Start from Your Goal — Approach to the Wholeness

I Cannot Develop My Muscle and Voice Independently

I heard some interesting word from one of the most popular dancer in Japan. Daichi Miura, who is known as his creative style of dancing as well as beautify high tone voice. Unlike regular dancers, he can dance and sing excellently at a same time. That fascinates all the young age in Japan who are the big fan of dancing.

He said that he used to do intensive weight training so that he can build better muscle for dancing. However, he found that does not work. As he build his muscle in his arms, it affects his voice. Since internal muscle of arms and throat are somehow connected. He had became no longer be able to make his high tone voice. He said “I cannot develop my muscle and voice independently, and connect them later. I need to train the dancing and voice at a same time”.

Wholeness

This implies the importance of “wholeness”. As things get complexed, it’s quite hard to understand how the entire system works just looking at each units.

Sometimes engineers are more task oriented since we are interested in technical detail. If I am focusing on the module A, and you are focusing on the module B, it should work once after the modules connected. It sounds working. However, it does not work like that in real world as our digital systems are keep becoming complexed. There might be unexpected behavior on the interaction of modules. There might be mis-communication. Or, there might be missing logic required to be implemented which is unclear to be handled by module A or B.

We knew the idea. However, we always missed it because we are interested in technical detail as engineer. How effectively we can avoid this tendency?

Start from Your Goal

I talk to my Jr engineers to start from the goal. We do business. We get paid by providing values to customer not by providing systems. This way of thinking always helps me to look at the big picture with higher level of context of the problem. I need to understand the customer. I need to understand the problem. I need to understand how the problem get resolved. Then finally I understand how each systems and modules working.

In Daichi’s case, his goal is entertaining people with his unique style of dynamic dancing and beautiful voice of singing. He could achieve his unique performance since he starts from his goal. If he is focusing on weight training or vocal lessons, he never be able to reach there.

Start from your goal. This will be the mantra to tackle with your complex problem.