Occasionally I’ll find myself playing the daily chess puzzle on chess.com. Like some other sorts of puzzles, they have a weekly cycle, where the easiest one is on Monday, and they get tougher throughout the week, with the toughest ones on Sunday. The easy ones tend to be something straightforward like a checkmate in three moves. One thing I noticed about the tougher ones is that sometimes they involve changing tactics midway through. For example, you start attacking the king and then, based on the other side’s defensive moves, checkmate becomes impossible but there’s a way to win a bishop or a knight.
It’s often unnatural to do this sort of lateral thinking, but it’s incredibly useful. Many of us have seen double diamond diagrams describing the design process, but the diagram that resonates with me most is a herringbone model. It shows individual paths, and it reframes the idea of failure. Someone presented this at a talk, and I would credit them, but I can’t recall who it was.
We start with a problem to solve and try a few ideas, then test them. Often we learn that the idea doesn’t work. We try new ideas.
Sometimes when testing an idea, it doesn’t entirely work, but it spawns additional ideas that branch off from it. If things work out, we refine an idea that leads to a solution.
It’s useful in any sort of problem solving, and it’s especially useful when things look bleak.
For example, when the US Digital Service is hollowed out with loyalty tests and turned into a shell for the Department of Government Efficiency with the intent of dismantling federal agencies in the same way, it gives me hope to remember that one or even many blocked paths don’t mean it’s the end of the broader goal of delivering better government services.
Jennifer Pahlka recently cited “an assault on the modern state as we know it” and ended her post saying:
Our job now is to be changed, to reflect, to become better. We can’t do that without disagreement, without the imagination that comes from engaging across division. When we come out the other side of this, Dems can’t be who we are today. We can’t retreat again into a procedure fetish that serves no one, to start. Hell, the public isn’t putting us back in power if that’s our plan. We must find a new way.
Someone told me in college, “You don’t have to know what you’re doing for life. You just have to know what you’re trying next.”