Boys and girls of the world easily unite around a simple, recurring thought — “Dad, why in the world have you done it this way?! Your design doesn’t actually work!”
Earth hath no labyrinth like a Dad’s clever solution.
I am you. You are me. On a daily basis we are stymied by solutions that come from what I call the “Clever Dad Design System.” It is a design system that is the opposite of concepts like Monozukuri or continuous improvement. It is a design system that rewards tacit cleverness over empirical wisdom. It is a design system that is often constrained by one of three things, 1) the laziness of the creator, 2) the creator’s emotions, or 3) his counsel-free and obvious (only to self) brilliance. The Clever Dad Design System is not about the end user.
In its shabby form, it is a design system that employs disparate materials like wire, mystery putty, coaxial cable, JB Weld (Original) and Liquid Nails (full tube) — but it is also a design system that can transcend the garage consciousness into public engineering and design, finance, exciting new products that no one needs, gallery art, and of course, complex software development.
Cooked up in an insulated vacuum filled with one man’s unaudited cleverness, the Clever Dad releases his creation into the world. Sometimes, a group of clever dads assemble in a team—with similarly insulated cleverness—to unleash even more unaudited brilliance on the world.
Clever design is not wise design. Clever design is often too smart to work. Sure, Uncle Tony’s solution might work in his yard, but it will simultaneously flood his neighbor’s yard. Clever design is about the genius of the author, not the experience of the end user.
Are you a builder like me? You’re a smarty-pants right? You like to grind and get ‘er done? You know all the fancy words too, just like me? You’re curious and you’ve been around the block eh, just like me?
Have you considered, that you and I, we might also be students of the Clever Dad Design System?
Clever Design In Our World
First-Time Home Buyer
You’ve just purchased your first home ($112,000 over asking), you inspect the garage sink. You feebly ask your contractor, “But these sketchy water lines go through the basement foundation wall and mate into a plastic piece that is screwed to a 2x4 with a deck screw. Errr, is this up to code?” His answer, resounding and soon to be recursively familiar, is “Nope…absolutely not.”
Welcome To Dallas
You drive in the city of Dallas through an interwoven hydra of five lane highways—with four lane side highways, bonus mystery levels, and built-in u-turn lanes. Earlier you took an exit on the right—but this time you for sure going left, jefe. In your rental car, you calmly scream, “What the f*** is going on here?! Who the f*** designed this mess!?” The polite British assistant from Google Maps or Siri is no match for the imagination of a Clever Design Dad from Texas public works—who squeezed out his design version of a wet dream all over a growing suburban sprawl. When he wakes up in the morning, sipping his black coffee while standing in the kitchen, cinnamon roll in hand—crumbs on his manicured (and dyed) mustache—he looks at the large framed technical drawing of his metropolitan monster that is hung imposingly above his kitchen table. He smirks, looks down to see only the tips of his shoes, and just knows that he is the f****** man, just like he was in high school. “I bet people f****** love that interchange…,” he thinks with pride as he skips on to his next innovation project at the nuclear plant.
React JS Is The Industry Standard No One Asked For
You’ve been hired as a web developer to work on a React project. It’s a hydra of inefficient, abstracted nonsense. It’s so clever—it works SO WELL in fact—that it barely works. You politely ask your team lead, “Why is our core bundle 6.8 MB?” You’re told, “don’t worry, we’ll refactor that and get it down…” But you won’t, because you will run out of budget. Optimizing Daedalus’ labyrinth takes too much time—like brushing your daughter’s hair after a Disneyland cotton candy adventure, it just cannot be completed in time; it’s just too complex. It is pure experiential pain—and the solution is of unknown value when weighed against its cost.
Gallery Art—It’s Beyond Your Comprehension
You visit your local art gallery to find the following “art” rested atop a beautifully crafted white pedestal, staged dramatically in the middle of a sprawling polished concrete floor. You ask yourself, “What in the f*** is this? It’s puffed corn trash with children’s acrylic paint. An adult made this?? Why, how, when? Get f*****!” Ever the curious cat, referring to the accompanying words from the art gallery, you painstakingly read:
Now this…this is clever. Wow... This art is so clever, indeed, that it is completely useless to you visually, intellectually, empirically, spiritually, culturally, and otherwise. Dad punked you, again.
