On Doing The Right Things, and Leaving the Consequences to Code
“In the absence of any other orders, always march to the sound of the guns” Napoleon asks his generals
But why?
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I’d like to extend my gratitude to my own mentor on such matters, the invincible Prof. Dave Snowden. A gentleman from Wales I’ve never met nor spoken with, yet his public work has had the largest impact on my thinking. Can NOT ever thank you enough Prof. Dave Snowden, your work and vibes have been invaluable for commanding the proper practice, the best game for my team.
Introduction
How to succeed in business? It’s obvious, right? Have well-defined, tightly-articulated goals and targets, and stop at nothing to get them. Otherwise, you will just lose it to someone that wants it more, right? Every business school will teach you this “apex predator” mindset: some variation of “a lion doesn’t hesitate”.
Oftentimes, the same school would show a sample of 10 successful companies to “prove” their theory, in a clear-cut case of the “survivorship bias” fallacy. We only know the bullet hole patterns of planes that successfully make it home
There are countless failed companies that have had the same “predator” mindset. A market is a Complex Adaptive System, mimicking others actions is a confusion of correlation and causation, meaning the actions you seek mimicking are a ‘byproduct of’ and NOT ‘the reason for’ success.
Correlation and causation are not easily told apart, for example amongst babies delivered via Cesarean section, there are higher percentages of autism, does this means cesarean section cause higher chances of autism? No, actually c-section is often chosen in an emergency, once normal birth in trouble, and that’s what correlates Autism and C-section, while not causally linked, what-so-ever; and such confusions are so very pervasive.
The point I seek to convey here is, to borrow from genius (like him or not) Peter Thiel, the ‘mimicking predator’ mindset is a trap. The game of doing the same only faster, more aggressively than others, is for losers, running in a straight line 5% faster than rest, waking up an hour earlier,… .
All these ultimately won’t take you nearly as far as even one insight of wisdom would, one novel ‘zero to one’, mixing together constraints and affordances, stitching together such closed systems disciplines, those we are now mistakenly taught to linearly optimize.
I’d like to both share from my experience AND shamelessly challenge the entire mindset of business schools, including: Having clear well articulated goals and targets, optimizing for efficiency, stewarding determination, ruthless Gordon Gekko style / Just All of it. It’s straight up Bullshit.
Just as examples:
It wrongly assumes we know enough and it’s all about execution. When the opposite is true: Success is almost entirely about adaptation. About constant learning and coping better with novel circumstances. Things now change faster and faster. We can no longer work based on assumptions of stagnation.
It wrongly assumes both causality and directionality, which you don’t have, failing to notice the perverse incentives and lost opportunities resulting from the present day obsession with explicit code for everything.
It wrongly fails to utilize any of the tangible potential every teammate can afford to provide, had they been deploying autonomous reason. Instead of being told how to interpret everything. Such a single perspective misses the chance for fruitful anomaly to surface and provide valuable learning benefits.
It optimizes on the wrong measures, therefore can not help but, by design, make rent seeking paper-clip maximizers from us all over sufficient time. Even if you start a company out of pure passion e.g. high-end speakers. you can not help but transition from a company that makes speakers, to a company that makes money, until your “high-end” speakers suck bad.
Can you teach any group of people to acquire any novel creative skills e.g. ‘dancing’ over email? I personally dont think so. Add relationality to task e.g. ‘Group synchronized dance’, and you’ve crossed over from ‘not really’ territory all the way to ‘cant possibly’ dark land. So why on earth would anyone be able to teach another how to solve one’s business problems, using categorical best practice?
It is entirely missing creativity and playfulness which are crucial to exposing some hidden-capture-games going-on at the expense of collective interests.
Fine, What’s better?
Are you married? Well, I am for some 13 years now. Any married person knows, there are matters on which spouse and you won’t agree on, and life at times can feel like a rope pulling contest, where each tries to “score points” pulling towards one’s preferred route. What’s worse, oftentimes you’d feel a genuine achievement for “your camp” was made, just to find out at the next iteration, you’ll be asked to give that achievement back etc.
The new mode that I seek to propose here, has helped me in Spacemesh and marriage alike.
