Phase Transitions

While reading Dan's post on productivity here, I found a phrase for a concept that I relate a lot to. I will put the relevant snippet here:

More generally, Fabian Giesen has noted that this kind of non-linear impact of velocity is common:

There are "phase changes" as you cross certain thresholds (details depend on the problem to some extent) where your entire way of working changes. … ​​There's a lot of things I could in theory do at any speed but in practice cannot, because as iteration time increases it first becomes so frustrating that I can't do it for long and eventually it takes so long that it literally drops out of my short-term memory, so I need to keep notes or otherwise organize it or I can't do it at all.

Certainly if I can do an experiment in an interactive UI by dragging on a slider and see the result in a fraction of a second, at that point it's very "no filter", if you want to try something you just do it.

Once you're at iteration times in the low seconds (say a compile-link cycle with a statically compiled lang) you don't just try stuff anymore, you also spend time thinking about whether it's gonna tell you anything because it takes long enough that you'd rather not waste a run.

Once you get into several-minute or multi-hour iteration times there's a lot of planning to not waste runs, and context switching because you do other stuff while you wait, and note-taking/bookkeeping; also at this level mistakes are both more expensive (because a wasted run wastes more time) and more common (because your attention is so divided).

As you scale that up even more you might now take significant resources for a noticeable amount of time and need to get that approved and budgeted, which takes its own meetings etc.

There are many examples where I have experienced such phase at work or otherwise. All of them have been very interesting, including the inverse functions¹.

Real-time upgrades of compile-cycle systems is a very common pattern here. We used to have our team wiki on a git repository. While git had its own benefits, switching to real-time editor based wikis helped us increase the amount of content written and shared with a non-linear dependency on time taken to push the page to display.

For teams focusing on productivity and efficiency, phase transitions have important implications. While transition-agnostic metric improvements are important, it pays hugely to spend time on the ROI curve for each metric and take team level goals based on potential of transitions.