Talking with Dani Diestre about Instituto Tramontana

Since the first conversation left us with topics to develop, we met again, this time to combine digital product and Instituto Tramontana, where I teach the product leadership and culture programme.

An enriched perspective

We talked about how Instituto Tramontana proposes that digital work professionalise itself by incorporating material from other disciplines, with particular attention to the social sciences and the humanities.

The twentieth century is the century that managed to make uncertainty operational across different fields. Economics learned to distinguish risk from uncertainty; statistics, to say something sensible about what has not been observed; industrial management, to work with variability instead of denying it; anthropology, to describe practices without reducing them to a procedure.

The ground digital work stands on is not new, and there is no reason to feel that the risk coordinates it works with are entirely unknown. It does have this odd property of behaving like an oil stain, transforming everything it touches. We should lean on what we already know in order to handle that transformation better.

The alternative — and it is what usually happens — is to badly reinvent, every five years and under a new name, what other crafts have spent a century thinking through well.

Calculating, sketching, speaking, writing

We discussed the importance I place on the four recurring, decisive actions that put our judgement in play when we lead digital product. Throughout the programme I encourage the practice of communication in all its dimensions, as a way of consolidating a voice of one's own.

When we invent in digital, we move at a very particular frequency: a few degrees above the detail, a few degrees below the concept. We sketch, calculate, speak and write at the frequency of the fat dot.

It is an uncomfortable frequency, because it offers none of the alibis of the extremes. Below it lies the detail, where you can always look rigorous without deciding anything. Above it lies the concept, where you can always look strategic without committing to anything. In the middle you have to choose, and choices show.

Digital product is complex

I explained my conviction that the impact of the digital products we build usually sits at a different level from the way we build them. We still carry around a wild kind of thinking and acting with a material we have not yet come to terms with.

It is a strange mismatch: we build artefacts that mediate the lives of millions of people using working habits that would not survive scrutiny in any other craft with comparable consequences. The programme starts from this problem and concentrates on raising the level, so that people can improve their own organisations.

The point is not to teach a method. The point is that someone leaves with judgement of their own, and with the vocabulary to defend it on Monday morning, in front of people who have not read the same things.