Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
Bad Norms and Policies Produce "Legislatice Mediocrity" in Organizations
Summary:
Encouraging a culture of being teachable and open to listening to others is crucial for innovation and improvement in organizations.
While standard operating procedures (SOPs) and efficient systems are appreciated, they should not create taboos or hinder learning, leading to what the speaker refers to as 'legislative mediocrity.' The speaker advocates for a focus on innovation and continuous improvement, rather than being stifled by rigid norms and policies.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You want to be teachable and you want to have a culture of being teachable and listening to others. Yeah. That's that's really important. And so I love SOPs. I love I love it when you get a system working well and efficient. But I don't like it when it creates taboos and when it stops people learning. Legislative mediocrity. It drives me nuts. I'm very much let's do innovation. Let's improve.
Organizational Structures That Enable Knowledge Flow With Stuart French
Because You Need to Know Podcast ™
Increasing Returns (Order) in a System is a Product of Disorder, Numerosity, and Feedback
Summary:
Disorder, in tandem with feedback, leads to order.
Feedback occurs when information is transmitted and found by others, creating a cycle. This feedback, combined with disorder, results in the phenomenon of increasing returns, where random decisions influence subsequent decisions.
Increasing returns in a system depend on disorder, feedback, and the involvement of a sufficient number of individuals.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The next one on the list will be feedback. So the disorder only in tandem with feedback is going to lead to order. And the and trail again, an example, the feedback is coming from one end going out, finding something interesting as happenstance by accident. And then it leaves information. Another and finds it. And that's where the feedback starts. And this feedback is, you know, just like, I believe, Brian Arthur was talking about increasing returns. Initially, something random happens. Someone makes a random decision and a few more, say, people make a random decision. And that leads other people to not make a random decision, but make a decision based on that previous one. So this increasing returns phenomenon is a combination of disorder and feedback. And of course, the morosity, you need a few people to make it happen.
The 10 Features of Complex Systems — Part 1
Simplifying Complexity
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
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