aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
Velocity and possibility
seths.blog
The art of project management includes the dance between velocity and possibility.
If you describe the outcome with specificity and remove as many variables as possible, you’ll get the work done with more speed, higher reliability and less cost.
That velocity, though, might encourage us to recognize that all sorts of options are available. There are countless chances to make the project better and to find new opportunities.
Exploring the possibilities in moments of high velocity almost certainly ensures that costs will increase, reliability will be impacted and you’ll miss deadlines.
That’s because possibility is the art of being willing to be wrong. It’s exploration. It’s far easier to explore on foot than it is on a high-speed train.
The best time to explore is before you scale your investments, your commitments and the size of the team.
We seek both velocity and possibility, but not at the same time.
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
— David Foster Wallace
What made the trilogy so stunning and atypical as a sci-fi story was the fact that Liu wasn’t interested in interrogating whether humans deserved to survive. Instead, the novels explored the danger of connection, of the way a thought, once shared, can expand into an unstoppable force—a radical, terrifying ideology or a shrewd solution to a... See more
Fundamentally, I think of governance as a curation process in which the real purpose is not the top decision your making and determining your course of action. The real purpose is surfacing data. The real value of governance is seeing how your community aligns on different issues.
Rehash: A Web Podcast • Non-Financial Use Cases for Tokens w/David Phelps | S3 E2
Good protocols do not just treat solutions to problems as works-in-progress, with bugs and imperfections to be worked out over the long term, but the specifications of the problems as works-in-progress as well. Good protocols learn, grow, and mature in ways that catalyze thoughtful stewardship and sustained generativity. Bad protocols on the other
... See moreVenkatesh Rao • The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols
When we innovate only in terms of a solutionist framework, Easterling argues in her book Medium Design , we optimize for static outcomes wedded to the status quo of product-market fit. Solutions are one-time fixes, usually implemented by someone else, which break as soon as the context they’re responding to changes (which it does, constantly).
... See moreGuy Mackinnon-Little • The Product is the Process: Prototyping Reality with Public Assembly – ZORA ZINE
What else can be considered as a service?
Are.na • As a Service / Are.na
“I’m not one of those people with their heads in the clouds; I’m one of those whose entire body has been consumed by the clouds.” — Antero Alli
provocations and design
The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.
But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.