Evolve Toolboxes for Unstable Landscapes

1.   Conduct Preliminary Assessment
2.   First, seek out and implement well established solutions and best practices specific to your industry
3.   If no such solution exists within the industry, seek out those solutions and practices developed by other industries in response to problem analogs and adapt them to suit your needs.
4.   If no such solution exists in another industry, decompose the problem/solution space into the constituent characteristics that comprise a good solution, identify which industries have had the need to develop partial solutions to problems with those characteristics, and integrate those solutions into an actionable framework specific to your needs.
5.   If the problem/solution space of today does not contain partial solutions, or the constituent components do not yet exist, then identify their antecedents, locate those future timelines where they are likely to exist, plot what had to have occurred in the future past that led to their development, and plan accordingly to arrive where you need to be when you need to be.
6.   If the likely problem/solution space of the foreseeable future does not contain either adequate identifiable solutions nor a path to such solutions, then you probably have on your hands a truly difficult problem in need of a scientific discovery, a technological breakthrough, or an external event to mobilize the substantial resources, talent, and time required to solve it. If that’s the case, best of luck to you.

Establish A coherent FRAMEWORK within the body scientific

The state of knowledge has never been changing faster. You used to be able to learn a discipline and be able to rely on that knowledge for a considerable period of time before enough had changed to make a difference. Now, the frontier of science and technology research in many fields, but especially in medicine, molecular biology, machine systems, and neuroscience, has accelerated to the point where academic research can be outdated before it's even published.

Nor is it enough anymore that you know the material as it was taught. Some fraction of the theory is junk that accidentally got a statistically valid result, while some other fraction got the theory right but the experiment wrong and failed to report it. A modern problem has also emerged where a huge amount of material being shared today is flat out wrong, be it from error or to intentionally mislead, and then reverberates within confirmation-biased information bubbles.

In this circumstance we need an independent way of checking what’s really going on in a reliable fashion - a rigidly coherent framework in which ideas are constantly evaluated against each other for interdependent outcomes and consistent internal logic.

OUTLINE WHAT IS KNOWN - logically constrain WHAT ISN'T

All paradigms are built on assumptions; things we hold to be true for the sake of smooth operation which aren't necessarily so. When a new paradigm appears, it is these very assumptions which pose the most danger, precisely because they were taken as facts to be true and not caveats to be remembered. If enough time passes people may forget there are even assumptions present at all. Thus when these assumptions fail they can do so unexpectedly and catastrophically.

Yet, the hard part about developing workable solutions to problems that violate our assumptions isn’t identifying a different opportunity or coming up with a new idea; there are an infinite number of possibilities to choose from. The hard part lies in explicitly defining an idea by figuring out and calculating its implications, comparing those implications to data that is consistent within the current state of knowledge, and clearly communicating the insight gained such that it can be implemented correctly yet retain the freedom evolve and adapt as things change.

It’s no longer about what you know, it’s about how quickly you can assess what is known, integrate that knowledge, and come up with something better. This is a tall order that is difficult to do well, as it requires a continual development of new skills in multiple subjects and updating one's knowledge of many more.

Do the math - Calculate the implications

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Draw a picture - Conceptualize predictable consequences

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Methodology

Evolve Toolboxes for Unstable Landscapes

Establish A coherent FRAMEWORK within the body scientific

OUTLINE WHAT IS KNOWN - logically constrain WHAT ISN'T

Do the math - Calculate the implications

Draw a picture - Conceptualize predictable consequences

build a model - Test your IDEAs by breaking them

document your findings - quarantine bad options with evidence

advance possible actions - communicate what's important

evaluate possibilities THOROUGHLY - then commit to a course

plan carefully - act deliberately

Measure what you manage - learn experimentally

Just One Question:

What are your greatest challenges, and how can I help you solve them?

Space is cool.