Jorge 0:00

The land might be a source of multiple things, but if you're going to make it manageable, particularly in a world before computers, you're just gonna care about like how many trees can be grown there or, how much copper can be extracted or what have you. And you collapse this very rich environment into this abstraction that you can measure and therefore you can manage. And in so doing, you lose a lot.

Narrator 0:33

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

Jorge 0:43

Hey, Harry, it's good to see you.

Harry 0:46

Hey, happy Monday, Jorge. It's great to see you too.

Jorge 0:49

Happy Monday indeed. We usually record on Mondays, and that's a good day of the week to do this. I don't know. People are down on Mondays. I like Mondays.

Harry 0:59

I like Mondays too, but, let's not push our beliefs and philosophies on other people any more than we already do. My understanding is you brought something to share today.

Jorge 1:11

I did bring something to share and it is a long reading. So I am going to just get started with it and hopefully, we'll have a substantive conversation from this.

Harry 1:25

Let's dig in.

Jorge 1:27

"Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, compared the hedgehog who knew "one big thing" to the fox, who knew many things. The scientific forester and the cadastral official are like the hedgehog. The sharply focused interest of the scientific foresters in commercial lumber and that of the cadastral officials in land revenue constrained them to finding clear-cut answers to one question. The naturalist and the farmer, on the other hand, are like the fox. They know a great many things about forests and cultivable land. Although the forester's and cadastral official's range of knowledge is far narrower, we should not forget that their knowledge is systematic and synoptic, allowing them to see and understand things a fox would not grasp. What I want to emphasize here, however, is how this knowledge is gained at the expense of a rather static and myopic view of land tenure. The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were arranged and owned at the moment the survey was conducted. But the current is always moving, and in periods of major social upheaval and growth, a cadastral survey may freeze a scene of great turbulence. Changes are taking place on field boundaries; land is being subdivided or consolidated by inheritance or purchase; new canals, roads, and railways are being cut; land use is changing and so forth. Inasmuch as these particular changes directly affect tax assessments, there are provisions for recording them on the map or in a title register. The accumulation of annotations and marginalia at some point render the map illegible, whereupon a more up-to-date but still static map must be drawn and the process repeated. No operating land revenue system can stop at the mere identification of parcel and ownership. Other schematic facts, themselves static, must be created to arrive at some judgment of a sustainable tax burden. Land may be graded by soil class, how well it is watered, what crops are grown on it, and its presumed average yield, which is often checked by sample crop cuttings. These facts are themselves changing, or they are averages that may mask great variation. Like the still photo of the cadastral map, they grow more unrealistic with time and must be re-examined. These state simplifications, like all state simplifications, are always far more static and schematic than the actual social phenomena they presume to typify. The farmer rarely experiences an average crop, an average rainfall, or an average price for his crops. Much of the long history of rural tax revolts in early modern Europe and elsewhere can be illuminated by the lack of fit between an unyielding fiscal claim on one hand and an often wildly fluctuating capacity of the rural population to meet that claim on the other. And yet, even the most equitable, well-intentioned cadastral system cannot be uniformly administered except on the basis of stable units of measurement and calculation. It can no more reflect the actual complexity of a farmer's experience than the scientific forester's schemes can reflect the complexity of the naturalist's forest. Governed by a practical, concrete objective, the cadastral lens also ignored anything lying outside its sharply defined field of vision. This was reflected in a loss of detail in the survey itself. Surveyors, one recent Swedish study found, made the fields more geometrically regular than they in fact were. Ignoring small jogs and squiggles made their job easier and did not materially affect the outcome. Just as the commercial forester found it convenient to overlook minor forest products, so the cadastral official tended to ignore all but the main commercial use of a field. The fact that a field designated as growing wheat or hay might also be a significant source of bedding straw, gleanings, rabbits, birds, frogs, and mushrooms was not so much unknown as ignored, lest it needlessly complicate a straightforward administrative formula. The most significant instance of myopia, of course, was that the cadastral map and assessment system considered only the dimensions of the land and its value as a productive asset or as a commodity for sale. Any value that the land might have for subsistence purposes or for the local ecology was bracketed as aesthetic, ritual, or sentimental values."

Harry 6:15

Wow. I am gonna place a bet that I know where that came from.

Jorge 6:21

All right, let's see. Let's see. I'm curious.

Harry 6:25

So there are a set of books that I've run across in my life that before I read them, I thought about the world one way, and after I read them, I saw the world a different way. And the book Seeing Like a State was one of those books. And I'm gonna put my money on Seeing Like a State. Is that where this came from?

Jorge 6:49

We have a winner! How many times...

Harry 6:52

i'm so glad

Jorge 6:54

We have a winner. I'm so thrilled because this is, gosh, we've been doing this now for a while and finally one of us has guessed the book correctly. Yes. And yes, that book is on my list of books that have changed how I see everything. The book is called Seeing Like a State, and the subtitle is significant, so I'm gonna read it: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. And it's by James C. Scott. So, you've read this?

