What does Navani do?

[+Oltux72 he/him]

Gavilar was pretty insulting. Now it would be easy to say that he just used her impostor syndrome against her. But that would be wrong. Gavilar was clever. He had a hint of truth there. Navani is not an especially good artefabrian. Gavilar was correct but at the same time he did not understand what he was seeing.

Leadership in Alethkar is kind of primitive. You are the best at a certain task, hence you lead and instruct other people doing the same task. That is not what Navani is. She is specialised in leadership. In other words, Navani is Alethkar's first engineering project manager. That was beyond Gavilar, essentially a politician and soldier. But the question is, does she understand her own function or does she merely see herself as an aristocratic oddity?

[rjl]

Navani is more than just a project manager, a project manager takes an assigned task and tracks progress on it/ensures everyone involved knows what they're doing.

Navani is an innovator and an integrator.

She dreams up new ideas people haven't thought of or haven't taken seriously THEN she finds the various experts needed for them and brings them together.

[Saoilin]

So basically she is the Steve Jobs of the cosmere. 

[Karger he/him]

Much more like Thomas Edison.  The Napoleon of Science!  The Wizard of Menlo Park.  Who either was or was not one of the greatest scientists in human history depending on who you ask.

Seriously this is from his wiki page.

Quote

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America's greatest inventor.^[1][2][3] He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.^[4] These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world.^[5] He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.^[6]

 

Edited July 30, 2020 by Karger

[dgreene196]

17 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Leadership in Alethkar is kind of primitive.

This reminded me of a little detail in Shallan/Veil’s scene in Chapter 2, when she notes the roughening roads in the war camps.  However primitive bureaucracy may be in Alethkar, somehow, they keep all the roads maintained with minimal crem - that must be a monumental undertaking (as are all the nations of Roshar).

Just something I’d never thought of.

As for Navani, I think she definitely recognizes her role as a source of ideas and inspiration for artefabrians.  And, beyond that, she’s able to navigate the worlds of politics and scholarship to bring to bear expertise and resources around Roshar to create something knew.

Navani is a driving force.  You might say she Connects people and ideas.

[Karger he/him]

47 minutes ago, dgreene196 said:

This reminded me of a little detail in Shallan/Veil’s scene in Chapter 2, when she notes the roughening roads in the war camps.  However primitive bureaucracy may be in Alethkar, somehow, they keep all the roads maintained with minimal crem - that must be a monumental undertaking (as are all the nations of Roshar).

It is probably deeply ingrained in any municipality's social structure.  I would not be surprised if that is how the underclass are expected to supplement their income.

[+Child of Hodor]

3 hours ago, Saoilin said:

So basically she is the Steve Jobs of the cosmere. 

I was gonna say that.

The big idea person who has a good understanding of the underlying fundamentals, but has a ton engineers and other experts under her working to make the ideas a reality. 

Hopefully she is nicer than Jobs was at times. Storms into the room “I don’t want excuses, make it fly!” and storms out. 

[Halyo_Alex he/him]

3 hours ago, Child of Hodor said:

I was gonna say that.

The big idea person who has a good understanding of the underlying fundamentals, but has a ton engineers and other experts under her working to make the ideas a reality. 

Hopefully she is nicer than Jobs was at times. Storms into the room “I don’t want excuses, make it fly!” and storms out. 

So you could say that she...

Unites Artifabrians?

[+Oltux72 he/him]

6 hours ago, Saoilin said:

So basically she is the Steve Jobs of the cosmere. 

Much closer: Oppenheimer

[Jenet]

Many engineers think that bug fixing and testing is the most important work in development. And yes, it is important, but if it wasn't for the really imaginative and creative entrepreneurial engineers, we would not see much really new stuff. 

We may devide engineers into two types: The technically oriented, detail focused, conscientious engineer is the most common, and that is good, for most of the time consuming work is done by them. But in order to innovate, we need the Steve Jobses and the Edisons and the Henry Fords of the world. These people are often resented by the Wozniaks of the engineering community, because they often get most of the glory for the inventions.

Just like Sanderson has very accomplished people to help him finish his books, Navani has other engineers to finish her inventions. We are happy that Sanderson is able to delegate proof reading, continuity, illustrations, arcanums, project management etc to others, so he can write more stories. Navani does the same.

Engineering is all about the guts to try out new ideas and designs and live through the onerous testing, failure, ridicule, struggle, and testing and failure yet again and again. That is why we have development teams. Very few advanced designs are carried out by just one engineer. I would say none.

I love the fact that we get to follow the development of Navani's inventions, from painreal betas via archer plantforms to air ships. And with the knowledge that there will be space ships in the future. The airship design is vulnerable and fickle at the moment, but every first working version is like that. I bet the next version will feature a much more sophisticated technology. Just imagine the development of cell phone batteries. How many times have we said the the technology has come to the end of the capacity of the medium? And then we found a new medium and could make smaller batteries with more capacity?

