Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, has said that police culture has long been detached from the needs of the communities they are supposed to serve and that it needs to be transformed. Police racism and abuse of power are well documented, but why have so many attempts at reform failed? At one obvious level if the culture in an organization is still unchanged, what should we expect? But yet many of the tactics that have been tried address only symptoms and are often subverted as changing a policy does not change culture.
Charles P. Wilson, Chairman of the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, has even stated, “The [police] system was designed to keep poor people under control” reflecting how even today the disturbing roots of policing in America (slave patrols in the south, protecting the wealthy, warrior vs. guardian culture) retain their influence.
That word, system, is one that designers know well. It means rather than being able to address a problem as a singular thing, there are instead multiple forces that interact, often in ways that are more complex than they seem. Just because a problem is easy to spot, doesn’t mean it’s easy to fix. Systems theory is its own subject, as are police history and police reform, but I haven’t seen them brought together in a simple way that most people can grasp.
Shaila Dewan, who covers criminal justice for The NY Times, explored this in her rundown on The Daily podcast of 5 of the systemic reasons (there are more) for why the police stay protected even when they violate our trust. She explained:
“Our systems are set up to protect police officers from repercussions… its even been bitterly complained about by police chiefs coming in wanting to change their departments… Minneapolis had two police chiefs who were heralded as reformers. The current chief sued the department for racist hiring practices before he became chief… but he may be forced to rehire [the four officers involved in the George floyd killing] “
This view helps explain the Gordian Knot of how police, unions and other organizations, resist change and protect each other. It’s far from complete, but it offers an introduction into why this has been a hard problem to solve.
The police police the police. It’s commonly known that most departments have Internal Affairs divisions that investigate police issues (often romanticized in movies), but we forget that they often report into the same larger organization that ultimately manages the people being investigated and who have incentive to bury or minimize bad news about their department. Internal affairs typically only investigates and makes recommendations, via methods that are often kept from the public. They are usually former police officers who are part of the same culture and community as those they are investigating. As citizens we call the police as a (hopefully) objective actor but the police are not policed in the same way. Police records about individual officers, complaints and discipline history, are often hard to obtain and provide limited information to the public.
Courts and arbitration protect police officers. Public employees can appeal firings or suspensions to an independent group or mediator outside of the police department. Through these appeals police are often given lighter sentences or are reinstated, since they often base judgements on past precedent of leniency (which self-reinforces light penalties). The Twin Cities Pioneer Press analysis showed fired cops were reinstated 46% of the time.
Civilian review boards rarely have power. Review boards are often created in response to police brutality, but they are often toothless, relying on journalists and the media to apply pressure. They are granted meetings with police leaders to discuss issues or review cases but not much more. Often few complaints brought to these boards result in any action.
Police unions are very powerful. Unions represent the needs of officers, not the needs of the police department or society. They are well funded compared to other unions (given the political nature of policing) giving them significant negotiating power with city governments. A primary duty of unions is to protect police jobs. “They are often the biggest opponent of reform minded chiefs. Minneapolis is a textbook example of this.” Minneapolis Police Union President Bob Krul, whose own words on violence are disturbing, has 29 complaints against him as an officer. He has stated he will get the jobs back for the officers involved in the George Floyd killing.
Reasonable Fear laws reduce sentences. Prosecutors and juries, who depending on their ethnicity and neighborhood have had far different experiences with the police, are often willing to give officers the benefit of the doubt in use of force since they are viewed as public servants, taking risks for the greater good. The concept of reasonable fear laws is that officers have dangerous jobs with split second decisions: If an officer can make the argument that a reasonable officer would have been afraid for their life in that situation, than a jury or prosecutor is not supposed to convict or judge harshly.
In systems theory stasis is the tendency for systems to be resilient to change. Each part of a functioning (in the sense it achieves outcomes the people in it desire) system will naturally adapt to keep the system stable and even compensate for changes, neutralizing them.
This helps explain the pattern of:
Something terrible happens
Society is outraged
Change is demanded
A new policy is created (or a police chief who believes in reform is hired)
And… nothing changes
Dewan offers that “.. even an institution that wants to change itself can’t overcome it’s architecture.” There are often just too many powerful or slow moving forces that work against change happening. We don’t often talk about the value of institutions, but they are meant to provide value across generations. When designed and maintained well, the slow moving nature of an institution is an asset, not a liability. It’s a different scale of investment and return that many have forgotten.
Fixing a broken system usually requires:
Studying similar systems and why change failed or succeeded
Integrating different kinds of expertise
Considering both symptoms and causes
Attacking the problem from multiple directions
Growing and nurturing a new culture with it’s own stasis/resilience
Understanding feedback loops & how parts of the system influence each other often in complex ways
Committing to the long term, possibly over generations, as change may require more than a single term for mayors, politicians or anyone involved, just to even successfully manage out the defenders of the status quo.
People who design things for a living depend on optimism. To do their job well, whether it’s designing websites or automobiles, they must believe they can make things that are better than what currently exists in the world. The problem is that this optimism, when combined with immaturity, creates a shallow view of how organizations work and how decisions get made.
Designers claim, and often with good reason, that they understand human behavior better than others, but their distaste for what they call politics reveals they’re unaware of one of the most natural behaviors people in groups have. Designers who don’t comprehend or wish to avoid all politics betray their own ideas by not recognizing how politics defines the human landscape they must work on.
The confusion stems from the two different meanings of the word:
Politics (n): the things self-serving, manipulative people do.
Politics (n): the process of making decisions that apply to members of a group.
When someone says “I hate working in Stan’s organization, he’s so political” they’re using the first definition, and they specifically mean the abuse of power to serve someone’s self-interest or the creation of a culture of fear and dysfunction. These are bad things, for sure, but often the word politics is used in a lazy way, by someone who simply doesn’t understand why their ideas get shot down, or why they’re not given the power they think they deserve. Rather than examining the culture they’re in (who is thriving here? what are they doing that I am not? Do I need new skills or a new job?), they blame the very concept of politics.
The hard truth is that human nature is political (2nd definition above). The fields of sociology, anthropology and psychology are largely about the complex challenges of people trying to get along with each other (and themselves).
Put simply, when you organize people to do something, whether it’s throwing a party or starting a company, each individual has their own opinions on the right way to do it. And they have preferences for who they like to work with and what tasks they like to work on. This means no matter how talented leaders of an organization are, some people will not get everything they want.
This motivates people to influence those with power or to try and take it for themselves (and if raises, promotions and prestige are at stake the tendency for people to forget their ideals increases). There are of course many ways to express ambition, some much healthier and more transparent than others, but politics are everywhere people are.
“Every management act is a political act… in some way [it] redistributes or reinforces power.” — Richard Farson
Blaming “politics”, in the abstract, is a convenient way to avoid taking responsibility for solving problems. The same is true for pointing fingers at “management,” “engineering,” or “marketing” and saying how stupid they are (See: The Fallacy of ‘They Don’t Get It’). Of course it’s true you could work in a completely dysfunctional place where even Machiavelli could not succeed, but it’s far more likely there are reasonable forces at work you don’t fully understand.
Pointing fingers doesn’t make those you point at any less stupid or ineffective, and it deflects any personal responsibility for learning how to be more persuasive, collaborative or thoughtful in how you approach working with them. And who knows, it’s possible that with a careful eye, it might just be that what you see as incompetence in another is just a smart person constrained by similarly difficult political factors that you can’t fully see. Of course some workplaces are truly broken, but that mostly raises the goal of finding yourself a new place to work. When a designer, a natural optimist, is pessimistic about who they work for and with, it’s time to move on.
Designers love to talk about their mastery of problem-solving skills, but politics is just another kind of problem-solving: people problems. If you approach organizational problems with the same optimism, discipline and creativity that you approach a design or engineering problem, you can find alternatives to explore and use them to make better decisions. And this is the grand irony of designers complaining about politics: designers should be great at the combination of problem-solving and understanding people, yet so often they can’t escape their frustration that these problems even exist.
The greatest factor in your political experience of an organization is your boss. A good manager will buffer you from organizational drama and set you up to succeed, while a bad one will amplify the worst problems an organization has. For designers, this means the heaviest political burdens land on the most senior designer in their organization. It’s their job to pave the way for all the people who work for them, establishing relationships with other powerful people in the organization.
But sadly design as a profession suffers from the Peter Principle. The problem of overpromotion is universal in the working world, but design is a specialized enough field that often the people who become design directors, or executives, are far better at designing than directing, leading or managing. In the best cases they know their primary job is to be an ambassador of design to the CEO and other executives, to form partnerships, align goals and gain influence that can be transferred down into their own organization. But even as an individual designer without much support from above, there are still many things you can do.
The way forward is that politics, even in the healthiest organization, is based on your reputation. The same organization will feel very different if you have a great reputation for getting good work done vs. having a poor one (or no reputation at all). This means earning trust and cultivating respect from your peers and superiors is the path. This is far more productive than allowing your audible frustrations at “politics” in meetings be the primary way people know you. And much like designers study users, they can also study their coworkers and superiors. By asking simple questions, much can be revealed that makes healthier politics possible:
What is my reputation? How does this help or hurt my ability to influence decisions?
Who among my peers is thriving here? Why? (If no one is thriving, also ask why)? What can I learn from them?
What does my boss value? What problems is she trying to solve? How can my talents help solve them?
What political skills are my weakest? How can I become a better facilitator? negotiator? persuader? listener?
Is my (design) work simply rated by leaders as low priority and what I see as “politics” is really just a prioritization decision?
