Week of 2022-10-24
Where I recognize that, in my adventures with dandelions and elephants, I was talking about strategies and how conditions that we create might help in choosing these strategies.
Dandelion or Elephant?
The discovery of the dandelion/elephant framing was exciting and my fellow FLUX colleagues and I engaged in a rather fun “hacky sack of ideas” game, tossing the framing back and forth and looking at it from this side and that. One pattern that emerged was the “dandelion/elephant” test: is this company/team/product/concept a dandelion or an elephant? The test kept producing unsatisfactory results, making us wonder: are we holding this wrong? As usual, some new insights emerged. I will try to capture them here.
First things first: it is very easy to get disoriented about what it is that we’re testing. In our excitement, we’d forgotten that the biological equivalents of our subjects are strategies. The r-selected strategy and the K-selected strategy are approaches to the problem space that various species take. Similarly, “dandelion” or “elephant” aren’t attributes or states of an organization or product. They are strategies that an entity chooses to overcome a challenge it faces. In other words, it’s not something that an entity is or has, but rather how it acts.
Since it deals with strategies, the dandelion/elephant lens is highly contextual. A whole company or an organization or even a product is not beholden to just one strategy. There can be multiple, complementary sets of strategies for the same product.
If I am building a REPL environment, I am clearly exercising the dandelion strategy in relation to its customers. I want ideas my customers have to be easily copyable, discoverable, fast to first results, etc. See the Interest, Legibility, Velocity, Access conditions I outlined earlier.
However, when considering how to organize the development of this REPL environment itself (all the infrastructure and tooling that goes into creating a dandelion field for others), I am likely to take an elephant strategy. I would want capabilities that enable me to build upon my idea, not continue to reinvent it from scratch every few months. I will seek higher reliability, more features, rigorous processes, and increasingly more powerful capabilities – the outcome of the Stability, Breadth, Rigor, and Power conditions.
Just like with any strategy, these are subject to becoming embodied. This is why I keep harping on about conditions. Us choosing to employ a given strategy is not a simple decision. It is a matter of the environment in which this decision is made. It is our environment that enables us to choose a strategy – or prevents us from doing so.
Here’s one way to think of it. Our strategy is an aggregate of the moves we individually make. If most of us are making dandelion moves (rapidly mutating ideas we discover, generating new ones without holding on to the old ones), we are in the dandelion environment. If instead, we seem to be making mostly elephant moves (collectively reinforcing one big idea, making it richer, more nuanced, more thorough, etc.), we are in the elephant environment.
In either case, no matter how hard our leaders may call on us to change a strategy from the one we’ve currently embraced, we will only be able to produce gnarly beasts: dandelions with elephant trunks, or elephants made of pappus.
The contextual quality of the lens allows us to use it to spot inconsistencies of our intentions with our conditions. Once spotted, these inconsistencies can offer a lot of insight on what nudges to make to the cone of embodied strategy.
This framing of strategy challenges feels more hopeful to me. Instead of looking for someone to blame, look for the conditions that are present and whether or not these conditions are mismatched with the intention. If there is a distinct mismatch, look for ways to change conditions to align better with the desired outcomes.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/10/24/dandelion-or-elephant/
Embrace the suck
This one is interesting. It’s the first draft of a FLUX piece that ran in issue 73. If you really want to sense the generative power of collaborative newsletter editing, read both and see how much better the article became over the course of the week.
The titular phrase is well-known in the military, though this might be a different take on the adage. This one came out of a morning conversation with fellow FLUX-ers, where we briefly chatted about life experiences that we didn’t look forward to, didn’t like when we were in the midst of them, yet have grown to cherish them over the years. To draw a line, we’re talking about experiences that didn’t involve actual threats to life or violence.
Picture a simple framework. There are three attributes that can have positive or negative value: anticipation, experience, and satisfaction. The “anticipation” attribute reflects how much we are looking forward to or dreading a situation we’re about to experience. “Experience” describes what we feel throughout the situation. “Satisfaction” is our long-term attitude toward the experience.
Lining up possible values, we have a simple three-row four-column table, starting with all three attributes being negative (“hated coming into it, hated being in it, and keep hating it ever since”) and eventually flipping them, one-by-one, to positive (“loved the idea of it, love every minute of it, still smiling when thinking about it”).
If we try to draw a graph of experiential learning on top of that table, it is fairly evident that the amount of experiential learning is the highest in the middle, and lowest at the edges – kinda like a bell curve. Those experiences that made us uncomfortable at first, but turned into a fond memory later are the ones where we learned something. Perhaps we didn’t realize how much we’d love broccoli. Or maybe reliably shipping the same product instead of trying to build something new every few months. Everyone will have their story of a transformative experience like that. On the fringes, neither experience is particularly educational: the left-most predictably sucks and the right-most reliably rocks.
However, if we try to draw a curve of learning potential, we’ll see something more like a power curve. Despite us learning a lot in the middle of the graph, it’s all of the obvious kind: we were thrust into a novel situation and were able to orient ourselves using some tweaks to our existing mental models. The highest potential for learning will hide in the least pleasant corner: it is here where we weren’t able to relate to the environment in a productive way.
It is in these situations we have the most to learn, to update our models of the environment. The suckiness is the signal. It tells us that there are gems of wisdom and insight to be discovered. This will feel counterintuitive – I had a bad experience, and that’s the one where I stand the most to learn from? Shouldn’t I just shove it down into the back corner of my memory and never think about it again? And usually, it feels so right to do just that.
To countervail, we can develop a habit to look at our past totally sucky experiences with a kind of inward-focused curiosity: what was it within me that reacted so negatively to it? What was being protected and why? Is there perhaps something to learn about this part of me that is being protected, something that would help me see this past experience in a different light?