Category: Philosophy

A Century Ago

Currently, I’m listening to Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants. I really love historical fiction and in particular Ken Follett’s writing. I read Pillars of the Earth years ago and recently finished listening to World Without End. Fall of Giants takes place during WWI, the best thing about the work is realizing how much the world has changed in the last 100 years. I’ve grown more grateful to be living in a time with so many luxuries and creature comforts.

Our governments might seem incompetent in the moment, we should expect better. But if we compare to the situation of 100-years ago, they were were truly incompetent and in turmoil. In 1914, Europe was largely run by the landed aristocracy, democracy was rare. England had rule over many countries as territories. Universal suffrage was a dream for many countries, even women in England were just getting the right to vote. The aristocracy was cruel and poverty commonplace. Racism and classism was the way of life. The world literally fell into the Great War because of silly chains of bilateral agreements to backstop allies. Our governments today are not without their faults but there’s been objective improvement. The spread of democracy has improved the lives of many but there are cracks showing. There are social riots in the US, but in general the world is relatively geopolitically stable. Nevertheless, it’s the improvement in life brought on by industrialization and technology that stands out for me.

WWI was largely fought with horse and cart to supply front-line troops. This was a war fought largely on the ground, in the trenches, not the air. Solders would charge at machine guns hoping to overwhelm the shooter before they could reload. The Great War was fought by people who didn’t even truly understand the power of the weapons they yielded, many had never been tested in battle.

The understanding of physiology was primitive at best. At this moment, I sit at home healing from minimally invasive foot surgery. I was put under general anesthesia and they used live x-rays during the procedure to guide a power-drill. Such a procedure 100-years ago would have been technologically unfathomable, my procedure took less than an hour!

In today’s age, I watch YouTube on my flat-screen TV, control it with my smart phone, write this blog entry on a laptop. Their only forms of entertainment were theatre, tea time, drink, and sex. Maybe our endless diversions are the things that keep us from going to war.

Today, I often prefer to listen to audiobooks using a wireless headset. It frees up my hands and eyes to work on other things like woodworking with power tools. In 1914, electrical lighting inside home was uncommon except for the most wealthy. Putting on a record or the radio was a great luxury. Today, we expect to stream media and get entertainment on demand. How challenging it would be to pass a pandemic without these advances!

When it gets cold, my smart thermostat knows to turn up the heat. And now I have the equivalent of a printing press in my home the size of a shoe box. When I need goods, I don’t even necessarily need to leave the house, everything is deliverable through my smart phone. The wonders of the modern age are really amazing when we look at how much the world has changed in the last 100-years.

In Canada, we gripe about our slow COVID19 vaccination rollout, in 1918 the Spanish Flu killed 20+ million worldwide (somewhere between 1-5% of the world population, depending on your favourite source), vaccines couldn’t even be developed in the timelines we see now. We should be grateful for the advances we’ve seen in science and technology.

Food was rationed during the Great War, today we suffer from a different problem, over indulgence. During the lead up to the Russian Revolution, Russians were lining up at midnight to buy rationed bread. Today instead of starving, we are more likely to eat ourselves to death.

Sometimes technology seems to take longer than we thought it would, people says it took 20 years for the internet to really take-off. But it took smart-phones less than half that time to become ubiquitous. Today now we have vaccines that can be developed in < 12 months instead of years. It’s possible in the near future, that after a virus is sequenced, we could devise a vaccine within weeks. With advances in computing and biosciences this is not unfathomable.

I turn 40 this month, I hope I can live long enough to see what the next 50 years will bring. It is an exciting time to be alive and grateful.

Thinking Distributed

The best analogy I can think of for how to think about scaling an organization to think distributed is the contrast between communism and capitalism methods of government.  Objectively speaking, one is not necessarily better than the other, but in practice one scales better in our current world.  

Communism is centralized command-and-control, it is a non-distributed organization.  In theory, if you had perfect knowledge and ability to react in real-time, there would be minimal waste and demands would always be met with the right amount of supply.  In practice, it hasn’t played out this way, probably because we don’t live in a world of perfect data and instantenous data processing abilities.  Capitalism in contrast, relies on that invisible hand, it argues that in efficient markets, supply-and-demand will balance itself through price discovery.  There might be some degree of loss in the beginning but it will come to an equilibrium fast and the overall oversupply or undersupply will be minimized.  

In capitalism, when the government wants people to spend money, they lower interest rates.  Instead of directing, they guide.  They create incentives for the market to move in the desired direction but they don’t direct.  In communism, there’s a required a feedback loop to central command so it can process the data and tell each type of producer the next steps.  This often leads to either over-production or under-production because it’s easy to have incomplete information or data processing delay. 

Leading a distributed organization is similar to working with monetary policy.   We want to create the right incentives, we want the default thing to be the obvious thing.  We want to build the necessary tools and safety-nets so that people can focus on their objectives and not worry about duplicating work.  We want teams to operate independently, instead of relying on upper-management (central-command) for next steps. 

Leadership cannot scale to have perfect knowledge of everything teams do, otherwise the leadership team ends up having massive reporting apparatus just to track work output and teams will end up idle waiting for the next instructions. Instead leadership needs to empower teams to want to act in their own best interests because those interests.  Leadership can guide teams by helping them clearly define KPIs, but how they go about achieving those KPIs should be left in their hands, doing anything differently will only disempower.  

Disagree and commit

We live in a world of inter-subjective realities.  Humans created religions, economic models, monetary systems, government, corporations, and moral values.  None of these things exist in nature, they were created from our imagination and we applied human value to them.  

When a person joins a new company, they will often discover that the company has a set of values.  These values were chosen by the leaders of the company because they want these values to guide the company’s actions.  These values are frequently repeated and made highly visible to keep people aligned.  The company’s values might actually differ from an employee’s own personal values, this leads to some degree of cognitive dissonance.  The employee may disagree with some of the values, but the company doesn’t need them to agree but to commit to it.  

Humans are masters of overcoming cognitive dissonance.  When someone converts from one religion to another, seldom do they buy-in 100%.  There are likely beliefs, values, or rituals they don’t agree with or understand, but they still converted to this new religion and go through th rituals because they’ve committed to doing so.  

Imagine someone immigrating to a new country.  This person might immigrate because they like the way of life, the natural landscape, the employment opportunities, the people or the social benefits.  They might not agree with the taxation system and how that money is spent (cognitive dissonance) but the government still expects them to commit to paying their taxes. 

As a leader, it’s important to recognize the difference between personal emotional comfort vs operational need.  We often want people to agree with our values when it is more imperative that we get people to commit and deliver.