A Useful Model: “Mind” as a Priority Stack
Every person has a priority stack made up of constraints that they want to satisfy. It is commonly known as “their mind”. Every constraint defines an outcome with beneficiaries etc. The order of the priority stack therefore is tacitly an order of outcomes, and an order of beneficiaries. This plays out precisely in everyday life as we will see below.
When people send us motivational messages, whether it’s advertising or threats of relationship breakup, they are attempting to influence the order of our priority stack and move an unmet constraint to the “top of mind”. Being able to keep all the different needs and desires of our constituents straight requires “clarity of mind”. When someone behaves in an unpredictable way, we cannot discern their priorities and we say “their mind is hidden from us.”
“Do you mind?” means “does this action violate your priority stack and threaten a valued outcome?” “Never mind” means “Please don’t evaluate this request in terms of your priorities, there is no threat to them implied here.”
The more I think about it the more central this particular piece of the structural puzzle becomes.
For demagogues, politicians, advertisers, clergy, parents… human minds are battleground, and always have been. The nature of the battle is the order of constraints / outcomes on which you will work. So foundational work towards your own personal freedom is learning to attend to your priority stack: to learn about the constraints in your stack, learn about how other people want you to feel about the constraints, how the constraints are structured, and who wants which ones satisfied and why. Eventually the work becomes action taken to satisfy the top-of-mind constraint, and your priorities become manifest.
I’m going to take a close look at a few times when my priorities changed.
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A manager for whom I did testing at work made it clear that a bug that I had reported was not worth pursuing and he did not want me to report bugs like that again. We were building a product that allowed businesses to post Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and Requests for Quotes (RFQs), respond to them, and transact with one another in a many-to-many online B2B marketplace. It’s still an advanced concept but has mostly been made moot by the enormity of Amazon, Google, Accenture and the like dominating the market for most sourcing, advertising, or integration proposals. Anyway one of our early clients was using the framework to build their site: putting their catalog online, crafting the data structure for the forms they would use to request or respond to proposals, etc. And I was to find problems with the system, point them out clearly, and suggest the software changes that would meet the quality criteria as I understood them.
I wrote up a bug stating that the word “form” on a form was mis-spelled “from”. And in so doing I mis-spelled the word “mis-spelled”.
In our next weekly bug triage meeting the project manager, Dave, saved this bug for last and when we got to it he stated flatly, “Geordie, this is not the kind of work we are paying you for. If the form doesn’t work then fine, but a cosmetic error can be fixed anytime. Keep your eye on the ball. And if you write a bug about bad spelling your spelling had better be perfect.” He was fuming, and he had a right to — and I needed to hear what he had to say right then.
Clearly Dave’s intent was to change my priority, and he succeeded. How? What happened in that moment? Let’s look at my priority stack before and after that triage meeting. While I was at my desk testing the marketplace I was balancing an outcome — the marketplace — across constraints: accuracy, clarity, repeatability, responsiveness, load handling, etc. I was also balancing my own self-perception across productivity, smartness, and integrity. My smartness score felt low — I found the massive codebase intimidating and confusing, and the extremely cutting-edge data structuring techniques opaque to my ability to tell whether they were going to work or not across a wide spectrum of data — and I compensated by homing in on an obvious and rather petty “bug” and wrote it quickly up to bolster my feeling of “productivity”. I could try to defend myself and make a case that the typo violated the “clarity” constraint on the interface, but that would not really hold water, because contextually the correct word was obvious.
A second-order outcome — my process of critical appraisal, i.e. testing — I was also balancing across constraints: depth, coverage, relevance, utility, obviousness, and self-branding. In my priority stack the topmost item that day was the constraint of accuracy on the marketplace RFP form, and I deployed my own sub-outcome, testing, as the means to show whether the marketplace met that constraint. In other words, the Accuracy constraint mandated the lower-order Testing outcome. Within the deployment of testing I had several constraints to balance across, and without a clear priority in one of them I fell back on my go-to approach, ambient learning. I used the form, followed the data flowing into and out of the database, and thought about what could go wrong. While I was there I noticed that one of the words was mis-spelled. And since I wasn’t finding any other bugs that day, I wrote it up. This constituted a third-order outcome, the bug report, which needed to balance across its own constraints: length, clarity, relevance, justifiability, and value.
