Harry: 0:00

People aren't asking that question, "Hey, is this gonna be a temporary thing or not?" They're going ahead and building out... they're talking to their LLM and they're generating some code and they're, "Look, it works. It's so cool!" And what they've just done is they've built a perishable thing, but they're thinking about it as a potentially permanent thing.

Narrator: 0:22

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge: 0:32

Hey Harry. It's good to see you.

Harry: 0:35

Oh, fantastic to see you again, Jorge. Thanks for making time today.

Jorge: 0:39

I always have time for you, my friend. What has changed since we last talked? Because we talked about change last time.

Harry: 0:47

What has changed? Let's see. It's raining. We had some of the most beautiful weather of the year the last few days and I see the raindrops coming down, so the simple pragmatics of weather, those things are changing. We got our new website launched. I'm very excited to say. We got a new assessment just about completed for determining your competency level as somebody who might be interested in learning how to prioritize better. So there's so many things happening. I'm super excited about it.

Jorge: 1:23

When you say we, are you talking about your consulting business or...?

Harry: 1:27

My apologies. Yes, Peak Priorities, my little... the shingles hanging down and the little nascent consulting company, which we do speaking, coaching, executive coaching, consulting, and certain special projects. I love it. I'm just incredibly blessed.

Jorge: 1:48

Fantastic. I'm gonna check it out. Last time I was there, you had just opened up the newsletter, so it sounds like there's more stuff there.

Harry: 1:56

Oh. And yeah, and I published an article recently, which you may have received on Collapsing Sliding Windows. Yeah, that new strategic planning construct.

Jorge: 2:05

Yeah, if folks get value from this podcast, they really would get value from your newsletter. So highly recommended.

Harry: 2:12

Thanks. Did you bring anything to read today?

Jorge: 2:15

I did, I brought a reading and how about I just barge into it?

Harry: 2:21

Okay. Sounds good.

Jorge: 2:25

"When you see a young and an old human, you can be confident that the younger will survive the elder. With something non-perishable, say a technology, that is not the case. We have two possibilities: either both are expected to have the same additional life expectancy (the case in which the probability distribution is called exponential), or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young, in proportion to their relative age. In that situation, if the old is eighty and the young is ten, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one. Now conditional on something belonging to either category, I propose, (building on the so-called Lindy effect in the version later developed by the great Benoît Mandelbrot):" this is now me giving you like the, air quotes thing, right? this next part is in italics because this is the thing the author is proposing: "For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live."

Harry: 4:03

That is so interesting. It's so obvious after I heard it, and of course never would've been able to put it into those terms. Where in the world did you stumble on this?

Jorge: 4:17

This is from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile.

Harry: 4:21

Oh yeah.

Jorge: 4:24

And this is an idea that didn't originate with Taleb, but it's the first time I came across it, which is the Lindy effect. And I read this passage hoping that we'd talk about this idea because for me, like you're saying that it makes a lot of sense. For me, when I first read it, it felt really counterintuitive. And then the more I thought about it and the more I became aware of it, the more I was like, "That's an example of the Lindy effect. And that's an example of the Lindy effect. Yes, this is a thing!" Right? Like the more something and he makes a distinction between perishable and non-perishable things, right? the more something non-perishable has been around, the more likely it is to be around.

Harry: 5:13

Yeah.

Jorge: 5:14

Which is a really interesting idea, particularly in our time of great change where there's all this new stuff popping up.

Harry: 5:23

I'm just reminded of just how brilliant he is as a thinker and as an author. And I did not read Antifragile. Of course, I understand the concept behind the book. But, that's a pretty strong endorsement to go pick up a copy of that book and read it cover to cover. I also love how you seem to be finding these handles like the Lindy effect or Chesterton's fence or something that you can put in my backpack and carry with me and use once I understand it.

Jorge: 5:57

This is the mental models thing that Shane Parrish talks about, right? Like the idea that there are these ideas that become part of your mental toolbox, way of looking at the world. We've talked about framing in the past, right? Like the frames you bring to things. And I think that a lot of what we do in these conversations is discuss these things, right? And again, for me, it started as a kind of counterintuitive thing where I was like, "Is that right? That can't be right." And I think that my initial reaction to it my initial hesitancy to adopt that one came from my involvement in technology, just because working in this space, it feels like there's so much new stuff coming out and things become obsolete so quickly. And yet, there are some things around that when you start looking around, it's like, "Hey, that thing's been around for a while." Right? Like the operating system in our computers, like the Mac operating system, that's a version of Unix. And that thing is about as old as you and I are, right?

Harry: 7:13

Yeah, it's not a spring chicken.

