Template:Modernism versus pragmatism

Modernism vs. pragmatism

• Vertex vs. edge
• Text vs. meaning
• Algorithm vs. heuristic
• Formal vs. informal
• Tool vs. application
• Innate vs. emergent
• Obvious vs. subtle
• God vs. Darwin
• Simple vs. complex
• Quantitative vs. qualitative
• Calculated vs. interpreted
• Static vs. dynamic
• Stocks vs. flows
• Structure vs. interaction
• Nouns vs. verbs
• Trees vs. wood
• Permanent vs. ephemeral

“I should explain that in the Soviet scientific community in those days, mechanistic determinism held sway over all other approaches. Researchers believed that the natural world was governed by the iron law of cause and effect. This mentality was a product of the political environment.”

— Cixin Liu, Ball Lightning

A running theme in the JC is the distinction between top-down and bottom-up of organisation models, particularly where it comes to dealing with existential risk.

We are in the swoon of an obsession with data, technology and the algorithm. Thought leaders perceive an inevitable, short, path to a singularity where everything can be calculated, everything planned and we will no longer have to rely on irrational, costly, inconstant, error-prone meatsacks. Only crusty old refuseniks can’t see it.

Now I am just such a crusty old refusenik, and while that is largely borne of self-interest — I am an irrational, costly, inconstant, error-prone meatsack, after all — before mortgaging our futures to the machine, it is worth nutting through the digital prophecies to see if they hold water.

We start with a fundamental, philosophical divide between, on on hand, modernism: in a deterministic world wherein the causal principle holds it follows that, in theory, we can calculate all outcomes from first principles. In this world the main challenge is outright data processing capacity and the sophistication of our model. Encouraged by the success of artificial intelligence in solving problems not long ago considered intractable — chess, alpha go, self-driving cars, facial recognition, chatbots and so on — modernists extrapolate to a world where risk is atomised and calculated out of existence.

On the other hand is pragmatism: whether or not the causal principle holds, and however good robots may get at chess, they cannot manage non-linear interactions and dynamic environments which present “wicked problems” and complex systems. Not only can formal logical tools not deal with rapidly emerging risk situations, they can’t even see them. It’s better to live with uncertainty, deploy experts, proceed with caution, keep slack in the system and use practical rules of thumb to which we have no great metaphysical attachment to address contingencies. We should live on our wits and figure things out as we go. There is no certainty, but humility is no bad defence.

Determinism begets modernism and sees centralisation and automation as the highest good. We should aggregate and optimise processing power. The main role of the executive is orderly administration and maintenance of a machine which, by cold operation of logic, will dispense optimal outcomes by itself. The less we interfere the better.

Pragmatism begets systems thinking and aspires to decentralisation: the world is fundamentally unpredictable; it is best dealt with by experienced experts; management’s main function is to empower and equip experts and optimise their ability to communicate. Pragmatists prioritise relationships and interactions and over equipment and structure.

So; centralised algorithms versus distributed heuristics.

Perfection versus good enough.

Determinists are from Mars; pragmatists from Venus.

Modernism

“Modernists” view organisations, and systems, as complicated machines. Formal design is important, and follows (centrally-determined) function; the more efficient your contraption is, the better it will navigate the crises and opportunities presented by its environment — the market. Modernism regards the market as an extremely complicated mathematical problem: hard, but— theoretically — calculable. Modellable. Should a model not work, one must refine it.

Shortcomings in current technology mean we cannot — yet — fully solve that problem. We still need humans to make sure the machine operates as best it can, but the further humans are from that central executive function, and the better the algorithm gets, the more humans resemble a maintenance crew. Their task is to ensure the orderly functioning of the plant. As technology advances, human agency can be progressively decommissioned.

Business, and government, suffers from a kind of physics envy. It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate: everything is numerically expressible and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success.

—Rory Sutherland

The modernist narrative focusses on what it can see, which is necessarily limited to the formal inputs and outputs of its own model. There are at least two consequences of this.

Modernism only sees what it can see

Firstly, modernism cannot “see” informal, but vital, interactions between components of the system that are not in its model: random acts of kindness, the star seller’s sales technique, the time every staff member spends building lateral relationships, the value of those relationships, the necessary work beyond the service catalogue, the work-arounds that the machine going; the ad-hoc tricks that make up the difference between meaningful performance and work-to-rule. The critical call that clinched the deal.

Theory: it is not an organisation’s form or structure, but its interactions that determine its outcomes. A badly organised firm that interacts well with its customers will perform better than a perfectly organised firm that interacts poorly:

“You are in a queue. an operator will be with you shortly. Your call is important to us.”

An organisation is a system. Systems are comprised of stocks, flows and feedback loops. Key are their interactions: components that don’t interact are not in a system. A system’s behaviour emerges from how its components interact, not what it is made of or how it is arranged. In other words, a system is defined by its “flows”, not its “stocks”. Flows create feedback loops. Feedback loops create, or deplete stocks. Stocks — formal, structural capacities — only facilitate flows. But formal structures are easier to see than interactions. Yet modernism focuses on formal structure, organisation lines — mostly vertical — not functional communications, which are mostly horizontal.

