Structure Follows Context

July 23, 2014 By

I like mirroring principles in business a lot. My two favorite ones in business are Conway’s Law (product structure follows organizational structure) and Chandler’s Law (structure follows strategy). In conversations about business in recent years, I’ve been adding two more principles to complete a loop of sorts: market structure follows product structure and strategy follows market structure. The whole thing is what I call the data-driven death spiral, and is the reason I’ve become a partisan on the question of product-driven versus customer-driven thinking.  It operates through unimaginative leaders navigating entirely on the basis of market signals, which ultimately leads to businesses chasing their own tails. The only way a maturing business can break out of the death spiral is through the actions of a very strong leader. One capable of injecting a stiff dose of imaginative authoritah from the top.

dddspiralThat said, I’ve been sensing that my model is incomplete in a significant way. The biggest mirroring effect is the one it is easiest to miss: structure follows context. A context is the evolutionary environment (which is not the same as the competitive environment) within which a business grows, and which they shape to serve their needs as they grow. A city is the classic example of a context, but there are other kinds, such as ancient trade routes, or github (for purely virtual software teams). Contexts host businesses, but are not themselves primarily or necessarily businesses.

A context  is the sum of all history rolled up into a present-day operating environment, like a canvas with an evolving painting already on it. A new business must be painted onto some such canvas, just as software must be compiled for a specific machine. Only dictators have the luxury of razing a living context, creating a blank canvas (a dumb thing to do in almost every case).

Let’s look at the example of Seattle to see what I mean.

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Close Encounters of the Missing Kind

July 16, 2014 By

My daily routine is a strange attractor.  Every morning, I decide whether to hit one of the cafes on my regular circuit or work at the desk I rent from a local business. After lunch, and sometimes a nap, I pick a different location for my second work session. My most frequent cafe choices are as follows:

  • A downtown  cafe inside an office high-rise, patronized mainly by the herds of people who work there and ebb and flow through it, guided by the invisible pilot waves of office rhythms.
  • A somewhat dingy cafe that has some mix of locals, homeless people, tourists and what I suspect are gang members who seem to hang out there in the afternoons.
  • A cafe a few blocks from downtown inhabited by a mix of office workers getting away and a few sad people, obviously impoverished, who sit for hours nursing a coffee and browsing on cheap laptops or smartphones.
  • A self-consciously alternative cafe staffed by attractive, tattooed goth baristas, which attracts more conventional looking people apparently looking for a change of scenery, as well as the tattooed classes.
  • A rather precious hippie cafe with an ideological menu of offerings, which seems to be a crossroads for the local crunchy and nightclub sets.

If I decide to take my bike, or am in the mood for a longer walk, my range expands to perhaps twice as many locations.

There are enough cafes in my bike-accessible prowling territory that I could probably go months without repeating myself, but I don’t like either a routine that’s continuous exploration or complete predictability. A strange attractor seems to work perfectly for me. I’ve been doing this for perhaps fifteen years now, and my circuit has generally ranged from two to a dozen work locations. Home, surprisingly, has rarely been on my circuit. Home offices are really hard (read “expensive”) to get right.

It’s a lifestyle on the edge between settled and nomadic and between unsociable and sociable. I think my days of experimenting with true nomadism are over. My circuit is still more cloud mouse than metro mouse, with more big-chain cafes on it than indie, but I think I’ve become more willing to self-localize lately, and less freaked-out at being recognized by baristas.

I think a lot more people, like me, are starting to lock onto a strange attractor routine: it’s more stimulating than a regular routine, but not as demanding as full-blown nomadism. The third place is not a place so much as a pattern of movement in a socially fertile zone.

***

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Portals and Flags

June 25, 2014 By

The point of complex debates is not to prove your side right and the other wrong. Smart people make this mistake most often, and end up losing before they ever get started. The point of complex debate is always seduction: winning-over rather than winning. You do this not through logic or even novel insight, but by demonstrating a more fertile way of thinking. One that promises to throw up an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope. 

