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One of the most effective tools for building a culture of trust is simply saying, “I trust you to do the right thing.” Backing those words with action shows people that you’re serious. Larry once had about 40 people reporting to him in a research unit of a major consulting firm. As a manager, he was expected to read and approve all travel and expense forms. Since many of these consultants traveled extensively, this would have meant spending a half-day or more on paperwork each week. This struck him as a tremendous waste of time and energy that did not add any value to his unit. At a group meeting, he told the team that he trusted them to stay at a Marriott rather than a Four Seasons hotel, and that he wasn’t going to dive into their expense reports. He realized that the cost of not trusting the group would be far greater than an infrequent upgrade from coach to business class. This not only gave Larry time to do more worthwhile work, but it added to the group’s social capital.11 They knew they were trusted and proved to be trustworthy over the years.
The Smart Mission
Edward J. Hoffman, Matthew Kohut, and Laurence Prusak
The Tension Between Organized Behavior at Scale and Individual Needs
Summary:
Large-scale organizations aim for legibility and coherence, but this may lead to a lack of diversity and individual needs.
The educational system's emphasis on GPA overlooks other important skills and qualities.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
One of the most influential ideas for me recently has been from James South's book Seeing Like a State. And Scott has this idea that like what large-hill organizations wants its legibility and legibility is a kind of clear coherence that's aggregatable to a kind of higher level view. So a simple version might be like look if you're a CEO you can't have every department have its own obscure little value system. You need a single collective value system or something close to it so you can get production and profit measures and aggregate them in what Scott says is bring the whole organization Into view. So one way to put my worry is that what would be good for human life is an incredible diversity of bottlenecks which work on different often non-metrified systems. If Scott is right large-scale institutions will tend towards is a kind of monolithic measurement system that moves towards let's have a small number of bottlenecks and let's have A unified measure. And so like the heart of my worry is that organized behavior at scale is inevitably in tension with what a diverse population of individuals needs. And that's just an unfixable problem. Let me just give one quick example. In the educational system the dominant measure is GPA. You can add other like I can write in my notes all kinds of other shit about what students are good at. That barely matters because that's not aggregatable. When a law school admissions officer is doing their spreadsheet to do the first main cutoff nothing in my weird little notes is going to make it into that first level cutoff. The big moving forces just look at GPA.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Have we overshot the scale at which humans can effectively coordinate?
Summary:
We need Jim Rutt to join the conversation to discuss whether we have exceeded our ability to coordinate effectively.
The slow progress of science and the population growth curve are related to this question. Sam Bowles and his work on behavioral engineering and the return of civil society are also important in this discussion.
We are currently witnessing a clash between institutions and individuals, and something has to give.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
We need Jim Rutt on this conversation right because ultimately this is about have we actually overshot the scale at which we can effectively coordinate and all these studies like you Know this I know it's controversial but like the slowed canonical progress of science these kinds of questions they seem related in a way to the sigmoidal curve of population growth. Have we risen above a level at which intelligibility can actually happen and if so where was that level. I mean I remember you know Sam Bowles is another person who has been looming large for me over this whole conversation not only for his work on the problems of viewing humans as agents That can be governed through behavioral engineering via incentive but also because of the paper that he wrote with Wendy Carlin the article he wrote in Vox EU in 2020 on the battle for The COVID-19 narrative which talked about the return of the civil society you know meaning that the Mesoscopic world of guilds and church groups and sports clubs and pubs and neighborhood Organizations mutual aid networks and all of these other human scale sub-done bar number structures that we found ourselves suddenly very much in need of and yet were eroded by the Radical success of both state power and market power in every way it feels like we are in a kind of clash of the titans right now we're like you know we watch institutions going up against Large institutions and people are struggling to remain unpolverized underfoot. At some point something has to give right.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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