Who frustrates me the most? Are my goals aligned with theirs? Why not? Who sets their goals? Do they have a good relationship with who sets mine? Who is the boss of all of them and why haven’t they fixed this problem yet?
Who has more influence than I do, that I trust, who can lend me their ear for advice?
Can I ask one of them to mentor me over coffee now and then about how to get things done here?
Who has a good reputation that I can partner with to pitch an idea and use their reputation to help grow mine?
Is there a manager here that I’d be better suited working for?
Or is it just time for me to find a new place to work?
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came via email from J.B.:
How can I learn to ask better questions?
If you’re asking this question you’re already doing well, as you’re asking questions about questions.
There’s the saying “there are no bad questions” which is especially true if you’re allowed to ask more than one. A question creates a space to be filled and in seeing how someone tries to do it the possibility of another, better question is created. The shape of the space a question creates is what makes it more or less interesting. “How did this happen?” creates one shape, but “Why did this happen?” creates another. Which one is better? It depends on what you are curious to explore. Better questions either satisfy your curiosity, or lead to other questions you are curious about.
This means there’s something about persistence in asking good questions. Whether you do it in your own mind or you do it with another person, it’s best to think of questions as a sequence. You don’t need to ask brilliant questions if you ask and answer many of them. A question can’t ask itself. You need gumption, or the courage to ask questions. Many people have good questions, but never find the courage to speak up or to explore them on their own.
Part of the fear around questions is the worry that we will expose a truth that someone, perhaps even ourselves, doesn’t want to be brought to light. Or we’ll be told we’re stupid or wrong for asking. We are social creatures who need each other to survive and the instinct of fear about being ostracized, which thousands of years ago would reduce your chances of survival, is powerful. This is part of why meaningful conversations are uncommon.
Most conversations in life are a kind of social grooming, a way to feel safe and included. Since the most powerful questions (What is Good? Why do you believe what you believe? What assumptions about life have you never questioned?) don’t have easy answers, we tend to play it safe and avoid asking them. Questions often lead to new perspectives which often leads to change and many people are afraid of change, even if it’s progress. Finding someone you enjoy exploring “dangerous” questions with is rare and if you find one, cherish them.
The surprise is it shouldn’t be hard to accept that there are many different answers to our biggest questions. There are 6 billion people, in 196 nations, practicing 4200 different religions on planet earth. Most of them can’t possibly agree with each other on many important subjects. Logically, rationally, diversity is everywhere and we shouldn’t be afraid of exploring different ways to be and live. But the problem is our brains are designed for life in small tribes. We’re biased towards behavior that works well in small uniform communities, even if logically we know how much diversity is in the world.
If ignorance means simply being uninformed, then curiosity means you are interested in your own ignorance and to want to do something about it. Even asking 5 whys, which depends on gumption more than brilliance, uses persistent curiosity to force deeper thinking. Once you see questions as tools for exploration, you’re likely to ask more of them of more people, increasing your skill at crafting good ones.
But my favorite way to think about better questions is.. a list of questions! At any moment in life when you want to question something, pull up this list and you’re guaranteed to find inspiration for better thinking. This list is adapted from the work of Richard Paul and the Foundation for Critical Thinking.
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came via email from S.P.:
I often feel overwhelmed by the news I read. How can I better manage my responses?
The news is of course defined by what is new, but the implication has always been that somehow we are informed about the world by consuming “the news” and good citizens are informed ones. Yet as news shifted in the 1970s from being a public service to a business, the organizations that provide it had new preferences for what to share, and how to share it. Neil Postman wrote, “I do not mean to imply that… news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.”
Of course, we are more upset or fearful than entertained when we hear of another school shooting or violent crime, but the reasons why it is chosen are similar. It’s the power of drawing attention that drives media as a business and it’s easier to gain attention for negative reasons than for happier ones. For example, the top trending story will never be “mostly the world, and your neighborhood, is doing better than, or the same as it was yesterday” despite how often this is true, since it’s not a dramatic story. In a sense, it’s not considered newsworthy even if it’s more important to know than the most recent homicide (or all of the “new” things that happened that week). This alone makes news a distortion of reality that is hard for many to notice. Some news sources are more balanced than others, but the news is never neutral. News has an obsession with the immediate present and your life should not.
More profoundly, when a report of a homicide headlines the news, we tend to assume crime is worse. If the crime were in a nearby neighborhood, we might be less likely to visit wherever the crime occurred, or may even avoid going out into public at all. But in reality, the crime rate in that area might be the same as it has been for years, or even be at an all-time low, but the constant news about it shapes our perception more than the reality. Put another way, the individual incident can’t tell you anything about what the trends are. And it follows that an individual news story can’t likely tell you much about the trends either. We mostly consume microunits of news, headlines and skimmable paragraphs, free of any greater meaning or information to help us put the “news” into a coherent worldview that would actually make us more informed.
The top news event on any given day can mean one of two things:
Something important and profound with lasting consequences may have happened
Something that easily draws attention but has little substance on any trend changing occurred
Reporters often take the stance that they can’t know which one is right for a particular event since it just happened. They would claim that it’s only over time that hindsight lets us understand what really happened and to see which events signified real change. Sometimes that’s true, but that suggests we’d all be better off reading the news once a week, when journalists have made more sense of what happened and have a thoughtful context to offer. But we crave novelty, and media businesses thrive on providing it. Few of us have the self-control to resist the ways media tempts us to consume right now.
But even when reading breaking news, there are simple questions that, if asked, help put the top news of the day into a context that helps us be truly informed. These questions include:
What is the source? Who paid for this to be written?
What assumptions are you confirming are true, but aren’t in this news itself (see confirmation bias)?
Why did this get your attention? What feeling did it generate? Did reading/hearing more than just the headline change that feeling?
Is there another story from an equally reputable source that puts this news in a different context?
How is this event any different from the last time an event like it occurred?
What pattern, if any, does this event form with similar ones over the last week/month/year/decade/century?
Does this event fit, or is an outlier, to the primary accepted theories for what is happening in this field/city/community/profession?
What alternative explanations or meanings can this event signify (including the possibility that the event alone signifies nothing)?
How many other similarly probable events occurred today? Or occur each year?
What other questions should we be asking of the news we read? Leave a comment with suggestions. Thanks.
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question is from Crysel [44 votes]:
What is the real motivation for creativity?
For most of history people did not use the word creativity very much. They just invented and discovered things in the course of their lives without applying special labels to them. But something strange happened to in modern times. We developed a romance around the notion of creativity. Most people today think of it as an extra layer of cognitive powers, that only special people have. This is untrue and there’s an easy way to prove it.
Imagine you are getting ready to work. You stop at your door to do your pre-airlock check for your phone, your wallet and your keys. You realize your keys aren’t in your pocket. Oh no! And at this moment an important sequence of cognitive events takes place.
Your brain instinctively tells you to look by the door in the place where you usually put your keys when you come home. So you go and look, perhaps at the basket on the shelf right by the door where they usually go. And they are not there!
Now your brain thinks a bit more. Maybe they fell? So you check on the floor and behind the basket. Not there!
And here is where the magic starts: your brain starts getting increasingly creative. You look under the basket. You look in the hallway outside. You look in clothes you haven’t worn in days, or weeks. Then you check the basket again (perhaps the keys magically reappeared since the last time you looked?).
You consider increasingly unusual explanations for where your keys are. Maybe you left them at the restaurant last night (which is unlikely since you got into your apartment)? Or someone broke into your place and stole them! (which also doesn’t make sense as if they broke in they don’t need your keys). And on and on your brain will go inventing and trying out solutions.
The lesson here is that when suitably motivated your brain will be creative all on its own. During step 3 above you did not have to engage in a brainstorming exercise or put on a magic hat of ideation. Your mind will, when motivated and presented with a hard problem, generate inventive, unusual and unorthodox ideas. This helps explain why our species has survived despite not being very strong or very fast. We are good at solving problems and when we are motivated can persist in trying to solve even very hard ones.
Now some people hear this and say that looking in strange places for keys isn’t really creative because most of those ideas are failures. But that’s just it. Creative work is very much like looking for keys. You have to do the work to explore many alternatives, many of them unsuccessful, until you arrive at a worthy idea. Even the most brilliant writers and artists write first drafts and draw early sketches that they eventually throw away. They learn much from those “failed” ideas and those lessons help make their second, third and final drafts better than the last. Working with ideas is never an efficient process. It’s messy and uncertain no matter how talented you are.
All this means that when we don’t feel creative often all that’s missing is a strong enough motivator. Sometimes we have demotivators in our own minds, like fear of being judged by others or fear of failure and it’s only by becoming more self-aware that our natural creativity can be free to surface. Other times we’re in cultures or teams that penalize creative thinking. But even in the best situations remember that creativity is a kind of work. You have to burn extra calories. And most of the time we, and our brains, prefer to be efficient and do the least amount of work necessary. But when we are suitably motivated, perhaps out of fear (losing your keys) or passion (solving a problem you care about deeply), our brains have most of the tools we need already built in.
Which is more dangerous: people who write badly, or people who read poorly?
Polls like this are mostly just fun for me. Even so, I try to word them carefully and think through how to make the question less leading towards one answer. And then before I post it, I stop to think up a guess at what the results will be.
In this case I predicted it would be nearly even. I thought the poll was clever, but not particularly interesting as binary choices often create false dichotomies. I admit I was quite surprised to see the result (21% write badly, 79% read poorly):
Yes, it’s true that binary polls are often unfair as in any real-life decision there are layers of nuance, clarifications and details that change both how you might define the problem and how you’d try to solve it. But the brutality of the forced choice has a power too, at least as a thought experiment: if you could only solve one of the two problems, which would you solve?
I see now that I agree with the answer. Here’s why:
A bad reader can squander the work of a great writer. If the reader is only skimming headlines or reading primarily for speed rather than comprehension, it’s easy for them to misunderstand or overlook the value of what they read. Reading is always the last step and it takes place entirely in the reader’s mind, not the writer’s. And of course there are far more readers than writers as it only takes one writer to produce something, but hundreds or thousands of readers can read that one work.
Misinformation and fake news are popularized by readers. Our decision to share something on social media hinges on our (mis)comprehension of its accuracy, meaning or truthfulness, or our disregard for those things. What becomes a trend, goes viral or becomes popular is based entirely on readers opinions no matter how (un)informed they are, or how many great works from great writers they have entirely ignored.
Learning to read better helps you to write better. The most common and worthy advice from writing teachers is to become a better reader and to read better works. It’s by improving the questions you ask as a reader, and developing the patience to pause and think, to reconsider, to glance between the lines, that the capacity to write well begins to grow. If we want better writers, we need better readers first.
Now that you are finished reading what I have written, what comments will you write for me to read? I look forward to reading your thoughts with extreme generosity, thoughtfulness, and patience 🙂
(I tried to find a picture of dangerous reading, and this was the best rights-free image I could find. I mean, she could trip in the sand, or maybe a big rogue wave could come up a knock her over, right?)
On Tuesdays, I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came from Ms. Unknown:
What ideas must we reject to save our future?
It’s wonderfully romantic to view the world from the point of view of a checklist of things we can either choose to accept or reject. I don’t mean this in a judgmental way. It really would be nice if we could vote each year as a planet on which ideas to promote or reduce, and then all collectively work hard towards that goal. But the tangible reality of how human society works regarding ideas is a terrible mess. Or at least, more positively speaking, it’s a complex web of interactions of needs, wants, scopes, fears, cultures, timings and coincidences. We’re all fighting our local crusades for more happiness or security and rarely have much reason to think in a unified way about what kinds of ideas are best or worst for all of us.
Ms. Unknown offered four ideas to reject: competition, scarcity, individualism, and the endless pursuit of more. Which in their way, in a simple list, seem lovely. She is describing the utopian world of Star Trek, where all core needs for all people (or at least human earthlings) are met. Star Trek of course conveniently skips over how they got from our primitive world to theirs. Even assuming Ms. Unknown is right, how do we get there? It’s hard to see it happening without a science fiction cliche like a terrible world war or alien invasion, something to force our myopic species to recognize our survival depends on our partnership in sharing spaceship earth and not petty self-interests, but I hope to see neither of those scenarios play out in my lifetime.
I’m prone to dualism, so I see most ideas on this list as having good and bad elements. Competition can be good if it’s done in a healthy way. Many people only do their best work if there is some element of competition, like artists, musicians or athletes who see others doing interesting work that challenges them to keep improving and growing, perhaps collaborating and building on each other’s work. But you can’t have a football league, or a literary society, with only one team or one author. Bad competition is when the combined choices by some competitors work against the greater good (Say, when two businesses collude to fix prices in a market so that no new entrants can even try to compete). This means it depends. The ideas aren’t necessarily good are bad, it’s how they are applied, with what goal and what result.
By scarcity, I assume she meant of fundamental needs like food, shelter and water. It’s hard to argue against the improvement of the standard of living for all. What’s there to lose for the rest of us? Probably not much. But taken to the other end of the spectrum, a question about the Star Trek Utopia is without scarcity of some kind, how are people motivated to strive? The history of America is driven by people from other nations who wanted a better life, who felt a scarcity of opportunity where they were, and where therefore motivated to take risks. Without some kinds of scarcity, or perhaps at least ambition, what drives progress? (Although the Western obsession with progress is an idea worth unpacking on its own).
It’s only the last idea from her list, the endless pursuit of more, that I’m more easily swayed to her position. The endless pursuit of anything makes me think, at first, of mental illness. The endless pursuit of cleanliness. The endless pursuit of stuff hoarded in your apartment. The endless pursuit of pictures of kittens in hats. The endless pursuit of status and conspicuous wealth. The endless pursuit of endless pursuits.
Of course, some pursuits are noble: the endless pursuit of reducing stupidity or the endless pursuit of helping people be better to each other. Yet somehow the world culture I see often rewards certain endless pursuits far more than others. The developing world is chasing the American dream of the 1950s and 60s, without learning from the mistakes (cars, pollution, suburban sprawl) that came with them. Our economies depend on the endless pursuit of growth which depends heavily on the endless pursuit of selling us things we don’t really need.
We are still struggling with the basic notions of maintaining a long-lasting civilization, but have the hubris to spend most of our time and resources in denial of the biggest challenges to our future. Perhaps the idea we need to consider rejecting most strongly is that we’re good at learning from the past or collectively learning anything at all. There is wisdom here on planet earth, it’s just not yet distributed to the places and people who need it most.
What ideas do you think we most need to reject? I’d like to know. Leave a comment.
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came from Daniel H. [23 votes]:
Does the attention economy lead to creative burnout? (And make life harder?)
Trying to make a living doing creative work has always been hard for two reasons:
The work is more emotionally challenging than other kinds of work
There is more competition for income for the kinds of work more people want to do
For these reasons alone it’s no surprise that many writers, designers or even programmers experience burnout in their careers. There’s only so long even the most disciplined and tough personality can persist in making things of their own invention without wearing themselves out. And as is the way with burnout, it’s only once you are past your limits that you discover where you limits are (or how long it will take to recover from crossing them).
It’s true that in today’s short attention span information overloaded age there are new challenges for makers. It’s easy to blame these cultural shifts, and to see how software uses our brains against us, as a problem (and for the future of civilization it’s scary indeed). For creators, the news and information cycle is so fast that to earn attention for your work suggests you have to keep up with it all. But the other side of that technological coin is that it’s easier than ever to make things and distribute them. Most people today have in their pocket everything they need to write a novel, or make a film, and at the click of a button, put it online and make it instantly available to the entire planet. They can even use wonderful tools like Kickstarter, as I have several times, to get their friends, family and fans to help make it happen (something artists have often had to do in the past, from Vincent Van Gogh to Richard Linklater).
Of course the entire planet does not care when yet more media is added to the world (4oo hours of video are posted to youtube every minute, so even if the world cared, they’d still have to prioritize). But even 50 years ago, before the internet, there were more films made each year than anyone could possibly see and more books published annually than anyone could read. For a very long time we’ve been living in a world where there is a surplus of creative works, which therefore means they compete for attention (Herbert Simon wrote about the attention economy as early as 1971). The attention economy has certainly intensified, but it’s part of an old story of how as civilization progresses, the means of creation enter more people’s hands.
One major positive difference that comes along with this change is the number of gatekeepers is lower than ever. Thanks to the web no one can tell me, or you, or anyone, NO, which was true until these last few decades. Before the web there was often no way to get your work distributed unless you had permission. Given the choice of a) depending on the approval of others to finish projects and share them with the world, but having fewer competitors vs. b) being able to put anything into the world, but I have to compete with everyone else for attention, I definitely choose b. At least I have a chance. At least I can compete, and use my skills at creation as an advantage.
Getting back to the attention economy and burnout, the wise answer is that if creativity is a primary resource in your work, you have to manage your emotional health carefully. This means understanding 4 things.
What is a sustainable pace of work for you (that can last for a long career)? This is more about self-awareness than what’s happening on Facebook (or whatever eventually replaces it). How many blog posts or tweets can you write in a week? Or short films? What if you have to average that over a month or a year? Or a lifetime? How much downtime do you need to sustain that level of production? These are questions anyone serious about being a professional maker of things has to consider. You can’t live on all-nighters (and the recovery time from those bold efforts is often longer than people realize).
What is a sustainable amount of income/attention? Much of my income comes from speaking at events. Speaking pays very well and is a short commitment, a combination that gives me the time and funding to support writing projects (including this blog, which is free). Most creative people in history realized they needed multiple paths of income, and attention, to make their life work (or do their life’s work). Only when you sit down and do the math can you understand how best to prioritize your limited time and what kinds of attention to seek (See Should I Quit My Job?).
Attention from fans matters more than the rest of the world. The most famous people in any media get most of the attention. But the fallacy is that you need to be in that top 1% or 5% to make a living. That’s not true. You simply need enough fans and attention to earn you enough money to make a living (an approach services like Patreon have validated). By most measures I am not a famous person, nor a particularly famous author. I’ve made it work over these 15 years because enough people have seen my work and liked it sufficiently to pay for it, recommend it to others and come back for more (and I’m very grateful to them). Maybe you only need attention from a handful of the right people (Patrons of the arts, a specific professional group, venture capitalists, who knows) to earn the balance of the income you need. Michelangelo and Da Vinci were likely unknown names more than a few hundred miles from where they lived. Once you start targeting the attention that helps you most, what the rest of the world is obsessing about doesn’t matter anymore.
