The Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope - Episode 12

This edition of the Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope brings short posts around the topics of epistemic humility and pluralism.

Many people think that their eyes are like windows through which they are peering into the world "as it is". The problem for Silicon Valley is that many of its executives have this "model" in their head.

The model captures what philosophers call naive realism (or in its most unreflective form, the "window model" of perception). In this worldview (pun intended), perceiving is essentially passive and transparent: the world sits out there fully formed, light carries it in through the eyes, and the mind simply receives it. Seeing is like looking through clear glass.

But, we know that this false. Thanks to science - we now know that colors and sounds don't exist in the universe - there are only photons with different wavelengths and vibrations of air molecules.

Colors and sounds only exist inside our head. The world is our construction. British neuroscientist Anil Seth's phrase for ordinary experience is a "controlled hallucination". You can relate this to the age-old Hindu concept of "Maya".

[Side-bar: There have been inversion experiments (which no ethics board will allow now) in which lenses were used to invert the view of the participants. Brain's plasticity is fascinating. But what's also interesting to me in those experiments was that active self-generated movement drove better adaptation... A passive observer moving around the same space does not adapt the way an actively moving one does.]

If this is true for the physical world, it is even more true for the social realm that we inhabit in our minds (family, society, organization, etc.). Every perception is shaped by our lived experience - pre-existing beliefs, prejudices, etc., whether we are conscious about them or not.

What the top executives in Silicon Valley miss is this self-reflexive approach. What biases do they themselves bring to the table? Of course, your CISO will find security problems. The VP of SRE will find reliability problems and the VP of Developer Productivity will find productivity problems. As the Systems Thinker Russell Ackoff elegantly put:

"The adjective in front of the word 'problem' tells us nothing about the problem - it only says something about the person saying it."

Paraphrasing another Systems Thinker, Peter Checkland, it is better to view an organization not as a machine, but as a set of processes in which purposeful people continuously renegotiate their perceptions (H/T Harish Jose).

This is the domain of second order cybernetics! I strongly believe that transformed organizations are downstream of transformed leaders.

𝐖𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭?

1️⃣ Grab Harish Jose's book, "Second Order Cybernetics: Essays for Silicon Valley":

2️⃣ Join the Cyb3rSyn Community and get the book (+ 7 more books) bundled along with online chat, forums, exclusive podcasts, zoom meetups, online training and more.

P.S.: I mean this more in the way Henry Mintzberg meant it.

An effective executive seeks understanding, not solutions for the problems their VPs bring them.

Of course, the VP of Security will find security problems. The VP of SRE will find reliability problems and the VP of Developer Productivity will find productivity problems.

They are paid to do so, and are encouraged to spend millions to "solve" them.

Many will use some "quantified" metric to show that they've made progress, or even succeeded.

Despite their best intentions, they hollow out the corporation from the inside out — firing the smart people who kept the revenue coming, laying off the glue people who made it all work inside the chaos. To them, the short-term increase in shareholder value justifies it all.

When things go south, they simply move on to another company to repeat the same mistakes:

Reductionism, Taylorism, Shareholder Primacy, and the blind chasing of Efficiency.

This is the doom loop of Silicon Valley!

Don't want to continue the cycle?

Do we owe it to ourselves to create better workplaces — jobs that aren't soul-sucking?

First, learn what NOT to do.

In the messy real world, avoidance of error is a much better evolutionary strategy than imitation of success.

Don't copy and repeat the mistakes of mainstream management!

I made many of those mistakes and wrote a book about it. Grab a copy here:

I celebrated Father's Day last month with an early lesson my dad taught me as a kid.

My dad is a big fan of South Indian classical music (Carnatic music) and used to listen to it every day.

His interest rubbed off on me, and I became a fan too — familiar with the various artists and their renditions.

He used to play a short clip or the opening of a song and quiz me to identify its raga.

(A raga is the melodic framework at the heart of Carnatic music - a set of rules for combining notes. There are thousands of named ragas in the Carnatic system. Two ragas can share the same notes but sound completely different, depending on how those notes are approached and emphasized.)

Once I'd gotten confident identifying the popular ones, he played a song I wasn't sure about. Still, I went ahead and gave an incorrect answer.

He looked me in the eye and gave me a profound insight:

"If you don't know, just say you don't know. By giving a wrong answer, you just proved you don't know 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐚, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐰𝐨."

That advice stuck with me. I've used it to learn many lessons throughout my life.

As my good friend Harish Jose elegantly put it:

This is what most executives in Silicon Valley get wrong. Instead of saying "I don't know," their ego stops them from admitting it, so they give wrong answers, directions, and advice.

Unlike Carnatic music, wrong answers are hard to detect in business.

The feedback loop can take years — by the time a bad strategy, OKRs, or metrics come back to bite you, the people responsible have already collected millions in stock compensation and bonuses and moved on to another company (to repeat the same mistake there).

Epistemic humility is an important trait for any leader.

I hope you start saying "I don't know" more often in meetings — and see how it transforms your understanding of the project, the people, and the organization.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned for more multidisciplinary insights in your inbox!