Once you realize that spouse and self are sentient creatures, that for example what is true for us precedes what is meaningful, so you must not “compute”, on behalf of another sentient being, you can not tell the other person what its output needs be, given a specific input.
So instead of explaining one’s conclusions to ‘deaf ears’, instead of seeking compliance, you’d seek a better way for achieving lasting changes in one’s marriage life. And the essence here must be to create the context for folks to change their own mind or arrive at novel insights, and not eat their food for them. Only once one has a sincere a-ha moment, it’s of lasting quality.
But how? It’s not hard at all, you stop being so sure what’s best for everyone, try a variety of new stuff out, allow the autonomous experience and reasoning to occur freely. Use the delta between expectation and actual experience, for moving slightly closer to having a “shared assumption baseline”. From which you may effectively, up and down regulate the good and bad, emerging from repeating changes.
Instead of aiming to agree how to both behave, on what the outcome needs be, as if regardless of what your inner voice renders appropriate at any specific moment. Instead what we hold together in common domain is a ‘shared baseline assumption’ (not the output) of what we iteratively coordinate together, and then freely act from that in real-time.
It’s only in this way, that you are able to break free from this ‘rope-pulling’ into something that’s not stagnant and actually seeks moving forward and higher.
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Not here to sell you illusions, getting there is very difficult, since it requires time and unlimited dedication. Sustaining it is always fragile, in Spacemesh for example, we paid with time and a long team shuffle for getting the proper vibe / default position to stabilize and proliferate.
Nevertheless shall any team successfully deploy a culture by which everyone keeps each other in check. Collectively holding each other’s bar. Once the entire team adopts the appropriate modesty and open mindset, using at most sincere curiosity, as we perform experiments and let reality be our judge. Allow experiment results to assist us, collectively and individually, in reaffirming or discarding older beliefs (a.k.a “shared assumption baseline”).
It is only then that your novel magic-dance with uncertainty begins, and only there lies an option to robustly outperform any top-down management. And best yet, if you happen to be in the right time in the right place, an elusive portal to greatness opens up, for achieving zero to one, achieving something completely novel and completely different that no other team has ever done before, if you commit to sincere curiosity together, and never give up.
As we further explore below, and as “people of action” often understand better than theorists, in the encounter between the Idea/Theory and Practice/Implementation, in this distance between the two as those encounter, and back-feeding from practice to theory. In this dance lies both the devil and the chance to achieve greatness, so best learn to dance it well.
However it’s by no means obvious where implementation transcends ideas, and you have to search and discover it. So you build a process aimed at capturing insights (e.g. one system’s mechanisms, reusable by another system, if examined from a different perspective) between top down “progress” and bottom-up “emergent” until some puzzle clicks.
“Why Like This”?
Why Consensus all the way down, why afford for the better choice to show itself? Well as mentioned above, every challenge requires its own optimal dance, and while categorical best practice is what we are befriending.
So the rationale I’m presenting here, out of Spacemesh specific ‘frame of reference’, is nothing like ‘a categorical better way’, the fact remains that the most value i can give would be sharing of my experience. And also should it turn out Spacemesh has achieved something meaningful, let it be a testament for the potential of this “new way”.
The reasons we choose this way of working, and style of leadership, responsible before the future, treating the opportunity to serve the public as sacred, seeking the healthy. Over “rational”, “normative”, acceptable way of running amuck to some initial success, and gliding metcalfe’s law lock in benefits, we personally chose to pass on, are presented herein:
1. It’s the Future ready Way
As mentioned already, and as Kurzweil shouts on every stage. Things get faster, evolution occurs faster, you can no longer keep up with it all, and must choose what you are tracking etc. It is safe to assume that matters would further accelerate at exponential velocity. To become future ready one must come to terms with uncertainty acceleration. If you are positioned to resist change it might seem like you are winning at first, yet upon even the first of unexpected turn of events, you’d face it as a risk and lose the opportunity within it to other more agile players. The faster it goes the higher the emergent/adaptive payoffs over the reductive/linear thinking. The more novelty occurring faster the higher the artist’s advantage over the engineer.
