More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 16 - November 20, 2020
The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.
Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence:
If we couldn’t change the environment to suit us better, we would have to change to suit it. The question was how.
Nelson’s real genius lay not in the clever maneuver for which he is remembered, but in the years of innovative management and leadership that preceded it.
civilian organizations also wrestle with the basic questions of individuality, standardization, and predictability of outcome. Individual companies and entire economies depend on business leaders’ knowing how best to manage for success.
Though we know far more about everything in it, the world has in many respects become less predictable.
While we might think that our increased ability to track, measure, and communicate with people like Tarek would improve our precise “clockwork universe” management, the reality is the opposite: these changes produce a radically different climate—one of unpredictable complexity—that stymies organizations based on Taylorist efficiency.
In popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with “leverage”—the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.
The tiniest rumors—sometimes true, sometimes not—would spread like wildfire through online forums.
The amount of nonlinear change that once took months to play out can now happen in the time that it takes to type 140 characters.
AQI could adjust and survive. We were stronger, more efficient, more robust. But AQI was agile and resilient. In complex environments, resilience often spells success, while even the most brilliantly engineered fixed solutions are often insufficient or counterproductive.
Resilience thinking” is a burgeoning field that attempts to deal in new ways with the new challenges of complexity. In a resilience paradigm, managers accept the reality that they will inevitably confront unpredicted threats; rather than erecting strong, specialized defenses, they create systems that aim to roll with the punches, or even benefit from them. Resilient systems are those that can encounter unforeseen threats and, when necessary, put themselves back together again.
Robustness is achieved by strengthening parts of the system (the pyramid); resilience is the result of linking elements that allow them to reconfigure or adapt in response to change or damage (the coral reef).
The structural and functional distinctions between commands and teams have serious ramifications for adaptability.
team fused by trust and purpose is much more potent. Such a group can improvise a coordinated response to dynamic, real-time developments.
Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.
Their structure—not their plan—was their strategy.
How we organize physical space says a lot about how we think people behave; but how people behave is often a by-product of how we set up physical space.
We needed true, not theoretical, collaboration, transparency, and trust. Putting everyone in the same room was a start.* But if we wanted instinctive, second-nature, teamlike trust, we would have to go much deeper. The stronger the ties between our teams—as with the prisoners—the higher the likelihood we would achieve the level of cooperation we needed.
The program succeeded because it defaulted to trusting, cooperative behavior, and punished the other player for selfish behavior. However, as one peace and conflict studies expert has since noted, “the punishment lasted only as long as the selfish behavior lasted. This proved to be an exceptionally effective sanction, quickly showing the other side the advantages of cooperating.”
As Mulally put it, “Working together always works. It always works. Everybody has to be on the team. They have to be interdependent with one another.”
“Idea flow” is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group. Pentland likens it to the spread of the flu: a function of susceptibility and frequency of interaction. The key to increasing the “contagion” is trust and connectivity between otherwise separate elements of an establishment.
The organization as a rigidly reductionist mechanical beast is an endangered species. The speed and interconnected nature of the new world in which we function have rendered it too stupid and slow to survive the onslaught of predators.
due to the leverage leaders can harness through technology and managerial practices like shared consciousness and empowered execution, senior leaders are now more important than ever, but the role is very different from that of the traditional heroic decision maker.
The role of the senior leader was no longer that of controlling puppet master, but rather that of an empathetic crafter of culture.
The gardener cannot actually “grow” tomatoes, squash, or beans—she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.
a leader’s example is always on view.
Simple honesty shows, and earns, respect.
If people are not educated enough to make informed decisions at the polls, the feedback system on which democracy is premised will not work.
An organization should empower its people, but only after it has done the heavy lifting of creating shared consciousness.
In the words of Albert Einstein, “Our theories determine what we measure.” When we urge people to think “outside of the box,” we are generally asking them to discard mental models.
