Ban Open Loops: Part Two – Sports

30 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology, sports

Tags

AI, cognitive computing, Customer experience, customer service, education, leadership, learning, technology

Sports and open loops.

Sports offers a joy that many jobs and occupations do not. A golfer putts the ball and it sinks into the cup — or not. A basket-baller springs up for a three pointer and —- swish — within seconds, the shooter knows whether he or she was successful. A baseball hitter slashes the bat through the air and send the ball over the fence —- or hears the ball smack into the catcher’s mitt behind. What sports offers then is the opportunity to find out results quickly and hence offers an excellent opportunity for learning. In the previous entry in this blog, I gave examples of situations in life which should include feedback loops for learning, but, alas, do not. I called those open loops.

Sports seem to be designed for closed loop learning. They seem to be. Yet, reality complicates matters even here. There are three main reasons why what appears to be obvious opportunities for learning in sports is not so obvious after all. Attributional complexity provides the first complication. If you miss a putt to the left, it is obvious that you have missed the putt to the left. But why you missed that putt left and what to do about it are not necessarily obvious at all. You might have aimed left. You might not have noticed how much the green sloped left (or over read the slant to the right). You may not have noticed the grain. You might not have hit the ball in the center of the putter. You might not have swung straight through your target. So, while putting provides nice unambiguous feedback about results, it does not diagnose your problem or tell you how to fix it. To continue with the golf example, you might be kicking yourself for missing half of your six foot putts and therefore three-putting many greens. Guess what? The pros on tour miss half of their six foot putts too! But they do not often three-putt greens. You might be able to improve your putting, but your underlying problems may be that your approach shots leave you too far from the pin and that your lag putts leave you too far from the hole. You should be within three feet of the hole, not six feet, when you hit your second putt.

A second issue with learning in sports is that changes tend to cascade. A change in one area tends to produce other changes in other areas. Your tennis instructor tells you that you are need to play more aggressively and charge the net after your serve. You try this, but find that you miss many volleys, especially those from mid-court. So, you spend a lot of time practicing volleys. Eventually, your volleys do improve. Then, they improve still more. But you find that, despite this, you are losing the majority of your service games whereas you used to win most of them. You decide to revert to your old style of hanging out at the baseline and only approaching the net when the opponent lands the ball short. Unfortunately, while you were spending all that time practicing volleys, you were not practicing your ground strokes. Now, what used to work for you, no longer works very well. This isn’t the fault of your instructor; nor is it your fault. It is just that changing one thing has ripple effects that cannot always be anticipated.

The third and most insidious reason why change is difficult in sports springs from the first two. Because it is hard to know how to change and every change has side-effects, many people fail to learn from their experience at all. There is opportunity for learning at every turn, but they turn a blind eye to it. They make the same mistakes over and over as though sports did not offer instant feedback. I think you will agree that this is really a very close cousin of what people in business do when they refuse to institute systems for gathering and analyzing useful feedback.

If learning is tricky —- and it is —- is there anything for it? Yes. There is. There is no way to make learning in sports —- or in business —- trivial. But there are steps you can take to enhance your learning process. First, be open-minded. Do not shut down and imagine that you are already playing your sport as well as can be expected for a forty year old, or a fifty year old, or someone slightly overweight or someone with a bad ankle. Take an experimental approach and don’t be afraid to try new things. Second, forget ego. Making mistakes provides opportunities to learn, not proof that you are no good. Third, get professional help. A good coach can help you understand attributional complexity and they can help you anticipate the side-effects of making a change.

Soon, I suspect that the shrinking size and cost and weight of computational and sensing devices will mean that training aids will help people with attributional complexity. I see big data analytics and modeling helping people foresee what the ramifications of changes are likely to be. There are already useful mechanical training aids for various sports. For example, the trade-marked Medicus club enables golfers to get immediate feedback during their full swings.as to whether they are jerking the club. Dave Pelz developed a number of useful devices for helping people understand how they may be messing up their putting stroke.

It may take somewhat longer before there are small tracking devices that help you with your mental attitude and approach. We are still a long way from understanding how the human brain works in detail. But it is completely within the realm of possibility to sense and discover your optimal level of stress. If you are too stressed, you could be prompted to relax through self-talk, breathing exercises, visualization, etc. You do not need technology for that, but it could help. You may already notice that some of the top tennis players seem to turn their backs from play for a moment and talk to an “invisible friend” when they need to calm down. And why not? Nowhere is it law that only kids are allowed to have invisible friends.

“The mental game” and which kinds of adaptations to make over what time scales are dealt with in more detail in The Winning Weekend Warrior How to Succeed at Golf, Tennis, Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey, Volleyball, Business, Life, Etc. available at Amazon Kindle.