Such intellectual seduction settles the original issue not by establishing an unassailable position around it, but by turning it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought. You cannot win over everybody, only the adventurous. But winning over an adventurous minority that joins you in passing through a portal, on a journey of discovery is enough. It allows you to eventually overwhelm those who prefer to plant a flag on a conquered hill of browbeaten minds, and sit around by it awarding each other medals of honor. Because adventures tend to yield riches that make whatever was originally being contested seem worthless by comparison.

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The Physics of Stamp Collecting

June 18, 2014 By

Ernest Rutherford’s famous line, “all science is either physics or stamp collecting,” has bothered me ever since I first heard it. I’ve used it to make fun of biologists, and I’ve used it as a critical perspective on physics.

Rutherford almost certainly meant it as an insult to non-physicists, but there is a deeper and non-prejudiced philosophical thought underneath the dichotomy. To get there you have to ask: is there such a thing as a physics of stamp collecting?

I’ve discussed the quote once before, in my extended post on foxes and hedgehogs (short version: foxes are stamp collectors, hedgehogs are faux-physicists), but let’s dig a little deeper.

Turns out, the distinction between sustaining and disruptive variants of deliberate practice, which I discussed last week, is a consequence of the distinction between physics and stamp collecting.

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The Deliberate Practice of Disruption

June 11, 2014 By

Recently, I concluded that our understanding of expertise, especially in the sense of the 10,000 hour meme, is seriously flawed. Even though there is something real there. And I don’t just mean the understanding conveyed by Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized the idea. I include the primary researchers such as K. Anders Ericsson on whose work the popular accounts are based.  

The problem isn’t what you might think. It’s not the basic model of 10,000 hours of practice coupled with metacognition that’s the problem. The observation that you can get to useful levels of skill short of mastery in less time doesn’t fundamentally challenge the model. Nor is there a serious problem with the ideas that practice is necessary or that practice without metacognition is insufficient. That’s all true enough. Nor is the idea vacuous and tautological as some suggest.

The real problem is that research on expertise focuses on fields where “expertise” is a well-posed and objectively codified notion. This means mature fields that are closed and  bounded, and can be easily observed, modeled and studied under laboratory conditions. So it is not surprising that the work of researchers like Ericsson is based on fields like “medicine, music, chess and sports” (Wikipedia) or “music, science, golf and darts” (Ericsson’s own website).

Notice something? They’re all sharply circumscribed and regulated domains.

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A Life with a View

April 16, 2014 By

There is a memorable exchange in the Seinfeld episode The Keys, between Kramer and George on the theme of yearning. Unlike much of the show’s humor, which seems dated in the digital era, this little existential joke has improved with age:

Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
George: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
George: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I…I sit…and yearn. Have you yearned?
George: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving…but I haven’t yearned.

You can imagine a more poignant version of this conversation over an iPad showing a Facebook feed. The Internet, with its constant parade of lives-that-might-have-been-yours and classmates-not-dated, is a jungle of yearnings. Yearnings that were once confined to fading and static memories of childhood, occasionally awakened by petrichor, now sneak into your life as a steady, colorful stream of living confusion, via windows in present realities. There was no equivalent in the past to being a silent spectator of other lives by default. You either had active, evolving relationships of mutual influence, or mutual invisibility. Like passengers on subways, we only saw people on other routes at stations. There were no relationships of continuous mutual spectatorship.

There was no such thing as a life with a view. 

***

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The Legibility Tradeoff

April 9, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

I am fascinated by organizations as a technology for agency transfer — getting people to follow some plan outside of their selves. We’re not yet very good at building such agency transformers; our organizations get gamed, taken over, taken advantage of, treated as externalities, captured by minority interests, ground down to gridlock, etc. But we’ve been getting better at it, finding better ways to influence others than the coercion and threat of violence that we started out with. In this post I want to survey the progress we’ve made, and suggest that there’s still wisdom to be milked from the old saw of “don’t micromanage, delegate.”

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Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories

March 6, 2014 By

Until recently, I had never been conceptually attracted to the idea of an afterlife or prior lives, either as thought experiments or as aspirations. And definitely not in any religious sense. This is perhaps because I’ve never been able to imagine interesting versions of those ideas.

