Power of Ten with Andy Polaine cover image

S3 Ep2: Abby Covert – Stuck? Diagrams Help.

Power of Ten with Andy Polaine

CHAPTER

How to Write a Book About Collaboration

In the book, you have a whole section around collaboration. I did this really fun exercise kind of in the middle of the process of writing the book where I interviewed people that signed up off my mailing list and said that they had stories of diagrams they had wrestled with. None of them are one to one with an actual story. So get out of the diagram and go live your life, make some decisions that were the reason you made that diagram. That's like fiddling with typeface and font size instead of actually writing the paper.

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Speaker 1
So get out of the
Speaker 2
diagram and go live your life, make some decisions that were the reason you made that diagram. That's like fiddling with the typeface and font size instead of actually writing the paper. So you have in the book, you have a whole section around collaboration, you've got different sort of examples, sort of example case studies, which I'm assuming are kind of drawn from real life-ish things, you know, or actually are, I don't know how kind of one to one they are
Speaker 1
or not over there. None of them are one to one with an actual story. I would say that of the eight that I would say six of them have my own experience in them, but are influenced by other people. I did this really fun exercise kind of in the middle of the process of writing the book where I interviewed people that signed up off my mailing list and said that they had stories of diagrams they had wrestled with. And I just was really fascinated in hearing like, when I say diagram, I don't even know what you think I mean, but I would love to see some examples. And I saw so much diversity of thought and form and background of the sense maker that was doing the diagram that it just, it became this thing where I was like, I had intended to do that work not to write stories, but to just kind of like get better examples to pepper throughout the book as I was talking about craft and collaboration. But the stories became the way to teach collaboration, which I think really was very effective. Like, walking through somebody's experience of making a diagram, especially somebody who doesn't actually know they're making one in many cases in the book. There's people aren't quite sure they're making diagrams at first. And then all of a sudden they are. I think that that really took all the lessons of the book and put them into the frame of exactly what we've been talking about, like the human part of like, it's going to be messy and it's going to get weird and you're going to feel strange and you're going to feel exuberant and then disappointed and all of the things. So, yeah.

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