Navani's job is to be the entrepreneur and provide the creative ideas. This is a very important job. But she has a habit of diminishing her own importance, and think that she should be more of a doer. As we see in her prologue. This lets us, as readers, believe more easily that she is an impostor, that she really isn't an engineer, she lets all the others do the job, and takes the glory from all of them. We believe in her impostor syndrome's story.

Gavilar is a good bully and knows his prey. He exploits all her weak points and of course he pounces on these. But it is unfair. She is a very good engineer, and perhaps soon a rocket scientist. 

I cut and pasted this list of the "big five" personality traits from another site. It is important when putting together an R&D engineering team that you get the right mix of traits in your team mates. First have a look at the traits:

• openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
• conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
• extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
• agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/callous)
• neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

The project manager should have a healthy mix of conscientiousness and openness to be able to both take in the innovations from the inventor and to communicate with the doers. Must be balanced on agreeableness, not too nice and wishy-washy, not too cross, in order to both  communicate and to get things done.

The nitty gritty doers need a heavy dose of conscientiousness, and often are low on agreeableness. Low on extraversion and high on cautiousness.. You need many of these.

The inventor needs to be extremely open to experience, which is the exact opposite of cautious. Navani is in fact quite organized for an inventor, she likes neat markets and streets, and often comments on tidyness and nice order. She is quite high on concientiousness.  But she is not the person to struggle over flight data for months to find the tiny details that will improve the safety of the current design. She will already be onto new ideas for the next design, and even the next one after that.

Gavilar is wrong. Either because he is uneducated or because he is evil. But he knows her insecurities, he does.,

Edited July 31, 2020 by Jenet
edited a logical error

[Harbour he/him]

I was surprised and at the same time very pleased by how Brandon dive deeper in Navani PoV and revealed her vulnerabilities. She turned different on inside than i thought and well more cute.

Edited July 31, 2020 by Harbour

[+Child of Hodor]

3 hours ago, Jenet said:

 

Gavilar is wrong. Either because he is uneducated or because he is evil. But he knows her insecurities, he does.,

Yeah, what he said was an intentionally uncharitable and cruel view of her. She has the aptitude and the drive to be a great scientist.

But, her full-time job for most of her life was to be noblewoman and then Queen. Plus, raise her kids, as Queen she'd have plenty of help but between the two of them I'm sure Navani spent more time on that than Gavilar. 

Meanwhile there are ardents and others who are able to dedicate their entire lives to study, like the woman in the interlude in WoK who is measuring the firespren.

Still, Navani had a lot to offer. Certainly more than freaking Aesudan. I think Gavilar kind of panicked when she was looking at the sphere so he lashed out as hard as he could to distract her. He seems to want to keep his family out of this dangerous business he's doing. Don't get me wrong, he clearly resents her, suspects she never loved him and may have cheated on him. 

[Jenet]

3 minutes ago, Child of Hodor said:

Still, Navani had a lot to offer. Certainly more than freaking Aesudan. I think Gavilar kind of panicked when she was looking at the sphere so he lashed out as hard as he could to distract her. He seems to want to keep his family out of this dangerous business he's doing. Don't get me wrong, he clearly resents her, suspects she never loved him and may have cheated on him. 

Yes, I really find it interesting how mean he is towards her. He quite clearly has guessed that she loved Dalinar and not him. Even though they both tried to hide the fact even to themselves. This jealousy might be the reason for his cruelty. And he then tries to blame her for choosing the one who would make her queen. But I cannot see that Navani ever had the ambition to become queen. Her interests are not in that direction. 

I find that Gavilar comes across as the average psychopath. Very good at finding accusations that will pain his victim and find purchase in their minds. I guess that he has been doing this for a while, so that he knows very well how she will react, so that he can dominate the argument.

- Her tendency to value the doers more than the leaders, and her bad conscience for leading only

- Her doubt as to how her ideas and creative work with her engineering teams are of any value

- Her bad concience for choosing the brother she loved the least, and trying to convince herself that she loved both

- Her self doubt when it comes to her royal ambitions and how that influenced her choice of husband

I comes across like Gavilar is the one who has widened these cracks in Navani's confidence. And it seems she has managed to get over a lot of them after he disappeared out of her life.

But wow, I wonder what it did to her that her prayer was answered so promptly...

[Aminar]

Gavilar's words are a classic abuser tactic. You're worthless. You do nothing. Without me you'd have nothing. It's all a way for him to keep control over her. He knows her insecurities. He knows how to twist her. And we can see the contrast in how Dalinar sees her. Dalinar sees the the real her and says so. He builds her up and loves her for it. Gavilar saw the real her and needed to destroy it because of his own insecurities. His need to be the most important person around. Which is understandable in the leader of a nation where strength is everything and he knows just how fragile his hold actually is. Especially when he feels betrayed by his wife's love of his brother but needs them both too much to do anything about it. But it still makes him an abusive monster. 

[Karger he/him]

On 7/30/2020 at 3:11 AM, Oltux72 said:

Much closer: Oppenheimer

Not really.  Sure she is developing weapons but that does not make her an Oppenheimer.  She is working on many things that will develop industry and science not just warfare.