“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple system.”
John Gall, Systems Theorist
Gall’s law is a well-known concept in systems design. Its gist is that you cannot start a complex system from scratch. There are just too many uncertainties, manifested as interdependencies, that cannot be accounted for via design alone and requires multiple iterations and pivots.
Mark Zuckerberg said something similar to the effect that starting Facebook now would be an impossible effort primarily because of the various elements that needed to be worked out from the fairly simple dating-ish site that it started with.
Richard Hamming, in his book, The Art of doing Science and Engineering, talks about how learning happens and how big things happen and how good work happens. And in all of these examples, the idea is to start small, even if it’s wrong, starting somewhere kickstarts the process for learning and constant, iterative evolution.
When we start on a new project – a novel perhaps, or a startup idea, or even buying a house – the idea is daunting because we invariably end up looking at the finished product and worrying ceaselessly about our ability to match up to it. A novel that you liked that took its author numerous frustrating years to build through, the home that you saw that took years to nurture and build the roots for, that startup you see doing fascinating work around hard challenges and increasingly taking new ones – all of these stories basically started small, maybe even with things that could not scale.
Startup gurus in fact advise on doing things that do not scale. Because it gives the fledgling group the muscle to learn along the way, iterate and build hidden pathways and learnings that become increasingly difficult to copy over. Starting small builds more specific knowledge – something that is prized and leads to product decisions and strategy opportunities that are hard to arrive at through any other means.
I have a working proto-theory about viewing organizations as a) living organisms, b) cultural concept, c) a product, or d) a political system.
The common denominator in each of these metaphors above is that of a complex system “with interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something” (from Thinking in Systems).
An organization could also be a metaphor for human beings, more specifically our professional world. So, for example, similar to the various functions that stand up an organization including finance, business, legal, commercial, engineering, etc. you need this portfolio of skills and capabilities to stand up your career. And similar to organizations, not all careers succeed or are able to scale beyond its upper limit.
There’s a healthy and rich set of learnings that you can borrow from the rich literature around corporations available today. And maybe vice versa from the troves of research around personal development and self-growth to the field of business.
Venkat Rao, the founder of Ribbonfarm, in his course of writing, talks about how writing long-form blogs (>2,500 words), requires adopting the learning from Gall’s law and incorporating that into the process we follow to structure and craft these long-form narratives and that they require starting small but iterating quickly and methodically to identify the daemon, the Ctulhu, that will drive the rest of the writing instead of relying on brute force or design in the form of structure of table of contents for this long-form writing.
My read from this take is that while you cannot design the complex system from scratch, you can take assistance from this daemon – this creative dark force that over takes you in the throngs of deep immersion, that lets you work towards resolving some of the uncertainties via inspiration and an over-arching meta question that you identify as you plod through your writing.
Summoning this daemon requires showing up though. A common refrain I have heard from all writers of note. Regardless of how hard or frustrating it may be to stare at a blank word processor, or a blank sheet of paper, wishing your magnum opus to form in and of itself, it’s a much better strategy to write ‘shitty first drafts’ quickly and then rigorously start pruning the tree to distill the essence by separating out what you think you want to say, versus what you really want to say. Which is to say that through this process of writing first and second and third drafts and ruthlessly editing them, you invoke the daemon naturally.
It’s an interesting proposition and one I am willing to entertain as it seems like something magical or transcendental that takes hold of you once you have done your homework, invested significant attention and passion, and given the raw starting point for the daemon to possess you and letting the daemon take care of the complexities.
This isn’t much different from the key takeaway I had reading this incredibly interesting book called “When we cease to understand the world” by Benjamin Labatut, where the author essentially traces a fictional account of how some of the biggest scientific discoveries of the last century came about. And his primary message to us is that most likely these transformative discoveries were made in the throngs of insanity, as if the scientists were possessed by a ‘daemon-like’ madness that led them to transcend the known forces of this world and see something beyond, something pristine and elegant and frightful, that bore a deep hole of fear and madness in these passionate individuals who had immersed themselves so deep in their work that nothing else mattered to them other than boring deep into the very fabric of reality to offer their gift to us mortal folks with a new understanding, a new dawn of human knowledge.
Does not hurt to create the environment then to let this daemon run amok and shake the foundations of the complex systems we find ourselves surrounded with, ones that have taken literally millions of years to form.
Jargogled Impressions. 