The organizational landscape

There are lots of ways in which cultures, organizations, people, and other complex things could be different.

Let’s focus on organizations. Here are some ways in which an organization could be different:

• Hire people who deeply care about the organization’s mission (or prioritize this less)
• Have more or less permissive and trusting policies for employees
• Have a higher hiring bar, trying to avoid false positives at the expense of growing slowly
• Have a lower bar for firing people.
• etc.

You can view these traits as dimensions, making up a high-dimensional space, and each organization fitting somewhere on that high-dimensional space.

Many peaks

I think that there are multiple pretty different peaks within that high-dimensional space. For instance, I think that Walmart and Amazon and Facebook and Apple have all been quite successful companies in their time, but they have fairly different approaches to making money: for instance, Facebook focuses on quickly shipping imperfect products and iterating, whereas Apple focuses on getting products absolutely right before they’re released.

Let’s suppose that Apple is more successful than Facebook as a company (this intuitively feels right, but I’m not totally sure what the best measure would be). Imagine someone from Apple advising Mark Zuckerberg on how to make Facebook more successful: it would be easy for them to suggest that he focus on having fewer high-quality releases. But this would not fit well with lots of other decisions that Facebook has made: it would generate less data for their metric-driven analysis and goal-setting; it would lead to unnecessarily slow releases of software; and it would annoy many of Facebook’s staff (who joined Facebook because of the fast-moving culture). Releasing slowly, which has served Apple well, would probably harm Facebook.

Other examples of different peaks:

• Hire fast and fire fast vs. hire slowly, so that you have great people, and then give them more chances to find their fit.
• Hire people who are aligned with your mission and then have permissive employment policies (like generous holiday allowances) vs. not selecting based on mission alignment and then having more restrictive policies.

Sitting on top of hills shouting advice

I think that a lot of advice is someone sitting on top of their hill, which is north-east of your hill. They know their hill well, and they can see the gradients close-by around them. They know that they’re at (or near) a local optimum.

And they look over to you, and see you’re far away and nowhere near that local optima.

So they tell you that you should move north, because their hill is north of you. But you can see your hill falling away to the North. Not a good decision.

Shifting hills?

What about totally shifting to their hill? Normally this is just not realistic - it’s hard to shift your whole organization’s culture even a little bit - shifting it significantly on multiple dimensions at once just doesn’t work. Maybe you could do it with 2-3 people?

What to do about this advice?

So should you ignore their advice?

Often, but not always.

I think this sort of advice can be useful if:

• Their hill is a much higher hill, and it is really near yours
• You’re actually climbing essentially the same hill as them, but you’ve just started and it’s taking you a while to figure out the easiest path up.

Other times, you should ignore the advice for yourself, but you might still want to understand why their thing works for them: this will help you collaborate, even if you don’t shift to their hill. (Plus it’s interesting, and maybe you’ll work at an organization like theirs one day.)

Applications

Similar dynamics apply to other complex systems, like cultures and people.