2. It’s the Crypto Way
The crypto planet was conceived with a sincere, non-cynically aim to do better. Better for us cryptids is more fair, more inclusive, more integrative and fluid etc. Yet it is absolutely not about being hippies or ‘Kumbaya’ style non-productive. One major dimension we propose improvement is long term orientation, collaboration over short term competition: Less wasted energy and efforts by well-intentioned folks on building transitional interim stuff. Rejecting this short term focus, demonstrating a commitment for the long term harder creative work, such thinking is conducive for aligning interests towards healthy non-transactional groups.
Human Sensor Networks, examining everything from Cognitive Diversity & Neurodiversity, central to the new way forward. Investing in adaptivity, ever route-correcting and resilience over a short term bottom-line. Eventually we learn how to trust one another and not have our incentives work against us, we will give team A62 that’s passionate about B35 so much so they dedicate their life to perfecting the highest quality B35 for us, and we don’t later backstab A62.
3. It’s the Virtuous Way
Future groups are likely to be formed around shared values, about seeking to contribute to ushering the same ethics/aesthetics for the future, the only lasting mode of formation. Problem is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, talk is often cheap, thus of little use when aiming to tell the Game B apart from the Game A, to tell apart the Virtue Signaling from the Sincere care for all life forms.
Therefore, whether you are busy “finding the others”, or seek to lead a sincere committed team, I propose to examine by Results. And not excuse negligence for best intentions. Once you depart from the normative, stop expecting everyone to act the same, focusing on Actions/Code and NOT on Intentions e.g. Explanation (no matter how brilliant or beautiful) helps.
So if we want value based groups formed on Spacemesh we must start by demonstrating (and not talking about) our interpretation of infinite play. Why else would others possibly follow suit? Ultimately what you do is who you are.
4. It’s the Practical Way
Lastly and most practically, the challenges that DAO need to solve for us, are novel and hard, only by running one’s own operation as a DAO, witnessing first hand the ‘tyranny of structure-less-ness’- Only via first hand experience with the political topologies that inevitably emerge, and the real sacrifice one must make for having all one’s team bring their fullest most authentic self to work. Basically getting intimate with the problems our industry set to solve. You really can not solve problems you don’t know intimately.
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And so I dare the bravest among you, who seek to take a shot at greatness, and can afford to fail, to consider lifting this weight. I do this by means of sharing my learning from experimenting with groups organizational topologies, in inquiry into how can teams possibly afford for all team mates to bring their best, most emancipated version of themselves to our group projects, without it becoming chaotic, dysfunctional nor squashed by some inherent parasitic tendencies of certain kinds of players.
The Spacemesh Test-Case
As an example for the new way in practice, for paying attention to distance between Theory and Code, breaking the linearity between these, as the dance metaphor alludes to: In Spacemesh, our strength is supreme cryptography talent very committed to project, and the optimal way to make use of this gift, was for developers and the researchers to be interwoven together, so novel learning flows both ways, the researcher only understands the limitation of an idea once implemented by a developer, AND the developer also sharpens one grasp of refined subtlety via implementation and interaction.
Cryptographers are artists, their craft is utility. I know it’s confusing at first, but they got the wisdom of composing, concatenating and rotating 3D virtual shapes together, in their minds. But like any artist inspiration and insights may not be manufactured upon demand, and when they come they come and it really doesn’t matter how convenient now is, nor how urgent yesterday was.
Developers on the other end, are engineers, often extremely intelligent, builders of digital scarcity real estate. Providing real value to real people. I do however often feel they would hit pause on the world if they could, because they really like everything tidy, organized and sequential.
These 2 distinct characteristics need not be meshed into one ideal, god no, rather appreciated and respected for what they are, with price each has to pay for one’s best work. Should you give any of them control over the other, e.g. bible brought down from mount Sinai by cryptographers to dev, or even worse have dev choose selectively out of cryptographers recommendation… failure is guaranteed.
The ideal relationship , the best dance, between these, like the one between the heart and lungs, or any other sufficiently complex system and another for that matter. No one is the boss of the other, since they both occasionally need to rely on each other, instead they #keoic (keep each other in check). Keep each other intellectually honest, collectively holding each other’s bar. So if for example, well defined experiments makes for a clear case, whereby cryptographer assumptions were wrong, even they are “trapped” to concur.
So main point about #keoic is not the intuitive, “who are you to boss me” Anarchy Values nor preventing abuses etc. Instead it’s about maximizing adaptive fitness, as it by design forces both sides to reckon with anomalies and changing circumstances, to turn friction into continuous learning, (instead of only one learning what the other already knows).
Upon such culture clashes, between teams, they need NOT be left to own devices nor not someone to force a decision, instead we need to have both on board not suffocating the art that seeks to express itself, in the tension. So instead teams need help with implementing and operating a well function #keoic process, for higher quality choices to be discovered.
The New Way
New way to do what exactly?
Collective Navigation Journey (a.k.a ‘Desert Crossing’) — a group of humans to come together as autonomous agents with shared aspirations. And dialing the team culture just right, until magic happens and group dynamics, as reality unfolds with ceaseless surprises, becomes insightful, full of class and grace.
An entirely novel way for teams of free people with shared aspiration (read: shared vision, dream, hallucination, view beyond the horizon) to operate, learn and repeatedly ‘recalculate-route’ within any complex uncertain accelerating environment.
What’s New About it?
Ever tried teaching someone Skiing or Swimming? If you did, you know, you really can not survey 10 pro-skiers, look for dominant moves amongst them and copy those to become a skier, you never show the person a pro movie and say “now do that”. Relationality to rapidly changing terrain, works nothing like that.
Instead you look at where the student currently is and work with them on the next leg up. Basically never ask where the road needs to end, nor what the destination looks like, rather always ask what’s the next move north. That’s what you do when learning to ski, try new balance, new focus, new moves, and see+learn which works when, until some natural autocorrect takes over. What students in essence ask themselves here is ‘what does skiing want from me’? how can i stop getting in its way, let the body takeover and the fun begin.
Back to the business settings, think about a small startup, with big dreams, that management demands team-mates to be more like Google, to dream big, to overachieve, blah blah… Yet it doesn’t happen obviously and management gains frustration. Very familiar, right? Because again, relationality to changing terrain, works nothing like that. Condition are never ideal and fraction allows real-time learning.
Hoping one group learns to achieve anything creative and adaptive (not in a lab) as a group, can not progress with “let’s all be more like that pro skiing group” instead you make a change and see if better skiing emerges as a result. To become a pro skiing team, we therefore NOT point to some wishful place, some perfect ideal, and aim to mitigate distance from that point to here, you let go of all that ideal based thinking, and focus and team skiing quality right now.
To achieve scalable behavior in human systems, you need to have processes that engender the right behavior, rather than assuming behavior will engender the processes. You just can NOT escape the harder creative work of discovering, in participatory co-creative fashion, what it is that THIS Ski and THIS team need as a guiding and binding process.
How does such a team advance and make progress?
At heart, such new way is the ‘sensors’ analogy, we never know enough, we can’t ever reliably anticipate the future states of a complex adaptive system. So we adopt modesty, playfulness, and experimentation.
As the great George Gilder once told me “it’s not about what you know, stupid, it’s about how fast you are learning”. So instead of helping the truth, push through the edges of shared-baseline-assumption, in aim to resist or verify. Knowledge only precedes by recognizing blind spots and that once you recognize them then they become almost trivial. How could I have been so blind you’d say in retrospect, but finding the faulty hidden assumption, can not be systematized.
So winning in our new-way is about continuous learning: The use of experimentation and active-inference for reducing uncertainty
In this way, you stop trying to predict the future, instead leave it open, and focus on making higher quality, more effective choices, right now. So forget about “moving fast and breaking things” and start moving slower, use extra time for reinforced learning, reducing uncertainty and coherence sustaining, always trying to understand now better.
North? North is discovered as we aim to implement what our heart knows is possible, and face the inaccessibility of this way, one optimal decision at a time.
What about Leadership, how does that work?
Our leader’s role, being a cute confused human, like we all are, is NOT to be the hero that would make it rain for all of us, thus we must follow and blindly pledge our trust to. Instead you are choreographing, creating a certain scene and letting the team dance in it, see what happens.
Make changes and see what happens and reinforce the good stuff and disrupt the bad stuff, reminding yourself to be humble since one truly can’t predict nor control the results — that is the key move and what you must come to terms with.
