Week of 2021-09-06
Consistency, cohesion, and coherence
My colleague Micah introduced me to this framing of different degrees of organization and I found it rather useful. Recently, I shared the framing with my son and he came up with a pretty neat metaphor that I will try to capture here.
Imagine a box of gears. All gears are of different sizes and kinds. There are spur gears, bevel gears, herringbone, and their tooth spacing is all different. It’s a boxful of random junk. We call this state disorganized: entities are disjoint and aren’t meant to fit together.
Now, let’s imagine a different box. It is also full of gears, but here, all gears are of the same kind, and they all fit. It’s still just a pile of gears, but at least they are consistent. This state of consistency is our next degree of organization. The entities fit together, but aren’t connected in any way.
If we took the gears out of that second box and built a working gear system out of them, we would achieve the next degree of organization, the state of cohesion. Here, the entities have been organized into something that actually does something -- we turn one gear and all others start turning with it. It’s amazing.
But what does this gear system do? This is where the story’s final degree of organization comes. Running rigs of gears are cool, but when we build them to do something intentional -- like changing the rotational speed or torque of a motor -- we reach the state of coherence. In this state, the entities don’t just work together, they are doing so to fulfill some intention. The addition of intentionality is a focusing function. In the state of cohesion, we’d be perfectly fine with building a contraption that engages all the gears we have. When we seek coherence, we will likely discard gears that might fit really well, but don’t serve the purpose of intention.
We also noticed that the states aren’t necessarily a straight-line progression. Just picture a bunch of gears that barely fit, rigged to do something useful -- thus skipping the consistency stage altogether.
Playing with this metaphor and developer surfaces (APIs, tools, docs, etc.) produces a handy set of examples. If my APIs are all over the place, each in different language, style, and set of dependencies, we can safely call my developer surface disorganized. Making them all line up and match in some common style/spirit turns them consistent. If I go one step further and make the APIs easy to combine and build stuff with, I’ve taken my developer surface to the state of cohesiveness. Given how rare this is in real life, it’s a reason to celebrate already. But there’s one more state. My developer surface is coherent when the developers who use it produce outcomes that align with my intentions for the surface. If I made a UI framework with the intent to enable buttery-smooth end-user interactions, but all the users see is a bloated, janky mess -- my developer surface could be consistent and cohesive, but it’s definitely not coherent.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/09/06/consistency-cohesion-and-coherence/
The story of an opportunity
While geeking out on this idea of coherence and possible mechanisms that bring coherence, I ended up in a fun rabbit hole of narratives as catalysts for coherence. There seems to be certain kinds of stories that somehow end up bringing people together, organizing them and the outcomes of their efforts into a coherent whole. Looking back at my experiences, the one that stood out was the story of an opportunity.
Generally, the story of an opportunity is a prediction of compounding returns. Such a story conveys a mental model of a compounding loop, along with a recipe (sometimes just a sketch) for reaping benefits off it. I use “compounding returns” and “benefits” here very broadly. It can be straight-up money. It can be gathering enough impact to get a promotion. It can be acquired insights, carbon emission reduction, the attention of others, or practically any tangible or intangible thing we find valuable.
The story of an opportunity begins with describing the status quo in a way that’s resonant for the listeners. Then, it depicts the (boring/awful) future based on the status quo, setting up for the big reveal: the possibility of drastically different outcomes. This is the central moment of the story, the captivating twist in which the listeners acquire a mental model -- how a change in their actions can lead to exponential returns.
At this stage of the story, the fork in the road is presented. Do the old thing and get old results, or do this other thing and get to ride the power of compounding returns. The story of an opportunity continues with plotting a path, helping the listener become convinced that taking the new path is plausible and perhaps even prudent. There’s usually a discussion of costs that might be high, but meager next to the predicted outcomes -- and a conclusion that asks for commitment.
There’s something incredibly powerful about such stories. The glimpse of that mental model can be intoxicating and inspiring (and sometimes, ruinous). Growing up in the Soviet Union, I was prepared for linear outcomes: things will happen in this sequence, and then this will happen. It will all roughly be the same. Then, the iron curtain fell and the American Dream unceremoniously barged into my youthful mind. The movie that truly changed my life was The Secret of My Success, a bad movie that aged even more poorly. But back then, the cartoonish portrayal of riding a compounding loop of wit and circumstance was my fork of the road, followed by dramatic life-defining choices.
A story of an opportunity can act as a force of coherence in an organization. It can inspire people to come together and do amazing things, putting their hearts, sweat, and tears into the common goal. It is also just a story, and as such, can morph or be replaced by other stories, affecting coherence. The durability of a story’s power seems to reside in the accuracy of its prediction: how does what happens next reflect on our chances for riding the compounding loop? In an unpredictable environment, this accuracy diminishes quite a bit, making it more challenging to find a lasting story of an opportunity. Yet, it does seem like we collectively yearn for these stories, continue to look for them -- and feel betrayed by them when the predictions don’t pan out.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/09/10/the-story-of-an-opportunity/
Say it in many different ways
Shared mental model spaces are challenging to grow and expand. Mental models, especially novel and interesting ones, are subtle and have to be examined patiently to become shareable. The process of sharing itself often causes the models to mutate, creating variants that take off on their own. It’s a bewilderingly complex process, evoking images of mercury drops and murmurations.
And yet, this is how we learn. This is the only process we humans have at our disposal for creating intersubjective reality. Every failed attempt at sharing, each blank stare and subtle -- or not-so-subtle -- mutation takes us a tiny step closer to expanding our shared mental model space and becoming more capable of communicating together.
I used to get frustrated and give up pretty easily when my ideas were left seemingly unheard. Flip that bozo bit -- make life easier. “They don’t get me.” As I’d found, that was a recipe for a self-isolating vicious cycle: my head is full of insights, but nobody can understand what the hell I just said. Why say anything at all?
It took me some time to figure out that for novel ideas and mental models, the rewrite count is crazy-high. Our minds are these massive networks of mental models. To become shared between us, a mental model needs to overlap with enough existing mental models to bridge to the new ideas. So, if I reframe “they are not getting my idea” as “I haven’t yet built enough bridges to their existing models,” the path toward shared mental model space becomes more evident. To get to that resonant moment of understanding, I have to keep conveying and re-conveying concepts in many different ways. I have to say it in many different ways, relying on different framings and metaphors, until the bridge suddenly appears and -- click! -- you and I share a model.
I also have to let my model mutate. Though it sounds similar, the process I am describing is very different from “convincing.” Achieving a shared mental model means accepting that what I bring with me is subject to change. The bridge works both ways. Your mental models enrich and influence mine. And each re-telling of a concept creates a new opportunity to bridge with someone else’s mind.