This Can’t Even Be Real, C’mon Dad!?
The Segway—A Vehicle By Loser, For Losers
Behold, the Segway. The future of personal transportation. A true innovation in Loser Tourism.
A perfect storm led to the defeat of this two-wheeled transport, from the overhype preceding its arrival in 2001 to the mammoth ego of inventor Dean Kamen, who refused to share details with the press, regulators, or even investors. Kamen claimed the Segway “will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.”
FTX
Sam Fried is a god of the Clever Design System. No finance and trading experience beyond some advanced theoretical course work? Perfect. Likes to play video games on fundraising and regulatory calls? Far out! Borrows millions on millions of dollars to inflate his own crypto token that he pumps up to also sell back to his investors and community members—who will risk bankruptcy when his s***coin melts? Oh, and we can quickly nuke a few medium-sized private banks on the way down? We salute you, king.
Theranos
Theranos is the defining unethical epic of the Clever Dad Design System. “But, she’s not a clever dad?” you say. Oh yes, she is. She’s the king of Clever Dads. She’s the Donald Trump of cleverness.
Having medical and pharmaceutical experience may have been a prerequisite for innovative bloodwork breakthroughs in the 90s or the early 2000s, but in the 2010s, all you needed was an honest techno-futurist dream, some well-cultivated entitlement mixed with a 2200 level of exogenous testosterone-fueled stubborn pride, mixed with sociopathy and some mild insanity.
Honest employee: “Hey I think our genius blood testing product might not work like we say it does…? Like, this maybe could harm people and give them fake results I think?” Elizabeth Holmes: “Well, it has to work, no matter WHAT. Or I will personally eat your face in front of your mom on facetime. You know what?! You’re fired. Any other Junior-Senior Pharmacists here want to be ‘smart’ today??”
In the face of immense negative feedback from technical world experts, fifty years of pharmaceutical science to the contrary, and boxes full of failure data, this Clever Dad went dress-up, full sail, from beginning to end. Convinced of her genius, she skippered her yacht through the Straights Of Clever, directly to a place called Prison. God bless her, she inspires us all.
The “Clever Dad Design System” — don’t do it.
How can we avoid becoming a Clever Dad? It’s actually pretty simple.
1) Complex solutions usually mean we don’t understand our core problem
Just like philosophy, concise and elegant explanations indicate mastery of material. Meandering and recursive explanations usually show that we don’t understand something very well. Even worse, wacky and clever explanations can indicate we are trying to be deceptive in order to cover up insecurity about our solution to a problem.
If we have to explain how to use a product, then what bit of solution will it be. If we do not understand and empathize with a user’s problem, we cannot manufacture a concise solution. Instead, if we operate in our own vacuum of cleverness, we often end up with an unusable mess.
Simple solutions work. The further we move toward abstraction and away from simplicity, the more convoluted and complex our solution will be. Complex solutions are hard to implement, debug, and maintain.
2) Stay humble
The odds absolutely indicate that you and I are not once-in-a-generation geniuses. If we sit down with a true genius in our field—we understand how small and naive we are.
I spend all week, every week, writing code. If the universe gifts me a few small successes, I start to feel clever and smart. Look at all the apps I make! Dang, I’m the man! Nope. I’m actually not the man. I can spend four minutes pair programming with Ryan Day and it makes me want to cry. It crushes my silly man-pride. Sitting with Ryan is like we’re speaking two different coding languages. He is Plato, and I am the most advanced child in Kindergarten. I am ‘good enough to be dangerous,’ while his mind is 80 steps ahead. It stings badly to know that my born level is just average compared to his. It’s the truth though, and I ignore it at my peril.
