Where I try to articulate the “growth rule” for customer-vendor loops and look at various “dead loop” effects in the process, as well as offer a sure-fire recipe for getting oneself trapped in their own mind.
Loops: dead or alive
There are two important shifts to consider when examining a setting. The first is the shift in my needs. Over time, as my customer-vendor loop develops, I will find that the choices I made early on are no longer as useful as they were. For example, I may want to continue accelerating my capacity to build a Product, and the tools of the setting that I started with have hit their limit. In such a situation, I will want to examine alternatives for these tools and rethink my choices. I will want to change my setting.
The second shift is in the setting itself. Time also influences the setting itself. The ecosystem I may have chosen for its torrent of Customers may suddenly dry up to a tiny trickle, necessitating a search for another source. This one can feel a bit more challenging, because it has an appearance of kind of happening to me, rather than me making the choices.
Both of these shifts illustrate that settings change, whether through our actions or by themselves. To accommodate these changes and persist, every customer-vendor loop needs a bit of slack built into its stocks. Put differently, for a customer-vendor loop to be sustainable, it needs a capacity to grow. Applying a bit more nuance on it, the loop does not need to always grow. It just needs a capacity to do so. A customer-vendor loop that’s deep into its asymptotes is a dead loop. Dead loops are structurally unsound, because they no longer have room to change. Some dead loops can survive for a while, because they still produce value even after they can no longer fit the setting. However, they are a “dead loop walking” – their demise is predetermined.
This may sound a bit abstract, so let me reach for a more concrete scenario. Imagine a sub-team that was organized around a particular feature of some larger app. Maybe it’s a button that does something interesting when you click it. If we draw a customer-vendor loop for this team, we will notice that its Customers stock has a strong asymptote. It’s bound to some percentage of Customers that use the app – which makes sense: to click the button, the users will first have to get into the app. Similarly, the value of the Interaction of this loop is strongly tied to its expected usefulness within the app. The feature is boxed in by asymptotes.
In this scenario, the sub-team will happily climb the developmental stages of the loop, and run straight into the walls of the box. Once the feature reaches some plausible number of app Customers who click the button, the sub-team will quickly turn into a dead loop: the feature is still popular, and still needed by the app, but there’s little reason to improve it. A common side effect here is that the feature’s active development stops and the loop is abandoned. One by one, the members of the team move on to more interesting projects, with one burned out, yet still duty-bound maintainer left fixing bugs, grimly holding the dead loop of the original team in their grip.
An alternative ending to this story is the dead loop avoidance tactic, where the product lead of the team keenly avoids the deadness by steering toward new fronteers, defying the confines of the asymptote. What if instead of just users clicking on this button, we could also play a small video? What if we opened a tiny window that allowed the user to customize their preferences for how to use the feature? What if we made the button larger, or perhaps more colorful?
This creativity may seem wonderful, but because it plays out within the larger setting of an app, it may suddenly stop being an integral part of the overall app experience and instead start jostling with other features for user’s attention. If you’ve ever participated in an app experience that comes across as an incoherent mess of features, each seemingly operating within its own bubble, you have observed the effect of dead loop avoidance. If you’ve ever wondered why a particular app feature hasn’t improved in years, you’ve observed the effect of the dead loop abandonment.
At the core of these sad stories is a rule of thumb that’s worth repeating: to be sustainable, a customer-vendor loop must have room to grow. A team that’s organized to ride such a loop must have – and will keep seeking – flexibility to choose and change its setting.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/07/31/loops-dead-or-alive/
How to get trapped
So you want to add more suffering to your life and build a mental trap for yourself? Well then, look no further. This recipe is for you.
As the first step, you must be aware of the fact that you’re trapped. Traps aren’t traps if they are just a thing that happens every day. To become trapped, one must first recognize that there is another version of reality that exists without that thing that happens every day. This recognition is sometimes conscious, but often intuitive. In the most literal sense – and this is just my guess – an animal raised in captivity still recognizes that it is trapped, because there are eons of evolution whispering in the songs of roaming the wilderness in its ears. For us humans, traps usually get complicated. The “learned helplessness” phenomenon is often used to describe the condition where a person is so unaware of the opportunities that might be available to them that they are unable to imagine a reality that’s different from what is. Put differently, if you aren’t aware that you’re trapped, you’re not actually trapped. You’re just living your life.