Photo by Francesco Paggiaro on Pexels.com

Author Page on Amazon

US Open Closed

The Day From Hell: Why should anyone Care?

Wordless Perfection

Sports Fans Only

The Agony of the Feet

Frank Friend or Fawning Foe?

Business Re-engineering

Tennis Upside Down

Donnie Gets his Name on a Tennis Trophy!

Indian Wells Tennis Tournament

Small Things

An Amazing Feet of Athleticism

Ban the Open Loop

29 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, essay, HCI, politics, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AI, Democracy, life, technology, truth, USA

Soon after I began the Artificial Intelligence Lab at a major telecom company, we heard about an opportunity for an Expert System. The company wanted to improve the estimation of complex, large scale, inside wiring jobs. We sought someone who qualified as an expert. Not only could we not locate an expert; we discovered that the company (and the individual estimators) had no idea how good or bad they were. Estimators would go in, take a look at what would be involved in an inside wiring job, make their estimate, and then proceed to the next estimation job. Later, when the job completed, no mechanism existed to relate the estimate back the actual cost of the job. At the time, I found this astounding. I’m a little more jaded now, but I am still amazed at how many businesses, large and small, have what are essentially no-learning, zero feedback, open loops.

As another example, some years earlier, my wife and I arrived late and exhausted at a fairly nice hotel. Try as we might, we could not get the air-conditioning to do anything but make the room hotter. When we checked out, the cashier asks us how our stay was. We explained that we could not get the air conditioning to work. The cashier’s reaction? “Oh, yes. Everyone has that trouble. The box marked “air conditioning” doesn’t work at all. You have to turn the heater on and then set it to a cold temperature.” “Everyone has that trouble”? Then, why hasn’t this been fixed? Clearly, the cashier has no mechanism or no motivation to report the trouble “upstream” or no-one upstream really cares. Moreover, this exchange reveals that when the cashier asks the obligatory question, “How was your stay?” what he or she really means is this: “We don’t really care what you have to say and we won’t do anything about it, but we want you to think that we actually care. That’s a lot cheaper and doesn’t require management to think.” Open Loop.

Lately, I have been posting a lot in a LinkedIn forum called “project management” because I find the topic fascinating and because I have a lot of experience with various projects in many different venues. According to some measure, I was marked as a “top contributor” to this forum. When I logged on the last time, a message surprised me that my contributions to discussions would no longer appear automatically because something I posted had been flagged as “spam” or a “promotion.” However, there is no feedback as to which post this was or why it was flagged or by whom or by what. So, I have no idea whether some post was flagged by an ineffectual natural language processing program or by someone with a grudge because they didn’t agree with something I said, or by one of the “moderators” of the forum.

LinkedIn itself is singularly unhelpful in this regard. If you try to find out more, they simply (but with far more text) list all the possibilities I have outlined above. Although this particular forum is very popular, it seems to me that it is “moderated” by a group of people who actually are using the forum, at least in many cases, as rather thinly veiled promotions for their own set of seminars, ebooks, etc. So, one guess is that the moderators are reacting to my having simply posted too many legitimate postings that do not point people back to their own wares. Of course, there are many other possibilities. The point here is that I do not have, nor can I easily assess what the real situation is. I have discovered however, that many others are facing this same issue. Open loop rears its head again.

The final example comes from trying to re-order checks today. In my checkbook, I came to that point where there is a little insert warning me that I am about to run out and that I can re-order checks by phone. I called the 800 number and sure enough, a real audio menu system answered. It asked me to enter my routing number and my account number. Fine. Then, it invited me to press “1” if I wanted to re-order checks. I did. Then, it began to play some other message. But soon after the message began, it said, “I’m sorry; I cannot honor that request.” And hung up. Isn’t it bad enough when an actual human being hangs up on you for no reason. This mechanical critter had just wasted five minutes of my time and then hung up. Note that no reason was given; no clue was provided to me as to what went wrong. I called back and the same dialogue ensued. This time, however, it did not hang up after I pressed “1” to reorder checks. Instead, it started to verify my address. It said, “We sent your last checks to an address whose zip code is “97…I’m sorry I’m having trouble. I will transfer you to an agent. Note that you may have to provide your routing number and account number again.” And…then it hung up.