Harry 7:33

I have read that cover to cover. I really wanna read it again because I found it a very difficult book to read. And it wasn't... it was just dense, right? It was full of new ways of thinking that were so obviously right and well-researched, but were so counter to how I saw the world that it seemed like a portal that I went through that I thought the world existed one way, which is trees are just trees and plants are just plants and maps are just maps, and I came out the other side thinking, "Wow, there is an entirely different schema and viewpoint for looking at all of this," not just the difference between something being static versus dynamic, or not just a difference between something being complex or dynamically complex, but something being fundamentally measurable in a different way, and that there would be an entirely different construct for how to think about what you're looking at. Because seeing the forest for the trees is like the old way of looking at it, and seeing the forest through the eyes of the state, if you will, like the government state, is an entirely different way. And recognizing that the economics and land use and monetary value and tax base and people's intentions and hist- like, all of that goes into looking at how land functions. But it's not just land. Everything's like that. And it's the, it's this gen... I don't know what you call it. It's like this generalizable principle for looking at any map now, and looking... And not just a physical, not just like a road map, but any conceptual map of the world can be viewed now through multiple different points of view. I am so curious what brought this to our conversation.

Jorge 9:47

Yes. So that's what I wanted to bring out here because in hearing us talk about this book, it might start sounding a little nerdy and abstract. It's like, "What are you talking about maps and cadastral surveys and all this stuff?" I've been having conversations with line of business leaders in organizations, and they are being tasked by their managers to adopt AI. And there is a lot of that happening right now. Teams are adopting the technology. And I think it's fair to say that it's being done in a kind of hectic, experimental, ad hoc, somewhat bottom-up manner, where within certain boundaries, people are being given the tools and encouraged to experiment and explore with how they might be used in a business context. And I'm increasingly hearing that there is a lot of experimentation, and the experimentation is happening in a kind of very undirected fashion. the question becomes, What is the right balance between bottom-up and top-down transformation," right? Because management wants to make sure that initiatives are in service of the business's goals. We want to sell more, we want to produce more, we want to produce more effectively, more efficiently, more cheaply. We want to reduce the number of defects, the number of returned items. I don't know. Different businesses have different numbers that they want to improve. And I feel like we might be starting to move into the phase in the deployment of AI where people are starting-- are asking the question: "So how do we use this? And how we avoid people developing dozens of agents that do the same thing, basically. And Seeing Like a State, like you, the first time I read it, and I have read it twice, and I'm actually considering reading it a third time now because it's one of these books that you revisit and get something new every time.

Harry 12:16

Totally. Yeah

Jorge 12:17

But on reflection, I would say that this book is an argument against utopian top-down initiatives.

Harry 12:28

Okay, fair enough

Jorge 12:30

And the way that Scott does that is by explaining how such systems came about at the highest level, at the state level, right? How they came about and why they came about. So the passage that I read, which was obviously dealing with how we manage land use and the taxation of land-based resources, one of the points he's making is that parceling land so that it can be accounted for is not something that exists in nature. That's layered. It's an abstraction layered by people. This is something else that stuck with me in the, book. Just the fact that we have surnames is something that did not emerge from a natural human society. Surnames were imposed by the state in order to tax people so that we could run a census. And it wasn't until human societies had a certain scale and they had the necessary information systems that they could aspire to manage a large population. And when you do that, you have to make population or the land or what have you legible, and that requires collapsing it to comparable measures. And that's what that little passage I read was about, right? Like, the land might be a source of multiple things, but if you're going to make it manageable, particularly in a world before computers, you're just gonna care about like how many trees can be grown there or how much copper can be extracted or what have you. And you collapse this very rich environment into this abstraction that you can measure and therefore you can manage. And in so doing, you lose a lot. And I wanted to discuss this in the light of these hugely disruptive bottom-up experiments that are happening in organizations. And what I expect is the next phase, which is how do we balance the potential innovation that's coming through these experiments with something that is recognizably manageable to the people trying to steer the ship.

Harry 15:07

Yes. The two things that jump to mind upon hearing you reflect on this are, something that I know you're very familiar with, which is Stewart Brand's pace layers and another thing is the April 2011 Harvard Business Review article called The F Word, which is reframing failure, and helps provide, I think, an excellent model and taxonomy for thinking about how today, if you step back, failure is a pejorative. When you fail, it is bad. Versus in an experimental frame, failure is just feedback. And The F Word does an extraordinarily good job, I think, best I've seen, in all of the things that I've read and run across, of helping in an organizational or business context, place the word failure in a context where you can deconstruct it and apply it in more generative ways so that you can look at more experimental versus less experimental environments, more innovation or creative environments versus more mission-critical environments, and look at how "failure," or AKA feedback, is or is not appropriate and what you might do to take advantage of the sort of inevitable nature of failure, which is inevitable and out of our control, and apply it in ways that are more valuable. So that was one. And the other was, of course, the pace layers model, where in Brand's book, How Buildings Learn, he unpacks that at the most foundational layers, things change very slowly in a building, and at the outer layers, things change relatively quickly. The paint and the trim can change relatively easily and quickly versus the walls change more slowly versus the electrical infrastructure, HVAC tend to change even more slowly, and you get down to the foundation and probably it doesn't change much at all unless there is a major renovation taking place. But these are all ways of thinking about these kinds of structures. And then turning it around, of course, I was recalling, like in the advent of the telephone, there was one... You picked up the phone and somebody was on the other end. And there was no number to dial right? Because there was only a point-to-point connection at the advent of the telephone. And now we have 11 digits. And it's gone through this evolution of one digit, call the operator, to two digits, which was quite common a long time ago, to seven digits. Now it's seven plus three plus a country code, so we have 11 digits. And it's this model for abstracting away the underlying details. And now we just tap a thing on our phone that has a name, and underneath it is all of that detail, right?

