0:09 Hey guys, welcome back. You're listening to the second part of last week's episode.
Let's jump back in. It's we were joking that like I've been using xmR charts in my coaching practice, after using them quite a bit, just in my personal, you know, weekly journaling and stuff, right? And I do feel like there's some, there's, like a pro, there's a the, a level to it that is profound, right? Like, it's, I mean, like it teaches you something about the world and the way that the Universe works, right? And it's, it's almost like, you think about, like Einstein would always write about, like, oh, you know, you're doing math, and you feel, you know, the weaving of the universe's design. And I was like, I don't know. I hate math, like, I don't get that right. But it does feel like it's like, oh, I'm I can kind of sense this, like underlying structure to things, which is really, really fun. And, you know, it's funny, I found, you know, I was reading your posts around the same time that I was getting super fascinated by psychoanalysis. So I was reading Freud, and I was reading Lacan, and I was reading all these things are like none of that. There's no math in any of this, although Lacan famously tries to do math. I'm sorry.
Anyway, it does matter. But the idea of you start with this highly structured statistical thing, and from that, it slowly transitions into this more unconscious human element to it right where you know we were joking about like you, kind of in your day to day life, but this deeper truth of not every drop in my performance as a person, As a father, as a whatever is something that I have to agonize over. And, oh, yeah, not every win, not every day where I'm just killing it means that I can now expect to kill it every single day, right? Yep. Like, I've been this true. I've been doing really amazing on my diet plan. Lost like three or four pounds over the last month. Feel really good about that. Yesterday, I was depressed, and my wife and I ordered Taco Bell and a piece of cake. And you know, it wasn't a great moment in the dietary, you know, chart, xmR chart, in my life. But I also know there are ups and downs. That's the truth of being a biological thing, right? Like there are, so it gives you almost a sense of composure about life that I don't know, man, I feel like there's a self help book in here. You know what I mean? Like there's, there's
2:52 100% Yeah, so like after, after this you should go read making sense of Deming. Deming is, I write in the intro to that essay, that Deming is more it is more accurate to call him not a statistician, although he was a statistician, and the XML charts is built on some very advanced stats, which we don't have to talk about because whatever, if you're listening to this, you want to improve your business. He is actually a business philosopher, because 100% and the essay that I write, which is designed to make sure that you don't have to read his books because his books are quite hard to read. It goes from least controversial opinion to most controversial opinion, or rather, least controversial implication of this new understanding of variation that I know you have, that I have, right and most controversial. Let me give you the most traversal one right now, right measuring people and ranking them in schools and in organizations, in companies like sales, sales awards is useless, is dumb, because your exact ranking in the in the grades and your position in your class, right, is routine variation. So what if this semester you are position number 14 in class, and last semester you were seven, it could be routine variation, right, you know.
And so he said that if you try to measure human beings and rank them, position one, position two, position three, position four, right? Well, it is actually fundamentally unfair. And instead, people should not evaluate employees, evaluate students based on ranking, but instead you should dump them into buckets, into three buckets, exceptional variation above routine variation, routine variation and exceptional variation below routine variation. If you are below, you know you're below routine variation, you should be subjected to training or, you know, performance improvement plan, and maybe you need to be fired. If you are exceptional variation above routine variation. That means you're exceptional. People should you should be yes, you should be praised. You should be given a bonus, but you should also be studied to sort of see, like, hey, what? What do you do differently from everybody else? Can we? Can the organization learn from you? But if you are routine variation in the bulk of people will be the performance will be in routine variation, right? You should not be rewarded or punished.
Should commend to anybody else inside that ban, you should just be paid the same and then Deming sort of argued you should be paid based on your scenario, like, how many years have you spent in the company? Which is wild, right? Because your performance is not your responsibility alone. It is also routine variation. It is also the routine variation of the systems that you're depending is routine variation of the environment around you, right? And so this is why. And so like, this is why Japanese companies, for example, apart from the social political reforms after World War Two, right? They are a lot more amenable to if you are routine variation, you will be given a bonus based on your number of years and your loyalty to the company, because we want to reward you for sticking around. And you're you know, you have a lot of tacit knowledge about how the company works and the company culture, and we also reward you if you make an improvement, no matter how small the improvement is. And then what happens is that you will not feel as if you are Demings. Whole thing is that you will feel very disheartened and discourage if your position in the company and your position in your classroom is random, which is what routine variation is? Yeah, because there's no link between your efforts and your results. And so therefore this will be psychologically healthier for everybody who works in a company, while still being able to sort of say, people who perform above routine variation, they are exceptional.