Modernism as a negative sum game

Secondly, thanks to its physics envy, modernism is a negative sum game: its baseline is immediate, costless, faultless performance. Positive variance from this baseline is not possible: the goal is to lose as little energy as you can. But friction, gravity, heat, entropic energy loss means in the real world, the system loses energy. We can minimise entropic loss with engineering and environmental control but it remains practically impossible to conserve energy, and theoretically impossible to create it.

Human operators create a great deal more entropic loss than unattended algorithms. If the only gauge is accurate, efficient execution of instructions, humans must be worse at that than machines. Modernism cannot give credit to insight, diagnosis, model revision or reimagination because there is nothing to reimagine. There is no such thing as a valid alternative model. Economics is a kind of physics. There are no “alternative facts”.

Now, if bettering an algorithm is impossible, it stands to reason: meatware is expensive and inconstant: the largest risk to the organisation is human error, thus the strategic direction of an organisation’s development is to eliminate it where possible. Where that is not possible, human activity should be constrained by rigid guidelines and policies to reduce the probability of mishap, and monitored and audited to record and correct those errors that do happen top prevent them happening again. To the modernist, malfunction and human error are overarching business risks.

This worldview is one that appeals to many people in business management. Others might find it it rather desolate. But desolation is no argument against it if it is correct.

Pragmatism

When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.

—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976).

When you get too close to your material, sometimes you can’t see an absurdity even if it pinches you on the nose. Not only does a person catching a cricket ball not solve differential equations, or anything “functionally equivalent”, but she can’t. She would need the inputs for every differential equation in play. Just to determine a trajectory is: Y = H + X * tan(α) - G * X² / 2 * V₀² * cos²(α).

To be clear: it is’t simply that she is doing this subconsciously, somehow, in a way she can’t apprehend: she doesn’t know, even subconsciously, the velocity, angle, vector, or starting coordinates of the ball. She would need all of these just to perform that differential equation. She is doing something else: she’s using a subconscious heuristic: keep your eye on the ball, run towards it, and keep the angle of your gaze as constant as you can. It is called the “gaze heuristic”. No cosines or tangents required.

Bottom-up models are, for want of a better world, “pragmatic”. They see the organisation as a constantly changing organism operating with incomplete, ambiguous information in an environment that is also constantly in flux. To survive, firms must respond dynamically and imaginatively to unpredictable, non-linear interactions in the environment which is constantly shape-shifting into new configurations in unexpected, and unexpectable, ways. For a pragmatist, practical control must be exercised at the points where the organisation interacts with its environment. A firm should have talented, empowered, well-equipped people — subject matter experts — to handle those interactions. Those in the central management function have a holistic view of the environment and can provide aspiration and tools to the subject matter experts, but real decision making is done by those experts at the edges, not the the management function in the middle.

Intellectually, the battle ought to have been won by the pragmatists long since (systems theory, complexity theory, even, for all its obsession with algorithms, evolutionary theory line up with pragmatism), but modernism keeps devising new ways of getting itself back in the game, and over the last twenty years has been winning. What with the giant strides of the information revolution, the forthcoming singularity, technological unemployment, the abolition of boom and bust in 2005, and the effective management and distribution of financial risks through sophisticated financial derivatives (amirite?), it is easy to be lulled into a sense of security.

Getting down amongst the elephants and turtles is not to everyone’s taste, but if you do it helps to see the planet on top of it more clearly. Here’s a distinction to draw: between things and interactions between things. Nouns versus verbs.

The illusion of permanence and the Ship of Theseus

We see that even many of the markers we treat as formal, fixed and permanent are really temporary: the Dread Pirate Roberts effect: the personnel comprising a corporation change over time. Likewise institutions: corporations merge, change business models, change locations, move into different markets. IBM of 2021 is very different from the IBM of 1971.

But the individuals may be fleeting and transitory; the residue they leave behind is not: The corporation’s devotion to the formal means that successive individuals become progressively constrained by their predecessors actions and decisions — even if, in the mean time the dynamic considerations that led to the decision no longer prevail. A rule that has been there for a long time, but that no-one knows the provenance of, acquires a kind of mystical quality. I think this is the inverse of the “Lindy effect”.

The illusion of significance

Because we can see the formal structures easily we tend to imbue them with significance, and assume the static connections between the formal structures are what matters. For example the org chart: this places every person in a firm in a logical, hierarchical relationship to everyone else, and can be neatly and easily controlled, that’s not to say many organisation charts become positively Byzantine.

