CFAR!Duncan

Prerequisite: Hamming questions Purpose What is a Hamming circle for? What does it do? A Hamming circle is a tool/process for making some kind of progress on some large, significant bottleneck. This is slightly vague, because Hamming circles are versatile. Participants at CFAR workshops have brought, into their Hamming circles,...

80-20 To “80-20” something is to obtain most of the result (80%) with only a small proportion of the work (20%). This expression originates with the Pareto principle which states that for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes (e.g. most of a com- pany’s...

Author's note: these questions were usually the prework for an activity called "Hamming Circles," in which four or five people sat down and spent 20-30 minutes with each person's Hamming Question at the center of a slow, intimate discussion. The Hamming Circles activity is not fully described in this sequence,...

Prompt 0: Think about the way computer programmers talk about “bugs” in the program, or “feature requests” that would make a given app or game much better. Bugs are things-that-are-bad: frustrations, irritations, frictions, problems. Feature requests are things-that-could-be-great: opportunities, possibilities, new systems or abilities. Write down as many “bugs” and...

Author's note: This was originally included in the flash class section and has been broken out on advice from readers, to be placed at the front of the handbook. It was usually a full class at the start of the workshop, and was in the flash class section merely because...

Pendulums > "Remember back when we used to talk about pendulums too little?" One excellent, quick-and-dirty models of social change is the mental image of a pendulum swinging back and forth around a central resting point. Imagine that the pendulum is “stuck” at some point. For instance, in many parts...

Area Under The Curve People often try to maximize. They’ll track their productivity, and try to get the number as high as possible. They’ll look at the amount of weight they can lift, and try to push the envelope. They’ll seek out more and more and more of whatever particular...