Jorge 18:36

The primary reason why I brought this reading is I'm interested in the legibility of what is happening, right? So, if you want to manage something, you need like you were saying, you need feedback. You need to know how the system is responding to whatever decisions you've made, incentives you've created, et cetera. And the stage that we're in, at least for many organizations, this is one of those not evenly distributed problems. But for at least some of the folks that I've been talking to, we seem to be moving from a stage where the incentives have been around adoption of the technology. And I'm sure that you've seen people boasting, like they have competitions internally as to who's using the most tokens. That feels to me like that's the unit of measurement you would want to have visibility on if what you care about is usage of a particular technology. And I think that many organizations, they might be shifting away from that model. And the question is like, what is the visibility model that we need to move toward? Is it how many new services we are creating thanks to this technology? Is it the degree to which we are increasing our customer satisfaction scores? Is it... I'm wanting to move to a point where the things that we are measuring are more relevant to actual business goals as opposed to mere adoption of a new technology. And I'm hearing from folks that I'm talking with, there's another complication that this is happening in an environment of anxiety. You talked about failure. Part of the anxiety here is that for a lot of folks in these organizations, they're in a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation because if what is being measured is the adoption of the technology, and they're being incentivized to have their teams adopt the technology, then that's the number they wanna drive up. But then the media is telling them that this is a technology that is going to eliminate jobs. So it's, "Okay, so we're succeeding in deploying in an organization this thing that is likely going to replace us," and that, that creates an environment that is, let's say like the opposite of joyful. I can only imagine that it's really stressful, right? So anyway, visibility, like part of this book is about visibility and how do you take a really complex and unmanaged situation and abstract it in such a way that you can manage it. And I think that we have to be really mindful about how we do that

Harry 21:41

There are so many examples of measuring one side without identifying and then measuring the countervailing metric. I think about, I really don't remember if it was Southwest or one of the epic examples of trying to get to on-time status with number of airplanes, and what they missed was the number of bags that were getting left behind or something. And customer satisfaction went off the chart. So it was like, what is the countervailing metric for anything that you're doing? And then there was, the other epic one, which I remember conceptually, but not specifically, around trying to... What was it? Trying to get rid of, trying to get rid of snakes in India or something, and so that...

Jorge 22:28

Yes, the Cobra effect.

Harry 22:30

Yeah, people started breeding them. And getting clear about what's on both sides of the equation. And if joy is a thing that we need to start measuring, then what are the leading indicators of that? And how do we start paying attention to that when we're measuring tokens on one side?

Jorge 22:52

Yeah, I don't want to suggest that joy is what the business is gonna be after. I think that would be naive. But I'm saying that the choice of measures, the choice of what we are incentivizing and how we're going to be tracking progress is being done in an environment that is not... in a lot of our conversations we talk about acting... seeing clearly and responding skillfully. And I think that we're doing this, we're trying to determine what to measure and what we're driving toward. I'm just trying to acknowledge that we're doing it in an environment of high anxiety for people. And it's very important that we get this right because we want to... It's almost I'm asking the questions like, make sure that you're clear on what it is that you're looking to gain traction on 'cause, you might discover that you have gained traction, but you have gained traction on the wrong thing, right? So like if your manager is asking you to measure how many people are using AI and I don't know, how many agents are being created or what have you, it's like I don't know that's the long term, that's the best measurement of something that will ultimately create success for the business. Just understand the broader context in which you're being asked to do this and try to do right by what the business needs, but also maybe what your society needs more broadly beyond that.

Harry 24:31

And like Marshall Goldsmith, who wrote What Got You Here Won't Get You There, asserts is that we need to be measuring effort over outcomes. And, I think the corollary to that is I think we need to be measuring progress over productivity. And, maybe joy was the bad example. Maybe productivity is actually the thing that people used to focus on. But progress, how do you measure progress? Is it a function of a zero-sum system? I hope not. But I know we've gotta wrap it today, and this is a very important topic. I'm definitely gonna go back and reread that book in my copious spare time, and I so appreciate that you brought it today, and I think anybody that's willing to invest the time in reading this book will see the world a different way when they're done with it.

Jorge 25:19

I'm not exaggerating. It is one of the most important books I've read. it certainly informed my worldview deeply. We do have more to talk about in this, and you've mentioned several books that I need to check out that might help us deepen this conversation. So thank you, Harry.

Harry 25:33

Yeah. Thank you, Jorge.

Narrator 25:37

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.