The Problem of Mechanistic Thinking
David interviews Blair about his recent article in which he explores how our businesses are not simple machines that can be tuned (or killed) with specific wrenches, but they are complex adaptive organisms that we need to understand differently.
Links
"Your Business Is Not a Machine" by Blair Enns for winwitoutpitching.com
"Innofficiency in Your Agency" 2Bobs episode
Transcript
David Baker: Blair, this is going to be a little bit longer of an introduction. If you need to go get some coffee while I talk, feel free. I'm interviewing you today. You wouldn't know it by the level of prep I've had to do.
Blair Enns: I know.
David: You sent me this note. Says, "Hey, let's talk about this," two paragraphs. Then, "Oh, go look at this LinkedIn thing I did." I'm still waiting for-- Where are the notes that I'm-- Oh shit. I told my wife, it's like, "I'm going to have to prepare for this podcast."
Blair: I know. When I opened up the document before we started recording, I realized, "Oh, I didn't leave you with much," but there's a lot to talk about here. It's just not on the written page.
David: Famous last words. The problem of mechanistic thinking. I read through the stuff you sent me. I'm putting it together. I got this image in my head of a zombie apocalypse. I'm protecting my family, and there's this creature coming towards me. I go get my rifle, I start shooting, and nothing stops it. It just keeps coming at me, versus a vehicle coming at me, where I know I can just take out the tires or I can shoot the engine block, and the engine will stop. It's like one is a machine that operates with certain rules. The other is this complex adaptive structure. Whatever it is.
One of them is one, one's the other. We think that the business is a machine when it's actually more complex. How did I do so far?
Blair: Not bad.
David: Not bad. I know what that means in your world.
[laughter]
Blair: I know what I hate, and I don't hate it. You and I were talking about failing memory and just laughing about getting old. I've often said, I even say this in the preface to my latest book, that I've always hated the question, "What advice would you give to your younger self?" It's funny, in the last 2, 3 years, I'm 59, last 2, 3 years, I have just started to see all kinds of patterns that I guess take a few decades for you to notice.
Now that I've put onto paper and printed it in a whole bunch of books that I dislike that question, I now realize, "Oh yes, there are patterns that I see that would've been beneficial to understand earlier in life." It's like they've just started to reveal themselves to me, because maybe I'm just waking up, but one of them is this idea that mechanistic thinking is everywhere. This is a universal problem. We'll bring it back down to the domain of the business because that's the most relevant part.
I think, as I've said to you recently, I'm writing about whatever I want to write about, or the things that I'm interested in now. Talk about an old man. It gets all relevant to business in some small way, so I'm bending it to the business. My larger observation is that we are all so guilty of mechanistic thinking, of looking at the things in our lives and seeing them as machines. The smarter you are, the more you see yourself as a person who works through logic and inductive or deductive reasoning, the more you will be guilty of this.
I see it everywhere, and intelligence is not a buffer for this. Like I've already said, it seems to be the more intelligent people are, at least in certain domains, when they're in these linear logical domains of science, engineering, accounting, et cetera, there is this tendency to view things as machines. The big one is the business, but it's not just the business.
David: We would've never tried to tackle a topic like this in the early days of 2Bobs. There was an episode recently that was released about the big theory of everything, which was philosophical, like this one was too, and the response to that one was pretty off the charts, which I think gives us a little bit of encouragement that, okay, maybe we can go up a level and talk about some of this stuff.
I wonder if part of what you're thinking comes from the fact that most of these businesses that are listening start small, where they are a little bit more mechanistic, and then every person you add, every additional service offering, every market you address increases complexity, and we just encircle all of it and try to get our arms around this business. Even though there's a part of us subconsciously that knows, "Listen, this is more complicated than I think," we try to get our arms around it and say, "Okay, we've got to circle the troops here, and these are the ways we're going to manage the business."
You reference timekeeping. It's like the bigger we get, the more we're going to clamp down on timekeeping to make sure that we can manage this business as it gets more complex.
Blair: As you were setting that up, as you're talking through it, I'm thinking, "Oh, this is really interesting." I hadn't thought about it before. Your business is not a machine. It's a complex system. There's a subset of complex systems known as complex adaptive systems. It's a complex adaptive system. The adaptive part means it learns.
Machines are complicated, and complex systems are complex. What's the difference? They're both made up of numerous parts, but in a complicated system like a machine, there's a pretty straightforward relationship between the parts that is predictable and knowable. It's easy to deduce what's wrong, and probably more pertinently, it's easier to predict the outcomes of changes that you will make. That's just any machine, a computer, a clock.
It's interesting, if we go back in history, we'll get to this idea of viewing the universe as a machine. I didn't look up the timing of this. Back in the day, when the most complicated machine on the planet was a clock, people would view the universe as a large clock, and God was the clockmaker. Now the most complicated machine is a computer, so now our tendency is to view the universe like a large computer.
Now, in a complex system, you do have many different parts, but it's their relationship that's different. Here's the definition. Complex systems: made up of many interacting agents or elements whose relationships are dynamic, nonlinear, and emergent. Those words: dynamic, non-linear, and emergent. Your business is a complex adaptive system. It's made up of these individual agents that have agency, and those agents are people. You cannot predict what is going to arise from these people interacting. Where in a machine, you can predict how the components are going to interact.