What has been piquing my interest over the last year is a particular notion of digital after lives/prior lives based on persistence of memory rather than persistence of agency or identity. Not only is this kind of immortality more feasible than the other two, it is actually more interesting and powerful. 

We generally fail to understand the extent to which both our sense of agency and identity are a function of memory. If you could coherently extend memories either forward or backward in time, you would get a different person, but one who might enjoy a weak sort of continuity of awareness with a person (or machine) who has lived before or might live after. Conversely, if you went blind and lost your long-term memories, you might lose elements of your identity, such as your sense of your race or an interest in painting. Mathematician Paul Erdos understood the link between memory and identity:

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion… I was asked, `How were the dinosaurs?’ Later, the right answer occurred to me: `You know, I don’t remember, because an old man only remembers the very early years, and the dinosaurs were born yesterday, only a hundred million years ago.'”

Erdos’ version of course, is based on no more than clever wordplay, but I want to consider a serious version: what if you could prosthetically attach to your own mind, the memories of somebody who died on exactly the day you were born, serving as a sort of reincarnation for that person? What if you could capture your own lived experiences as raw and transferable memories that could be carried on by somebody else, or a robot, starting the day you died, thereby achieving a sort of afterlife? Or perhaps live on somewhere in the Internet, changing and evolving?

The most interesting and unexpected consequence of any notion of immortality based on the idea of a living memory, is that notions of heaven and hell make no sense within it.

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Demons by Candelight

February 27, 2014 By

I grew up with frequent power outages and load-shedding, especially during  the summer time. Dark evenings without power were a special time for children. The candle-lit hours on porches and balconies were a strange mix of an ethereal kind of intimacy,  beckoning darkness, and thoughts that retreated from both sunlight and electric lights.

You could do nothing useful during those hours. There was no TV or radio. Reading was difficult. Candle-lit meals tended to be either quick, simple affairs whipped up in semi-darkness, or leftovers. Families who turned the blacked-out evenings into family time generally sat out on the porch. Adults would use the time to tell family stories to children. Teenagers and some couples would stroll up and down the street, occasionally stopping to chat with neighbors. Younger kids would run around squealing and playing, seemingly possessed by the strange euphoria-inducing forces leaking in from another world. Or they would huddle together and try to scare each other with ghost stories.

Even back then, having never experienced cold northern climates, I instinctively knew that the Scottish word fey, born of cold foggy highlands, and which I had only encountered in books, was somehow the right word for the charged pre-Monsoon summer air around me.

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The Cactus and the Weasel

February 20, 2014 By

The phrase, strong views, weakly held, has crossed my radar multiple times in the last few months.  I didn’t think much about it when I first heard it, beyond noting that it seemed to be almost a tautological piece of good advice. Thinking some more though, I realized two things: the phrase neatly characterizes the first member of my favorite pair of archetypes, the the hedgehog and the fox, and that I am actually much better described by the inverse statement, which describes foxes: weak views, strongly held. 

If this seems counterintuitive or paradoxical to you, chances are it is because your understanding of the archetypes actually maps to more commonplace degenerate versions, which I call the weasel and cactus respectively.

strongweak

True foxes and hedgehogs are complex and relatively rare individuals, not everyday dilettantes or curmudgeons. A quick look at the examples in Isaiah Berlin’s study of the archetypes is enough to establish that: his hedgehogs include Plato and Nietzsche, and his foxes include Shakespeare and Goethe. So neither foxes, nor hedgehogs, nor conflicted and torn mashups thereof such as Tolstoy, conform to simple archetypes.

The difference is that while foxes and hedgehogs are both capable of changing their minds in meaningful ways, weasels and cacti are not. They represent different forms of degeneracy, where a rich way of thinking collapses into an impoverished way of thinking. 

I seem to have been dancing around these ideas for about a year now, over the course of three fox/hedgehog talks I did last year, and even a positioning for my consulting practice based on it, but I was missing the clue of the strong views, weakly held phrase.

It took a while to think through, but what I have here is a rough and informal, but relatively complete account of the fox-hedgehog philosophy, that covers most of the things that have been bugging me over the past year. So here goes.

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