Jorge: 7:16

No. So, even in the world of technology where things change so quickly, there are these things that do manage to stand the test of time. And his assertion there, the way that I understood it anyway, is that if you're looking to make a decision between two kinds of systems, it behooves you to look at the one that has some track record. I'm smiling 'cause that the words came out of my mouth and it sounded like, this is a kind of obvious thing to say. But again, I feel like I need to keep reminding myself in this time of so much change that, "Hey, there are things that have stood the test of time."

Harry: 8:08

The other thing too is like... your comment about software, I grew up on Unix systems, right? Literally, that's what I had, was using Unix on a PDP 11 in college and then my first job was with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation that put licensed AT&T System 5 Unix and put it on PCs. It was called Xenix, and that was before Linux. But I was thinking how important this is right now because we are entering the age of disposable software, and the types of things you can build using a Cursor, Lovable, or any of these sort of code development accelerators is likely to produce something that is remarkably clever and very useful, but not necessarily terribly durable. And there's a very good chance that you can express the idea quickly and turn it into something that has utility. Will it be around very long? Probably not. It hasn't necessarily been well architected. It hasn't gone through the annealing process of people thinking about how it should not just function, but how it should work under the covers and hang together so that it's scalable, extensible, usable, durable, flexible, and so on and so forth. So it just seems like a very timely topic.

Jorge: 9:45

That's why I wanted to bring it to our conversation, because I've been thinking about this myself as I build out capabilities, workflows, right? Obviously, I'm experimenting a lot with AI, and in my work with Greg, we're helping businesses use this to make their work better. And so, I'm working with these things day in and day out.

Harry: 10:16

And this is your company, unfinishe?

Jorge: 10:19

Yeah. And one of the things that is always on the back of my mind is, all of these big players in that space are relatively new organizations that haven't been around for that long, right? Yes, they're in partnership with the Microsofts and the Oracles of the world, which have been around for a long time. But OpenAI and Anthropic and these organizations, they're fairly new, right? They don't have the track record. And you're building out all these workflows that integrate these tools that are cloud-based, meaning you don't have control over the technology, they're not part of your infrastructure. There's somebody else's infrastructure that you're using, temporarily. And, it creates this situation.... and maybe this is not just a characteristic of the AI companies, it comes with the nature of cloud-based software. It creates this situation where your organization's infrastructure is being built out in a kind of ephemeral model. It like it could go away tomorrow, right?

Harry: 11:51

Yeah, there's nothing very solid about it and it's turning the whole process into an organic maintenance event rather than as a, design, build, deploy, maintain event. And, I have computer servers under my desk that have software that was designed and built in 2001. And I can connect the two servers and flip the switch and turn it on and connect it to a monitor, assuming I can find a monitor converter. And all that stuff runs today. It doesn't have to go out to the internet. And it all works still, shockingly, But if I were to build something today, the probability that I could go wire them up and flip a switch and turn it on in ten or fifteen or twenty years is gotta be close to zero.

Jorge: 12:50

That's why I wanted to emphasize the distinction that Taleb makes between perishable and durable things. Because as the world has moved to information you and I, with our background in information architecture, I think that we're especially prone to see the world through this lens, that information has become central to business. It has been for a long time, but it's become even more so, right? And there are businesses that are nothing but information, right? Like, their infrastructure consists of information technology, basically. And it's very different to build a business around physical plant than it is to build a business around information systems. And one of the ways in which it is different is that because of the nature of how information technology advances and the pace at which it advances, it does feel like it's more of a perishable good than a durable good. Right?

Harry: 13:55

I love the idea of being more intentional about classifying things as either intentionally perishable or intentionally durable. And in whichever category you so choose, that in theory, should determine an approach to how you're going to relate to the design, architecture, build, dependencies, deployment, and maintenance of that over time. It feels more analog right now. It's like people aren't, at least in my experience, people aren't asking that question, "Hey, is this gonna be a temporary thing or not?" They're going ahead and building out... they're talking to their LLM and they're generating some code and they're, "Look, it works. It's so cool!" And what they've just done is they've built a perishable thing, but they're thinking about it as a potentially permanent thing. And intentionally transitioning it from a disposable piece of functionality to a more persistent, durable piece of technology then has to become part of our engagement process.

Jorge: 15:09

So, here's an idea, and I'm gonna say this because this can get pretty abstract and detached from how this might help someone gain traction, and repeating what we said in the last episode, I'm gonna try to slap the snow chains on this one.

Harry: 15:26

Yeah, okay.