Now the proximate beneficiary of the marketplace is the client business that would pay us to use it. (The ultimate beneficiary would be the customer of that business who receives better service because the business uses our marketplace.) The data accuracy and consistency constraints obviously must be met for the client business to achieve that benefit. The entire project team subscribes to these constraints, as do I, and our joint goal is to meet the constraint demonstrably. The development team deployed their dev processes to create the form and the functions that moved data to and fro, and I deployed my testing processes to see whether anything was wrong. The proximal beneficiary of my testing is the project team, because they could relax and stand behind their work. Whether they know it or not, the developers rely on me to meet the depth, coverage, relevance, and utility constraints on my testing. And they are very sensitive to when I am and am not adding value to their work in these ways.
As I went through my workday my priority stack re-ordered itself. My frustration at not being able to think of bugs in the system given the code or the data, and my apparently lack of productivity caused me to prioritize a Productivity narrative on a second-order outcome rather than keeping focus on the Accuracy constraint on the first-order outcome, which I would have evidenced by learning more, or asking for help, or partnering with someone during the session to bounce ideas off of.
When Dave pointed this out in our meeting, he tacitly re-ordered my priorities so the constraints on the first-order outcome were “top of mind” for future testing sessions.
— — -
My wife and I adopted a baby and quickly discovered that all our disposable income was gone. We could not function as a family with a child the way we had functioned as a couple. E.g. we didn’t just have to account for Baby’s arrangements when we took a vacation trip somewhere — we realized that we may never go on vacation trips again. Was this OK? It kind of had to be.
Our fantasy world of parenting had Baby as a wonderful new element in our life-puzzle. The reality was that Baby made our life-puzzle moot, and installed herself as the top-of-mind priority under which everything else had to jostle for space and time and resources.
— — -
Musical Interlude
Raise your hand if your guitar got stolen and the money you spent to replace it was originally budgeted for a plane ticket to Albuquerque to visit your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend!
*Raises hand*
Yes I spent my money on a guitar instead of a plane ticket to Albuquerque. Thus I made my priorities manifest. Whether I wanted to say it out loud or not, I valued my own ability to play music over my desire to please my girlfriend by going to visit her. The symbolism was not lost upon said girlfriend. Like my manager Dave a few years later, she was very sensitive to the priority structure that is my mind, and specifically what it meant in terms of the value that I was likely to add to her emotional well-being. Not incorrectly, she interpreted the purchase of the guitar as a symbol that I was devaluing our relationship. She felt insulted, and insisted on further proof of devotion as evidence that my priorities were again aligned with hers.
— — -
At work, people expect you to prioritize “their stuff” ahead of “your stuff” if you want them to see you as a “team player”. Unfortunately it is rare that everyone puts “their stuff” on a board and stack-ranks them as a group, and hashes out the disagreements, and moves forward in solidarity. In actuality, everyone puts their priorities in the work equivalent of a hat, and gives you the work equivalent of an extensible arm, and tells you to pick the right priorities out of the hat blindfolded or you will be put on a PIP.
The military has the concept of “orders”, which supersede one another when given from higher ranking sources. “Order” of course is what is expected you will do to your mind, placing the instruction from the highest ranking officer in the highest-priority spot. A “good soldier” operates with a minimum of confusion about the order in which their priorities stack up.
One way that people manipulate others is to confuse their priorities. This is a common tactic in propaganda campaigns and conspiracy theory scaffolding. If you were to (for instance) insist that everyone be vaccinated against COVID-19, and someone else were to insist that no one should be vaccinated, then one way to view the disagreement is through the lens of the priorities in each others’ minds. In your mind, the mandate to save people’s lives is more prior than other concerns, such as expense or inconvenience. In your interlocutor’s mind, perhaps getting as many people as possible sick or killed is a high priority. Most likely they will not say this out loud, so they might pose a nonsense issue with the vaccine such as “it includes a tracking device” and attempts to prioritize the issue of rejecting tracking over the issue of keeping lots more people sick. This is a tactic known as “what-about-ism” and it is expressly designed to de-clarify your priorities. Your job in this case is to maintain your clarity around your own real priority stack, and avoid the rabbit hole of parsing false choices such as “Would you rather people be sick and maybe recover, or introduce a device that will track their every move for the rest of their lives?” This is not a choice that exists in the real world, but only the priority stacks of the minds of people who are the subjects of these types of propaganda campaigns.
Disclaimer — this idea of approaching “mind” as a priority stack is neither “true” nor “false”. It is a potentially useful way to think about things, and to decipher what other people mean by what they say.
