How do you manage to avoid Goodharting or quota-filling on other plans?
I ask because this runs to the very core of my current confusion in life: how to brainstorm (or babble) better plans in the first place. It is exceedingly easy for me to abandon one of my plans simply because I had no confidence it was that “good” in the first place. Also, I find it exceedingly easy to generate a dozen different plans if the objective is “just invent other plans” rather than “invent equally good plans”. But, if the objective is “invent equally good plans” I groan and cringe and, I’m ashamed to admit, give up.
For example, in the past I was told that if I wanted to be a professional film director then I needed to “enter films into film festivals” I did that to zero success. None. No laurels. Nothing. I had no faith in that plan to begin with and only did it because I was “supposed to do it”.
“Putting your films ‘out there’ (i.e. online)” was the only other plan I had.
It would have been nice to have been able to essay other plans that weren’t just quota-fillers.
As for parallel essaying of other plans, it reminds me of an observation David Snowden made in his CynefinSensmaking framework, that while Complicated and Simple systems which are highly predictable and therefore usually have a “best practice” or one and most optimal way to do something. Complex systems in which you can only predict trajectories are best suited to launching several simultaneous or parallel interventions which are not “fail safe” but “safe to fail”. He means you can wind down or stop the interventions which are less successful as you generate feedback, and scale up on successful ones. Sort of like A/B testing but more like A/B/C/D/E/ testing.
The following works for me. I do not know how well it works for other people.
I separate coming up with ideas and filtering for good ideas. Many of the ideas I come up with are bad ideas. For example, I’m about to spend a few minutes by the clock coming up with plans for becoming a professional film director.
“Go to film school and ask the professors for professional contacts. Show up at a college office hour and as the professors for contacts even if I’m not a student. Make movies in my backyard with home equipment, and put them online. Reach out to film studios and ask if they have educational opportunities or internships. Hire a professional film director to tutor me. Read books and biographies about professional film directors and copy what they did. Hang around the next actor’s strike and ask if anyone wants to goof off and do an amateur project that wouldn’t break the strike. Make movies and then talk to local theatres and see if they want to run those movies, maybe during slow times/days. Create an online buzz around an obscure and rarely seen auteur film that The Mainstream Media doesn’t want you to see. Project it onto the sky on a screen held up by drones. Make a film of a famous fanfic- hey, podfics hitch a ride on someone else’s story why not a film.”
Okay, time over. Some of those ideas need more detail- like, making a movie with the tools I have comes up as a first step of several plans and I’d need to work through more about how to do that. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I know just enough about film-making to know there’s some different choices I’d make while filming depending on the eventual format but maybe I can save some effort with multiple cuts or something. Other ideas are ways to fish for more ideas, like reading books on the subject or asking professors what to do.
Some are just bad ideas. Getting professional film directors to tutor me sounds expensive, and also I’m not at all sure the constraint is lack of skill at directing. Actor’s strikes seem to happen about every ten years so maybe keep that in your back pocket while you work on other plans. As for projecting it onto the sky, I don’t have any idea how that gets you paid enough to get called a professional plus you might get some kind of public disturbance complaint? But. . . talking to local theatres doesn’t seem like a terrible idea? Putting some kind of weird spin on a movie released online might work- it at least points at different tweaks or implementations to just putting it up on Youtube.
The point is, I didn’t come up with those plans to fill a quota. I was just coming up with a bunch of ideas. If in the end there was only one good idea in the mix, then I’d use that one and ignore the others. Sometimes there’s no good ideas, in which case I give my brain a mental cookie for coming up with ideas and another for not pretending that any of them were good.
How do you manage to avoid Goodharting or quota-filling on other plans?
I ask because this runs to the very core of my current confusion in life: how to brainstorm (or babble) better plans in the first place. It is exceedingly easy for me to abandon one of my plans simply because I had no confidence it was that “good” in the first place. Also, I find it exceedingly easy to generate a dozen different plans if the objective is “just invent other plans” rather than “invent equally good plans”. But, if the objective is “invent equally good plans” I groan and cringe and, I’m ashamed to admit, give up.
For example, in the past I was told that if I wanted to be a professional film director then I needed to “enter films into film festivals” I did that to zero success. None. No laurels. Nothing. I had no faith in that plan to begin with and only did it because I was “supposed to do it”.
“Putting your films ‘out there’ (i.e. online)” was the only other plan I had.
It would have been nice to have been able to essay other plans that weren’t just quota-fillers.
As for parallel essaying of other plans, it reminds me of an observation David Snowden made in his Cynefin Sensmaking framework, that while Complicated and Simple systems which are highly predictable and therefore usually have a “best practice” or one and most optimal way to do something. Complex systems in which you can only predict trajectories are best suited to launching several simultaneous or parallel interventions which are not “fail safe” but “safe to fail”. He means you can wind down or stop the interventions which are less successful as you generate feedback, and scale up on successful ones. Sort of like A/B testing but more like A/B/C/D/E/ testing.
The following works for me. I do not know how well it works for other people.
I separate coming up with ideas and filtering for good ideas. Many of the ideas I come up with are bad ideas. For example, I’m about to spend a few minutes by the clock coming up with plans for becoming a professional film director.
“Go to film school and ask the professors for professional contacts. Show up at a college office hour and as the professors for contacts even if I’m not a student. Make movies in my backyard with home equipment, and put them online. Reach out to film studios and ask if they have educational opportunities or internships. Hire a professional film director to tutor me. Read books and biographies about professional film directors and copy what they did. Hang around the next actor’s strike and ask if anyone wants to goof off and do an amateur project that wouldn’t break the strike. Make movies and then talk to local theatres and see if they want to run those movies, maybe during slow times/days. Create an online buzz around an obscure and rarely seen auteur film that The Mainstream Media doesn’t want you to see. Project it onto the sky on a screen held up by drones. Make a film of a famous fanfic- hey, podfics hitch a ride on someone else’s story why not a film.”
Okay, time over. Some of those ideas need more detail- like, making a movie with the tools I have comes up as a first step of several plans and I’d need to work through more about how to do that. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I know just enough about film-making to know there’s some different choices I’d make while filming depending on the eventual format but maybe I can save some effort with multiple cuts or something. Other ideas are ways to fish for more ideas, like reading books on the subject or asking professors what to do.
Some are just bad ideas. Getting professional film directors to tutor me sounds expensive, and also I’m not at all sure the constraint is lack of skill at directing. Actor’s strikes seem to happen about every ten years so maybe keep that in your back pocket while you work on other plans. As for projecting it onto the sky, I don’t have any idea how that gets you paid enough to get called a professional plus you might get some kind of public disturbance complaint? But. . . talking to local theatres doesn’t seem like a terrible idea? Putting some kind of weird spin on a movie released online might work- it at least points at different tweaks or implementations to just putting it up on Youtube.
The point is, I didn’t come up with those plans to fill a quota. I was just coming up with a bunch of ideas. If in the end there was only one good idea in the mix, then I’d use that one and ignore the others. Sometimes there’s no good ideas, in which case I give my brain a mental cookie for coming up with ideas and another for not pretending that any of them were good.