There is much management theory around the relationship of “spans” and “layers” optimal organisation charts no more than 5 layers of management; no more than 5 direct reports and so on. This, from People Puzzles, is pretty funny:

How many is too many?
Around five direct reports seems to be the optimum number, according to Mark and Alison, although there are some scenarios where up to nine can work.
When it comes to the senior team in a company, however, too many people reporting directly to the owner manager can really hold the business back. Alison recalls working with someone who had 13 people reporting directly to her. “She had to do 13 appraisals at the end of every year!” she says. “It simply wasn’t an effective use of her time.”

Witness the formalist disposition, when the most significant thing you can do is carry out a formal process. The ethos is this: look after the form and the substance will look after itself full stop take care of the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. But this is the reverse colon this is to look after the pounds and assume the pennies will take care of themselves.

In any case you can’t encode mandatory small teams and a flat structure. There is a mathematical relationship between them: the smaller the average team, the more management layers there must be.

And besides, this is to miss the map for the territory. An organisation chart is a static map of the firm configured in the abstract, in theory, before it does anything. This is how the machine functions when it is idling. Org charts are the plan you have before you get punched in the mouth. Formal reporting lines are often the most sclerotic, rusty and resented interaction channels in the organisation. Communications up and down them — usually reluctant, strained, for the sake of it — are at best responsive to commercial imperatives, and derivative of them: the firm’s business is done only when the gears are engaged, and that means its personnel communicate with those who are not in their immediate hierarchy. The business unit is a cog: what matters is the effect a cog has when it is engaged.

But as the complicatedness of our organisations has grown we have developed more and more internal engines which engage not with the outside world but with each other in in heat generating, vibrating, noise emitting, wasteful energy consumption. Of course one needs compliance but when NZ compliance needs its own chief operating officers and and its own internal audit it drift away from optimal efficiency. I know of one internal audit department that has its own internal auditor. Who audits that function? We approach an infinite regression. But the buck must stop somewhere.

You can understand the wish to focus on reporting lines — formal organistional structure — because it can be easily seen. It is is legible. It is measurable. Auditable. But it misses the organisation’s real arterial network: lateral communications that cross the organisation’s internal and external boundaries: these are the communications that employees must make — between internal specialists in different departments and with the firm’s clients and external suppliers — to get their job done and move the organisation along. Note: it is in these interactions, themselves that things happen: it is here that tensions manifest themselves, problems emerge and opportunities arise, and that these things are resolved. It is not the drill, but the hole in the wall.

These are informal interactions. They are not well documented, and from above, not well understood. They are hard to see. They are not legible. Yep everyone who has worked in a large organisation knows that there are a small number of key people, usually not in significant formal roles, who who get things done. They know histories, they have networks, they understand procedures and and, more importantly, workarounds. These are the ad hoc mechanics that keep the the superstructure on the road.

They are hard to see precisely because they do not derive their significance from their formality, but from their function. From the frequency of interaction and the comprehensiveness of connection. These people are the super spreaders. They are the informal hubs of a multiple hub-and-spoke network. They earn their authority not from their formal position, nor their formal grading, but their informal reputation, earned daily, interaction by interaction.

A map of interactions is not a top-down, God’s-eye view. It disregards the artificial cascade of formal authority, in favour of informal credibility. It reveals the organisation as a point-to-point multi-nodal network, is a far richer organisation than that revealed by the org chart. This is how the firm actually works, and and inevitably the formal organisation will frustrate it.

Yet no firm I know of even considers it. Yet, with data analytics, it would not even be hard to do: Log the firm’s communication records for data to see where those communications go: what is the informal structure of the firm? Who are the nodes?

Typically, vertical, staff-to-manager communications don’t have those qualities. Reporting lines are more an interaction constraint rather than an indicator of productivity. They impede the firm from interacting freely.

The modernist theory is that the firm is a unitary machine that must be centrally managed and controlled from the top; therefore the more organisational structure the better.

The “agilist” advocates removing layers, disestablishing silos, and decluttering the organisational structure.

The agile theory is that risks and opportunities both arise unexpectedly, come from places unanticipated by the formal management structure, and therefore the optimal organising principle is to allow talented people at the the coalface the maximum flexibility to react to those risks and opportunities. Thus, the imperative is to have the best people, with the best equipment, in the best place to react skilfully. Those people aren’t middle managers, the optimal equipment isn’t the one that leaves the best audit trail, and that place is not the board room, much less the steering committee or the operating committee. It is out there in the jungle. the fewest number of formal impediments to their creative use by those people.

For a modernist, this is inevitably a scary prospect. The modernist view is that as long as the structure is correct the quality of the people in any of the positions on the organisational structure is immaterial as they have predefined roles to perform.

So to understand a business one needs not understand its formal structure, but its informal structure: not the roles but the people who fill them: who are the key people whom others go to to help get things done; to break through logjams, to ensure the management is on side? These lines will not show up in any organisational structure. They are not what James C. Scott would describe as legible. They are hard to see: they are the beaten tracks through the jungle: the neural pathways that light up when the machine is thinking. They show up in email traffic, phone records, swipecode data.