🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 175

January 23rd, 2025

“FCP-175” // Photo: MK with Midjourney and Claude 3.6 Sonnet

Episode 175 — January 23rd, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/175

Contributors to this issue: Jasen Robillard, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK

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

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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.

“When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence, you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”

― Lois McMaster Bujold

📝 Editor’s note: We'll be off next week but will see you again the week after!

🌱🗝️ Shifting to curiosity

Your team’s morale is declining. You and other leaders initially focus on surface symptoms and consider organizing team-building events or offering temporary perks. Then, someone steps back and asks, “What might we be missing about the discontent on the team?” The dialogue opens up, and you discover previously unvoiced frustrations like feeling undervalued, a lack of clarity, changing focus, and inconsistent communication from leadership. If anything, the problem has become more difficult than when you thought it could be solved with some perks and seminars, but now you can focus on the deeper changes that will help rebuild trust and engagement.

In Playing to Win, A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, inspired by Chris Argyris, introduce assertive inquiry as a practice that balances advocacy with curiosity. Instead of purely advocating for ideas or asking people to consider that they might be wrong (something difficult for most of us to consider), assertive inquiry encourages us to view our ideas through the lens of “What might I be missing?”. This small shift can transform discussions from debates over correctness to explorations of possibility.

This mindset invites us to examine the uncharted corners of our assumptions — without first admitting that we might be wrong. It prioritizes curiosity to help uncover blind spots that might otherwise lead to oversimplifications or errors.

This reframing also builds psychological safety. The phrase “I might be missing something” is disarming. It signals a willingness to learn and shifts interactions from confrontation to collaboration, enabling members to voice concerns and propose novel solutions.

Another strength of this mindset lies in its alignment with iterative progress. In a world of constant flux, no idea or decision is ever truly final. Acknowledging that we might be missing something positions inquiry as an ongoing process rather than a quest for a single, perfect answer. It encourages us to test, learn, and refine.

Yet this openness must be practiced with discipline. Lafley suggests using it in a relatively structured process. Without clear boundaries, openness can devolve into over-analysis. In highly competitive environments, openness may be misinterpreted as weakness, exposing well-meaning practitioners to exploitation. To counter these risks, assertive inquiry works best when it’s anchored to situations where there's a shared interest in making a high-quality decision (as opposed to winning political points).

Ultimately, assertive inquiry’s core idea of “I might be missing something” transforms advocacy from an exercise in defense to an opportunity for growth. It fosters an adaptive, iterative approach to understanding uniquely suited to the complexity of the modern world. We can embrace the uncertainty of not knowing as a strength that leads us to uncover new possibilities.

🛣️🚩 Signposts

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

🚏🐑 “Solar grazing” is booming as sheep and solar panels work in tandem

As the US's solar power industry has boomed, so has agrivoltaics, a method of using land for both solar panels and agriculture. Both use cases need the same kind of flat and sunny cropland, and they work well together: sheep in particular, can eat up the grass that grows around solar panels in a cheap, reliable, and eco-friendly way. Combining solar power and sheep grazing thus helps farmers “increase and diversify revenues without taking land out of food production.” The US is now home to over 60 solar grazing projects across 27 states, including the fifth-largest solar installation in the country.

🚏🐔 Georgia shut down all poultry activities after bird flu was confirmed

Poultry is the biggest industry in the US state of Georgia, so it came as a shock when the state’s agriculture department suspended “all poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales… until further notice” after a case of bird flu was discovered in a commercial poultry operation. In the last 30 days over 90 flocks nationwide (commercial and backyard) have been hit by the flu — including over 15 million birds. (The US has seen at least 67 cases of bird flu in humans since April 2024, too.)

🚏🇫🇷 95% of France’s electricity came from low-carbon sources last year

Over 95% of France’s electricity last year came from nuclear power or renewables; fossil fuels “produced less energy than at any point since the early 1950s.” Several nuclear plants returned online after a few years of maintenance, driving nuclear power output up by 13% year-over-year. Plus, climate change seems to have worked in France’s favor this time as heavy rains pushed hydropower production to a 12-year high.