Now, anyone can design a bad system. And, even a well designed system can sometimes mis-behave for all sorts of reasons. Notice however, that designers have provided no feedback mechanism. It could be that 1% of the potential users are having this problem. Or, it could be that 99% or even 100% of the users are having these kinds of issues. But the company lacks a way to find out. Of course, I could call my Credit Union and let them know. However, anyone that I get hold of at the Credit Union, I can guarantee, will have no possible way to fix this. Moreover, I am almost positive that they won’t even have a mechanism to report it. The check printing and ordering are functioned that are outsourced to an entirely different company. Someone in corporate, many years ago, decided to outsource the check printing, ordering, and delivery function. So people in the Credit Union itself are unlikely to even have a friend, uncle or sister-in-law who works in that “department” (as may have been the case 20 years ago). So, not only does the overall system lack a formal feedback mechanism; it also lacks an informal feedback mechanism. Tellingly, the company that provides the automated “cannot order your checks system” provides no menu option for feedback about issues either. So, here we have a financial institution with a critical function malfunctioning and no real process to discover and fix it. Open loop.

Some folks these days wax eloquent about the up-coming “singularity.” This refers to the point in human history where an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system will be significantly smarter than a human being. In particular, such a system will be much smarter than human beings when it comes to designing ever-smarter systems. So, the story goes, before long, the AI will design an even better AI system for designing better AI systems, etc. I will soon have much to say about this, but for now, let me just say, that before we proceed to blow too many trumpets about “artificial intelligence systems,” can we please first at least design a few more systems that fail to exhibit “artificial stupidity”? Ban the Open Loop!

Notice that sometimes, there may be very long loops that are much like open loops due to the nature of the situation. We send out radio signals in the hopes that alien intelligences may send us an answer. But the likely time frame is so long that it seems open loop. That situation contrasts with those above in the following way. There is no reason that feedback cannot be obtained, and rather quickly, in the case of estimating inside wiring, fixing the air conditioning signs, providing feedback on why there is “moderation” or in the faulty voice response system. Sports must provide a wonderful venue that is devoid of open loops. In sports, you see or feel the results of what you do almost immediately. But you underestimate the cleverness with which human beings are able to avoid what could be learned by feedback. Next time, we will explore that in more detail.

As I reconsider the essay above from the perspective of 2025, I see a federal government that has fully embraced “Open Loop” as a modus operandi — in some cases, they simply ignore the impact of their actions. In other cases, they do claim a positive impact but it is simply lies. For instance, it is claimed that tariffs are “working” in that foreign countries are paying money to America. That’s just an out and out lie. So, the entire government is operating with no real feedback. We are told that ICE will target violent gang members and dangerous criminals. The reality of their actions is completely disconnected from that.

The Trumputin Misadministration works with no loop at all that correctly relates stated goals, actions taken supposedly to achieve those goals, and the actual effects of those actions. That can only happen when the government accepts and celebrates corruption. But the destruction will not be limited to government actions and effects. It will tend to spread to private enterprise as well. Just to take one example, if unchecked by courageous and ethical individuals, sports events will become corrupted.

Photo by Mark Milbert on Pexels.com

There’s money to be made by “fixing” events and there will be pressure on athletes, managers, referees, to “fix” things so that the very wealthy can steal more money. Outcomes will no longer primarily be determined by training, skill, and heart. Of course, as fans learn over time that everything is fixed, the audience will diminish, but not to zero. Some folks will still find it interesting even if the outcome is fixed like the brutal conflicts in the movie Idiocracy, the lions eating Christians in the Roman circuses, or the so-called “sport” of killing innocent animals with high power guns. It’s not a sport when the outcome is slanted. Not only is it less interesting to normal folks but it doesn’t push people to test their own limits. There’s nothing “heroic” about it. Nothing is learned. Nothing is really ventured. And nothing is really gained.

Photo by Gareth Davies on Pexels.com

———–

Where does your loyalty lie?

My Cousin Bobby

The First Ring of Empathy

The Orange Man

The Forgotten Field

Essays on America: The Game

Essays on America: Wednesday

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Travels with Sadie 1

The Walkabout Diaries

Plans for US; Some GRUesome

At Least he’s Our Monster

The Ant

The Self-Made Man

The Fault is in Defaults

27 Saturday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, HCI, management, politics, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

art, Customer experience, defaults, Design, google maps, HCI, printer, scanner, technology, UI, user experience, UX

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Photo by egil sju00f8holt on Pexels.com

So Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Cassius was trying to convince Brutus to join the plot to assassinate Caesar. As I recall, things did not turn out well for Julius Caesar. Or for Brutus. Or for Cassius. Or, ultimately, for Mark Anthony either, but that’s another story.

The point is that an interesting tension arises when we imagine that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. We like to imagine that it is our ability, or attitude, or grit that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. On the other hand, we also realize that many things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due largely to our heredity, our environment, our upbringing, etc. Both views are partly true and both have their place.

If you are a user of a product and you want to get something accomplished, blaming the stupid product will not help you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you are a product developer, it will not help you to blame your user. You need to design thoughtfully.