Jorge: 15:27

So maybe one way to break this impasse, this idea that, "Oh my gosh, is everything going to be perishable here because we're working with these leading edge technologies?" Maybe you could make a distinction between the business you're building and the means through which the business operates. Maybe the latter is perishable and the former is durable. I'll cite one of my favorites, the Walt Disney Company, right? They started that in the 1920s, so the technology that Walt and his brother were using back then is very different from the technology that the Disney Company uses today. Walt isn't around. His brother isn't around anymore. The company is a going concern. The technology.... if they had stuck with the technology that they had a hundred years ago, they wouldn't be around today. But you can't last a hundred years if you don't have the vision that the thing that you're making is a going concern. I think it's very important for people to differentiate the, durability of the means versus the durability of the ends, If the end is to build something that lasts, you can employ perishable means to do that. In fact, today, for some businesses if you're in information technology, you might. want to invest in things that are perishable. But you have to do it in service to durability.

Harry: 17:15

I think you're onto something here, and where my brain went with it was there has to be a better set of questions that we would ask, because that simple, whether it's on one side, are we building a business or on the other, are we building the means? Doesn't go far enough. Because you have to ask the question, how long does the investment, either the investment in money or the investment in resources, the investment in effort, how long does that need to persist and how much continual investment in keeping it up and running is. There's gotta be some kind of return on effort or return on investment model that allows you to step back and answer the question, where is it on this line? Because if it's all the way over to the business side, then one would say, in theory, you should never talk to an LLM about the code the application that you want unless you are very intentionally prototyping something that you want to demonstrate and you are intending to re-architect it, throw it away, and build something up that's gonna have some persistence to it over time. Versus the other side where, the means is to perhaps express some innovation and we have this business and we're trying to climb these s-curves of innovation, we're trying to explore and experiment. And in order to do that, maybe we say, the investment in time, energy, and money doesn't need to last very long, but we have to convey the idea quickly. And so, the question of how long does this thing need to last or how long will it last, I think those questions become really critical. Look, I co-founded a company called Virtual Vineyards, it became wine.com, and we were running on our prototype... our prototype became production code. It wasn't that prototype was intended to be production code. Amazon did the same thing, right? Their initial system was running as production code for quite a long time before they were able to peel it all back and rebuild the systems to make them, scalable, extensible, performant, and all that good stuff. So, job one is getting clear about, is this about building the business versus are you building the means to express or support that business. I think job two is understanding how much payback over what period of time do you need.

Jorge: 19:49

Again, I feel like now more than ever, we are at risk of losing sight of the fact that durability matters. And yes, it's a very exciting time to be working. There's a lot of new stuff happening. But very little of it, if any, has stood the test of time. And we need to be mindful of what we're doing when we're working in this space. That's my take on it.

Harry: 20:25

Yeah, and I think from a traction point of view, architects and senior-level people are gonna have perspectives on this stuff that may be quite valuable here. We may have to rely on experience and judgment in order to know where to draw the line, and just because somebody is incredibly smart and facile with the new tools and brilliant at putting something together that does something magical and amazing, it doesn't necessarily mean that thing goes into production right away without having passed a series of conversations that would allow us to know whether or not we're making prudent decisions.

Jorge: 21:10

Yeah. I think the key there, you used the word architect. The key here is, when making a decision about a component of a system, a vendor, a product, time is an important variable to consider, right? It's a determinant. And when you're architecting a system, if you know that there are going to be components in the system that have had less time to prove themselves, then you can architect the system as a whole to accommodate possible changes in those parts, right? In aircraft engineering, redundancy is an important, principle, right? So it's something like that. Consider which parts of the system might be at greater risk of not being around just because of the fact that they're new. It's not because they're bad, it's just because of the fact that they're untested, unproven, and design redundancies that allow the system the ur-thing to be durable, to stand the test of time.

Harry: 22:23

I think your pointer to risk here is probably a really worthy topic. Understanding what the risks are and the implications of those risks and how they might come into conflict with the goals that we have is a critical missing piece of information, I think, in a lot of these discussions.

Jorge: 22:42

In our last conversation, we talked about how being aware that there are stages to change helps you manage change. So knowing that there are different facets to risk can help you mitigate risk.

Harry: 22:56

Yeah, I think that's right.

Jorge: 22:57

That's the gist.

Harry: 22:59

It's a good place to stop, I think. And at some point in the future we should go head on, talk about risk management.

Jorge: 23:08

Absolutely. When this podcast has been around for another twenty-five years, and people will know, "Oh my gosh, yeah, this has really stood the test of time!"

Harry: 23:19

Yeah. Sounds like every episode we get out there makes it more and more likely that it'll be out there twenty-five years from now.

Jorge: 23:24

That's exactly right, except for the fact that both you and I are perishable.

Harry: 23:29

And it's all running on cloud technology.

Jorge: 23:33

Alright, well awesome sharing with you again, Harry.

Harry: 23:36

Thank you so much. Great reading.

Narrator: 23:38

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.