🚏📱 Indonesia will set a minimum age for social media use

Australia famously banned social media for children under 16, and Indonesia plans to follow suit. The world’s fourth most populous country plans to set a minimum age for social media users, though the government hasn’t yet announced the age threshold.

📖⏳ Worth your time

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

• Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity (Scientific American) — Network scientists studied how a half million people browsed Wikipedia and found that their traversal patterns put them into three categories: ‘hunters’ (who are deeply focused and move between tightly related articles), ‘busybodies’ (who jump between distant topics), and ‘dancers’ (who “[link] together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas”). Certain fields (space, performing arts, biology) attracted more busybodies, while others (math, chemistry, computing) attracted more hunters.

• Stagnation With Chinese Characteristics (Paul Krugman) — Krugman, in his excellent new newsletter, argues that China is reaching a place similar to where Japan was in the ‘90s: shrinking population and plateauing productivity. But while Japan downshifted into a ‘lower investment, higher consumption’ post-industrial economy with lower but still respectable GDP growth, Xi Jinping seems to be set on continuing his overinvestment into real estate and government-favored industries, putting the country on an “unsustainable path” whose outcomes are not clear but probably not pretty.

• The “Thucydides Trap” Trap (Secretary of Defense Rock) — Argues that the popular international relations concept of the “Thucydides Trap” — which says that war is inevitable between a current hegemon (e.g. the US) and a rising power (e.g. China) — is simplistic, reductionist, and it overlooks a lot of historical data. It’s not just a problem for scholars: the theory’s “deterministic framing” locks policymakers into a “confrontational mindset” when there are plenty of ways to achieve peaceful outcomes.

• Does Amazon Know What it Sells? (Benedict Evans) — Examines how Amazon has scaled up by treating everything it sells as an interchangeable, shippable packet. While efficient, this leads to some strange behavior for customers. What if this changed?

🔍🇨🇭 Lens of the week

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

This week’s lens: embassies of insight.

You're leading a critical negotiation at work. Stakes are high, tempers flaring. The rational course of action is clear: stick to the data and hold the line. But then, a voice inside suggests softening your approach, making an emotional appeal that could shift the dynamic entirely.

Now, picture consoling a friend after a difficult breakup. Emotions run high, and your instinct is to match their grief. Yet a detached insight, gently offered, might be what truly helps them move forward.

These scenarios highlight a recurring tension: the interplay of reason and emotion. These are often framed as a binary: logic versus feeling, the head versus the heart. Yet, these domains are deeply interconnected. Emotions shape rational decisions, and logic moderates emotions. Still, under pressure, we often default to one while neglecting the other, creating blind spots in our choices.

This is where the idea of an embassy of insight becomes invaluable. An embassy represents the interests of its homeland within a foreign territory. What if, in every situation, we cultivated the presence of a “heart embassy” in the brain and a “brain embassy” in the heart? These embassies wouldn’t aim to dominate their host’s perspective but would ensure representation, offering balance in moments of imbalance. Such embassies provide a way out of binary thinking. Decisions need not be rational and cold or emotional and impulsive; they can reflect integrated wisdom.

To cultivate these embassies, start by identifying your natural default. Do you lean toward logic or emotion? In moments of decision, pause and look for the alternate perspective: What would my heart/brain embassy say here? Cross-train to strengthen the weaker side of your decision-making. Logical thinkers might journal about emotions or practice empathy. Emotive decision-makers can benefit from studying structured frameworks. Sometimes, it helps to lean on a coach who shares your strength yet can effectively wield its complement. 

In the end, cultivating a heart embassy in the brain and a brain embassy in the heart moves us away from extremes. The embassy, the outpost in a foreign land, reminds us that wisdom emerges not from choosing sides but from allowing reason and emotion to speak to one another.

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