The Great Mental Models Volume 3: Systems and Mathematics

by Rhiannon Beaubien

When you scale up a system, the problems you solved at the smaller scale often need solving again at a larger scale.

Think this applies closely to company team, department, company, network culture.

They decided that everything they produced should be a group effort and not the work of any particular individual. How else could it be a unified theory reflecting the best of mathematical knowledge at the time and not the opinions of one person? So the mathematicians created a fictional persona to whom they attributed their work: Nicolas Bourbaki* of Poldevia. They took pains to make him seem like a real person.8 Many of the students who used their textbook never had any idea that Bourbaki was a group.

Optimises for long term thinking and reduces 'returm on politics'. A bit like blank firing squads, ensures everyone is equally responsible and not responsible for the outcome. Hypothesis: this increases psychological safety, and probably innovation.

You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

Bayse?