‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here
04Jul06
I have come across the quote below in two books - McLuhan for Managers by Mark Federman and Becoming a Techincal Leader by Gerry Weinberg.
‘Cheshire Puss,’ …’Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where-’ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘-so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’
Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland
The quote really ressonated with me. I’m a planner and goal setter. This quote sums up why I set goals and plans – I don’t want to wind up getting SOMWHERE where I don’t want to be.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments
Funny… For exactly the same reason, I often avoid making plans and setting goals. If the goal I set isn\’t really what I want, and the plan I make is wrong, then they will probably just mislead me. If I\’m not sure what I want, I don\’t find that pretending to know what I want helps me much.I would say that on a good week, I spend a good 20%-30% of my waking time feeling happily aimless. Some wonderful new ideas have come from my lack of discipline and time management!
The quote can be read against two grounds: deterministic and emergent. Planners and goal setters, for example, might be more deterministic in their reading, setting out along a particular path to achieve a particular objective. In the software testing business, for example, there are various codepaths, environmental circumstances, and weirdo users to be accounted for, and the causal input-response model works (more or less). On the other hand, a subscriber to a more emergent model might view the "it doesn\’t much matter which way you go … as long as I get somewhere" as a reminder of the complex feedback loops in a massively connected, open system environment. You will get somewhere, no matter which way you go, irrespective of your plans and designs. Complexity suggests that the somewhere might not (will likely not) be the place you intended, with the degree of destination certainty being inversely proportional to the size of the environment (more nodes/components = more paths = more feedback loops = less certainty). One more thing: taking a superhighway may be faster, but the country roads cover more ground, and enable more serendipity. In the complex world of software environments, comprehensive testing might necessitate enabling more serendipity.