Once you’re armed with the two pictures of reality – a "what is" and a "what should be" – congratulations! You are part-way there. These two pictures form the primary intention. If your awareness of the trap is conscious, it will be a commitment or a resolution of one sort or another. If your awareness is intuitive, it will be a longing, a feeling that overcomes you suddenly and completely from time to time, and keeps nagging in the background. That nagging sense with sudden spikes of emotion is a sure way to spot that you’ve constructed a proper self-trap.
If you’re an overachiever, you could trap yourself with just this one step. Just make sure that the “what should be” is utterly unachievable. Long for something that never existed or cannot exist – and work hard to convince your mind otherwise. Look for idyllic memories of the past, or stories told by people you admire. The farther they are from reality, the easier it will be to construct that sturdy, long-lasting configuration of constant suffering. Nothing traps as well as vivid reimaginings of our ancestors’ ideals.
However, if you’re a slacker and your “what should be” is reasonable, move on to the next step. Here, the thing you’ll need is a barrier, or something that prevents you from simply traveling from “what is” to “what should be”. Barriers come in the form of other intentions that aren’t aligned with your primary intention. We are mired in such intentions, so not just any will do. A secondary intention has to have these three important properties: strength, invisibility, and self-reinforcement. Let’s go through them one by one.
To trap ourselves well, we must pick a secondary intention that is strong. It must be at least as strong as the primary intention, and the stronger the better. Choose something that is sticky-sweet or horrifyingly spikey. Buddhists call them cravings and aversions. A traumatic experience works wonders in constructing a self-trap, but so does a simple but unyielding pull of physiological needs.
An effective secondary intention must be invisible. Find something that is a long-term habit, something you usually do automatically, without thinking. The best ones are those that you don’t even consider to be “bad habits”, or perhaps even view as virtuous. Look for the ones that formed so far in the past that you don’t even see them as habits. Behaviors based on childhood experiences tend to work well, since we may not even recognize them as distinct intentions.
Finally, if you’re serious about building a formidable trap for yourself, your secondary intention must be self-reinforcing. This one can be difficult to get right, but have faith: you can do it. One common trick is to make sure that the experience of acting on the secondary intention goes through this sentence: a) act on secondary intention, b) recognize that your actions are in conflict with your primary intention, c) feel as bad about it as possible and d) try to avoid thinking about it as quickly as possible. That’s it! By making sure to feel horrible, you’re reinforcing the strength around the secondary intention, and by rapidly moving away from thinking about it, you’re keeping it invisible. I promise, it works like a charm. Shame is a power tool for building self-reinforced traps. If you’ve grown up in a culture that thrives on shame, you can master trapping yourself faster than anyone. Oh, and don't forget to blame others. Few things can trap with more precision than moving the agency elsewhere. Get that sweet righteous anger going to solidify the trap.
And why stop with just one secondary intention? Traps work even better when there are multiple. Combine them and get an even more powerful trap.
To give you a quick example: if I am imagining myself ten pounds lighter than today (that’s my primary intention), an old habit of snacking while I am in the kitchen can serve me well as the secondary intention. All I need to do is make sure to feel shame while I am eating those potato chips while distracting myself with watching TV or another soothing activity. This forms a nice, robust trap: as my primary intention remains distant, the amount of shame grows, while my various means to reinforce the secondary intention continue to get more and more elaborate, producing more secondary intentions, and all the while churning out personal suffering.
Of course, if you find yourself wanting to get out of a trap, it is a bit more challenging than setting one up. After all, despite this somewhat tongue-in-cheek narrative, we find ourselves in traps of our own design without actually following any recipes. It takes self-patience and kindness to examine our traps, to discern the secondary intentions and their properties. It takes even more work to stay oriented toward them and gently untangle the habits, and find enough self-love to face them and have a long, quiet conversation with them. It may take weeks or it may take years or decades. But yes, you can get untrapped. I believe in you and I am rooting for you. You can do it.
Loved the trap bit. I find that the best way to trap yourself is to lean into your strengths - since they ultimately is what gets us. Individual destiny is almost never about our weaknesses, they may hold us back, but what destroys us is our strengths.