. The gist: when change is needed, don’t start by destroying what you don’t understand. Assume things are the way they are because of reasons. Once you understand the reasons, you’re more likely to avoid unintended consequences when making changes. Here’s the passage I read from Chesterton’s The Thing: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. Catastrophic outcomes happen for many reasons. One of the worst is what Harry called stupidity: “a result of a series of actions that lead to an outcome that’s the opposite of what you say you want, under conditions of self-deception.” Perhaps if more people knew about Chesterton’s fence there would be less suffering caused by stupidity. As always, I learned a lot from bouncing these ideas off Harry. Among other things, he responded with an intriguing followup book. Perhaps that will be the subject of a future episode. Stay tuned for more!
Louis Rosenfeld interviewed Harry Max and me for his Rosenfeld Review podcast. The subject? Harry and my podcast, Traction Heroes. We recorded this conversation late in 2024, before we’d shared the first episode. This interview lays out Traction Heroes’s backstory. It’s fitting that we shared it in Lou’s show, since he published Harry’s book Managing Priorities and my Living in Information and Duly Noted. The Rosenfeld Review Podcast (Rosenfeld Media) · Traction Heroes with Harry Max & Jorge Arango Listen on SoundCloud
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Everyone should pull one great practical joke in their lifetimes. This one was mine, and I think it's past the statute of limitations. The story is true. Only the names are redacted to protect the guilty. My first job out of college was a database programmer, even though my undergraduate degree had nothing to do with computers and my current profession still mostly doesn't. The reason was that the University I worked for couldn't afford competitive wages, but they did offer various fringe benefits, and they were willing to train someone who at least had decent working knowledge. I, as a newly minted graduate of the august University of California system, had decent working knowledge at least of BSD/386 and SunOS, but more importantly also had the glowing recommendation of my predecessor who was being promoted into a new position. I was hired, which was their first mistake. The system I was hired to work on was an HP 9000 K250, one of Hewlett-Packard's big PA-RISC servers. I wish I had a photograph of it, but all I have are a couple bad scans of some bad Polaroids of my office and none of the server room. The server room was downstairs from my office back in the days when server rooms were on-premises, complete with a swipe card lock and a halon system that would give you a few seconds of grace before it flooded everything. The K250 hulked in there where it had recently replaced what I think was an Encore mini of some sort (probably a Multimax, since it was a few years old and the 88K Encores would have been too new for the University), along with the AIX RS/6000s that provided student and faculty shell accounts and E-mail, the bonded T1 lines, some of the terminal servers, the massive Cabletron routers and a lot of the telco stuff. One of the tape reels from the Encore hangs on my wall today as a memento. The K250 and the Encore it replaced (as well as the L-Class that later replaced the K250 when I was a consultant) ran an all-singing, all-dancing student information system called CARS. CARS is still around, renamed Jenzabar, though I suspect that many of its underpinnings remain if you look under the table. In those days CARS was a massive overlay that was loaded atop the operating system and database, which when I started were, respectively, HP/UX 10.20 and Informix. (I'm old.) It used Informix tables, screens and stored procedures plus its own text UI libraries to run code written variously as Perform screens, SQL, C-shell scripts and plain old C or ESQL/C. Everything was tracked in RCS using overgrown Makefiles. I had the admin side (resource management, financials, attendance trackers, etc.) and my office partner had the academic side (mostly grades and faculty tracking). My job was to write and maintain this code and shortly after to help the University create custom applications in CARS' brand-spanking new web module, which chose the new hotness in scripting languages, i.e., Perl. Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course. CARS also managed most of the printers on campus except for the few that the RS/6000s controlled directly. Most of the campus admin printers were HP LaserJet 4 units of some derivation equipped with JetDirect cards for networking. These are great warhorse printers, some of the best laser printers HP ever made. I suspect there were line printers other places, but those printers were largely what existed in the University's offices. It turns out that the READY message these printers show on their VFD panels is changeable. I don't remember where I read this, probably idly paging through the manual over a lunch break, but initially the only fun things I could think of to do was to have the printer say hi to my boss when she sent jobs to it, stuff like that (whereupon she would tell me to get back to work). Then it dawned on me: because I had access to the printer spools on the K250, and the spool directories were conveniently named the same as their hostnames, I knew where each and every networked LaserJet on campus was. I was young, rash and motivated. This was a hack I just couldn't resist. It would be even better than what had been my favourite joke at my alma mater, where campus services, notable for posting various service suspension notices, posted one April Fools' Day that gravity itself would be suspended to various buildings. I felt sure this hack would eclipse that too. The plan on April Fools' Day was to get into work at OMG early o'clock and iterate over every entry in the spool, sending it a sequence that would change the READY message to INSERT 5 CENTS. This would cause every networked LaserJet on campus to appear to ask for a nickel before you printed anything. The script was very simple (this is the actual script, I saved it): The ^[ was a literal ASCII 27 ESCape character, and netto was a simple netcat-like script I had written in these days before netcat was widely used. That's it. Now, let me be clear: the printer was still ready! The effect was merely cosmetic! It would still print if you sent jobs to it! Nevertheless, to complete the effect, this message was sent out on the campus-wide administration mailing list (which I also saved): At the end of the day I would reset everything back to READY, smile smugly, and continue with my menial existence. That was the plan. Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies. One of the best was sent to me later in the day by intercampus mail, printed on their laser printer, with a nickel taped to it. Unfortunately, not everybody on campus knew me, and those who did not not only did not call me, but instead called university administration directly. By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact. I also ran the script to reset everything early. Eventually the hubbub finally settled down around noon. Everybody in the office thought it was very funny. Even my boss, who officially disapproved, thought it was somewhat funny. The other thing that went wrong, as if all that weren't enough, was that the director of IT — which is to say, my boss's boss — was away on vacation when all this took place. (Read E-mail remotely? Who does that?) I compounded this situation with the tactical error of going skiing over the coming weekend and part of the next week, most of which I spent snowplowing down the bunny slopes face first, so that he discovered all the angry E-mail in his box without me around to explain myself. (My office partner remembers him coming in wide-eyed asking, "what did he do??") When I returned, it was icier in the office than it had been on the mountain. The assistant director, who thought it was funny, was in trouble for not putting a lid on it, and I was in really big trouble for doing it in the first place. I was appropriately contrite and made various apologies and was an uncharacteristically model employee for an unnaturally long period of time. The Ice Age eventually thawed and the incident was officially dropped except for a "poor judgment" on my next performance review and the satisfaction of what was then considered the best practical joke ever pulled on campus. Indeed, everyone agreed it was much more technically accomplished than the previous award winner, where someone had supposedly gotten it around the grounds that the security guards at the entrance would be charging a nominal admission fee per head. Years later they still said it was legendary. I like to think they still do.
