Episode 155 — July 25th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/155

Contributors to this issue: Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ben Mathes, Dimitri Glazkov, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman, Chris Butler

We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

🚗🏎 Assembling a CAR

You know that important project — the one that’s existential for your organization, the one that’s been on everyone’s mind for months… the one that hasn’t made any progress?

When we see a hairy organizational problem, one that doesn’t seem to make any progress despite everyone wanting it to — chances are that, at its core, there’s a misalignment of the Capability, Authority, and Responsibility (CAR) for getting the thing done. Great organizational design brings these three factors as close as possible. When these factors aren’t aligned, things seem to drag, go in circles, or perhaps go straight off the rails.

Capability points to those able to do the work. Depending on the skill required, these people know the code base, understand the relevant legal aspects, or know how things are wired together (literally or metaphorically). If the work isn’t assigned to someone capable, we’ll likely end up in a situation where the work just can’t get done. The person responsible cannot do it, or — worse yet — they confidently rush ahead… in the wrong direction.

Authority points to those with the power to make work happen. These people have (or can get) the resources and organizational clout to make the thing happen. When someone without authority initiates work, they risk someone with authority coming along and vetoing it.

Responsibility points to who gets the credit for the good or the bad that comes out of the work. The term is a bit of a misnomer: it’s not the person responsible for actually doing the work. Rather, this is the person who is accountable for the work. (But if we used “Accountable”, we’d ruin the acronym with two “A”’s 🙃.) Without responsibility, there is little motivation to do the thing. Sometimes a person may be intrinsically motivated by the work, but in an organizational setting, the potential to get positive credit for work done plays a significant role.

Organizing often involves aligning capability, authority, and responsibility within the same unit (individual, team, division). When that happens, we’re set up for success: we can do it, no one can stop us, and we own the outcome, too. Let’s go! But what can we do if we’re missing some of these factors?

If we lack capability, one approach is to work to build that capability through training, hiring, borrowing expertise, etc. Another approach is to look for where there is sufficient capability and transfer the work to that person or group. This can be highly effective—as long as we can transfer the authority and responsibility along with it. Partial transfers often end up in a stalemate.

If we lack authority, we must look for ways to obtain it, lest we get stuck in endless approval chains or relitigation of decisions that should have been long since settled. Two common failure modes for this factor are when the nominal source of authority is not the actual authority or when the authority is at some distance from those who are capable of and responsible for the work.

When authority is at a distance, the best thing to do is to see if sufficient authority can be transferred to those capable and responsible. This has to be done by the person with the authority, e.g., by saying that within this realm that person has authority… and then backing that up by trusting the delegate's decisions.

When nominal authority is separated from actual authority, things are more challenging. In this case, it may be that someone in another organization has veto power over some critical dependency. Sometimes, we can work around that dependency, such as by moving the dependency into your organization. Other times, the external authority is unavoidable (e.g., a legal or security review). In that case, we need to work to get the distant authority on our side.

Whenever we lack responsibility—and the work requires more than our intrinsic motivation—we need to find a way to get some skin in the game. Can we find a way to ensure that the work's success translates into something positive for our organization? Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s just important to make sure we have responsibility for things going badly, too. If we’re invested in avoiding failure and achieving success, we’ll be more motivated to ensure it’s done right.

We could be lacking more than one. The more CAR parts we’re missing, the harder it will be to make progress. This is rarely the case at the beginning of a project. If a person or team only has one of three factors, then the project is unlikely to get off the ground in the first place.

However, the CAR is not fixed. What the thing is often grows and changes. We can be capable of one thing (e.g., building websites) but then have the landscape change under us (it’s time to build iOS apps)! We can lose authority; that new VP pulls rank on our director and suddenly they own the product area we’ve been working in. We might lose responsibility, such as when a project keeps rolling on despite the market need for it having dissolved long ago.

All three factors are in flux. They are dynamic. Understanding this and taking proactive steps to realign these elements can revitalize even the most stalled projects. Monitoring this and maneuvering through the dynamic landscape can help a project pivot before it gets stalled. If we ensure we have high-quality parts, our CAR will accelerate us toward success.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.

