Hello there, friend!

This week, I bring you my brief notes on the book An Everyone Culture instead of an essay. I listened to it, hence the brevity, but I really liked it. In the pursuit of scaling wisdom, the “system” (i.e. self-management) is one part of the equation, but people are the other. Not everyone is ready for the level of responsibility and initiative required. Thus, looking for ways that can support adult development is just as important as looking for ways to bring organizations closer to self-management, and this book was a great primer.

Overview

• There are 3 main developmental stages in adulthood:

  • Socialized mind – very conforming, takes on the values of the group

  • Self-authoring mind – finds their own values and opinions and is consistently guided by them, but these are rigid

  • Self-transforming mind – has their own values and opinions, but is willing to adjust them based on experience and evidence

• Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs) constantly look for ways to challenge people, put them into roles and situations that they are not quite ready yet, instead of letting them settle in what they do best, which would promote stagnation

  • Crucially, these challenges are complemented by the organizational culture of looking for ways to constantly provide feedback. However, this feedback isn't just about behaviors – it's encouraged to look for the deeper patterns that cause the surface behaviors and address those

• DDOs also make it clear that mistakes and flaws are normal – discovering and admitting them is celebrated, only hiding or avoiding them is criticized

  • Some for example keep a company log of mistakes and flaws, where everyone is supposed to write their failings

• DDOs also make sure that company values don't just become slogans, but are really lived

• DDOs see profit as downstream from the development of people

3 – Conceptual View of DDOs

• The edge, home & groove are interdependent like the legs of a tripod, business & growth go hand in hand

EDGE (height of aspiration)

• Constructive destabilisation = trust, pain, care

  • If someone has mastered a role it's time to move on

  • To facilitate this, no role is dependent on just one person

HOME (depth of connection)

• if I show vulnerability, I will probably learn something – I am valued regardless of my flaws

• Mind the Gap = Aiming for Wholeness

  • Practices to close the gape between the work me and real me, for example "checking in" during meetings

    • Practice being vulnerable, take the fear off it

• Home = developmental communities

  • Constant accountability and dialogue support growth

GROOVE (breadth of developmental practices)

• Principles and practices are explicit and reflected on

• DDOs are not necessarily self-managed, but managers can get challenged and receive as critical feedback as anyone

  • At the same time, everyone is supposed to engage in the design of shared rules and processes, and basically all decisions. Managers are primarily coaches and cultivators of conditions

• It cannot be understated how brutal working in a DDO is, even as it is rewarding and transformative

  • They are working on weaknesses, not strengths

4 - practices

• Some interesting practices that can support development that caught my attention:

  • collecting data points on a person in a 360 manner so that patterns can be observed and decisions made about where to assign them

  • Pairing people with opposing tendencies (e.g. arrogant-insecure) into couples of mutual development support

  • Holding environment = holding on (accepting as is), letting go, sticking around (reforming the relationship with the person whose previous idea of we let go)

5 - Is this a way to run a business?

• NextJump saw a drop in staff poached when they decentralized authority more - jobs are more complex, but also more rewarding

• the culture has to come first, before business metrics – people have to be all in on it, or else it wouldn't work

• The culture has to demand and support people to reflect on and articulate their own weaknesses and mistakes, while also calling others on their

  • Without this you get business-as-usual: impression management and gossip. This leads to people knowing only about 60% of what they should know about themselves, thus bleeding efficiency

  • The explicit assumption that "people and business grow together " – as people are encouraged to address their flaws honestly, they do the same with the business, learning much more about how it works and how to manage it – mastering the Activity

Last week’s dig-ups

Personal metawork

• A tiny but very useful plugin for Chrome (or Brave) that I’ve been using for some time – Video Speed Controller. It let’s you play any video in your browser at up to 4x speed, with hotkeys for easily adjusting the speed or rewinding the video.

Collective metawork

• Dave Snowden – internal scaffolding (like skeleton) is what allows systems to scale. Also, hierarchies of roles are ok, hierarchies of individuals are not.

• A short read on why flat organization pursued to cut costs (as Meta is doing) is doomed to fail.

Philosophy & Sense-making

• According to Peter Schiff, the financial crisis has already started and currency crisis (i.e. runaway inflation) is coming. It would be nice to dispel the concern just because Schiff is a Bitcoin skeptic, but that’s hardly relevant to his analysis of the problem, only to his recommendations about the solution (his is to invest in gold).

I’ve done a mini-binge on cognitive science podcasts, this time mostly without Vervaeke!

• One key notion is the Free Energy Principle formulated by Karl Friston. One possible interpretation is that every cognitive agent is trying to minimize surprise. This is known as predictive processing.

  • Andy Clark, co-author of the proposition of extended mind (i.e. mind using its environment to assist in cognition) unpacks this a bit – we are constantly trying to predict reality. When our predictions are off, we can either update our model of reality, or change reality by our actions.

  • But the Free Energy Principle is apparently a bit more general – it can be applied to any thing of which we can say that it exists, i.e. we can distinguish between its interior, its exterior, and the surface between the two. All such things will through some math magic appear to be optimizing for the function of minimal surprise.

  • Also Andy Clark: What we believe and what we feel influences the world we see (the world we predict). We thus participate in bringing our the world we experience into being.

• Another fascinating discovery was that of Michael Levin, who’s something like a computational biologist or bioengineer or biophilosopher..?

  • For example, he’s working on agential materials, i.e. materials that have in a sense will of their own, which can be harnessed to direct them to do what we want. That is, we could just rewrite the software rather than the hardware.

  • Biology has interesting lessons for coordination – “Every component [of a system] has its own goals in various spaces, usually with very little regard for the welfare of the other levels.” Higher levels “bend the option space” of lower levels. This can lead to cancer on the one hand, and such marvelous systems as the human body on the other.

  • Evolution is about creating access to “free lunches” from mathematics, physics, etc.

  • The placebo effect is an example of information flow between different levels of cognition. The key take-away is that there are levels of cognition (the conscious level being probably the highest, the cellular the lowest) and information is indeed flowing between them.

• Both Michael Levin and Karl Friston had some things to say about the sense of Self

  • It evolves incrementally, there are no discreet steps where we suddenly gain consciousness. It emerges as a hierarchical cognitive system that needs to establish a boundary between itself and its environment.

  • Another reason why we have a sense of self in the form we have is that we need to make rough models of the world in an energy-efficient way.

  • Also, we wouldn’t need the sense of self if there our environment wasn’t full of beings similar to us.

  • And finally, the arguments against people having free will are using the wrong time frame. Free will is best thought of in terms of the character that we cultivate over time.

Reflection

• I realised that this time, writing the thesis is much less linear, much more spiral like – thanks to logseq and perhaps some better ideas about how to take notes, I keep jumping between sections as ideas occur to me. It’s more fun and more efficient. I hope.

And that’s it! Let me know what resonated, and I’ll see you here next week.

Take care

Chris