Your people bump up against each other. You have culture issues. When I say issues, I mean good and bad. You have the dynamics of culture. You have the dynamics of feelings. People learn from each other in ways you can't predict, et cetera. I think, to your point, as soon as you add one person, you're adding another independent agent. You add a whole bunch of people, you have all of these independent agents. The idea that you can predict what will arise from this is ludicrous.
David: The difference between an adaptive and a non-adaptive system is that the adaptive system is learning. The only adaptive element of our businesses is the fact that humans are involved, right?
Blair: I'd have to think more deeply about that, but it might be right. The classic example is the weather is a complex system, but it's not an adaptive system. The weather doesn't learn. Your business learns. The economy learns. The planet learns. Your body, various components of your body, your immune system, your endocrine system, your digestive system, how you metabolize food, that all learns and adapts.
I think I made the point in the article that I wrote on this that seeing your body as a machine instead of a complex system and a complex adaptive system is one of the reasons why it's so hard for so many people to lose weight, because it's not as easy as calories in, calories out. You start restricting your caloric intake, and your body has ways of adapting to that. Immediately, your basal metabolic rate, the energy you burn when you're not exercising, it just drops. There are all these things that happen in response to it.
It occurs to me that there are so many people out there who struggle with losing weight, and they feel so shitty about themselves because they think this is a straightforward problem. It's not a straightforward problem. As soon as you understand that, maybe you can start to think about it differently. That's just the body. The same thing happens in your business. The same thing happens in the economy.
In fact, remember you and I had dinner with Rory Sutherland earlier this year, and he recommended to me Roger L. Martin's book, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency. This word "efficiency" that applies to machines. What Roger L. Martin is saying is economies are not machines. They're complex adaptive systems.
If you recall the podcasts we've done on one of my pet topics, "The Innoficiency Problem," where I say innovation and efficiency are mutually opposable goals, you cannot increase one without decreasing the other. Many people just reject that idea because they have a mechanistic view of their business. They think you can just tweak some things to optimize for efficiency without some unintended consequences. As the point of that principle states, one of the consequences of increased efficiency is decreased innovation.
David: I think I am overly in love with the Industrial Revolution. It's partly because I'm really drawn to mechanistic thinking.
Blair: You're drawn to machines. You certainly own enough of them.
David: Yes. Taught motorcycle racing. It's like, "Okay, these are the laws of physics that are going to control whether you live or die." It's pretty straightforward. It's pretty black and white. There's a little bit of stuff at the edge we don't understand. Then you go back, and you think about the Model T. I think it was 33 hours it took to assemble a car, and then it went down to 31 minutes or something like that. That strikes me as a pretty simple equation. Whoever thought about all that, that engineer, that's amazing.
Then we take that thinking to AI, we have not done an episode on AI and I'm not even close to wanting to do one, but it enters the argument here because people are thinking, "Okay, AI," they're taking some thoughts about AI, but they're approaching it very mechanistically, I guess that might be the way to say it. They're saying, "Okay, it's going to put 20% of the people out of work." The universe just laughs at that bullshit. It's like, "No, we're not making that much change that fast." It's not that easy. It's just like we don't quite understand this. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but the idea that 20% of people are going to be unemployed, that's just mechanistic thinking to me.
Blair: That's exactly right. That episode we did was called Grow or Die. It touched on AI. The reason I'm thinking about this is because I'm thinking a lot as we all are, but I'm thinking a lot about AI and AGI, what is intelligence, what is creativity, what is the domain of humans or people, and what is the domain of machines, of computers. I did a talk on that called A Theory of Everything, that we referenced. I wrote that post, Grow or Die.
This is part of a series of me writing about AI indirectly. I'm trying to understand, and then if I put together a cohesive argument, I will publish it. I'm not writing with the intent of creating a post. I'm writing to understand. I've already written a few thousand words. If it turns into a post, it'll be the longest post I've ever written. It really is on the future of human creativity. It is about why AI will not lead to AGI.
At the heart of that mistake that some of the richest, most successful people in the world are making is this mechanistic thinking, which is not about intelligence; it's about the belief that underpins their intelligence, because all of our logic is built on some foundation of belief. David Foster Wallace said, "Everybody worships, even those who claim they don't." Everybody worships. Everybody has a fundamental belief, a fundamental worldview, a fundamental theory of how everything works. All of these smart engineer types who are way smarter and way more successful than me, this is me, nobody, saying they're getting this wrong.
David: You realize how that sounds, right? [laughs]
Blair: I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. They're getting this wrong because they have a mechanistic view of the universe. In this mechanistic view of the universe, intelligence arises out of biology, and the consciousness question is basically a throwaway. The universe it's not a machine. It's absolutely a complex adaptive system. It's more appropriate to think of the universe as a living organism. It may actually be a living organism. I don't know if it is or if it isn't, but it's the right way to think about it. We've gone through that with the planet. We used to have a mechanistic view of the planet. Now we see the planet as a complex adaptive system.
