A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to be invited to attend and speak at Tom Gilb‘s 12th Gilb Seminar.  It continued Tom’s decades-long work, and was focused on moving from “a state of nice-sounding words for objectives and solutions to clear quantified objectives and constraints to define the problem with clear quantified assertions to the merits of solution alternatives”.

As the five days unfolded so did a rich collection of ideas, insights and tools. Instead of recounting various presentations, I’ve decided to present a list of books which were cited along the way — or at least those which I noted down. Some of these are by people who presented, though in those cases I’ve mentioned only the ones that were cited first by others. These are listed in (almost) no order and without comment. And, in an act of apparent masochism, none of the links are to Amazon…

• “EVO” by Kai Gilb
• “The Sciences of the Artificial” by Herbert Simon
• “Software For Your Head” by Jim and Michele McCarthy
• “Discussion of the Method: Conducting the Engineer’s Approach to Problem Solving” by Billy Vaughn Koen
• “Freedom From Command and Control” by John Seddon
• “121 Heuristics for Solving Problems” by By Marco Aurelio de Carvalho and Semyon D. Savransky
• “Out of the Crisis” by W. Edwards Deming
• “Economic control of quality of manufactured product” by Walter A. Shewhart
• “How to Measure Anything” by Douglas Hubbard
• “The Failure of Risk Management” by Douglas Hubbard
• “Changing Minds: In Detail” by David Straker
• “How to Invent (Almost) Anything” by David Straker
• “Applied imagination: Principles and procedures of creative problem-solving” by Alex Osborne
• “A Whole New Mind” by Dan Pink
• “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell
• “Principles of Mass and Flow Production” by Frank G. Wollard
• “Irrationality” by Stuart Sutherland