Peter Morville > Quotes

“What we find changes who we become.”
― Peter Morville

“The journey transforms the destination.”
― Peter Morville, Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

“time when learning how to learn (and unlearn) is central to success. Instead of hiding from change, let’s embrace it. Each time we try something new, we get better at getting better. Experience builds competence and confidence, so we’re ready for the big changes, like re-thinking what we do.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“We must go from boxes to arrows. Tomorrow belongs to those who connect.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“To build strength and flexibility, we should open our minds to people and ideas we don't like, and pick fights with those we do.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“The planning process includes at least the following six functions: forming a representation of the problem, choosing a goal, deciding to plan, formulating a plan, executing and monitoring the plan, and learning from the plan.[”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“My ability to help my clients was limited by our narrow focus. This was partly my fault for defining myself as a specialist, but I eventually came to see that this problem of reductionism is endemic to our culture.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“Each way of organizing has strengths and weaknesses. Taxonomy affords a view from the top, facets help us muddle through the middle, and tags build bridges at the bottom.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“research by the U.S. Marine Corps revealed “the most successful Marines were those with a strong internal locus of control – a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Librarians are on the front lines of an invisible struggle over our information diet and, for better or worse, the scales are not tipping in their direction.”
― Peter Morville, Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

“minds. As a wise woman wrote “Language as an articulation of reality is more primordial than strategy, structure, or culture.”[31]”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“In recent years, Eric Ries famously adapted Lean to solve the wicked problem of software startups: what if we build something nobody wants?[ 41] He advocates use of a minimum viable product (“ MVP”) as the hub of a Build-Measure-Learn loop that allows for the least expensive experiment. By selling an early version of a product or feature, we can get feedback from customers, not just about how it’s designed, but about what the market actually wants. Lean helps us find the goal. Figure 1-7. The Lean Model. Agile is a similar mindset that arose in response to frustration with the waterfall model in software development. Agilistas argue that while Big Design Up Front may be required in the contexts of manufacturing and construction where it’s costly if not impossible to make changes during or after execution, it makes no sense for software. Since requirements often change and code can be edited, the Agile Manifesto endorses flexibility. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“Figure 1-9. Four principles. To serve memory and use, I’ve arranged these principles and practices into a mnemonic –STAR FINDER. In astronomy, a “star finder” or planisphere is a map of the night sky used for learning to identify stars and constellations. In this book, it’s a guide for finding goals, finding paths, and finding your way. First, we can get better at planning by making planning more social, tangible, agile, and reflective. At each step in the design of paths and goals, ask how these four principles might help. Social. Plan with people early and often. Engage family, friends, colleagues, customers, stakeholders, and mentors in the process. When we plan together, it’s easier to get started. Also, diversity grows empathy, sharing creates buy-in, and both expand options. Tangible. Get ideas out of your head. Sketches and prototypes let us see, hear, taste, smell, touch, share, and change what we think. When we render our mental models to distributed cognition and iterative design, we realise an intelligence greater than ourselves. Agile. Plan to improvise. Clarify the extent to which the goal, path, and process are fixed or flexible. Be aware of feedback and options. Know both the plan and change must happen. Embrace adventure. Reflective. Question paths, goals, and beliefs. Start and finish with a beginner’s mind. Try experiments to test hypotheses and metrics to spot errors. Use experience and metacognition to grow wisdom.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Planning up front isn’t only about making a plan. It’s about learning, awareness, and practice; so we can identify options, understand feedback, and deal with disruption. Improvisation favors the prepared mind and body.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Design is how it works.”[”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“As an information architect, framing is a vital part of my work, but it’s not what organizations ask me to do. For example, the National Cancer Institute hired me to fix the usability of their website by reorganizing its navigation. The goal was to reduce the number of clicks from the home page to content. But I soon discovered a bigger problem. Most folks searching for answers about specific types of cancer never reached cancer.gov due to poor findability via Google. I only saw this problem because I knew how to solve it. I explained to my client that by aligning the information architecture with search engine optimization, we could improve usability and findability. Together, we were able to reframe the goals. The site went on to win awards and rise to the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“once in a while, we do need a mapmaker who takes the time to survey the system, uncover hidden paths and powerful levers, and share what they learn with the team. Sometimes the mapmaker must endure solitude in search of discovery, but much of this work is social. Our systems are mostly people, which means our expertise is useless without empathy. And so we study users and interview stakeholders, just as Donella would advise. Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened.[17] As”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“In this chapter you may have noticed and perhaps even been irritated by the inconsistent spelling of realise and realize. It’s not a mistake but a subtle gesture to surface a delicate point. Different isn’t wrong. I am British and American, and this book will be read in many countries, so neither spelling is right or wrong. When in doubt, we’re told to pick one and be consistent. But why? Is it to maintain the illusion there’s one right way? Is it because diversity is inefficient? I invite you to ask if some irregularities that irritate may also inform. Why do they cause anger? What do you fear? What might they teach?”