If we can hit all the political flashpoint issues. One of the reasons why there's such a divisive, not even arguments, people aren't even arguing anymore, the subject of climate change, A, the stakes are super high, so it's existential potentially, but the reason we can't have a conversation on it is people who are creating these models and saying, "This is what's going to happen to the planet," it doesn't matter how much logic you have built into your system, it doesn't matter how smart these people are, these models, they're not worthless, but they're not right, because we don't understand the planet's ability to adapt.
This isn't me saying climate change isn't an issue; we shouldn't be doing something about it, we shouldn't be worried about it. I think we should be doing something, we should be worried about it, and we should be talking about it, but these prophecies of doom do not help. That's like, "Okay, we can model this out, this is what's going to happen." The planet is so freaking complex and so adaptive we cannot predict what's going to happen.
David: You gave an example of the difference in predictability and complexity that I was really drawn to thinking about, particularly because something really bad happened just about 40 minutes from me a week ago. The Accurate Energetic Systems, AES, it's where they make TNT and all kinds of explosive things. Something went wrong and an entire building disappeared, including 15 people that they could only basically identify using the rapid two-hour DNA testing.
The ATF is researching it, and they'll come up with some answer. It probably won't be the right answer, but if they can find the real answer of what happened, it will be a very specific mechanistic thing, like, "Something did this, then it caused this, then this happened, and bam, then there was no turning back." In your example, you compare that kind of thing, like somebody dismantling a bomb. It's very dangerous, but it has rules. There are laws.
Compare that with a gifted therapist untangling someone's past, and I couldn't help but think about the explosion that happens sometimes. This overlaps with AI. It's like the idea that I'm going to tell all my problems to AI, and it's going to counsel me out of this. It's like, "Do you realize how silly--" The best therapist in the world barely understand people. That's an example of a complex adaptive system.
Now, you're running a firm with 40 of those people in it, you are serving 30 clients, and you're serving a world of 200 and some countries and billions of people. Now, you might need to be rethinking everything every day and realizing that you don't have your arms around everything. Be humble about how much you can control and how to explain everything. It's just do your best, follow basic rules, but don't pretend that this is something that you can completely understand to get your arms around.
Blair: As you're bringing it back to the business, it's not an anti-efficiency episode. It's not an anti-efficiency rant. My abstract for the email that went out for this post was, "If efficiency is not your guiding principle, then what is?" A lot of firms still selling time have utilization targets. They have people tracking time. The time sheets are lies, but we measure them anyway. We have utilization targets, and we're trying to do all these things to push past this hidden barrier that, for some reason, we can't seem to get past this barrier of being more efficient.
We keep trying. As you push some mass toward the speed of light, it requires an exponential increase in energy. It's like all of this energy, all of this focus, all of this management angst around getting a few more points of billable efficiency. This is a result of mechanistic thinking. The solution isn't to abandon the pursuit of efficiency and be completely chaotic. Let's just not worship at the altar of efficiency. Let's appreciate that this is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts evolve, learn, change, and as a result, the mechanism it's more fluid. You're better off thinking of your business as a living system than you are thinking of it as a machine.
If you're an accountant, if you're an engineer, where you're working in a world that is more mechanistic, you are going to bring that mechanistic view to your business. Now, a lot of these creative firms they're owned by creative people. For creative people, culture's really important because they know creativity is something that arises out of the right culture, so they're really tuned into culture. They're more inclined to think of their business as a complex adaptive system. I suspect some of them feel like, "Yes, but that's just the creative in me. The grownups around me are telling me I need to be pursuing billable efficiency targets and doing these other things."
I would say to those people, "I think you should trust your intuition more." Don't discount these things. You don't have enough efficiencies; you're out of business. I think for a lot of people listening to this, their intuition around how the business should operate and the pursuit of efficiencies that makes them a little bit uncomfortable, I think their intuition is probably more correct, and they should pay more attention to it.
David: That's an interesting point, and maybe we should end here, but you think, somebody comes to the field from a creative field, they tend to look at something as a complex adaptive system, but they look around, and they realize, "Oh, I'm not making as much money as I should. I'll join this group, and I'll ask other people what I should do," then there's three suggestions, and they glom onto one or two of them, assuming that this will fix their world. It's like, "No." That fixed the other person's world. It may not fix your world.
That's interesting point, trust your instincts more, but balance that with looking at results, too. It's like you said, all time sheets lie. All tax returns lie, too, but the solution is not to omit tax returns. No. You still look at that stuff, but if you don't believe that there are complex adaptive systems, then try to tame a 61-acre farm like I have. It's a losing battle all the time.
That doesn't mean I stop. It just means I realize my role in it, I need to keep thinking, listening, and being curious, and this business it's fun, but it's also not depressing to think about it. It's like, "Oh wow, there's so much more to learn here. This is really interesting." I finally understand my business now, and then seven months later, oh, it's a different business. I don't understand it now.
Blair: Keep your agency weird.
David: [laughs]
Blair: Move it to Austin or Portland.
David: Yes. Thanks, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.