A creative life is not the safe and secure path. I wish that it was, but I know it isn’t. The more creative the life you choose, the more risk that will come with it. If you want a secure, predictable career, consider an office job where you work for someone else. You will likely get a salary, health benefits and predictable days of working just from 9am to 5pm, all things I do not get as I am self-employed, just like many writers, bloggers, Youtubers, musicians and filmmakers are. It’s a mistake to enter creative life, including starting your own business, while presuming the outcome is clear. It can be wonderfully rewarding, but as I’ve pointed out in this post, you are choosing to compete to earn a living, and even if you do everything right odds are high you can still fail. I recommend doing it anyway, you will learn more about life and yourself by taking the challenging path, but you should do it with your eyes open.
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[There’s no askberkun post today – hope you enjoy this timely essay on films and expectations. There are no spoilers about The Last Jedi, but I’ll allow them in the comments.]
“The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” —Joan Didion
We love or hate films based on what we expect of them. It’s easy to blame a movie’s creators, as we are their customers, but in reality half the work is ours. Do you want realism or an escape? Do you want to be satisfied or challenged? To think or to laugh? What rules from real life must be followed or do you want broken? Too often we leave it until we’re midway through a movie to realize that what we wanted wasn’t what we thought we wanted and we rarely blame ourselves for that mistake.
Two decades and ten films into the world of Star Wars I find my expectations hard to manage. I thought Rogue One, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were good “Star Wars films” but what does that even mean? It’s hard to watch any of these films now, new or old, without thinking at various moments about how it ties together, or cuts against, the history of the series. This is part of the fun, but it’s also a trap. These are now meta-movies. They are, as Lucas intended, serials, like the cliffhanger shorts he was inspired by, but is that what I really want watch? I’m not sure.
It’s hard to experience any event, or character, no matter how well done, in a Star Wars film as if it exists in it’s own time in it’s own ‘real’ universe. The burden of Star Wars (and most film series than span generations like Terminator, Indiana Jones or Spiderman) is any story you are watching is burdened by narrative masters that lurk in the shadows off-screen, in our memories. And franchise reboots only complicate the expectations game, playing on and against our expectations in both interesting and frustrating ways. I want to just watch the film in front of me, free from too much context, but that’s not the world these films put us in anymore.
All movies depends on the audience accepting a departure from their daily lives. We know these are actors on movie sets inventing a false reality. Mostly this departure is what people are paying for: an escape of one kind or another. Even the act of sitting in a full theater itself, sharing an experience with others, is something we don’t do often in life anymore. Consider the ritualistic decent into shared silence as the previews end and the feature film begins: when else in life are we in grand rooms with hundreds of strangers who all agree to respectfully share the silence? It’s evidence that everyone has reverence for the powerful shared escape of film.
Coleridge coined the term suspension of disbelief to describe the desired state of mind a reader, or viewer, needs to have for the work of art to function. But the question is: who should do the greater burden of achieving this state of mind? The creator or the consumer? We assume it is the creator, and they do have the lion’s share, but if the consumer is not in the mood for Shakespeare, or Amy Schumer, is there anything Shakespeare (or the director of the particular play) or Amy Schumer can really do about it? Films, like most commercial art, make promises in their advertising and marketing, but our expectations, when we sit in that chair and the film begins, are still are own.
More to the point about Star Wars, these are not realistic films. Most of the battles, plots and plans even in the original triology don’t hold up well to even the most basic questions (see: we dare you to explain Luke’s plan). It’s the suspension of disbelief that holds most viewers back from ever asking these kinds of questions. Which means the endless arguments about plot lines and holes, boneheaded choices by lead characters, or story arcs that go nowhere reveal the arguers chosen position on the spectrum of disbelief suspension: they only want to disbelieve so much. Which translates into something like “YES, movies with time-travel, or zombies, are fine. And in Star Wars, it’s OK that a long time ago spaceships somehow operated on different principles of physics, a power exists that unifies the universe in such a way that people can use it move objects with their minds, but NO a Starkiller base couldn’t possibly work.” Even when we criticize the inconsistencies of a film, we forget that we’re partly responsible for the rules we’re expecting a fiction to be consistent with.
Part of the value, in fables and fantasy, of bonehead choices and challenges to logic is the gift of superiority it gives to the audience. It’s straight out of the classic soap opera and hero myth narrative playbook to inspire the audience to judge mistakes, to debate flaws, and to be enraged by them. “What! They had an evil twin?” is well known as one of many standard genre tropes for soap operas and films, but even the Iliad expects us to accept the plausibility of a (successful) Trojan horse, the power of Helen’s beauty, and even begs the reader to criticize the hero Achilles (although perhaps not the supernatural nature of his powers).
And each person has their own, often subconscious, list of expectations they never want violated. Some of these rules, like say, the limits to how the force works, or what is allowed to happen to certain characters, feels fair as it’s defined by the legacy of the films themselves. If James Bond could suddenly fly, or Wonder Woman turned out to be an an alien robot from the future, the shock would be understandable (although comic books notoriously introduce shocking plot lines that violate rules). But if a story that has always had the same flaws continues to have them, and there is outrage, who’s problem is it really?
For all the worship of Campbell’s Heroes Journey, a model of storytelling Lucas claims to have used in on his final drafts of the original Star Wars, there’s something shallow about it’s advice. Stories based on universal themes, that are told in a universal way, tend to overly simplify the complexities of good, evil, love and hate. There are rarely “bad guys” and “good guys” in life in the way these stories suggest (and to be blunt, the evil of the bad guys, and good of the good guys, in Star Wars is never explained well, as explaining it is not a strength of this idiom. Luke and Rey could just as well have been “evil” given their rocky starts in life). Is this a problem or an advantage? Well of course it depends. Do you want a soap opera about a far away galaxy today, or a factual memoir by a refuge from a war torn country? A slapstick comedy or a family drama? Do you like the suspension of disbelief mythology and fantasy require, or do you want the down to earth reality of a good documentary about a topic you know well?
One meaning of the word idiom is a mode of expression, or a set of rules for what an audience can expect. Star Wars from the beginning was a fairly tale, a space opera, by design, not caring much about science (e.g. spaceships can’t make bank turns in space, nor make sound), logic or military strategy. Those attributes might be expected in a war movie like Saving Private Ryan, but that’s not the kind of universe Star Wars was created for and thrived in. Arguably a great film transcends idiom: it magically draws you into it’s world regardless of your preconceptions, boosts your suspension of disbelief through filmmaking craft, but that is harder to do in story that’s being told in installments over 40 (or more) years. Which leads to the question: if you saw a random Star Wars film without knowledge of any of the others, what complaints would you have?
Running jokes about how stormtroopers have terrible aim are good because they strike at a truth about the series and the genre. Another is the how heroes regularly pilot spaceships, including freighters, at high speed in impossible turns (that violate physics) through jagged landscapes and spaceships, ones they’ve never seen before, defies any understanding of science or human performance (assuming of course these characters are human at all). Flash Gordon (a major Lucas influence) had similiar problems and so does Indian Jones or The Fast and The Furious or any story with an action hero as the star, as if they die the series ends, but if there is no drama, our disbelief is broken, or we’re bored.
The grand trap might just be that as the age of Star Wars’ first audience matured into adulthood, we backfilled more mature expectations into it. The mythology shifted into religion as the literalness adults crave took control over the generous imagination of youth. For this reason we take seriously story details that were never quite meant to be taken that way. In Greek Mythology, the god Athena was born from the head of Zeus, but to my knowledge there is no reddit forum yet that debates how impractical (or not) this mostly metaphorical plot note might be. We criticize movies that explain too much as having too much exposition, but in fantasy if you start explaining things you chip away at the unreality of the whole thing.
The Star Wars prequels were of course terrible in many ways, but one perhaps noble failure was it’s attempt to make the Star Wars universe sophisticated, nuanced, mature, something more than a fairy tale. Lucas did this of course in direct conflict with the originating idiom the films were born in (most notably the tragic introduction of midi-clorians), but was he wrong to try? I’m not sure. Had the film’s fundamentals of plot, writing and acting been sound, the (now) adult fan base might have widened their suspension of disbelief to allow for more mature kinds of storytelling, even within the context of a fairy tale. But now we will never know, and the series is burdened by the resulting damage (in a similar way The new Star Trek and Hobbit films have burdened their series too).
I found The Last Jedi to be both frustrating and liberating. As a movie I think Rian Johnson and his team did a fine job. They made a “good Star Wars” film. Given the truly otherworldly baggage they inherited they both took more risks, and yet respected the idiom, enough that I’ll keep watching, and for films of this kind I’m not sure what other opinion there is that matters.
The lesson in all this about suspension of disbelief is that it can be thought of as an exercise of imagination. For every plot flaw, every stupid choice a hero makes, for every consistency violation, we can play the generous game of filling in the gaps ourselves. Let’s assume there is a good reason for this, and if I need it I can create one myself, even if it’s not shown on screen. Our brains do it for us most of the time when we sit in a theater, but I advocate helping it along. This can be far more fun than tearing films apart (which is certainly fun too) as we go to theater hoping to escape, rather than to devise ways to ruin the attempt.
But of course we don’t go to movies to obtain homework. I agree we should expect much from the people who take our money for their movies, books and art. But in the end we choose which tickets to buy. By now we know very well what, at its best, the world of Star Wars can do. And there is far more pleasure to be gained by offering generous suspension of disbelief and by matching our expectations, to the idiom of the movie we’re choosing to go see.
[Last Jedi spoilers are allowed in the comments: so view them at your own risk]
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came from J.R. [via email]:
What is a favorite theory that you wish more people understood?
A favorite theory I wish was more well known is the Satir Change Model. It’s popular in some circles, but often when I mention it in talks at events few have seen it before. Virginia Satir was a family therapist who studied how families behave, and in particular, how they respond to change. Her ideas have been successfully applied to organizations and groups of people.
