Tensions Aren't Always Bad
...but we need to think about the mechanisms to resolve them
Places To Start (if you’re new here):
Making the uncommon, Commonplace: My fav quotes, laws, and marginalia - please feel free to add your own
My Reading List: Some of those works (book, articles) that have shaped my world view - again, feel free to add your own.
I used work at Amazon and you learn a lot about tension there. Not that way, but the tensions involved in how you make business decisions - how to navigate competing interests. One thing that Amazon is known for is it’s Leadership Principles, or LPs. I don’t that their really understood as ways to resolve tensions.
I first heard about these when I was getting ready for my interview loop there. I was told that I needed to know them and be able to frame my replies to interview questions to be in line with them. You know the questions…”tell me about a time when…” and so on. I had been through interviews before where I was told to frame answers to align with the mission and vision of the org so that wasn’t new or different. Once I was hired though, I started to hear the LPs used in meetings as shorthand for a pro or con to a particular idea or plan. People would say things like “I don’t think that’s Think Big enough” or “I don’t think that Bias for Action enough.” It started to hit me that at least the org I was in, used these to actually run the place. Now way back then, there were only 14, they’ve since grown to 16. You can read them all here.
One thing people tend to get wrong when they hear that number, 14 or 16, is thinking that they all have to obeyed simultaneously or that they all carry the same weight all the time. That’s not how they operated in reality. They operate in shifting levels of tension with each other depending on a set of variables. Let me use two that show this clearly, Bias for Action and Dive Deep. Now the text of the first is “Bias for Action: Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.” The latter reads “Dive Deep: Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.” Almost diametric right? How are you supposed to know if you need to most fast or take time to fully understand something? The answer is the type of door.
Let’s say you want to try a new online app for doing something. There is a free trial, you don’t need to provide it access to any corporate systems or data (maybe check with InfoSec just to be sure), and if doesn’t do what you need, you just cancel it. That’s a two way door - inexpensive to move thru, doesn’t impact the customer, easy to come back thru - time for bias for action - let’s use the thing and get actual data and see if it works. Now let’s think about using a new tool or service on the amazon.com home page. Probably not cheap, certainly exposes or needs access to customer data and has the potential to impact the customer experience if it goes sideways. That’s a one way door - expensive and potentially problematic to move back and forth through. Time to Dive Deep. It really resonated with me that the tension between the LPs was resolved this way. It’s not always that clean and I’ve seen some good debates about whether or not the door is one-way or two-way (that leads to another LP - Disagree and Commit). That’s a long preamble to say that I’m fascinated by tension and how its gets resolved. Both my disciplines, history and anthropology, could be seen as a record of how humans have resolved different sets of tensions like war, religion, adopting agriculture, and really dealing with next technology all along the way.
I think recent examples of tensions at scale certainly include COVID and then the current tension between the actual data we have on worker productivity when working hybrid or remote and RTOs. That’s created this tension between how we manage and how people want to live and if we actually want to dedicate the appropriate time and energy to a) stop thinking of the “workforce” like it’s some monolith driven by the exact same intrinsic and extrinsic drives throughout and b) figure out how to best make use of this new world or remote/hybrid work.
It has also been pointed out to me (usually gently) that I post and write about AI, in all its different forms, a lot. Guilty as charged but I’d like to offer a why. This will seem obvious but AI, since it doesn’t require any new infrastructure on the user side, has penetrated nearly every single sector of the market and nearly every single role within that market, from the CEO to the entry-level new hires. My fascination isn’t so much with the specific tech of AI, but with the width and breadth of the organizational and structural tensions that could come from this “new” tech (new tech that’s been built on decades of research and work). The main way I’ve tried to frame this tension in the broadest sense is one between the poles of Value and Activity. I kicked off this newsletter by writing about that here. It reminds me of the tensions that “e-learning” created when it launched. There were tensions between instructors who were comfortable working in a virtual environment and learning a new set of tools and those that did not want to give up on what they saw as the gold standard of IRL training. The pandemic raised the stakes there when it slammed millions of students into virtual classrooms and really showed where the weaknesses in the current systems are.
Here we are again though - just recently MSFT announced a new AI Team CoPilot that “keeps meetings on track, takes collaborative notes, manages large projects, and assigns tasks.” Talk about tension. Can almost hear the project managers revolt now. That’s a tension though - between the menial tasks that used to occupy us and the time we could now have freed up to pursue higher value (either to customer the company or both).
So there are these tensions. There are also forces like COVID and AI that are making the tensions more visible and increasingly strained. The question then is, how do we resolve them? Wouldn’t that be a cool newsletter? The perfect way to resolve tensions. Gosh. Can’t think of anywhere that would be helpful right now, can you? Sadly though, the answer that I can come up is that right now it seems that the only way, actually our default way, that we have to resolve most of these tensions is by power of will. Those that shout loudest or have the most authority will win - at least in the short term. We are missing the ability to look objectively at these competing interests and resolve them in a way that makes sense to all - doesn’t mean all have to agree, it just has to make sense.
I think it boils down to culture. Now typically when an anthropologist talks about culture, they have some definition in mind like this: "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." ~ Tylor, Edward B. (1871). Primitive Culture. Or "Culture is a well-organized unity divided into two fundamental aspects—a body of artifacts and a system of customs. It includes tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, and rituals." ~Malinowski, Bronislaw (1944). A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. My favorite by far though is this: “Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations.” ~Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. I think Geertz gets to what I think is at the heart of how we resolve these tensions, at least in our limited corporate sphere.
Now if we combine some Tylor with some Geertz, we need to look for ways - artifacts, tools, customs, rituals - with which we weave a fabric of meaning to guide how we resolve tensions. Sounds very academic right? How about this - the docs that we wrote at Amazon (which were the same formats across the enterprise) are artifacts, the doc reads in which we discussed the docs, were filled with ritual and customs - like how to ask if people needed more time. On top of all that, we had the LPs and the 1 way/2 way door structure to guide the outputs. I’m not saying that every org should try to copy that - that’s a mistake you see made often - but I will say that to get to a place where we can resolve some of these tensions (both large and small), we need to be thoughtful, and conscious about the culture we are creating and in which we are trying to reach some conclusion not simply by force of will.