I was reminded of this debate by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellent scanners and printers are today, not to mention cheap! I was born in an era of expensive, heavy, noisy, dot matrix printers or teletypes. You’ve come a long way, baby! But the software that actually lets us use these marvelous machines? Here, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I think I finally diagnosed what the problem was. The scan screen came up with a default that said “custom size” and the defaulted “custom dimensions” were 0 by 0. Because, obviously, the development team had done a thorough study of users and found, I suppose somewhat surprisingly, that the most common size of image people wanted to scan was 0 by 0. I suppose such images have the advantage that you can store many more of them on your hard drive than images that are 8.5 by 11 inches or 3 inches by 5 inches, say.

This absurd default is not an isolated example. Often there seem to be “defaults” are rather odd, to say the least. My google map application, for no discernible reason, decided that a good default location for me is the geographical center of the continental United States. It was not “born” with this default but somewhere along the line “developed” it. Why? I have never travelled (knowingly) to the geographical center of the United States. I have never wanted to “find” the geographical center of the United States. Yet, for some mysterious reason, whenever I do try to find a route to say, the dentist who is ten miles away, the map app tries to send me from Southern California to the geographic center of the US and then back again. I can eventually get around this, but next time I open up the app, there we are again.

Of course, I am tempted every time to just to see the place (near the corners of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. And, “with no traffic”, it only takes a little over 22 hours to get there. The phrase, “with no traffic” in Southern California is equivalent to “when pigs fly.” So, tempting as it is to drive 22 hours to the geographical center of the US and then 22 hours back (provided the sky if filled with flying pigs) in order to go to the dentist who is a few minutes away, I haven’t yet actually taken that particular trip.

I am tempted to rant about the absolute ludicrosity of “sponsored links” (which cheeringly informs me that I could take a side trip to a gynecologist on the way to the dentist) but I’ll try to stay on topic. Where do these defaults come from? Is this just a nerd’s nerd free choice as a perk of the job? Do they seriously conceptualize size in terms of a two dimensional grid with an origin at zero zero and therefore this is a “logical” default for paper size? Are they trying to do the user a favor by saving space?

I am hoping there is a product manager out there who can answer these questions. I am hoping things will turn out better than they did for Caesar and Brutus and Cassius.

Now, a more serious impact of “defaults” have insinuated their way into my daily life. That would be bad enough, but this insinuation has also found its way into the lives of my relatives, my friends, my neighbors, my countrymen, and even my fellow humans throughout the world.

For about 250 years, America had a default that different political parties would play by the same set of rules. Of course, parties sometimes pushed at these rules or interpreted them somewhat differently. They argued and debated about which criteria were most important for various offices. But the default for both parties was that we lived in a democracy; that the citizens choose their leaders; that the truth matters; that we keep our agreements; that our leaders don’t simply use their position of power to line their own pockets and settle their private grudges.

Those defaults are now out the window. All of them. The result will soon be inefficient and ineffective government but it won’t stop there. When government officials are open to bribery, then private businesses will tend to be led by people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will tend to hire people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will treat their customers more cavalierly, more contemptuously. Customers, in turn, will care less about being civil to the people whom they interact with. And so it goes.

Sometimes, there’s a good reason for defaults.

Dick-taters

The Truth Train

The First Ring of Empathy

Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation

Tools of Thought: What Comes Next?

Tools of Thought

Travels with Sadie 1

The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise

Starting your Customer Experience with a Lie

26 Friday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, essay, management, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Business, cancer, Customer experience, Democracy, ethics, honesty, marketing, scam, spam, truth, UX

I really need someone to explain to me the strategy behind the following types of communications. I get things in email and in snail mail and they start out with something like, “In response to your recent enquiry…”, or “Here is the information you requested.” or “Congratulations! Your application was approved!” More recently, I’ve gotten text messages giving my “secret code” (which I shouldn’t share with anyone) which will allow me to access my account with unexplained riches of cryptocurrency.

And…they are all LIES! I understand that sometimes people lie. And I understand that companies are sometimes greedy. But I do not understand how it can possibly be in their interest to start their communications with a potential customer with a complete and easily discovered lie. What is up with that? So far, the only explanation I can gather is that they only want a very small number of very very gullible (perhaps even impaired?) customers that they can soak every penny out of so the initial contact is a kind of screening device. ?? Any other suggestions?

In the eleven years since I first published this post, the level of lying and misdirection has only increased. It has spread like a cancer to every segment of American society. Perhaps that is not surprising given that the we have a convicted felon (for fraud) in the “Whites Only House.” Many politicians of the past have bent the truth (encouraged a certain “spin” on the facts). But typically, this has done in a way that’s hard to trace or hard to prove or is targeted to specific issues. The lie of “trickle down economics” is one that has transcended Republican and even many Democratic administrations for decades.