To the positive end, we reward them. We still recognize that such people exist, and we reward them, right? But at the same time, we don't punish people for jiggling up and down on the sales ranking. So this is one of the profound things that sort of damning after really understanding routine, exceptional variation, right? He wrote about this, and he I joke to you that a lot of his books have this quality of old man yelling at Cloud, and the reason was because he was so old and nobody listened to him. And he had this profound secret that he held that had transformed an entire country, right, in Japan, right, and nobody will listen to him.
6:56 And so funny man, like, it's, it's, I think it really profoundly bumps against, I don't know what you want to call it, but like a sort of default mode of human perception of the world. If we perceive an effect in the world, we immediately say, what was the cause of that? Right? And that's a thing that we don't even know that. We do. We just tie something that we assume is the cause to the effect. And so saying to someone like, you know, we're not saying, like, about variability, that there is no cause, simply that the cause is so complex and distal, you're never going to know what it was. And it's a million different things. It's multi factorial and all that stuff. So, like, it doesn't even matter, it's just gonna go like this, and so you can kind of let go of the need to explain it. I think that that's a that's a jump for a lot of people, right? Yep. I was curious about you. Had you ever read or gotten into general semantics? Nope. Okay.
8:02 What is that? Well, man, okay, so general semantics, there's this guy, Alfred Corby. He where, I think that's how you pronounce it, like it's a Polish name. He was around in 50s through 70s, something like that. I couldn't be getting the date wrong. And he had this like philosophy, called General Semantics. But in his his biggest, sort of most impactful book is this book that was called Science insanity. So he's writing from a kind of science point of view. He's writing for people involved in science or whatever. COVID skis. Most famous quote is, the map is not the territory. That's the one that evolves. And so he would say, like he had this whole idea of, we are profoundly misled by saying things are a certain way. Like he had this whole thing about, like, the word is, he's like, nothing is anything, because that it makes it static, when in actuality, there is up and down, and Corbin skis kind of followers and people have kept his kind of philosophies going. They actually developed a a something called E prime, which is a form of English that has no is like verb, so you're not allowed to say anything. Is anything which is really funny, but corn Bucha had all these things that he would say would help you sort of more accurately perceive the world. And one of the things that he would, he would do is say you're not allowed to say, like, Cedric. So, for example, let's say I talked to someone and they they said, like, oh, what Cedric? Like? And I'd be like, oh yeah.
Like, you super cheery, you know, great conversationalist. Or I'm not allowed to say that, because Cedric, as a concept, hides all this variation in your personality. So what I'm supposed to say, like in writing, for example, I could say Cedric, and then as, like, a little, you know, exponent, I would put the date that I talked to you. So it's like Cedric on october 25 at this time, because I'm what I'm really saying is, here's what you know, it this little moment, right? Anyway, corpus case comes, it comes at this kind of idea from a completely different point of view from Deming. But like when I read, I read corpus key this year, and I was like, there's a lot of overlap there. It's like people trying to say that there's so much variation in things. And corobis thing particularly, is like, when you label it, you sort of forget that things change, right? Oh yeah. It's a really interesting guy. Science and sanity is sort of like Deming. It's a, it's like a 900 page, oh, God, you know, but you can read, you just Google it, no Wikipedia, you'll be fine anyway. But
10:47 this topic, yeah, this topic is 100% in my wheelhouse. This is the main thing that I'm trying to communicate in Comic Con. I think you can tell, you can probably tell, like reading, like business is not one thing. It is many things, and it's trying to, how do I put this in simple terms that so we won't drag too long. Business consists of concepts, and we can talk about those concepts, right? But we have to remember that the concepts point to something like, again, it's the whole map. Is not a territory. Thing like MBA, programs in particular, like to talk about maps. They spend all their days talking about maps. They talk about frameworks. They put frameworks on slides. They charge $200,000 for the framework. But like, this is very difficult for me to communicate, and in many ways, like it's something that I've been it's like the sort of in the water and common cog in my writing, but you want to figure out what reality really is, and reality and we but we have no choice but to resort to these abstractions. And this, these lousy concepts, this, these weak English words that we use to communicate what the actual concepts are right, where what the concept actually is in the real world, way instantiates can be very different from situation to situation. I guess that's one way to sort of capture it. This is 100% an obsession of mine, and it's really important when we you're using data right? Because a data is an abstraction, a metric is an extract, an abstraction, right?
And people can forget, right? I'm sure somebody listening to this will be thinking about, Oh, you know, what? About good hearts law? Well, you should probably go to COVID COG and read this whole essay about good hearts law. It turns out that good hearts law is not useful. It turns out that this body of this, this body of work by people using techniques 100 years ago and put the practice 50 years ago during World Two day and worked out how to defeat good hearts law. There is an answer to this, just because you don't know about it, and can quote good arts law because you read about it on Wikipedia. What someday it doesn't give you any like, go, go do some research. It's it's not solved per se, but there are ways to deal with it that is more productive. And good arts law stems from a fundamental sort of misunderstanding, that the metric is the thing, right? Whereas a metric is fundamentally just a string of numbers measured in some way, thrown off by some real world process. And you can never forget that the real world process is the thing that matters, not the numbers that you're looking at that tells you something about the process, right? And that's another sort of, like, really subtle thing that xmR charts sort of communicate to you, right? Maybe one thing that's not so obvious, if people are listening to this, is that, you know, we've talked about how XML charts are just like able to separate signal from noise, and that you can use XML. Once you can separate signal from noise, you can do trial and error, and you can actually improve. But one thing that sort of falls out from this as well is that XML charts come with a built in recommendation for improvement, right?
They say that if you see exceptional variation in a process, right? Your job is to investigate, figure out what caused that exceptional variation. If it's bad, remove it. If it's good, see if you can replicate it. But if you see a chart that is, you know completely, they call it Wheeler calls it predictable, which means there's no exceptional variation. Everything is wiggling within very predictably, within a certain range, which is why they say that it's predictable. You can literally, if an X amount chart sort of say it's not going to be more than this value and this value, it's just going to wiggle between these two lines, right? If you see that, then the solution is to completely rethink the underlying process, completely introduce new technology, change the way you hire people, change the way you sort of do the workflow of that process. And if you think about it, right? This, this very simple set of recommendations, it's quite profound, because the default way that people approach improvement is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Don't, don't change it, don't fundamentally rethink it. But if it's broken, if
14:34 it's like, or the tiniest, the tiniest, little like, I'm gonna the button, the buttons orange, and I'm gonna make it lightly, darker orange, and I'm gonna see this is one of my favorite things, because it's totally counterintuitive. Yeah, please continue. Yeah, yeah, so
and if it's completely broken, right, like the process is not working, your sales is shit, or, like your marketing is not doing what it's supposed to rethink everything, scramble right, whereas XML chart. Give you a very standard sort of toolbox, very standard approach to improvement problems, which is that, is it stable or not? Is it, sorry, no, I shouldn't say stable. Is it predictable or not? Right? If it's not predictable, make it predictable first, right? Go investigate all the exceptional variation. Because the exceptional variation are signals that tell you these are things that actually impact your process. And maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing. It's a bad thing. Maybe you need to, like, redesign the process to get rid of it. Okay, now it's predictable. Now you can start improving it.
And the way you improve it is either you change, you fundamentally rethink the process, so that you tighten the variation bounds, so it wiggles, so you want to tighten the wiggling so that it doesn't wiggle too much, or you move. You shift the entire range of wiggling up or down, right, depending on whether up or down is good. And the standard recommendation also is that you want to tighten the variation first. If you can in manufacturing, it's possible in most businesses, in various business metrics, it might not be possible before you shift it, because then it's easier to see that you've shift something with tighter wiggling right. So this in itself, is remarkable, because now every time you look at a metric, if you can put it on XML chart, you immediately know what to do to improve it, right? That's so much better than when you open a Google Analytics dashboard and you're looking at a wiggling traffic chart and you're like, What do I do? Is this good, or is it bad? Like, yeah. How do I make it better?
16:17 Or, yeah, let me look at like, the last 90 days or something, right? Because then you're like, oh, it's kind of good, but then it's like, it's already passed, it's already over. You can't, you know, there's nothing to do about it. You sort of come to that problem way too late. Yeah. So if you go, by the way, if you're listening to this, and you go to xml.com the articles have lots of examples of real charts taken from common cog right, where we've successfully changed some process. So I recently reorged The members forum, and all the metrics have like changed to a different process. Right? When we launched the Common Core case library, which is a library of business cases, in November, the average session duration shifted to a completely different process, right? It shot up, and it stayed stable at a higher range of variation. It wiggled at a higher average number. And once you see this, right, you cannot unsee it. It's it's on an XML chart. It just leaps out at you, whereas, if you're looking at a wiggling chart, that whipsaws right. It's very hard to sort of see at which point it actually change, which means it's very hard to sort of investigate and say what actually changed in that week. So, so if you're listening to this and you run a business goal, please for the love of God, try to look at some of your metrics on that XML chart.
17:33 You know the headline on the website has to say, please, for the love, for the love of God, use this chart. I told a data guy, right, like, about this, and, you know, like, and, and one, one year later I came, he came back, and more people had paid attention to it, and more people and I just had not stopped, shut in. I couldn't shut up about it. He thought I would give up after a year. It's like, wow, you know, you've really milked this one chart. I was like, yeah. It's like, well, it's like, yeah, you, you, you don't, you know, don't undercut my level of obsession about this one. I mean, it look, it's, it's been, it's been true for me, right? Like I've often found this and business, it's particularly clear that, like, if you spend enough time with any subject, right, and you just keep scraping at it, you sort of end up in a place where it's a microcosm of the entire universe, right? Like it the deeper you go on a subject, the more sort of abstract, the sort of broader, the sort of basic principles become, and the more you kind of learn about, you know, so you you end up studying golf, and you get deep enough into golf, and you're talking about psychology, and, you know, it's really true, you're right. And it's this, this, it's so true. We laugh because it's like, well, it's one chart. It's like, such a nerdy pocket protector thing to be passionate about. But like you said, what we're really talking about is, how do you make things better?
How do you make things better in a scientific way, in a way that's not guessing, it's not based on your religion or whatever dog I mean, your business religion, right? Like, well, this is how you improve things, or this is what works. Or, you know, direct mail is the only way to get, for me to get clients, like, whatever your dogma is, right? It doesn't matter. It's about studying reality. And I always say this to people, like, I am not a spiritual person. I'm really not like I'm very practical, but like, the closest I get to a kind of spiritual belief is I want to have as direct as possible a connection to reality, like I want to, you know if someone's gonna let me Pierce. The veil. I want to pierce the veil. Right? If someone's like, you can pull the trigger and get out of the matrix, and it's going to suck. You're going to be in a vat of goo, and it's going to be terrible. I'd be like, push the button, right? I want that right? And this is that it is a way out of the matrix in, like, a really profound way, but it'll help you make money in the short run. And if that's what gets people into the thing, go and use the chart, right? Go and use the chart. It's very powerful, yes.
20:26 And like, oh, I can keep going on. Like, there's a long history of people businesses that have made billions of dollars just using the chart and teaching the chart. And I think the thing, the reason why it's so ridiculous. It's the same reason why it's so affected. It's so simple. When I listen to data professionals talking about all these fancy ass AB testing, statistical significance or correlation analysis, I'm like, you know, normal people can't do that. What can normal people do? Normal people can do trial and error. We learn how to do trial and error when we were learning to talk, learning to walk, right? So if you give them the ability to separate signal from noise in wiggling metrics, suddenly you give them back their ability to improve, which anybody, if they are, if they know how to do this, will be able to improve, because that's how they learn to walk in the first place. And that's, I think, the real power of these ideas. They are simple enough to be able to spread and be used by anybody, including people on the factory floor. And they're complex enough to actually cut through the messiness of statistical reality, which is that there's randomness and variation all around us. And that's the that's the beautiful thing, right? And on that thing where you said you're very practical, and you want people to just improve things. It's fundamentally just a way to improve things, right? That means, favorite question was, how would you know you propose an improvement?
How would you know that it's worked, or in our world, right? In the world of business today, it was true as well during Demings time, but it's especially true today, given YouTube, given social media, right? Somebody will come up with some set of ideas, some sort of best practices. There are fads in the business world, right? Like the most recent fat, I think it's like, OKRs or something, right? Which John Doe door can pronounce his name, John Doe, I think it was, wrote a book and like it's spread through Andy Grove because Google did it. Everybody wants to try to implement OKRs, right? And back in that means day he would be like, how would you know it will work? Right? It worked for that company, in that context, in that industry. How do you know it works for your dinky little 20% company? You should measure. You should say, Oh, if we adopt this set of best practices, whether it's agile, whatever the management fad du jour is, what set of metrics do you expect to see changes in and how long do you expect those changes to show up before you expect those changes to show up? You pre register that, write it down on a piece of paper or Google Docs, whatever, and then go execute and see if it actually results in a change using an XML chart. Then you cannot lie to yourself. And maybe the best practice doesn't work for you. It works for Google, but it doesn't work for you. So he, he's his whole thing is like, how would you know before you chase up the management fad and get distracted, go and check and you know, that's piercing the veil. Basically, it's
23:14 such a profound thing, because I had this conversation with someone the other day. They were, they are not my client in the Google Ads world, right? They're a friend, and they use a competitor, which does, doesn't bother me at all, right? But so we're talking about that. I'm like, yeah, they're a great company. And he's saying, yeah, they use this new technique. They have this technique that they use, and it seems to be working for everybody. That's not working for us. And I said, Well, how do you how do you know that it's working for everybody? Just like, well, they have a ton of testimonials, right? And I said, you know, it's like, if they have 100 clients, and they have this secret technique, and it works, not at all. Probably at least 10 of those clients are going to have success randomly, and they'll get testimonials for it, right? It is so easy for us to be misled about what works. I always get into this, this, this like another rabbit hole, but it's like, I remember reading this thing about how chickens will develop superstitions because they'll scratch a certain way in the dirt, and then someone will come and feed them. And in their chicken brain, a chicken's brain, their brain is like, scratch a certain way means food, and they create, literally, like a little Bayesian probability thing. And maybe the next day, they scratch the same way, and the food comes and they're like, oh my god, absolutely scratching that way gets me food. And they will believe that as chickens, right?
They will do that every single day, scratch certain way to try to get the food. And they think those things are it's so easy for us to do that, having a way of just being able to cut through that and saying what really works for me, right? Is such a powerful and profound thing. Well, let me ask you, Cedric, because I know it's light where you are, and I don't give you, like, a million, million hours, because I will literally talk your ears off about xmR charts until you pass out. But I want to ask for people who are listening to this. I mean, obviously xmR, it.com xmR, it.com is the place to go. You can also find the metrics master class there, which, by the way, I took it, is so incredible. Go use the chart. But if you think you are going to, if you get value out of this chart, use it for a while. It's so easy to figure out. There's a whole documentation on zemerit That's very, very clear. But if you want to make this a bigger part of your life, metrics master class is the easiest and most straightforward way of doing I've been using the charts for got to be over a year now, I learned so much from the class. It was so useful. I was like, Oh my God. I really understood how to move the limits and everything. It just incredible value. So highly recommend that everybody go check that out. But I am curious for you, Cedric, what is your goal? If I said, Cedric, 10 years from now, your dream goal for xemra.com what would it
26:13 be? I want every business intelligence tool or data tool to use or steal the user interface paradigms that we figured out through user testing and building this tool, and build it into their tool, and have these, these sets of ideas, be widespread. And you know, it will be a bit of a pipe dream, but it will be kind of magical if, say, high schools would teach these ideas. And so if we could do that, that will be incredible, because members of my team, first of all, they're blown away by this journey. So a lot of things that you learn in the metrics master class, we learn the hard way by making mistakes and reading statistical papers. So we've done all that work so you don't have to which I appreciate very much. Thank you very much.
26:56 But you know, they're like, Why were we not taught these things in high school. These ideas are very simple, and maybe you don't have to go into the full stats, which you know, most business people, when using these charts don't actually go into the full stats, right? But if you had taught this to us in high school, we could have approached business and life very differently. I think fundamentally, most of us, me, you, anybody who's running a business who's listening to this, we have sort of internalized this idea that you can never truly understand your business, that you're at at the heart of your business is the black box, and that you know you do some set of things that seem to work, and every year, your revenue goes up, and your fear is that you don't truly understand your business. And one day, something happens in the world, and then your business no longer grows, and then you don't know why, and you don't know how to fix it, because you don't even know why it worked in the first place. That's the fear that I had, and that's the fear that a lot of people working with me right, like I have a team, and they have had prior business experience as well.
One of them said, for the first time I actually see feel like I understand how a business works, end to end. And we every day, we not every day, but every week. We learn something new about the business. Oh, okay, this lever has stopped working. Ah, this lever has, you know, this lever works for getting whatever it is, more revenues, more members, more newsletter subscribers. This is a it's like a drug. It feels like a rush, this feeling that your business is not a black box and you totally can understand, maybe not 100% but at a level that you never expected to be possible. So I want that for everyone. I wish that people understood that you can run your business in this way and some of the downstream sort of what Amazon did with these simple ideas is astounding, right? If you want, maybe you, I think Dan, you add the link to the wbr essay. It's a fairly long essay. It's like 10,000 words, and maybe you shouldn't read it until you you've started using the XML charts in practice. But once you do, once you understand these ideas that Dan and I are talking about. You've had this experience where you actually understand your business. You will read the wbr and say, and go, Oh, that's logical. Of course, you would do something like that. And then you will start iterating your practices in your company to be a bit more like the wbr, which, by the way, Amazon uses to run a multi billion dollar multi, you know, multi regional, multi country, and there's so many lines of business, so it's a superpower when you're able to do this, because the ideas taken to the extreme leads to incredible outcomes. Well,
29:28 Cedric chin, I cannot tell you, man, how much I was looking forward to this conversation. You completely over delivered for those who are listening, obviously common. Cog.com you should go and read it is my opinion, probably the best business blog you could possibly read. You've also got xemrit.com, xmR, it.com you can go there right now without logging in. You don't need to pay anything. You can paste your own data and start playing around with xmR charts. It is magic, of course. Metrics masterclass. You. Can get there as well. Cedric, Is there anywhere else that you want people to follow you, like on social media or anything like that? No, I think that's good enough. Sign up for the newsletters on any of these things. I think Xamarin has a free Yep, Xamarin has a free email course, which gets you started immediately on the ideas of using XML charts and gives you a taste as well some of the things that you get in the metrics masterclass. Go sign up for that, right? And then, and then, please, for the love of God, put your business metrics on an xmR chart.
30:27 All right, I am. So here's what you could steal. You could steal this. If you don't steal it, I'm going to use it. So, just telling you so. So please, for the love of God, put your business metrics on this chart. Is the funniest possible title for, like, a courser video. So I might steal that one. The other one is, like, I wrote it down. I was like, you know, it's caught. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna try to teach, like, a workshop on xmR or something. And we call it opening the black box. Open the black box, right? It's like, look, I love that metaphor, Cedric chin, man, thank you so much for being on the podcast, dude. I cannot tell you how valuable it was and how much I appreciate your time. So thank you so much. Thank you all right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode. I hope you got a ton out of it. I could not tell you how excited I was to fanboy over Cedric in this interview, and I had a ton of fun. So thank you so much to Cedric for coming on. Really was an honor. You should definitely head over to zemrit.com check out the metrics master class and everything they have going on over there. I am a very, very happy user and customer of both of those things, so I highly recommend them. And of course, you can check out my blog.
This is where this podcast is coming from. It's better questions.co that is better questions.co. Every week I'm just writing about the stuff that I'm learning, the stuff that I'm reading, and sharing the best of what I find. So if that's interesting to you, whether you're interested in business or philosophy or life, or you want to just get into the weeds on whatever subject I'm obsessing about this week, head over to better questions.co. You can subscribe to get those easily in your email inbox. It's one email a week. Look, this was the very first interview episode of this podcast, and like anything new, you never know how it's going to go. But the last podcast that I was on I ran for many, many years, and I am so looking forward to this one. So I just want to say literally, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, if you are listening to this, thank you. Check out the other episodes. Check out what we have going on. But just thank you for giving me some of your time. I hope I've used it well, and I will promise you my only goal with this podcast is to dig into the most fascinating subjects and people I can possibly get my greeting little hands on and share that with you. So I hope you are looking forward to nerding out with me from now and into the future, and I will see you next week. Cheers. You.