We like to believe change and progress are predictable, especially if we’re applying an idea we’ve used before or that is widely accepted. But according to her research (based on family behavior), and her model, even when we’re making the right change, at the right time, confusion and fear are likely.
Late Status Quo – this is the present, where things are stable, at least in the sense that they’ve been the same way for some time.
Foreign element – This is Satir’s term for any change that is introduced, which could be something deliberate (a new healthy diet) or something surprising (new neighbors move in next door). It could be a new idea, process, team member or anything. Often people resist foreign elements, even if they come with the promise of solving a problem. People often prefer to keep doing what they have been doing (status quo), even if there are things they don’t like about the status quo, especially if they don’t have much trust in their leader or their coworkers.
Chaos – (IMO this is the central idea of the model). Even if you are doing everything right, and the change is the right one, volatility will rise for a time. Average performance will drop as people experiment with adjustments to incorporate the new idea. Hidden assumptions, and emotions, will be revealed, which can be painful at first. A new idea may require new conversations, redistribution of responsibilities and more. What makes this phase challenging is it’s hard to predict how long it will take or if the path is the right one (e.g. “do we need to keep going, or is this direction a mistake?”)
Transforming Idea – The job of a leader is to help a team work through the chaos phase until they reach clarity. This is challenging as each person might require different coaching, advice, support or training to adopt the new idea. And the team as a whole may need to reform, with different roles and responsibilities. Someone with leadership skills might correctly identify a new direction, but it takes someone with people management skills to help them through the transitions that the new direction demands.
Practice and Integration – Once the new idea is understood and adopted, finally the expected gains can be seen and progress becomes predictable. And eventually stabilizes again as the new status quo.
The model isn’t predictive. It doesn’t tell you how much chaos a particular idea will generate, if any at all. It can’t tell you how long it will take before you find the “transforming idea”. It also can’t tell you whether the new idea you’re introducing is the right or wrong one (e.g. the chaos will never end, or performance will never recover). It’s simply a useful framework for thinking about the psychological patterns likely to arise when something changes.
Inexperienced people often confuse the chaos phase as a failure in their choice. And if they quit early, assuming “chaos” means they made a mistake, and revert back to the old ways of doing things, they likely will never have the confidence to try something that bold again. They now confuse the chaos phase with failure. This is a kind of self inflicted learned helplessness, where the necessary cost to improve and grow is now too psychologically expensive. People and organizations can become paralyzed here, as they’ve become extremely resistant to any threat of a “foreign element”, even though that’s exactly what’s needed to grow.
Some foolish people dismiss Satir’s work based on the question what do families have to do with workplaces or individual adult choices? But workplaces are based on relationships, and we learn our models for how to relate to other people from… our families! Your favorite, and least favorite, coworkers learned many of their patterns of behavior from their early relationship with their parents and siblings. How we define trust, love, collaboration, friendship and teamwork all come from our experience with the first and primary tribe in our lives.
Anuradha Gajanayaka compares the Satir model to Kanter’s Law, which states that “Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” She suggested that we “Recognize the struggle of middles, give it some time, and a successful end could be in sight.“
And that is a key takeaway from the Satir model. Even if you’re doing everything right in your life, or as a leader, when you try to change something be prepared for surprises. Plan time for “chaos” in response to the change, where it’s normal for performance to drop and for experimentation to happen until the new idea is understood, incorporated and refined.
The most striking change is that it’s no longer a slidedeck, but an actual document of corporate philosophy. Part of the thrill of their original release was that the format, which was an internal presentation, gave the sense we were seeing something not designed for public consumption and was therefore more authentic.
That allure is gone: they removed the mocking references to Enron’s corporate values or high priced employee sushi lunches. Also gone is the cheesy yin/yang symbol and the generic Arial font (It’s Gotham now). The interesting charts have also been removed. This is now as much a reflection of a mature organization’s wish for how to be perceived as it a tool for attracting talent they think will fit their ideals.
“Our core philosophy is people over process.” They emphasize in many places how little they care for bureaucracy or the status quo. Tied to this is a demanding philosophy of performance and high expectations.
“The real values of a firm are shown by who gets rewarded or let go.” It’s rare for an organization to talk explicitly about the central value of firing people (See Innovation by firing people). They wisely identify how empty most corporate value statements are, especially when people are allowed to remain in the organization who violate them. (A problem I called out in my critique of Airbnb’s culture document).
Their list of core values is good, but commonplace. As they point out, it’s easy to make lists of values but far harder to find leaders willing to uphold them (“It’s easy to write admirable values; it’s harder to live them”). Their list includes: Judgement, Communication, Curiosity, Innovation, Courage, Passion, Selflessness, Inclusion, Integrity, Impact. A fine list but similiar to ones many companies have.
We are a Team, not a Family. This new clarification was compelling. “A family is about unconditional love, despite your siblings’ unusual behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be… and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.” A team is a better metaphor for workplaces in many ways than families are, and too often when executives try to explain their ideas of culture, they use family models (permanent, based on respect, unique) rather than team ones (flexible, based on performance, many can exist). One misstep is Netflix’s odd use of ‘unconditional love’ and ‘sibling’s unusual behavior’. It makes it sound like they have a negative view of families more than it clarifies how they want teams to function. I think they were trying to say that respect on a team is conditional and based on behavior, which they could have said without bringing weird siblings or asides about familial love into it. I’m sure some of their employees have odd habits, as weird as some siblings, and the presumption is they want coworkers to be accepting and supportive.
The No Asshole Rule. They refer to this as “no brilliant jerks” but it’s clearly in line with Bob Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule philosophy. Their justification is simple: ‘on a dream team, there are no brilliant jerks The cost to teamwork is just too high. Our view is that brilliant people are also capable of decent human interactions, and we insist upon that.’
Trust, not rules. It’s always refreshing to read about a place that wants to treat employees as adults. ‘Our policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses is 5 words long: “Act in Netflix’s Best Interest.” We also don’t have a clothing policy, but no one has come to work naked; you don’t need policies for everything’.
The Questionable:
In the original I called out several problematic ideas. Most of them are still here, but refined and recast in this new edition.
What is Integrity? Their answer is curiously narrow. ‘In describing integrity we say, “You only say things about fellow employees you say to their face.’” This is more about transparency, where you are forthcoming and don’t hide useful information from people, than about integrity. Integrity is, perhaps, based on practicing what you preach and honoring shared commitments. They do list other attributes for integrity (admit mistakes, treat people with respect) but the emphasis on who you say things to struck me as strange. It could be implied that if you don’t have the moxy to confront someone directly, perhaps about their offensive behavior in meetings, then you then shouldn’t tell your boss, HR, or anyone about it. I don’t think this is what they meant, but their odd emphasis makes it hard to know. They do a better job at completing the idea of integrity in how they describe courage: “You question actions inconsistent with our values.” But even questioning isn’t enough – one assumes they want people who act on their values and insist others do too.
Is the Keeper test a good one? Their philosophy for firing people is based on this question: “if someone on your team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would you try hard to keep them from leaving? Those that do not pass the keeper test are promptly and respectfully given a generous severance package.” But what if the reasons here are the managers fault? Or if they don’t like the employee for personal reasons? Or there is a breakdown in performance feedback? I admire the clarity of this test, but it can’t work on its own. You need a “Manager sanity test” that asks: “why do I feel this way about this employee? Have I told them I feel this way, discussed it and created a plan for improving the situation, before deciding not to keep them? Is there something I’m missing?”
Misunderstanding of great teams. “If you think of a professional soccer team, it is up to the coach to ensure that every player on the field is amazing at their position.” This is a shallow understanding of great teams. A great team has talent, but just as important is that the players work well together. The notion of a dream team fits the all-star fallacy: that simply having the most talented person at every position is enough to make a great team. Many all-star teams are terrible – playing at levels worse than mediocre teams in the same sport. The reason is all-star teams often have little chemistry and too much ego. A wise coach builds a team that is a mixture of both a) the best talent at each position, but also b) with a sense for how the players styles will work together, what roles they can play, and how their strengths and weaknesses balance. Great teams often have role players that are not the best at their position in the world, but fit better with the rest of the team, and the style the coach chooses for how the team will play, than a star would. And since the nature of projects in a fast paced organization like Netflix change often, it’s likely that on some projects an employee will be the star, and on others they’ll play a more supporting role. Both are important roles. It’s a reflection of a strong team culture to acknowledge these forces as healthy, that playing different kinds of roles creates opportunities to learn, rather than simply believing great talent alone makes for great teams.
What do you think of Netflix’s philosophy? What, if anything, would you adopt in your workplace if you could?
One day at the mall while walking with his daughter he noticed how, because she was bored, she made up a game of not stepping on the cracks in the floor tiles. I took this story to suggest we have the power to make many ordinary experiences fun if we are motivated to frame them that way. I believe this is true. The key to his daughter’s success might be that she was motivated to create, which raises the question: if she was never bored, would she ever be motivated to try to learn how to make things fun for herself? There are many things in life we know we want, but finding the motivation to go get them is the challenge. It seems counter-intuitive to have to expend effort to have fun, but maybe there’s a truth here that we don’t want to admit?