So leaders do not manage people’s mindsets, instead manage processes.
There is a tension (akin to dialectic tension) that needs preserving for the next best move forward to be discovered. Your goals as a leader is to let the sensors truly sense, increase agency and autonomy in the system, without losing accountability and closing the loop for wider team learning sake.
The 2 extremes, the thesis and antithesis, ‘we all dance to my tune’; and ‘we all dance each to its own tune’, find their synthsys in, ‘we collectively decide and revise our tune, and then all dance to our very own tune in harmony’. For example simply telling people they have authority without closing the loop, without honing on our beat, is a waste of time.
The truth of the matter is, all teams play a game, command a practice, decision making unfolds in a specific topological fashion, scaffolds are used as means of offloading some of our decision making to our environment “going with some flow” unless triggered by anomalies; Your role is such a team’s leader, what it takes to lead is a function of the specific game team plays and the specific cog-wheel it lacks to run smoother.
What’s wrong with Explicit Goals and Targets?
The desire to have explicit code for everything, is very very dangerous, which must stop with this “Tyranny of Explicit”. That’s right we no longer obsess about codifying everything in extra explicit fashion, because anything explicit can be gamed! or narrow feeding interest, best severing capture tactics.
And what’s worse is a recipe for myopic sight, if you seek only something very specific, you are guaranteed to miss other cool things that can be useful and accessible. The 2 extremes, the thesis and antithesis, being too tightly articulated and the antithesis of having no north star being fully reactive, finds its synthsys in having sufficiently vague northstar that is both not completely amorphous yet affords experimentation
Participants are always invited to deploy autonomous Reason, and in fact solicited for their different perspectives.
If not efficiency, what do you optimize for?
As mentioned we optimize for insights ( and not speed of execution, must pay the price in one or the other). Why? Any team set to solve something important, in a fast changing unpredictable world, must learn to acknowledge that in the journey from idea to reality, you win some and lose some all the time, some ideas turn out impractical while novel pathways you couldn’t have imagined opens up. This dance with affordance , is at the heart of any collective navigation journey. Focused on the distance between theory and practice, between idea and implementation, between ideal and possible, that’s where it’s at. Yet identifying such a higher optimum, can not be systematically identified. You’ve not escaped the creative work of looking for it. So you build a process, for actual to back feed into possible, aimed at seizing such zero to one leaps between top down (idea into reality) and bottom-up “emergent” (reality back to idea) until some puzzle clicks.
What’s the key difference in vibes and how organizations behave?
Most strikingly, Participants have disintermediated connection to cause, thereby open and free to express it as they now see fit, no one being told how to use reasoning — The anomalies that must emerge, friction emerging from autonomous member’s observation and judgment is NOT avoided rather comfortably examined, for its benefits of introducing us to our blind spots, typically a very implicit assumption we previously fail to notice we are making.
The use of Roles is essential, humans got to represent. Were you ever told by a boomer to “be yourself” and then you looked inside and there was no one there, instead had they asked you to represent the group’s gate-keeper role you immediately know what to do with “yourself”.
Proliferating vibes likely to include but not be limited to Modesty, Curiosity, Playfulness, Constant-Experimentation
Why is this way preferable, from an Ethical standpoint?
Imagine loving someone deeply, which is great, but also conspiring secretly to make it impossible for your lover to leave you, which is less great. This aim, to make the future go our way, to prevent your lover from freely choosing to stay with you, as if going behind the scene of reality and pulling some cord in one’s favor. This is so entrenched in rational post-modern humans, we often fail to notice it’s what we are actually up to.
The main essence to grasp is just how deep asymmetry of relationships plus Obsessionen on previous best practices may derail one’s team from identifying what’s theirs to master- So instead of ‘calculate probabilities’, instead of ‘extract backwards’ from most likely future, instead obsessing about prediction. You simply make the best turn, as the team and open future sees it, in every corner, and observe curiously what this road brings ahead.
Shall you observe carefully how often we help truth be such that supports one position, as if a result of demand and not interrogation, you can no longer unsee this phenomena. And the difference between learning from reality, and forcing our truth on reality becomes sharper. So we learn to tell these apart, and aim to avoid bending reality to fit our plans.