In essence, trickle down economics is the lie that by giving special breaks to the very wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country, it will increase their wealth but that increased wealth will actually benefit everyone because the very richest people will spend that extra money and stimulate demand and everyone will get richer. In case you’ve been asleep for the last fifty years, that’s a lie.

Increased wealth in America happened largely because of increased productivity. People invented tools and processes that were more efficient. Some of these innovations and improvements were due to inventions. Many of these inventions were driven by breakthroughs in science and technology. Other improvements were simply because workers learned how to do things better from experience and we as a people got better at sharing those improved ways of doing things. Increased productivity led to increased wealth which was shared by owners and workers. Profits went up faster than costs but so did wages. Nice.

Until about the mid 1970’s. Since then, productivity has continued to increase, but nearly all of the increased wealth has gone to the greediest people on the planet. Along with the lie of “trickle-down economics” several ancillary lies have been told over and over. One is the myth of the “Self-Made Man” which suggests that billionaires shouldn’t have to pay taxes because, after all, they earned their money by working 100,000 times harder and smarter than everyone else. Bunk. See link below.

Another ancillary lie is that we must pay CEO’s and people who own stuff lots and lots of money because otherwise they won’t invest their money in America or work for American companies. Again, balderdash. It’s been studied.

Another ancillary lie is that lowering taxes on poor people will only be bad for them because they will waste the extra money on drugs and cigarettes and alcohol and pornography while lowering taxes on rich people is good because they will spend their money on the fine arts and supporting charities and science. Nonsense. Of course, sometimes poor people will spend their money on “vices” and sometimes rich people are very charitable. However, there’s no general such phenomenon that characterizes all of these groups. Generally, rich people actually are less generous in their giving than poor people and the studies of Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) show that they typically cheat more than poor people.

Politicians have been “spinning” or downright lying about the impact of their economic policies for quite some time now. Recently, however, the scope of lying has extended to everything. Putin’s Puppet doesn’t just lie about the impact of his economic policies (“foreign countries pay us for the tariffs I’m imposing). The Trumputin Misadministration lies about science, medicine, history, crime, geography, technology and everything else. It is a war on truth itself. Not only does the Misadministration itself lie; it wants to censor anyone who tells the truth.

Make no mistake. This is not simply a difference of opinion about how to govern. Fascism is a philosophy that replaces governing with absolute control. In effect, everyone in a fascist state is a slave. It destroys humanity and life itself.

To ignore the truth and refuse to admit to your mistakes is not just “anti-democratic” — it is anti-life. Life only exists and persists when it is able to sense what is happening in the environment and make adjustments based on that input. Logically, the only possible ultimate outcome of complete fascism is complete death.

But we don’t have to rely on logic alone. We have historical examples. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao sought absolute power and ended up killing millions of their own people. A dictatorship is a liarship and as such, it necessarily destroys everyone. If you think you’re safe because you’re male, or straight, or white, or “conservative” or rich, you’re deluding yourself. Nearly all of Stalin’s closest associates were destroyed by Stalin. The record of the Felon is the same. He’s betrayed his contractors, his business partners, his wives, his own VP, and even his decade-long rape buddy.

In such an ocean of lies as we now find ourselves, it may seem even more tempting for businesses and organizations and individuals to lie as well. “After all, everyone’s doing it!” No. The opposite. It’s more important than ever for individuals, organizations, and businesses to uphold the highest ethical standards; to be honest about and to learn from mistakes; to champion the truth and not to encourage the growth of cancer.

If you and your organization or team cave in to the current trend of lies, you will ruin your organization and your team — as well as your own personal integrity — for the long term. If lying for profit is the spirit you follow, you will hire dishonest people and honest people will quit. Your policies, your allies, your suppliers, your customers will not be conducive to having a productive and thriving organization. Of course, your reputation will suffer, but the disease is much deeper and more lasting than that. Now is the time to be more determined than ever to show honesty and integrity in your hiring, your management, your policies, and your choice of business partners.

————

Cancer Always Loses in the End

A Little is not a Lot

Try the Truth

You Bet Your Life

Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?

As Gold as it Gets

The Orange Man

At Least he’s Our Monster

The Three Blind Mice

The Con Man’s Con Man

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

Newsflash: MUSAK does not compensate for bad customer experience

25 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, essay, HCI, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bad music, customer service, customerexperience, Design, HCI, humanfactors, IVR, Musak, UI, userexperience, UX, wordpress

Newsflash: Playing really low quality Musak while the customer is on hold for 40 minutes does not improve the customer experience. Nor, does always playing the message that you are experiencing “unusually heavy volumes” right now improve your credibility. Now, I admit that someone in marketing who thought about for about 15 seconds *might* think that playing really bad music would be a good thing. After all, people do pay money to listen to music. Not everyone is a pirate. And, people spend a lot of time listening to music. Here’s the thing that might come to you if you study the rocket science surrounding this situation for about 20 or 30 seconds. People pay to listen to the music they choose. They do not pay to hear the music you choose. Furthermore, people pay to listen to music that is high quality. Granted, sometimes, when nothing else is available some of the people some of the time would prefer low quality music to no music at all. But no-one chooses absurdly bad quality music over silence. One more thing: unless you are a love-struck pre-teen, you do not listen to the same short sequence of music over and over and over and over for an hour at a time. No. You listen to a piece of music. Then, you listen to a different piece of music. Then, you listen to a different piece of music.

Now, I do grant that it is somewhat useful if you are going to put your customers on hold for 40 minutes that you give some sort of signal other than complete silence to show that you are still there and haven’t had the system “hang up” on them (which happens all too often but is another topic). But playing loud, obnoxious, very low fidelity music is not the answer.

Back to credibility. If you are really monitoring the call volume and the customer calls at a time of really unusual high call volume, you may want to tell them that they would have better luck another time. But if you always play this message, what do you think it does to your credibility? I am amazed to find that my credit union, an otherwise fine institution, always plays this message. And every single time, it makes me think twice about whether I can really trust my funds to an organization that clearly lies every single day.

You might think that it’s bad for business to lose credibility. Of course, it is. But it’s far more than that. It’s a betrayal of the very thing that makes us human. We did not succeed in covering so much of the planet by having the sharpest claws or teeth. Nor is it because of our great strength. It’s because our language enables us to learn from each other across time and space and culture. That happens when people trust each other and are trustworthy. Of course, one may gain a short-term advantage by lying. But the long term impact of enough lies is nothing less than the complete breakdown of human civilization.

A Lot is not a Little

A Parachute Ripped by Lies

Dick-Taters

You Bet Your Life

That Cold Walk Home

The Pandemic Non-Academic

True Believer

A Cancerous Weed

24 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, poetry, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Democracy, fantasy, life, poem, poetry, politics, truth, USA, writing

Like poisonous vines

Of cancerous deeds

Whose only needs

Are parasitic hate

And never-ending whines.

Cancer-weed grows darkly while it lies in wait.

Be a reed;

Be a fire;

Be a seed—

A seed of love.

Star above.

Tuneful lyre.

A ray of light.

Destroys the blight.

The parasitic worm of hate

Cannot survive when bathed in light

It fears both fight and flight

It knows not love

Only a hurtful shove

And rusty metal glove.

Be a seed

Be a reed

Be a light

In darkest night.

A bloated orange tick;

Ever envies normal dick;

Ever scoffs at those who earn;

Ever scorns those who learn;

Divides to conquer and to kill;

It’s its one and only skill.

Be the fire;

Be the light;

Light the night;

Juice the wire.

Empty stalks of uncut grains.

Empty talk from worm-fueled brains.

Families broken on wheels of greed.

The Rule of Law is sold for song.

A pedophile’s pathetic need

Trumps anyone knowing right from wrong.

Be the spark

That lights the dark.

Be the throng.

Who rights the wrong.

But my 401K is doing okay!

Who cares if it all goes south one day?

I’m so straight—not one bit gay!

I’m all white and no bits black!

I love a fight when none hit back!

Be a reed.

Be a seed.

In darkest night,

Ignite your light.

Who cares if millions die in endless war?

Our minds can’t think ahead so far.

Even though a thousand years of tyrants are the same.

Their cruelty and greed is insane shame.

Be the fire;

Be the light;

Light the night.

Juice the wire.

Be the fire;

Juice the wire.

Light the night.

Be the light.

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Imagine All the People

The Only Them that Counts is All of Us

Math Class: Who Are You?

Where does your Loyalty Lie?

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

My Cousin Bobby

That Cold Walk Home

Donnie Gets a Blue Ribbon

The First Ring of Empathy

The Orange Man

The Three Blind Mice

The word “simply” should be banned.

24 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, HCI, psychology, satire, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

books, Complexity, consumer products, food, health care, packaging, Simplicity, UX

So, in 2013, I changed from four medical plans to four different medical plans to six plans for 2014. Thank goodness we don’t have a “single payer” system because there is nothing I love more than pouring through a hundred pages of text for each plan which is mainly garbage but occasionally has important information. There is nothing more fun than ping-ponging among doctors every time your plan changes. Oh, wait! I forgot that in addition to the plans I *actually* had, IBM also sent me huge packets of information on plans that were no longer relevant. In the midst of all this, I was heartened to find a concise 72 page document from my dental plan which also informs me: “Please note: if you are a previous user of MyBenefits, you can still enjoy all the same features under the new plan. Simply visit (our website) and re-register with an updated username and password for access to your new plan.” It is the word, “simply” that I object to. Indeed, in some parallel universe, there is probably a time and place for the word “simply” but in has no legitimate place in actual 21st century America. It *invariably* signals this message: “We are going to make this difficult for you. But we don’t want to come out and say that so we will preface our instructions with the word ‘simply’ so when you do have trouble you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.”

(Why do I need a different userid and password?). Anyway, you know the drill. You go to the website and the first six userids that bear any resemblance to your name are taken. But they don’t typically tell you that till you also enter a password. And, of course, there are the typical “security questions” such as “What sized underwear did you wear in the fourth grade?” “What was your second grade teacher’s maiden name?” “What was the name of the company you bought your first ant farm from?” And so on.

This ironic use of “simply” is not confined to websites. It also applies to packaging as in, “SIMPLY remove the plastic overwrap.” Yeah. But, what if you left your chain saw in the garage? “Simply, tear the plastic along the indicated line.” In the rare case, when it is physically possible to tear, it never tears evenly. More typically it is some semi-metalic plastic that requires an industrial laser cutter. the most recent example involved two different kinds of dry cat food. These were nearly impossible for me to “simply” open. I left the bags for a few minutes to get an exacto knife and when I returned two minutes later, my CATS had indeed simply opened the packages and spread the contents around the hallway. For all I know, they might have actually ingested a piece of cat food but it was clear that their main intent was simply to cause a mess. The reason they could open the packages simply is that they have cat claws! I don’t! Not sure what genius came up with the idea that packages of cat food should be opened simply by cats but not simply by humans.

A variant on the use of industrial grade titanium plastic the requires war-appropriate hardware to open, is the soft, slippery plastic around cheese or ham that actually does open easily under a specific set of conditions. You have to be young. You have to have a strong grip. You have to have fingerprints–mine are gone (because of using too many touch screens?) Most importantly, your hands must be completely dry and free of any trace of any kind of oil.

Luckily, when preparing food, one’s hands never get damp or oily. Not if everything you touch is already pre-packaged in a box or a can. Of course, if you’re foolish enough to use fresh vegetables or fruits, you may be tempted to wash off bacteria and poison. You can do that, but you have to wait at least forty hours before attempting to open a package that requires you to “simply” tear off the tab.

And, while we’re on the subject of tear off tabs, did you ever wonder what kind of a bonus the MBA whiz kid who first mathematically modeled the MRA (Minimally Required Area) for a pull-off tab? I sometimes add a dollop of milk to my coffee and get one of two brands of milk. One has a pull-off tab of aluminum foil that allows me to use my bare hands to tear off the tab (even if they are a bit moist). The second brand sometimes has a plastic tab which is usable. But sometimes, it has a tab of aluminum foil carefully calculated to bear a visual resemblance to a usable tab but which, in fact, is only about 1/20th the surface area required to actually use it. The marketers however, have made it quite clear that I can open it by “simply” pulling the tab. And that is true, provided I use pliers.

Since the word “simply” has simply gone out of fashion in its true meaning, I think we should simply ban its use. Period.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels.com

Photo by lil artsy on Pexels.com

Corn on the Cob

Doing the Dishes

The Self-Made Man

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Plans for US; Some GRUesome

The Last Gleam of Twilight

I made a mistake; here’s what you can do to fix it!

23 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in America, design rationale, HCI, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

banking, banks., customer service, photography, politics, UX

Recovering from recently moved across the country, fixing up our new house, dealing with a huge moving van fire, health and family issues, I found myself with 45 seconds of uncommitted time, so I was **thrilled** to get a wonderful form letter from American Express informing me that a credit card I had cancelled about five years ago nonetheless had been compromised and it was up to me to take a series of time-consuming steps. At last!! Something to do!! How thoughtful! If all goes well, this would not only eat up the 45 seconds of free time but about 45 additional days. Of course, all of these steps require either going on-line or calling an 800 number so we KNOW that all will NOT go well. Going to a website generally means getting an account with a user name and email address. These may be the same or different depending on the site. You can pretty much bet PeterSIronwood and Peter Ironwood and PIronwood are already taken so I will end up with some completely impossible to recall username like IPeterIWoodIS437. Of course, I can regenerate my username by merely answering three simple security questions such as, “What is your favorite movie star?” I don’t know. Or, worse, it changes from day to day. Maybe the people who made up these security questions have a favorite movie star that they keep constant for their entire 23 year lives. But I don’t. “Where did you grow up?” What makes you think I grew up? And, what makes you sure it was in one place? And, even if it was in one place, which is the exact spelling I used last time: “SanDiego”, “San Diego”, “San_Diego”, “San Diego, CA”, “San Diego, California”, “California”, “SoCal”, etc. etc. Of course, I could take the OTHER route and call an 800 number. “We’re sorry. All of our agents are helping other customers. Due to unusual call volumes, your call may take longer to answer than usual. Your estimated wait time is 5.5 centuries. But meanwhile, you can listen to really loud, really repetitious, soul-sucking low-fidelity music. This century’s selection is entitled, “The Dementor’s Theme Song.” You know what? If YOU screw up YOU fix it! Don’t impose on ME to fix it.