Our confidence should also be proportional to the amount of time-earned wisdom we have. If we’ve only been working on a problem area for 6 months—ask questions, sit down, and shut up. We may have that special eye for value—that angle of attack. But first we must assume that the elders have wisdom we do not have. Our unique solution may not have been perfected yet because Dads just as dumb as us already tried 100 times, and also failed to paint with similar strokes of self-knighted genius.
If our [son, daughter, partner, investor, aunt, grandma] are experts in similar fields as our heart’s pursuit, just sit down and listen.
3) Listen to what people are afraid to tell us
Most people are afraid to hurt our feelings—particularly when the stakes are still low. They are subtly telling us we’re being dumb. We need to listen to the space between the big words.
Your daughter is telling you that you are being blind and dumb—but she’s just hinting at it. “Oh, interesting…but won’t that do XYZ also?” You answer, “Oh it will be fine.” No, perhaps it won’t be fine. Listen to her.
Your head of software engineering says, “We can do it that way, but it will cost 20x more over the life of our project. Would you consider doing it this way instead?” Just listen.
Your investor says, “That sounds exciting. Is it risky? What about this component of leverage?” Hmmm, maybe I should spend the next 40 days reading instead of making these crypto trades.
4) Just remember our last big project
That last big project we didn’t complete and spent all the money we had—it didn’t go very well, right? And some very smart people told us to be mindful, but of course we didn’t listen.
What if we’ve never actually completed a big project—like ever. We should probably just be quiet and listen and study first, right? Yep.
Better yet, let’s first apprentice under people who have proven their wares with sweat, gear grease, and grey hairs. Let’s ask them, “What’s the sustainable and efficient way to get this done?”
5) The sentiment data doesn’t lie
Our first data and feedback comes from our network (friends, family, elders, advisors, and so on). Share on paper, or preliminary idea form, and listen. Are people jazzed up, or are they concerned? “Oh really Dad, you want to tile the garage ceiling with free mismatched tiles from Habitat ReStore? I mean…maybe it might be better if you just paint it white instead? What if the person that buys your house is not so much a ‘tile on the ceiling’ kind of bloke?”
Do you think your coworker, roommate, wife, sister, son, or daughter tells their friends about your proposed solution and clever tactics? They are probably all just haters. Some of them are straight up haters, to be sure, but ALL of them are conspiring to cork your genius? Very doubtful.
Once we pass the first feedback phase and we have something out in the world, if our data says people don’t share and get excited about our solution, that means our solution is not good enough.
Do our customers tell us they love our product? Do we have to spend $45 to make $5? Or do we spend $5 to make $45?
No amount of marketing will profitably sell a product that doesn’t solve a problem with grace and efficiency. Sure, you might give many units away for deep discounts while spending the investors’ money, but at a gross loss. That’s a waste of your life, your customers’, your investors’, and so on.
6) Don’t tax our community with cleverness, heal our community with earned wisdom
The Clever Dad Design System imposes a rude tax on our communities. It pisses people off daily.
Our unconstrained and self-appointed genius tips people over the edge each day, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
How many open-carry shootings have been caused by frustration and confusion over Dallas’ highways? I pray the number is zero, but I bet money that it’s a lot.
How many developers’ lives have been wasted using Backbone, Ember, Vue, Meteor, Angular, and React? Too many! The suffering can stop with your next minimally abstracted code framework.
How many sons and daughters have been dismissed into therapy due to their Dad’s obtuse pride? Let the healing begin with words like these:
Child, I am sorry I’m an idiot. I thought I was a genius, but I’m not. I promise to try and be a better listener. I understand that DaVinci was not “just like me” and no, I cannot “probably drop that fool Mike Tyson” and I now accept that Steve Jobs was not “just a nerd with money” and that I could not “have made a better iPhone if I went to design school in the 80s”.
How many clever minds have avoided wisdom due to bravado, overconfidence, stubbornness, insecurity, and pride? We don’t want to do that. That sparkle in our eye and blind ambition cause us to walk the razor’s edge sometimes. Usually we are on the side without the safety net.
When in doubt, cut it out…your clever idea. Without the patience and humility to earn wisdom, we are a walking hazard to ourselves and others.