The Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope - Episode 11

This edition of the Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope brings a variety of topics - from Karma Yoga to AI. Let’s dive in…

During a recent chat with friends, we were discussing how the STEM types in Silicon Valley are over-indexing on knowledge that accumulates vs. knowledge that converges.

Yes, much of science and engineering has been about the accumulation and organization of knowledge. But knowledge only grows when it is of the reductionist kind. AI has it on tap. You can get “expert” opinions from various fields in an instant - AI has democratized this.

In order to be effective in a complex and uncertain world, we also have to seek knowledge that is about recognizing invariant patterns that persist across different contexts - knowledge that converges.

This explains why ancient philosophical truths remain relevant today - they represent invariant abstractions that transcend specific historical details.

𝐖𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭?

✅ Order a copy of the book, ‘𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐭𝐬’ by Harish Jose and Venkatesh Krishnamurthy and connect the dots for yourself.

✅ Join the 𝗖𝘆𝗯𝟯𝗿𝗦𝘆𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 to get a free bonus companion podcast (one for each chapter in the book) and engage in conversations with other tech executives/practitioners and multidisciplinary thinkers.

Karma Yoga, often referred to as the "Yoga of Action" or "Yoga of Duty," is one of the four classical paths of yoga, alongside Bhakti Yoga (devotion), Jnana Yoga (knowledge), and Raja Yoga (meditation). It emphasizes performing one's duties selflessly, without attachment to the results or personal gain. This practice is rooted in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, where Lord Krishna advises performing actions with dedication and detachment from outcomes.

Like the Roman Classics, much of Indian/Tamil mythology and storytelling is about conveying key insights into human psychology and exploring ideas around how to live a good life, excel in your profession, be a good leader, etc.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from The Bhagavad Gita…

But many times in business, executives make certain decisions while directly seeking certain fruits, eventually leading the organization on a slow march toward irrelevance and eventual death.

Here are two heuristics to detect if your organization is on such a path:

🛑 Anytime the conversation at the Board level (and by extension at the CxO level) is about improving a specific target related to quarterly/yearly revenue, profit, or profit margin (and their euphemisms like efficiency).

🚩 The Finance function not being subservient to product/engineering functions. It will dominate and force the engineering leaders to stick to a budget, headcount, or in most cases both.

The downward spiral from there can be hard to contain. Short-term growth in the stock price is the drug that usually keeps the executives blind to their long-term destination.

This is not just Eastern philosophy — the West agrees too, at least on paper.

In 2019, the CEOs of many of America's largest public companies signed a Business Roundtable statement that "redefines the purpose of a corporation," saying that they "share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders," not just shareholders.

181 CEOs committed to leading their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders.

But this approach takes systemic thinking, which we already know is sorely lacking in mainstream management.

A few years ago, my good friend Manish Jain brought up this scene from the movie ‘Moneyball’ from a systems thinking lens:

This discussion took me back to my security consulting days before I became a full time employee. During my consulting days, there was one pattern that kept repeating itself.

I was working with some of the smartest people in the field - 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲, they had the best subject matter expertise and knew what needed to be fixed. But I'd go back the next year for another penetration test and find the same vulnerabilities we'd found the year before - except now in more applications. It became clear that 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲, they were failing to meet their own commitments.

Morgan Housel illustrates this point through an analogy about healthcare - the difference between an 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲 and an 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲. You can see how the expert in healthcare factors in the human element:

The gap was not in the WHAT to do - the individuals had the knowledge of what needed to be done in the code. It was in the HOW (how do I pull this off given my own unique context — politics, budget cuts, legacy baggage, promo-driven-development, etc.) and the WHY (the motivation and inspiration for people to cooperate).

The shift was in seeing security failures not just as purely technical failures (lack of patching, weak passwords, etc.) but also factoring in the social aspects of a socio-technical system — who doesn't like whom, who is not talking to whom (e.g. Diagnosing via the Viable Systems Model), conflicting incentives/OKRs, role confusion, etc.

This is where I've found systems thinking to be invaluable — to help synthesize the different perspectives of the stakeholders and collaboratively reframe the problem situation to create win-win-win situations.

As a consultant, my biggest mistake was believing that the problem statement that I was hired to “solve” was THE problem that needs to be solved.

In a school exam, changing the question is not allowed. But in real-life problem solving, it is perfectly OK to change the question and is often necessary to succeed.

By this time you’d think every top executive in Silicon Valley understands that problems are abstractions and that any situation can be interpreted/reframed in innumerable ways - the Cybersecurity VP will see security problems across the company and the Developer Productivity VP will see productivity problems and SRE VP will see reliability problems and so on, right? But the answer is a big NO!

So, what’s your problem?

This month, we had Barry O’Reilly on to discuss his book 'The Architect's Paradox'. Barry started the session with the real-life story behind why he came up with the Theory of Residuality and then discussed some of the philosophical aspects that touched on the relationship between the static aspects of code and the flux aspects of an uncertain business environment. The attendees had some terrific questions and at one point Barry had to pull up the whiteboard to articulate his response - an hour and 45 minutes of interesting conversations and insights.

Here is the recording of the April session for premium-tier subscribers (Cyb3rSyn Community members can attend these monthly sessions for free. They can also access the video recording and start a conversation from the Event Recordings space):