The Walkabout Diaries

The First Ring of Empathy

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

Essays on America: The Game

Where does your Loyalty Lie?

Interview with a Giant Slug

As Gold as it Gets

The Opportunity of Disaster

22 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in essay, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

art, Customer experience, customer service, customerexperience, Design, HCI, humanfactors, userexperience, UX

After moving from Westchester County New York to the San Diego area, we were asleep (again) on an air mattress awaiting almost all of our material possessions to arrive the next day. We were awakened by a call from our moving company that our things would not be arriving tomorrow morning as promised. Or ever. Indeed, our furniture, clothes, electronics, papers, photographs, paintings, kitchenware, bedding, etc. had all been destroyed in a truck fire near Albuquerque, New Mexico. This was something of a disaster for us, and, from a positive “customer experience” standpoint, a disaster for the moving company.

But the point of this post is to point out that in this disaster, there is an opportunity for the moving company to be proactive and excellent and greatly ameliorate or even turn around this customer service disaster. They could, for example, send us a personal apology. They could be in constant contact about the status of any remains. They could arrange for us to visit the site of the fire at their expense. They could arrange to quickly reimburse us at least for the full amount of our insurance with the moving company so that we could get on with our lives as best we could. Obviously, photo albums, the drawings my kids made, letters from friends, my grandfather’s paintings, and souvenirs from a lifetime of travel could not really be replaced. But what *could* be replaced needed to be so quickly. And, given that we were in a somewhat vulnerable state, this disaster really offered an opportunity for the company to provide the very best customer service they possibly could under the circumstances.

That was the opportunity. What did they do instead? They basically refused to communicate with us. At every opportunity, they balked; did not answer emails; did not answer phone calls; did not offer reimbursement. As we found out later, they did not even pay the towing company who moved their van off the Interstate. Instead, they focused on how to limit their potential liability by withholding as much information as humanly possible. They refused to let us even come to the site and examine our stuff. We found out the day before, thanks to our insurance company, that we would be able to see our stuff on Friday if we flew to Albuquerque and rented a car to drive to Continental Divide. There we discovered the charred remains of our things. And, we discovered that nothing had been done for an entire month to protect our things (or those of the other two ex-patrons who shared the misfortune of choosing this moving company). What was left of our clothes, photos, furniture, etc. was all open to rain, wind, and passersby for over a month.

Continental Divide is a fitting metaphor for the choice that a company faces when they make a BIG mistake. They can admit the mistake and do everything in their power to make it right to the customer. Or, they can do everything in their power to continue to screw the customer in order to save costs, face, and limit liability.

Of course, the same choice also faces government. Any government will make mistakes. But then what? Do they admit those mistakes and try to ameliorate the damage? Or, do they deny, minimize, lie, obfuscate, point fingers elsewhere?

————

Try the Truth

The Truth Train

Dick-Taters

The Last Gleam of Twilight

Come to the Light Side

Cancer Always Loses in the End

Dance of Billions

You Bet Your Life

Wednesday

Where is the door?

21 Sunday Sep 2025

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Pattern Language., architecture, Christopher Alexander., Customer experience, Design, HCI, history, photography, Travel, userexperience, UX

Symmetry is often a really nice thing. I like snowflakes as much as anyone. So long as no more than three gather at any one time.

And, I suppose that making a building with four identical sides probably saves marginally on costs. Maybe.

But if you really care about the “customer experience” wouldn’t it be nice if the customer can figure out how to enter your building? I mean, enter it without walking the perimeter a few times. Especially if it is raining, or sleeting, or boiling hot, or dark. There is a variant on this which is popular with convention centers. They are required by law, I guess, to have approximately 480 doors or more. However, typically, all but one or two of these are locked.

Perhaps an argument could be made that making the entrance to a building difficult to detect adds to security. I seriously doubt it. A determined burglar could find out by trial and error or observation where the door is. That burglar has plenty of time because you see, being a burglar is how they make their living. But not so your customer. Much as you would love to *think* that your customer has nothing better to do than circle your establishment trying to find a way in, they do, in reality, have better things to do.

Recently, I had occasion to visit Paris. Do you have any trouble finding the doors in the building shown? Last year was the 850th birthday for Notre Dame. So, having an entrance which is distinctly visible from a distance as an entrance, we would have to say is a *solved problem*, n’est pas? Check out Pattern 110, Main Entrance, in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.