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Newsletter cribnotes
Modernism, formalism versus pragmatism
- Vertex versus edge
- Text versus meaning
- Algorithm versus heuristic
- Formal versus informal
- Tool versus application
- Innate versus emergent
- Obvious versus subtle
- God versus Darwin
- Simple versus complex
- Quantitative versus qualitative
- Calculated versus interpreted
- Static versus dynamic
- Stocks versus flows
- Things versus interactions
- Nouns versus verbs
- Trees versus wood
- Permanent versus ephemeral
A running theme in the JC is the distinction between top-down and bottom-up models of organisation. We are increasingly becoming obsessed with modernism as a prevailing dogma, about which few people talk directly, though there is much talk obliquely — John Kay’s Obliquity, for example. But systems theory, complexity theory, even, for all its obsession with algorithms, evolutionary theory line up with pragmatism:
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”[1] 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.
This map of interactions, which is not a top-down, God’s-eye view cascade of authority, but a point-to-point multi-nodal network, is a far richer organisation chart.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.
Turtles
Talking Politics with Adam Curtis
The idea that the truth is in the patterns in the days that human cannot even see.
Money as an abstract token of value that has no intrinsic value
Advertising generates economic production, rather than economic production generating advertising.
Authenticity
The importance of authenticity. Why is it not the same when it isn't David gilmour playing that guitar solo?
The importance of effort. We should not underestimate how we we value the effort required to produce intellectual property. Many years ago go robotics engineers designed a contraction that could play the flight of the bumblebee on classical guitar. Undoubtedly the machine was extremely complex, the programming highly ingenious and it executed the police flawlessly at tempo, undoubtedly more perfectly then the finest classical guitarist could. But would you pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch a robot playing classical guitar? Once the technical problem has been solved and can be inexpensively replicated the value of the performance tends to 0. Even though we can can program robots to flawlessly play, at no cost, we will still pay good money to watch a human virtuoso doing the same thing less well than the machine.
The segues into a conversation about the meaning of value. The same way that meaning does not exist in the words on a page, value does not exist in in the technical performance of a skill, but lies somewhere between the performer and and it's audience. Similarly, science is not simply demarcation of the correct answers to questions, but is demarcation of the correct questions requiring answers. This is a dynamic. It is complex in the technical sense, the ground rules are approximate and shift without warning based on the attitudes of the conversants.
Leaving aside all the overpowering psychological reasons not to value an AI version of Pink Floyd, there is the bluntly practical one. They can only ever be a flawless moment it can recombine existing elements into a new you form. But it cannot create genuinely new you output because it is not the artist. Whatever the machine comes up with it will not be what nirvana's next album was going to be. Of course, we cannot know that, but consider an AI algorithm directed at The Beatles first four albums. Is there any chance it could have devised music resembling that on revolver or rubber soul let alone tough White album or sergeant pepper's? An AI analysing Pablo honey and The bends will not produce amnesiac or kid A.
Allegory, fairy stories and the hubris of taking things literally
We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take Arthur C. Clarke at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons?
Critical theory, post-modernism, modernism and the death of objective truth
Most conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth. Some are completely true. There has to be something for the credulous people to glom onto. The conspiracy theory of our time is critical theory
Critical theory’s grain of truth, ironically, is that there is no truth. This is its debt to post-modernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept. Those on the right — Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds is an articulate example — and the left
The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones.
The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Helen Pluckrose, Douglas Murray and recently Matthew Syed) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just are true. No amount of identifying with an alternative theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window.
On the other hand Jacob Howland made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has critical theory escape its postmodern origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the high modernists who inhabit an intellectual world that seeks to solve all problems by top-down taxonomies and computation.
An illiberal alliance of technological corporatism and progressivism is rapidly turning universities into a “talent pipeline” for the digital age. When fully constructed, this pipeline will deliver a large and steady flow of human capital, packaged in certifiable skill sets and monetised in social-impact or “pay-for-success” bonds. But the strongly particular or eccentric shapes of mind, character, and taste that make human beings, as John Stuart Mill says, “a noble and beautiful object of contemplation” would clog the talent pipeline.
Critical theory has escaped its usual confines in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using their rationalist framework to advance what is a fairly radical political agenda. Critical theory is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has displaced them altogether and is making its own arrogant assumptions in their place.
That's not altogether a bad thing — although the practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another.
The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not false (that would be a paradox right?) So much as incoherent. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language.
And languages are intrinsically ambiguous. This is the tragedy and the triumph of the human condition.
The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright.
If you accept the proposition that truth is a function of a sentence and therefore the language of that sentence comma for there to be a transcendent truth the language in which it was uttered would necessarily need to be complete, comprehensive, and itself true. The nearest linguistic structures that we have to to complete languages are those of mathematics and perhaps science. Yet we know that mathematics is a necessarily incomplete language something Colin from that we know that any natural language is necessarily incomplete semicolon and in the case of science we know with certainty that science is not what a complete and comprehensive statement of the laws of the physical universe. We haven't solved the universe yet. There are large fundamental unknowns; dark matter; dark energy; the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and and special relativity. Even if the concept of transcendent truth were coherence we have nothing like enough information to access it. In the same way that the fielder does not have enough physical information to calculate the trajectory of a cricket ball, and therefore pragmatically approximates it, so we do not have anything like enough information to confidently predict the scientific performance of the universe and therefore we pragmatically approximate it.
Pragmatic approximations comma being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time I’m are are more tolerant, plural and liberal than concrete scientific calculations.
The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective.