Simplify, Add Lightness, Create Room to Spare...
Thriving in Radical Uncertainty
When did data become so cumbersome? How has it moved from something meant to guide us to something whose permission we need to do anything, and when did evidence-based decision-making move from tool to dogma?
I suspect our obsession with scale and efficiency has much to do with it. Scale often leads to mediocrity, as process and rules subjugate judgment and connection, and relationships are reduced to data.
We manage what we measure, and what we measure contains only a part of the story.
David Susskind wrote a paper last month titled. “What will remain for people to do?” addressing the questions AI will ask of our organisations. In it, he explores the future of human labour in a world where AI could potentially outperform humans at all economically valuable tasks. He argues that there will still be meaningful work for humans due to three fundamental limits. First, general equilibrium limits, where even if AI has an absolute advantage, comparative advantage may leave humans performing some tasks efficiently. Second is preference limits, where people may prefer human involvement in art, craftsmanship, or empathetic services. Third, moral limits, where society may believe certain decisions or actions must involve human moral judgment (e.g., life-or-death decisions or judicial rulings).
However, he also cautions that these limits may erode over time. Economic viability might reduce wages for the remaining human tasks, societal preferences may shift toward valuing AI-generated outcomes, and even moral boundaries could weaken as AI systems become more capable and explainable. Despite these pressures, he highlights that certain human qualities—especially affective empathy and deep moral agency—might remain difficult, or even impossible, for AI to replicate fully.
None of the aspects—general equilibrium, preference limits, or moral judgements—are particularly amenable to data; they all involve messy human relationships, and those same messy human relationships are at the heart of growth measured in things other than money, and can’t be measured with cold data.
Data is valuable, but it has no soul.
Goals are valuable, too, but only in the right place.
Goals, like data, are “finite game” measures - the stuff of matches, winners and losers, sides, and timescales. They are no more than historical curiosities on the infinite game path that connects past to emerging future and something more meaningful - keeping the game going for its own sake.
In my conversation with Steve Done, part of the OTW private network, we talked about the impact of the small groups we have been part of since the pandemic, and how they relate to infinite game thinking. There are no goals, no agendas, and no expectations, just great conversations in good company.
Yet things emerge that have changed how those in them do business, think about work, and amplify the impact of what they do; it’s just that none of them were planned. It is remarkable what can happen when we create simple spaces to meet, keep them light and free from pressure, and offer room to spare for what might turn up unexpectedly.
Organisations that are heavy with data and focused on efficiency, scale, and performance make themselves cumbersome. No matter what the rhetoric, they cannot move quickly and are more wedded to their own survival than to their effectiveness.
As the world changes quickly and unpredictably around us, opportunities emerge in unexpected spaces, and we are asked questions of who we are and what we believe in far more than what our resumés say.
We cannot do much about the organisations we work for, but we can do things to simplify and add lightness to our craft, and create room to spare to meet with others in the spaces where opportunities may make themselves known.
The company we keep and our conversations matter more than ever.
What would simplifying your work mean for you?
How might you achieve what is needed without all the unnecessary paraphernalia that organisations add?
How could you lighten those tasks to make them less of a burden, and how will you make the time to spare so you can have the conversations in the company of people and ideas that will help you find simplicity and lightness?
If you are not a member of the Outside the Walls Group and would like to join us, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a link. Our next conversation is this evening 5:00 pm UK time.
On our obsession with scale and efficiency: Could this be just a symptom, of a runaway desire to measure and evaluate, to attach some positive or negative value to the results? Efficiency and scale you can measure. You must measure. Otherwise, how do you know by how much something has scaled, or how efficient it is?
It is said about our economical system that it has become increasingly one dimnesional: more and more things are measured in money, and only that.
Data and Goals help us measure and compare, they are the basis for any measurements.
If this problem that we cannot let go of measuring is close to the root, is a meaningful path then in the direction of not doing so? Not sure that work in organizations can be that way, in the organizations we have today. They are built on that. Our whole 'mainstream system' is.
Is it meaningful to explore "simplifying" not in the sense of 'un-scaling', 'de-accelerating', 'measurable adding simplicity and lightness', but in the sense of disengaging from a contious OODA-Loop of measuring our success, evaluating it by the common metrics (money, number of parts, weight,...)?