Similarly, Progressive Summarisation’s contribution is to take the lean manufacturing notion of ‘muda’ and apply that to knowledge work.
In the Toyota system, unused inventory is waste.
In PS, the underlying principle seems to be “over-eager summarisation is waste”.
Conversation
There are other aspects of PS that appeal viscerally to me. observed that knowledge work is bizarrely artisanal: each new project demands a complete working from scratch. You are unable to reuse packets of information from previous projects.
This is muda.
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If you grok this principle, then you become less tied overall to the trappings of PS.
The goal isn’t: “oh, how do I follow the step-by-step highlight then bold then notes then headnotes then integrative piece” … it is “how do I remove muda in my knowledge work.”
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It’s also important to understand the origin stories of things.
Toyota’s system was built around the realities of the post-war Japanese economy.
Tiago’s methods has its roots in his history in boutique management consulting.
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Management consulting projects are hugely wasteful knowledge work efforts.
There are often huge overlaps between one client to another. But without a system for forwarding packets of information into the future, difficult to reuse insights or detritus from prior projects.
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Tiago’s work coincided with dealing with a mysterious illness.
Managing said illness is similar to the knowledge management problem in consulting: there are often months between dr consults. You want to have a way to forward research packets in time.
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All of this is publicly known. See: fortelabs.co/blog/the-story
Once you understand this context, criticism like “PS is bad for thinking” appear silly.
That’s not the goal. That’s like saying “the Toyota Production System is bad at making art.”
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The goal of PS is to reduce the waste of constantly going back to source material.
You don’t want to do over-eager summarisation. But you also don’t want to do too little, which means you would have to go back and reread the source text all over again.
That is muda.
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Why do I feel this keenly? A few years ago, I wrote a series titled A Framework for Putting Mental Models to Practice. commoncog.com/blog/a-framewo
As part of my research, I read a 600 page textbook of judgment and decision making titled Thinking and Deciding.
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I used many of its ideas in the series.
But of course, this is a TEXTBOOK. It covers everything there is to know about an entire academic subfield.
Everything from expected utility calculations to cognitive biases, to philosophical treatments in the topic.
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I used only a subset of the ideas in my series.
It’s no accident that those are the ideas I remember best.
Because I wasn’t yet doing PS, I have no ability to recall any of the other ideas in the book.
This is waste.
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I am likely going to have to reread whole sections of the book, if I want to reference it again.
It’s almost as if my earlier research never happened.
I feel those hours keenly.
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One reason I look closely at the output of productivity writers is due to stories like this.
Do they have a history of producing highly integrative, novel work, at a high enough throughput?
If they do not, it is not likely that they have ideas valuable enough to offer me.
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Now, they don’t have to be the best at this. But I immediately look for something in their prior experience that maps to the pains I feel as a knowledge worker.
Do they get the fundamental problems with what we do? Sometimes you need a large enough body of work before you do.
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And if you haven’t hit the point where you’ve read 7 books and 20 research papers for one project and you need a way to reuse all of that thinking in the future, or else you burn out, then perhaps I’ll wait until you have that lived experience before I listen to you.
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So, back to progressive summarisation: the principle here is more important than the trappings.
The principle is: reduce muda in your knowledge work.
How you achieve that, exactly, is up to you.
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But for what it’s worth, I’ve experimented a bit, and the my process sure looks a hell of a lot like ’s methods.
Which probably means that there is something fundamental to it.
/end
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