He criticized the notion popularized by Mary Poppins that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” as an empty promise, and that covering one large unpleasant thing with a thin layer of something pleasant is a ruse and rarely works. It also dodges the question why isn’t the core of the experience made well on it’s own? He offered chocolate covered broccoli as another example – we’re fond of coating unpleasant things with tasty ones as a “solution”, but rarely is it as satisfying as simply making the central ingredient excellent (why not buy fresh broccoli and cook it lovingly so it tastes delicious itself?) I liked this thought, until I reconsidered his daughter’s choice: didn’t she cover over the boredom of the mall with the sugary distraction of a private game?
He shared how he chose to use a push lawn-mower, which takes more time and is far more frustrating to use than powered ones. He didn’t complete the story (perhaps he does in his book) or how it connected to his daughter, or Mary Poppins, but it was enough to make me consider that fulfillment can be more powerful than fun. The pleasure we take in finishing a hard project might be greater than spending the same amount of time doing something that was ‘fun and easy’. Game designers know they must balance the level of difficulty in their creations, making it simple enough to enjoy but hard enough to challenge us and keep our interest. And this was where the idea of fun fractured for me: fun isn’t really the goal, it’s pleasure or satisfaction that we’re after which are deeper concepts.
In the end I’m left feeling there’s something shallow about the isolated quest for fun, which I admit I was on as I was attracted to the lecture. Looking back now, the very idea of going to a lecture about a book about fun seems like a very un-fun thing to do. The more time you spend thinking about fun, the less fun you’re probably having. It’s a common problem with philosophers, who in all of their thinking lose the very thread they’re trying to follow (e.g. great thinkers on life and love who failed to ever get a date). Inquiry is useful for a time, but soon there are diminishing returns in abstractions.
If I tried to explain all of this to a college student half my age they’d think I was crazy, as most twenty year olds are surrounded by people and situations heavily oriented towards having fun: it’s not something they’d think you need to go out and find. And in truth it wasn’t a particularly fun crowd or an especially entertaining experience, but who in their right mind would expect either of those things AT A LECTURE? Perhaps there is something to learn from the fact that this is not where people who are good at having fun go on a Friday night in Seattle (Yes, it was a Friday night. In my defense I DID have much fun at dinner with friends before we went to Town Hall, so there!)
One problem is the quest for fun assumes that we have binary states of fun or un-fun, which is about as true as always being either happy or unhappy. Our emotions are more sophisticated and that’s what makes us interesting. We can be happy and laugh in reminiscing about a tough day with a friend who was there, or, like Bogost’s daughter, use a very un-fun experience as the motivating force to create something more pleasing for ourselves. Fun is as multi-faceted as we are.
A great example of the limits of the term fun are the work experiences that are sold as entertainment. Learning how to be a chef, which is a job, is offered as a “fun and relaxing” experience for groups of friends. People love Crossfit, an exercise program that makes people as fit as marines, in part because of “the community that spontaneously arises when people do these workouts”. The dichotomy between work and play doesn’t hold up for long. Many people love their jobs because they find them fun, or at least enjoyable. When I watch a young band on stage at a concert, it certainly looks fun, even though I know they’ve worked hard at their craft and are technically working as I listen to them ‘play’.
It’s simply misguided to seek happiness, fun, or any singular emotional experience as if it were a product in a box. It’s just not a realistic understanding of how emotional experiences happen. As Victor Frankl wrote:
…happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
One related insight I learned from improv class is that fun things begin only when someone makes an offer. Someone has to make the first suggestion and give other people a chance to contribute in return. It can be as simple as inviting people out to lunch, to join you in a game, or even for a walk around the park. A wink, a nod, a smile, are all an offer of a kind. Someone has to initiate and create the possibility for an experience to happen. Like Bogost’s daughter we are always free to make offers to ourselves, to invent our own framework for the experiences we’re in, but some people find this much easier than others. Fun is easier to create when people we like, or are seeking fun as much as we are, are around us.
One approach is to think of the people in your life you find fun to be around: what is it that they do or say that makes you feel this way? I’d bet they simply make more offers, of the kind you like, when you are around them than other people do. They invite you into their stories, their jokes, or their hobbies, or find comfortable ways to invite themselves into yours. They share a sense of humor, or a sensibility, with you and offer ways to use that connection and grow it. If we want more fun in our lives then perhaps mostly we need to spend more time with these people or become more like them ourselves.
A tradition is simply a custom that has been passed down from one generation to another. Their longevity can have many reasons, some good and some bad. We can not assume that persistence alone provides moral justification. Instead we must ask better questions about traditions before we judge their value.
The problem is we instinctively defend our traditions. We learn them when we are young, and when we grow older we naturally want to protect what our elders taught us. Entire communities bond around traditions and rituals, and that is a powerful uniting force, but it simultaneously creates great social pressure not to challenge them. We develop the illusion that they always existed in the form that we practice them, making it easy to confuse questioning a tradition with questioning the identity (or existence) of the community itself.
The danger is that in resisting change both regress and progress are prevented. It keeps the status quo strongly in place. If one goal of a society is to help the next generation have better lives than the previous, that goal demands a periodic reexamining of what those traditions were meant to do, and to compare them with the effect they have now.
It’s the confident community, and leader, who recognize a strong idea can withstand being questioned. And that a truly strong community will prefer to recognize a problem, or that things have changed, and work to solve it, rather than hide behind the defense of longevity.
How did it change over time? (every tradition has changed over time)
Is the problem it was intended to solve still a problem?
What ideas are we using the tradition to honor, remember or pass on to future generations?
Can we carefully adjust this tradition to make it more effective to pass on those ideas?
Do we need to redefine this tradition given all we’ve learned since it started?
One of the most popular traditions in the world, and one that serves as a great example, is birthdays. Most of the world celebrates them today, but this wasn’t always the case. The Egyptians invented the practice in ancient times but it was limited to recognizing their gods. Then it was the Greeks who began the practice of lighting candles on the cakes they offered to the divine. Later it was the Romans who were the first to celebrate the birthdays of ordinary people (but only men). At that time Christians didn’t celebrate the birth of anyone, seeing birthdays as highly egotistical and pagan in nature. It was only in 336 that the first Christmas was celebrated. On and on through the centuries the birthday tradition has changed in meaning and significance, used in different ways, in different cultures, to honor or ignore, different people for different reasons.
The lesson is that what we do today will be someone else’s history. All traditions are living things, shifting and changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but they are all in motion, just at a pace we rarely notice. The more we can see traditions as just one of the many forces that tie us together, the better we can use them to help us protect and improve what’s best in our families, societies and civilizations.
“Every tradition we hold dear was once a new idea someone proposed, tried, and found valuable, often inspired by a previous tradition that had been outgrown. The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones. An organization where nothing ever changes is not a workplace but a living museum.” – From The Year Without Pants
Despite our cultural obsession with new technology, we forget that the idea of new technology is old. We also overlook that there are patterns for how new technologies impact cultures and societies that technologists are often ignorant of. Without understanding the social impact of past technologies, we’re more likely to repeat mistakes, since we don’t even know what to look for.
Recently I read The Real World of Technology, a short book by Ursula Franklin (Thanks Deb Chachra for the recommendation). It’s more academic in style than other culture/technology books I recommend, like my favorite book on the subject, Technopoly, but it had insights that were new to me. In a series of short chapters she identifies and addresses important observations about the sociology of technological change, and how, without us noticing, our choices have impacted us more than we think.
One of her primary observations is the distinction between holistic and prescriptive technology. A holistic technology means the person using the technology to create something controls the process of their own work from beginning to end:
Their hands and minds make situational decisions as the work proceeds, be it on the thickness of the pot, or the shape of the knife edge, or the doneness of the roast. These are decisions that only they can make while they are working. And they draw on their own experience, each time applying it to a unique situation.
Whereas a prescriptive technology is bound in defined steps and rules, with an obvious example being the assembly lines found at any factory in the last 150 years:
When work is organized as a sequence of separately executable steps, the control over the work moves to the organizer, the boss or manager. The process itself has to be prescribed with sufficient precision to make each step fit into the preceding and the following steps. Only in that manner can the final product be satisfactory. The work is orchestrated like a piece of music — it needs the competence of the instrumentalists, but it also needs strict adherence to the score in order to let the final piece sound like music.
Many technologies, like a guitar or a word processor, involve holistic and prescriptive elements. To play a song on a guitar I’m confined to six strings and 19 frets, and to write a poem, I’m confined to a language (and a keyboard of a specific design). But within those constraints I’d be free to work holistically, or even, to the core of Franklin’s point, decide on my own if I’d prefer a different tool (perhaps a fretless guitar).
But her primary point in the distinction is that is often technology, is especially as applied by organizations, is prescriptive by design or accident. And that corporations and bureaucracies can use technologies in prescriptive ways that only serve their own longevity.
More salient quotes from the book:
“Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, and any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planned, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.”
“Today’s real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies. Prescriptive technologies are not restricted to materials production. They are used in administrative and economic activities and in many aspects of governance, and on them rests the real world of technology in which we live. While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing it.”
“Size is a natural result of growth, but growth itself cannot be commandeered; it can only be nurtured and encouraged by providing a suitable environment. Growth occurs; it is not made. Within a growth model, all that human intervention can do is to discover the best conditions for growth and then try to meet them. In any given environment, the growing organism.”
“Production, then, is predictable, while growth is not. There is something comforting in a production model — everything seems in hand, nothing is left to chance — while growth is always chancy.”
“The unchallenged prevalence of the production model in the mindset and political discourse of our time, and the model’s misapplication to blatantly inappropriate situations, seems to me an indication of just how far technology as practice has modified our culture.”
“Yet for people all around the world the image of what is going on, of what is important, is primarily shaped by the pseudo-realities of images. The selective fragments that become a story on radio and television are chosen to highlight particular events. The selection is usually intended to attract and to retain the attention of an audience. Consequently, the unusual has preference over the usual.”
“Anyone who has ever been at a demonstration and then seen their own experience played back on television knows what I mean. Frequently a small counter-demonstration to a large demonstration is treated as if it were the main event. Side-shows move into the centre and the central issues become peripheral.”
“I find it hard to imagine anyone actually standing next to a person who is being hurt or abused and enjoying the sight and sound of the experience, nor can I imagine such a direct observer not intervening or at least feeling guilty for having failed to do so. On the other hand, violence depicted on a screen appears to be acceptable and entertaining.”
How would you explain the events of this year to someone from the year 2050 who time traveled to visit us? Many adjectives come quickly to mind: turmoil, danger, violence, drama, unrest, uncertainty. But if you think deeper about trying to explain what it all means, you’d realize this challenge is impossible. We couldn’t accurately tell someone from the future about the meaning of the present because we can’t understand the present yet: we don’t know what happens next! We don’t have the context to make sense of these events. If we were alive in 1776, 1914, 1968 or 2001 we’d have a similiar problem. We can describe the significance of those years now only because we know what happens after.
It must be said that we are a stubborn and frustrating species. Too often we wait for terrible things to happen before we’re willing to change our minds, or change anything at all. It’s not a rule, as history doesn’t depend on rules, but unrest and disorder are sometimes necessary to wake us up and motivate us to grow. And to remind us we share our fates with each other. In the end, the best we could tell our friend from 2050 is “something is happening!” We truly are living in an interesting time.
Contrary to the title of this essay, I don’t think the world is insane. Instead it’s more that we’re designed to live at the scale of tribes, not cities and nations (See Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontents, where he suggests we traded sanity away to get more security and stability). It’s not the world’s fault, in a sense, but our own.
When I get past my own emotions and rantings, I conclude three things about this year so far:
We’re addicted to news and news is shallow. Neil Postman said “information is a form of garbage” meaning that at a certain volume more information does not help you. The speed and quantity of news, which we presume to be an asset, does not help us gain perspective, understanding or meaning, three important things we all seek. The news business thrives on fear, more so that fact. Most forms of news are not helpful, but they are plentiful and addictive.
Our brains are poor at calibrating to a national or planetary scale. We’re easily misled by dramatic (but possibly unrepresentative) news. And we’re quick to use one narrow string of events to define our feeling of “how the world is”. Combined with cognitive bias, we’re prone to strong emotions based on irrational assumptions.
Big problems we’ve ignored are now un-ignorable. The violence, racism, classism, anger and fear that have fueled the worst events these past months did not suddenly appear. Instead, it’s the consequence of years, or decades, of problems we haven’t solved, or perhaps have largely ignored. Technology may have made these problems far more visible, but they were likely there all along.
You must focus on a problem you can impact. We are just individuals and worrying about all the problems of the world won’t help anyone. The rational choice is to pick an issue you care deeply about and focus your energy there. Even if you were a billionaire, you can’t solve every problem. By focusing, you can build relationships with other people interested in that cause, and celebrate even the smallest wins with them. That community will help you continue to invest and make a difference, a much larger one than you’d make than staying on the sidelines, waiting to find an optimal strategy that will never come.
The world, on average, is getting better. Many people refer to statistics that show that by many measures the world has been a steadily improving place. This is good and hopeful news: if you need a boost of positiveness, then look at these charts.
But the trap of that last point is the flaw of averages: simply because the total average, of say violent crime in America, has gone down for a decade, doesn’t mean there aren’t sizable pockets where crime is going up. Averages can be misleading. For example, on average the universe is a very dead and boring place, but that average makes it seem like Paris or Las Vegas don’t exist. But they do! Statistics tend to oversimplify – they’re useful but easily misused and rarely definitive without asking questions and thinking through for less biased answers.
My advice is simple. We are emotional creatures, so find a healthy way to vent the negative energy that you feel. Go to the gym, or for a hike, and let your feelings out through exercise, which we all know we need more of. Scream at the sky and challenge the wind. But don’t target your rage at people, certainly not at strangers: the golden rule is a good guide here.
Another safe place to express yourself is a private journal, where any idea on your mind can be expressed safely and without judgment (Social media isn’t quite the same, because you are expressing yourself with the knowledge that someone is observing you). Or talk to friends who care about how you feel (and if you don’t have friends who care about your feelings, your real problem might be you need to find better friends).
But then, once you’ve expressed those emotions… slow down. Be curious. Seek thoughtful points of view that differ from your own: it’s the only way to provoke your own thinking to improve (instead of just responding and sharpening your preconceptions). Talking to people who agree with you on everything will teach you nothing.
I’ve read so much these last few months seeking answers. I don’t look to the news for meaning, because that’s not what it’s good for: instead, I try to read deeper. Here are five essays, with varying views, that helped me to feel I understand what’s going on (or clarifying what I don’t understand). I don’t necessarily endorse their positions but to my point above, they help in the pursuit of understanding:
History tells us what’s next. A historian takes the opposite view about the world, and thinks we’re in big trouble (I agree more with the first one, but this one has its merits too. I’d like to see these two folks debate).
How Do People Change Their Minds? A good reminder that most expressions of opinions in social media have little effect. Venting is one thing, thoughtfully trying to influence a mind is another.
“The ultimate question of any advice, rules, or traditions is, What do you ignore and why? No one can ever follow all the good advice they hear. This is the advice paradox: no matter how much advice you have, you must still decide intuitively what to use and what to avoid.”
Books and experts often promise step by step ways to achieve a goal. The goal might be weight loss, becoming wealthy or living a happier life. But a promise is one thing: achieving the result is another. Looking at how most people who read these books and don’t achieve the results they desire reveals a problem. We often have more faith in advice from strangers than we do in ourselves.
Advice that sells the best makes the grandest promises, even if they’re false. We know, rationally, that there aren’t just 7 steps to true success and that even if there were, it would take more than 21 Days to Master it. We know growing rich requires more than following 13 steps.
Book titles never say what would be more honest: “This might work for you sometimes”, “You’ll have to take some risks to even try to get what you want” or “You’ll get just a handful of useful tips even if you read the whole book.” Honesty like this doesn’t benefit whoever is giving the advice, so the most popular advice givers rarely say these things.
Even if they did, our brains love the fantasy that there’s just a few easy tricks to learn to solve our biggest problems. We love it so much that when advice we pay for fails to deliver the impossible, we blame the advice, not the fantasy that magical advice exists elsewhere. Soon we’re on the hunt again for killer secrets and magic recipes.
The lure of advice is it’s a narrative: it feels good while you get it. But once the advice is over we return to the uncertainty of our lives, which feels, by comparison, confusing and scary. Advice is knowledge that we choose to use, or not. No one can make that choice for us, and it’s this that creates the paradox.
Simple advice can be hard to follow.
We can’t follow all the good advice we get.
Advice that feels good to hear can be bad advice.
Advice that feels painful to hear can be good advice.
It’s possible to follow good advice diligently and still fail.
Giving and receiving advice is far easier than making real life choices.
You’re in the paradox now – even this post is a kind of advice.
What now? I can’t advise you. But I wish you well.
All the clichés about beginnings are true, at least in part. The history of innovation is large enough that all the sayings, from Plato’s famous “Necessity is the mother of invention” to Emerson’s “Build a better mouse- trap and the world will beat a path to your door” hold some truth. The trap, and the myth, is that evidence supporting one claim doesn’t mean there isn’t equally good evidence supporting another. Invention, and innovation, have many parents: the Taj Mahal was built out of sorrow, the Babylonian Gardens were designed out of love, the Empire State Building was constructed for ego, and the Brooklyn Bridge was motivated by pride. Name an emotion, motivation, or situation, and you’ll find an innovation somewhere that it seeded.
However, it’s simplifying and inspiring to categorize how things begin. In reading the stories behind hundreds of innovations, some patterns surface, and they’re captured here in six categories. I concede to the existence of reasonable arguments for seven or five, or different categorizations altogether. I offer this list to seed your thoughts on what paths to innovation are in front of you now.
1. Hard work in a specific direction
The majority of innovations come from dedicated people in a field working hard to solve a well-defined problem. It’s not sexy, and it won’t be in any major motion pictures anytime soon, but it’s the truth. Their starts are ordinary: in the cases of DNA (Watson and Crick), Google (Page and Brin), and the computer mouse (Englebart), the innovators spent time framing the problem, enumerating possible solutions, and then began experimenting. Similar tales can be found in the origins of the developments of television (Farnsworth) and cell phones (Cooper). Often, hard work extends for years. It took Carlson, the inventor of the photocopier, decades of concentrated effort before Xerox released its first copying machine.
2. Hard work with direction change (Pivot)
Many innovations start in the same way as mentioned previously, but an unexpected opportunity emerges and is pursued midway through the work. In the classic tale of Post-it Notes, Art Fry at 3M unintentionally created weak glue, but he didn’t just throw it away. Instead, he wondered: what might this be good for? For years he kept that glue around, periodically asking friends and colleagues whether it could be useful. Years later, he found a friend who desired sticky paper for his music notations, giving birth to Post-it Notes. Teflon (a mechanical lubricant), tea bags (first used as packaging for loose tea samples), and microwaves (unexpected discharge from a radar system) all have similar origination stories. What’s ignored is that the supposed “accident” was made possible by hard work and persistence, and it wouldn’t have otherwise happened by waiting around.
