Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about thinking.

Let me talk about my work for a second.

One of the things I’m taking up for work right now is I’m leading a subgroup of an industry standards body that’s updating an industry standard for guidance for developing safety-critical software when using model-based development or verification techniques.

Now, if that sounds very nerdy and very esoteric, it is.

This is the hazard of doing something nerdy and, I guess, fairly esoteric for all of my career.

But essentially what we’re tasked to do is we’ve got about a 130-page existing document that just had lots of comments and thoughts come in on it over the last 15 years or so since it was published.

And now we’re trying to say, what minor updates should we make to this document to clarify it, improve it, adapt to new technology, and so on, so we can publish a revision that will last another 10 or 15 years.

There is, of course, some strategic aspects to look at this.

What is it that our various companies would like to do, and use this technology in ways that the standard isn’t thinking about yet, and make sure that the path is clear for those in an appropriate way.

But then also just clarification.

These are documents with just so many words written by committee over a long period of time, and trying to state clearly what you mean when every word means something, it’s just a challenge.

And darn it, we’re engineers, not writers.

The best of us are both, but it can be a little bit of a challenge.

But really at the planning and thinking stage right now, which is what I wanted to talk about here, because I don’t know how it works for you, but I don’t just, like, schedule time in my calendar to go, okay, now is when I’m going to sit and think about this and figure it out.

It tends to be more an iterative sort of, I need to soak in it kind of process.

So I will read the standard that we’re going to update and the key parts and sit and kind of focus on each of these sections.

I might take no more than a page and just kind of sit and read through it and think about how it’s being interpreted and the kinds of changes we want to make, and I’ll read the discussion papers.

And then I may just go off to something else for hours or a few days and eventually come back to it and look at it and think about it some more and go back and think about what those changes maybe ought to be, sort of start to imagine what changes I might draft into it if I were to propose changes.

And this is a process I might iterate over for, honestly, this one, it may be weeks of chewing on this, thinking about it, just kind of soaking on it, not actively putting hours on my calendar to go, must think about this, but continually sort of refreshing it in my mind and waiting for some of that creativity to happen.

What I usually find in these cases is that eventually there’s a creative spark that shows up that says, hey, what if we solved it this way?

And then that’s the thing to latch onto to go actually work drafting changed language, to go start writing something down, to start proposing a solution that’ll actually work.

And once we get to that point, then it usually moves more quickly.

It’s just a matter of kind of getting the words out on page and making sure that they fit.

But somewhere in the mysterious background processes of the brain that That soaking, that percolating is what takes the idea from a bunch of random thoughts and direction to a thing that we can actually move forward with and will be useful.

I’m really hoping that that happens sooner rather than later with the task I’m starting to lead here.

But, you know, we have time.

We have other people in the working group who will have their own thoughts they want to add to it, and we’ll put it all together and see what happens.

We’ll talk later.