Superpowers - Systems Thinking, Asking, and Listening

^z 16th July 2023 at 7:23am

From the January 2019 Greater Than Code podcast interview "114: Theory of Mind with Jean-François Cloutier", when asked to identify his 'superpowers':

JF: ... I turned to my wife and I asked, "Liz, what are my superpowers?" and she immediately said, "You see the forest before the trees." I said, "Huh, that's interesting." I guess I do have a pretty good sense of systems. I'm a systems thinker.

I approach everything as a system embedded into other systems embedded into systems and I always try to intuit the emergent properties of any system I approach or any system I write or any software. Software is always a system, even though the simplest of software is embedded into a larger system, including the environment in which it's used. I'll go with what my wife says, always a good thing to do in a marriage, and say, "Yes, I believe that would be my superpower" — systems thinking.

SAM: I would just like to take a moment and point out that you have, in fact two additional superpowers that I would draw attention to. The first is asking your wife things and the second is listening for the answer.

JESSICA: Rare and powerful skills. ...

(cf Fifth Disciplinarians (2000-09-10), Ingressive vs Congressive (2017-07-08), Eugenia Cheng on Thinking (2017-12-30), Mantra - Not Yet (2018-01-09), The World We Truly Want (2018-10-13), New Superpower (2018-10-27), ...) - ^z - 2019-01-29