3. Curiosity
Many innovations begin with bright minds following their personal interests. The ambition is to pass time, learn something new, or have fun. At some point, the idea of a practical purpose arises, commitments are made, and the rest is history. George de Mestral invented Velcro in response to the burrs he found on his clothes after a hike. He was curious about how the burrs stuck, put them under a microscope, and did some experiments. Like da Vinci, he found inspiration in the natural world, and he designed Velcro based on the interlocking hooks and loops of the burrs and his clothing. Linus Torvalds began Linux as a hobby: a way to learn about software and explore making some of his own.10 Much like the direction-change scenario, at some point, a possible use is found for the product of curiosity, and a choice is made to pursue it or follow curiosity elsewhere.
4. Wealth and money
Many innovations are driven by the quest for cash. Peter Drucker believed Thomas Edison’s primary ambition was to be a captain of industry, not an innovator: “His real ambition…was to be a business builder and to become a tycoon.” Drucker also explains that Edison was a disaster in business matters, but that his profile was so prominent that—despite his entrepreneurial failures—his management methods are emulated today, particularly in Silicon Valley and venture capital firms.
With half an innovation in hand, ideas but no product, it’s natural to try to sell those ideas: let someone else take the risks of complete innovation. Instead of idealistic goals of revolution or changing the world, the focus is on reaping financial rewards without the uncertainties of bringing the ideas all the way to fruition. The Internet boom and bust of the 1990s was driven by start-up firms innovating, or pretending to innovate, just enough for established corporations to acquire them. In many cases, the start-ups imploded before acquisition or were acquired only for their ideas to be abandoned by the corporations’ larger and conservative business plans.
The founders of many great companies initially planned to sell their ideas to larger corporations but, unable to sell, reluctantly chose to go it alone. Google tried to sell to Yahoo! and AltaVista, Apple to HP and Atari, and Carlson (photocopier) to nearly every corporation he could find.
5. Necessity
Waves of innovation have come from individuals in need of something they couldn’t find. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craiglist.org, needed a way to keep in touch with friends about local events. The simple email list grew too popular to manage and evolved into the web site known today. Similarly, the founders of McDonald’s developed a system for fast food production to sim- plify the management of their local homespun hamburger stand (Ray Crok bought the company later and developed it into a multinational brand). Innovations that change the world often begin with humble aspirations.
6. Combination
Most innovations involve many factors, and it’s daft to isolate one above others. Imagine an innovation that starts with curiosity and leads to hard work, but then the innovator’s quest for wealth forces a direction change. Midway through, this direction change is interrupted by a stroke of good luck (say, winning the lottery), allowing the innovator to return to the initial direction with renewed perspective and motivation. The removal of any of those seeds from the story might end it—or might not. In many of the stories of innovation, we have to wonder: if the first “magical” event didn’t take place, might the innovator have found a different seed instead? No matter what seeds are involved, all ideas overcome similar challenges, and studying them reveals as much or more than the beginnings of innovation.
The challenges of innovation
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar, was asked, “How do you systematize innovation?” (a common question among CEOs and the business community). His answer was, “You don’t.” This was not what readers of Business Week expected to hear, but foolish questions often receive disappointing answers. It’s as absurd a question as asking how to control weather or herd cats, because those approximate the lack of control and number of variables inherent in innovation. Jobs, or any CEO, might have a system for trying to manage innovation, or a strategy for managing the risks of new ideas, but that’s a far cry from systematizing something. I wouldn’t call anything with a 50% failure rate a system, would you? The Boeing 777 has jet engines engineered for guaranteed 99.99% reliability—now that’s a system and a methodology. It’s true that innovation is riskier than engineering, but that doesn’t mean we should use words like system, control, or process so casually.
To read more about the challenges of innovation, and how to overcome them, get a copy of The Myths Of Innovation.
Many companies are now providing standings desks, healthy food, and fitness trackers to promote the health of their employees. What patterns have you seen between the workplace environment and employee productivity, especially in terms of health and fitness?
Sick workers are not productive, which means any sane organization will invest in keeping its workforce healthy. More than 1/3 of American adults are obese, which may lead to more preventable illnesses and missed days of work than almost any other factor. Since 80% of jobs today are sedentary, and employees spend half or more of their waking hours at work, there’s a systemic trap that workplaces contribute to a problem that the workplace itself should be helping to solve.
To make the point another way: could you imagine a company that made their workplace as hazardous as possible, with typhus laced spikes jutting out of the floor and trap doors, with starving lions inside, around every corner? Companies invest millions of dollars in salary, training and benefits into their employees and want to get as much out of them as possible for as long as possible. Fitness is simply an important element of health, and organizations naturally care about the health of their workforce.
Productivity beyond basic health is trickier to measure. Productivity itself is also hard to define for creative kinds of work (See: Data Paradox). There are plenty of examples of people with unhealthy lifestyles being extremely productive, as any story of an entrepreneur in a garage living off ramen noodles attests to(related: workplace architecture’s value is overstated). Some of the most productive years for Van Gogh, or your favorite rock band, included abuse of alcohol, other drugs and sleep deprivation. These are anecdotes of course, but there are so many examples of highly productive creatives, at least in the short term, who made poor health choices. Everyone’s biology and temperament are different, different enough that there is no single answer to what factors makes one specific person productive or not.
I looked for studies claiming that exercises reduces productivity and didn’t find a single one. Of course that could mean that there’s not much funding in disproving the benefits of exercise, but that’s beyond even my level of skepticism about studies. The human body evolved to expect sustained exercise, as 20,000 years ago we had to work our bodies every day just to eat and find shelter. It makes sense that our bodies work best when we use them regularly. Even the U.S. government recommends 30 minutes of exercise per day for everyone.
If you are one of those chronically upset worriers, Dr. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, has a prescription for you: exercise. “If you could give one magic pill that would improve physical health, mood, reduce weight,” this would be it, Waldinger says.
I couldn’t find data to support it, but my hypothesis is any workplace that provides standing desks, fitness membership discounts and even healthy food, recognizes that employees are adults and should be enabled to make choices about not just lifestyle, but workstyle. It reflects a philosophy of empowering employees and giving them choices, rather than dictating policy. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a correlation between organizations that had these perks and ones that allow workers to choose to work remotely.
A previous essay, Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas, continues to get feedback, despite the fact that I wrote it before I knew the concept of cognitive bias. People leave comments often and here’s a particularly interesting link (thanks CCJ).
The Paradox of Expertise: the strengths of expertise can also be weaknesses. Although one would expect experts to be good forecasters, they are not particularly good at making predictions about the future. Since the 1930s, researchers have been testing the ability of experts to make forecasts. The performance of experts has been tested against actuarial tables to determine if they are better at making predictions than simple statistical models.
Seventy years later, with more than two hundred experiments in different domains, it is clear that the answer is no. If supplied with an equal amount of data about a particular case, an actuarial table is as good, or better, than an expert at making calls about the future. Even if an expert is given more specific case information than is available to the statistical model, the expert does not tend to outperform the actuarial table.
The full essay does explore advantages that experts have. It also discusses the paradox of using teams to balance against expert bias, the role of methodology, etc. The context of the essay is, you guessed it, CIA type intelligence gathering, but in reading this essay much of it applied to any kind of complex work.
Do you know of other attempts to quantify the value of expertise? Please leave a comment. Thanks.
When a system is broken at work, should you work to fix the system, game the system, or avoid the system?
It depends! Do you like your job? Do you like your community? If yes, you should naturally work to fix. If you don’t, you should quit your job or move before you start quitting your ethics (I’ve written previously on Why We Accept Bad Systems and you might want to peak at that post before reading on). Here are three answers to your three options:
Work to fix the system. If you haven’t quit working to fix the system makes the most sense. But is the system in question your responsibility? If yes, I’d ask how the system got broken in the first place as you’ll want to know that before you go about trying to fix it (See What To Do When Things Go Wrong). If it’s not your responsibility, it’s still your job to notify whoever is in charge that there’s a problem that’s in their interest to solve and to help if you can. If the broken system prevented me from doing my job well, I’d petition my boss to help get it fixed and/or work on fixing it myself. If I can’t petition my boss, what other sources of influence are there?
Game the system. Game is a funny word. It could mean anything from bending the letter of the law to deliver on the spirit of the law, which I’d approve of, to blatant theft and cheating, which I wouldn’t. A good question is who benefits from manipulating the system: the customer? Your coworkers and the organization? Or just you? If you’re only thinking of benefiting yourself you should look for a new job where you care more about your coworkers and customers. If you don’t, your coworkers would be wise to think about how to avoid working with you, or to perhaps how to fix the system so someone like you doesn’t get rewarded for gaming the system.
Avoid the system. On principle I’d avoid as many systems as possible if they weren’t necessary for doing going work. But I’d do it carefully, and with the support of my boss, coworkers and community when I could. Ideally my avoidance of a system could lead to it’s revision or elimination for everyone. But If I was continually disregarding my boss, or the local rules, working behind their back, I’d be setting myself up to fail. Even if I was successful on the project at hand, when they discovered I’d gone around their authority I’d lose their trust in the future. On the contrary, if I avoided a system with their support, and delivered great results, progress become possible. But always remember avoiding a system is a kind of gaming the system from the point of view of whoever’s job it is to run the system (perhaps a peer of your boss). Ignoring a rule someone cares about must be done with the knowledge that at some point you will be found out: the question is, what will you be able to say then about what you were doing and why?
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