🚏🤝 AI interviews are getting popular in the world of recruiting

A growing number of companies are using AI avatars to run video call interviews with candidates; these virtual interviewers can summarize the candidate’s answers and ask follow-up questions. The founder of a startup that offers such a service touted the ability of AI interviewers to avoid bias based on skin color, accent, or physical appearance. However, experts warn that AI is famously biased when it comes to recruiting, and that bias is often hard to sniff out. (Either way, entrepreneurs in China are now selling AI tools that can help candidates answer interview questions in real time.)

🚏🥵 Monday was the world’s hottest day on record (Sunday was the second-hottest)

This past Sunday set a record as the hottest day in recorded history, with a global surface air temperature of 62.76 ºF (17.09 ºC). But the very next day beat that record, reaching 62.87 ºF (17.15 ºC). As the graph shows, the ten hottest days “in the last 50 years have occurred after 2015.”

🚏🔌 Hackers targeted heating systems in Ukraine with malware

Inhabitants of at least 600 apartment buildings in Lviv, Ukraine had to suffer without heating for two days in the dead of winter after a hacking group targeted their local energy utility’s heating system controller with malware. The malware targets a popular protocol used to control industrial devices; other viruses in that family have been used to turn off the lights in Kyiv, attack petrochemical plants, and shut down electrical substations. Experts worry that energy grids across the world are dangerously susceptible to similar attacks.

🚏🇨🇭 Switzerland now requires that all government software be open-source

A new law in Switzerland emphasizes the principle of “public money, public code”: any public body must “disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it.” That includes software written by contractors. One proponent of the bill hailed the move as a way to reduce vendor lock-in and IT costs.

📖⏳ Worth your time

Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.

James Scott, Pathbreaking Scholar in the Social Sciences (Yale) — Fans of FLUX knew James C. Scott, who passed away last week, as the author of Seeing Like a State, his seminal book on top-down state planning. But the anthropology professor was also an expert in peasant resistance movements, the relationships between agriculture and state-building, and southeast Asian development (Malaysia’s Prime Minister was a fan of Scott’s work and paid tribute to his passing). Consider checking out Scott’s other works.
What Defines a Species? (LiveScience) — Evaluating the debate about where to draw lines between species, the author argues that strict boundaries between species aren’t working — this ultimately leads to an infinite number of discrete species. So, some scientists are coming up with new models that acknowledge that speciation is a continuous process. Others say that the quest for a global taxonomy is a big distraction: “there are many concepts in science that lack a unified meaning, and we still manage just fine in that space of uncertainty.”
What I Think About When I Edit (Eva Parish) — Suggests writing a preamble for every piece you write: what is your main point, and who are you writing for? Then, even if you think you’ve made your point very clearly, make it again at the start and at the end. And as you edit, take out all unnecessary words.
Against Choosing Your Political Allegiances Based on Who Is “Pro-Crypto” (Vitalik Buterin) — The Ethereum founder argues that crypto companies have a one-dimensional view of what it means to “stand with crypto”: they simply throw their weight behind any politician who claims they’ll help “number go up.” The true vision of crypto, Buterin argues, isn’t to merely profit off coins; it’s to promote free expression, privacy, anti-censorship, and reducing global inequality. He concludes that you shouldn’t support a politician for a single issue if their broader goals don’t line up with yours.

🔍🪨 Lens of the week

Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.

This week’s lens: the rock tumbler.

Creation comes in many forms: writing, digital creation, and physical objects, to name a few. Similarly, the process of creation comes in many forms. Sometimes we forge something new in the crucible of new creation, melting it down and reforming it into something new. Sometimes we grow a seedling of an idea into something organic, beautiful, and a bit out of our control. Sometimes we sculpt an idea, chipping away everything that isn’t the desired form.

At FLUX, one of our favorite metaphors for the creation of knowledge is the rock tumbler. We often apply the term “putting it through the rock tumbler” to a rough idea that has come up in our conversation. When we do this, we collaboratively create a written artifact that takes the insight and polishes it into something worth sharing. Putting something through the rock tumbler means taking its raw form and, through a process of gradual refinement, turning it into something beautiful. Unlike forging or sculpting an idea, we don’t have fine-grained control over the end result. Unlike gardening an idea, the process is more about building on the original insight than major transformation.

This in-between nature of the rock tumbler makes it especially suitable as a metaphor for collaborative creation. We can each add a little, remove a little, polish a little. Bit-by-bit we shape what was there. In the end what we end with still follows the broad contours of the original insight but has transformed it into something that is beautiful because of — not despite — all of the bumping along the way.

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🌀🗞 The FLUX Review

🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 155