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“The practices and artifacts of Scrum –backlogs, sprints, stand ups, increments, burn charts –reflect an understanding of the need to strike a balance between planning and improvisation, and the value of engaging the entire team in both. As we’ll see later, Agile and Lean ideas can be useful beyond their original ecosystems, but translation must be done mindfully. The history of planning from Taylor to Agile reflects a shift in the zeitgeist –the spirit of the age –from manufacturing to software that affects all aspects of work and life. In business strategy, attention has shifted from formal strategic planning to more collaborative, agile methods. In part, this is due to the clear weakness of static plans as noted by Henry Mintzberg. Plans by their very nature are designed to promote inflexibility. They are meant to establish clear direction, to impose stability on an organization… planning is built around the categories that already exist in the organization.[ 43] But the resistance to plans is also fueled by fashion. In many organizations, the aversion to anything old is palpable. Project managers have burned their Gantt charts. Everything happens emergently in Trello and Slack. And this is not all good. As the pendulum swings out of control, chaos inevitably strikes. In organizations of all shapes and sizes, the failure to fit process to context hurts people and bottom lines. It’s time to realize we can’t not plan, and there is no one best way. Defining and embracing a process is planning, and it’s vital to find your fit. That’s why I believe in planning by design. As a professional practice, design exists across contexts. People design all sorts of objects, systems, services, and experiences. While each type of design has unique tools and methods, the creative process is inspired by commonalities. Designers make ideas tangible so we can see what we think. And as Steve Jobs noted, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Framing. While common sense suggests we should start to plan by defining goals, it also helps to study the lens through which we see problems and solutions. By examining needs, wants, feelings, and beliefs, we’re better able to know and share our vision and values. Imagining. By expanding our awareness of paths and possibilities, we create choice and inform strategy. We search and research for information, then play with models to stray beyond knowledge. Sketches draw insights that help us add options and refine plans. Narrowing. After diverging, it’s critical to converge by prioritizing paths and options. This requires study of drivers, levers, estimates, and consequences, as the value of a strategy is tied to time and risk. Deciding. While decisions are often made in an instant, the process of committing to and communicating a course of action merits time and attention. Instructions are essential to the rendering of intent. Words matter. So do numbers. Define metrics for success carefully. Executing. The dichotomy between planning and doing is false. In all sorts of contexts, we plan as we travel, build, or get things done. Reflecting. While it helps to ask questions throughout the process, we should also make space to look back at the whole from the end. Long before the invention of time, people used the North Star to find their way in the dark. In the future, I hope you will use these principles and practices to make your way in the world. Figure 1-10. Principles and practices of planning.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Between perfect vision and total blindness lies all the truth we know.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,”[ 49] he was inviting us to be free.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“One day the farmer’s horse ran away. His neighbors cried “such bad luck” to which he replied “maybe.” His horse returned the next day with three wild horses. His neighbors shouted “that’s wonderful” and the old farmer replied “maybe.” The next day his son rode one of the wild horses, fell off, and broke his leg. The neighbors called it a “terrible misfortune.” The old man replied “maybe.” The day after, the army came to the village to draft young men, but the son was spared thanks to his broken leg. The neighbors said the farmer was lucky how things turned out, and the old man answered “maybe.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“Let’s say you plan to teach a class on a subject you know well. How do you begin? You might create a syllabus, then prepare lectures for each topic in the outline. But is there a better way? Remember, you enjoy access to information and aren’t limited to trial and error. Perhaps you find a book called Make It Stick about the science of successful learning and encounter another mnemonic, RIGOR, that helps you teach different and better. [71]”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.” –Jorge Luis Borges”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“Information architectures become ecosystems. When different media and different contexts are tightly intertwined, no artifact can stand as a single isolated entity. Every single artifact becomes an element in a larger ecosystem.”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

“Planning can be fun. If you hate planning, you’re doing it wrong. Plan with a friend, make a map, embrace uncertainty, daydream, and go for a walk. Our ability to imagine, organize, and invent the future is a gift. Shift procrastination into playing with planning.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“So before working to design the thing right, we must first be sure we’re designing the right thing. This calls for a process of diverging and converging twice. The “Double Diamond” asks us to discover many possible paths and goals before we define the problem and craft the plan; and then to develop and test prototypes before deciding upon and delivering the solution.[ 45] Figure 1-8. The Double Diamond. At the heart of design is our ability to model the world as it is and as it might be. This is powerful. A sketch or prototype can spark insights and change minds. Goals and vision may shift in a “now that I see it” moment. In recent years, business has begun to adapt these practices to strategy and planning under the aegis of Design Thinking. Post-its and prototypes engage our brains, bodies, colleagues, customers, and ecosystems in distributed cognition. Design helps us solve wicked problems by exploring paths and goals. And it works for individuals and teams, not just big business. In short, design is a great fit for planning, and its practices are the inspiration for this book.”
― Peter Morville, Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  – John Muir I’m”
― Peter Morville, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything