Doug Engelbart

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This is a Work-In-Progress. Feel free to edit!

Doug Engelbart is the reason I'm in the business I'm in. He was my hero and mentor, and he set me on this life course of improving collaboration because of his intellect and his friendship.

We first met in 1998, and I started working with him in 2000. I spent two intense years learning from and working with him, and was inspired to set down this career path as a result of that time. In 2006, he got an NSF grant for his HyperScope project, which he asked me to lead.

Doug passed away in 2013. I wrote this personal tribute for him, as well as a more professional tribute that summarized my views on his contributions to the world.

I've compiled some recommended readings on Doug's ideas. I've tried to encapsulate some of the more concrete things I learned from Doug below.

Lessons Learned

Doing good as a life's pursuit is an acceptable career choice. As crazy as it might sound, I never really understood this before meeting Doug in my early 20s. As it turns out, it was the permission I was seeking at the time to pursue what I considered meaningful. I am so grateful to have had clear, guiding purpose for myself since 2000 as a result of my time with Doug. It has made a world of difference in navigating a tremendous amount of difficulty and uncertainty over the years.

Everybody is people. Doug treated everybody he met exactly the same — with curiosity and kindness. He had zero traces of pretension or arrogance, and he was unconcerned with traditional notions of status. He knew he could learn something from anyone, and he did. His lab in the 1950s and 1960s (the Augmentation Research Center) was 50 percent women, which is practically unheard of even a half century later. He didn't beat his chest about stuff like that, because it seemed totally obvious to him.

Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean you're doing it. Most of Doug's ideas are deceptively obvious. It's what makes them compelling the first time you hear them, but it also makes them easy to take for granted when it comes to execution. In my early years with him, I would constantly find myself saying, "Yeah, yeah, of course that's the case," then realize afterward that, even though I understood what he was saying intellectually, I wasn't actually doing it.

Doug always used to say that he was handicapped, like a color-blind person. He didn't see the world the way others saw it, but the handicap left his other senses heightened. I think that was very true. Everyone is easily capable of seeing what he saw, but the rest of us are often distracted by other noise.

The urgent necessity of collaboration. The whole framing of my mission (i.e. "faster than 20") is lifted from his observation that problems are scaling faster than our ability to solve them. He observed this in 1950, and it acted as his North Star from that point forward, which he followed with clarity and consistency.

Think big, then think bigger. My all-time favorite Doug slides are what I like to refer to as his "whale" slides. They depict so clearly how we hold ourselves back from truly thinking big. Thinking big is what enabled Doug to do big things.

Doug first demonstrated the mouse, graphical user interfaces, outliners, hypertext, networked computing, etc. in his 1968 Mother of All Demos. Most of these technologies did not see mass acceptance until 20-30 years later. On the one hand, you could look at this and say that Doug was 20-30 years ahead of his time. On the other hand, you could also attribute this to the clarity and urgency of his North Star. It's one thing to see this coming, it's another thing to act with urgency so far in advance. (In California, we've all known that "The Big One" is coming for decades. How many of us act with urgency in terms of our individual preparation? How effectively have we collectively prepared?)

In some ways, this speaks to the tremendous flaw in how we traditionally do visioning and scenario thinking. What good is it to think about these things if we don't actually live into them? On the other hand, it's critical to have the proper amount of perspective and compassion about this. Even if we're living into these things, they are so challenging and overwhelming, and they are so dependent on so many things, failure is a certainty. The goal, ultimately, is to reduce our failure rate and to iterate fast enough to realize the benefits.

Even if we are successful in doing that in practice, it's tremendously difficult to recognize that we are doing this successfully in practice because of cognitive bias. Great baseball players strike out 7 out of 10 times. Terrible baseball players strike out 8 out of 10 times. Do you have the self-awareness and structures in place to help you see and navigate the difference?

Continuous improvement. Improving at improvement.

Collective intelligence = ability to learn and adapt.

Dynamic Knowledge Repository. Specifically, role of artifact / "knowledge product." Doesn't have to be digital.

Bicycle as metaphor for performance. Expert-oriented tools. Co-evolution.

Depression and stubbornness. How you evaluate success. Emotional honesty. Rubber band blog post.

Importance of language.

Don't confuse binary concept with quality of execution.