Changes, updates, & new directions…
What’s up with SKA, and where have you been?
Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Valley of New York
Storm King Analytics has always been a loose network of creative, problem-solving colleagues with links to West Point and the US Military.
Over the past few years, our network members have branched out in numerous directions and fields, including academic studies, blockchain start-ups, business intelligence support for other firms, and other data visualization projects. Because of this, we have been noticeably quiet on social media and via our newsletter. Based on some recent events, key team members have started to re-focus on “Storm King” projects, and we feel that it is a good time to reengage.
As part of our transformation, we are also moving away from our traditional idea of a monthly newsletter and plan to be more interactive (and pithy) on this new Substack page.
We plan to share insights from our ongoing work and one or two ideas that we have been discussing that we find particularly interesting or insightful.
One recent area of great interest to our team involves the concept of embracing complexity and the most effective methodologies to help leaders make better decisions, faster. Shane Parrish publishes the excellent Farnam Street (the address of Berkshire Hathaway) Brain Food blog. A recent post about conceptual models and complexity generated great discussion among our team.
Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
In this post, he introduces Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity:
The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases.
In other words, we need to be mindful of this law as we design models that assist decision-makers and be conscious of where the complexity resides in the model. In a very customizable product, we expect the user to bear most of the complexity. In a simple system, the developers address the complexity with minimal options available to the user.
More to follow over the next few weeks. Please leave a comment (or send an email) to let us know what you think.