🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 179
February 27th, 2025
Episode 179 — February 27th, 2025 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/179
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Erika Rice Scherpelz, MK,
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Alex Komoroske, Ben Mathes,Chris Butler, Dart Lindsley,Dimitri Glazkov, Jasen Robillard, Jon Lebensold, Julka Almquist, Justin Quimby, Kamran Hakiman, Lisie Lillianfeld, Melanie Kahl, Robinson Eaton, Samuel Arbesman, Scott Schaffter, Spencer Pitman, Wesley Beary
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.
“Lastly, resilience emerges out of a system’s ability to endure and bounce back from stress, like a jelly that wobbles on a plate without losing its form or a spider’s web that survives a storm.”
— Kate Raworth
🦸🪤 Escaping the hero trap
We’ve all felt it. That pull to step in, take charge, and fix things ourselves—because it’s faster, because the stakes feel high, because we know we can get it right. In the moment, it feels necessary, inevitable, heroic. This is the hero trap: we have shifted the burden to the intervenor and our repeated heroic behavior has led to dependence on our interventions.
We tell ourselves that we’ll focus on building better systems once we get through this crisis. But another crisis always comes. And if we’re honest, we might even like it that way. Solving problems feels good. Letting go feels risky.
But if we’re always the hero, what are we actually building? A company that depends on us for every critical decision? A team that hesitates because they know we’ll step in? A culture that survives on urgency instead of resilience?
The best leaders—the ones who build things that last—aren’t just problem-solvers. They’re architects. They strengthen systems instead of weakening them. They’re not the busiest firefighters; they build fireproof structures. Heroes keep saving the day. Architects make it so they don’t have to.
But how do we get out of hero mode, especially when real problems need solving right now? We will never have the perfect moment to build systems. But we can build while we’re in motion. As Gall’s law reminds us:
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
Instead of building the perfect system all at once, we must start small, iterate, and let resilience emerge. Here are some ideas we can start with.
Introduce some vacation proofing: What is the first thing that would break if we were unavailable for a week? Fix that now. Rinse and repeat, gradually extending the time horizon. Consider both “business as usual” failures and crisis-level failures.
Practice pre-mortems: assume things went wrong. What are the most likely failures? What do we wish we had in place to prevent or mitigate issues and improve our ability to respond effectively when they occur? The best time to harden a system against likely failure modes is before it breaks.
Look for 1-hour fixes: What’s one small thing you can do now that will save time later? We need to beware of the automation trap (see this week’s Lens), but minor improvements compound into real resilience when done thoughtfully.
However, the foundation of all this is a mindset shift. Are we building an organization that needs us forever? Or one that will thrive long after we’re gone? Can we take more pride in the latter than in the former? The best leaders aren’t just heroes. They build something greater than themselves.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏⛽ Sales of gas-powered cars peaked in 2018
A recent analysis found worldwide sales of cars with internal combustion engines peaked in 2018, and demand has since fallen. Electric car sales have been rising rapidly during the same span. (Interestingly, overall car sales have also declined in the years since, though the trend is fuzzier.)
🚏🛢️ BP is slashing investments in green energy and returning to oil and gas
The British oil giant announced that it will cut funding for renewable energy projects (like biofuels, solar power, and electric cars) by $5 billion to just $1.5–2 billion while increasing investments in fossil fuels by 20% to $10 billion. The shift comes as the company worries about poor stock performance and pressure from activist investors; rivals Shell and Equinor have also scaled back their renewable plans. (Five years ago, BP boldly planned to cut oil and gas production by 40% by 2030 and increase renewable output; they scaled that back to 25% in 2023 and appear to be reversing course entirely now.)
🚏🐔 Many Americans are raising their own chickens amid egg shortages
The American bird flu epidemic has sent the cost of eggs skyrocketing: a dozen eggs now costs over $8 on average, up from $4.61 just last month and $2.52 in January 2024. The US Department of Agriculture expects a further egg price rise of 41% this year. As such, interest in backyard chicken coops is surging: one chicken rental company has seen inquiries increase fivefold and bookings increase 15–20% compared to last year, and small-time chicken farmers are reporting that their eggs are selling out quickly.
🚏🇰🇵 North Korea stole $1.4 billion in crypto, the largest crypto heist in history
Last week, hackers linked to the North Korean government stole over 400,000 Ethereum tokens (valued at around $1.4 billion at the time, though the ETH price has fallen since) from the crypto exchange Bybit. Bybit followed the industry’s security best practices: using a “multi-sig” wallet that requires multiple approvals and keeping limited funds in a “hot wallet” for day-to-day transactions while putting most funds in an offline “cold wallet.” But researchers believe that the hackers bypassed this tech by mounting a phishing attack: by installing some kind of malware, they subtly changed the transaction-signing interface for employees and thereby tricked them into approving a transaction that handed control of the cold wallet to the hackers. One group of researchers said, “This attack proves that UI manipulation and social engineering can bypass even the most secure wallets.”
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
The Manager’s Unbearable Lack of Endorphins (Jamie Lawrence) — Observes that in sports and in skills involving perfecting a craft, there is a legible feedback loop between doing something and seeing the result. But as a manager, you have nothing tangible (such as code commits or features) to point to as something you did. Where is the high from managing people? Side-projects appear to be the main way a manager can “get the experience of competence in a work-like context.”
Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Langdon Winner / MIT ) — A classic 1980 paper that disputes the popular idea that “what matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded,” instead arguing that technologies can by design promote certain people’s interests over others’. Winner provides a few case studies: some conspiratorial, such as deliberately low overpasses designed to keep buses and therefore poor and minority clientele out of rich neighborhoods, and others caused by unforeseen second-order effects, like the decimation of tomato farms as a result of the mechanical tomato harvester.
How China Killed Hong Kong’s Economy (Polymatter / YouTube) — Argues that Hong Kong’s status as a wealthy financial hub is due to its unusual position as an economically and socially free city with close ties to mainland China; wealthy Chinese people could move their money there and thus keep it away from the long arm of the Chinese state. But with the infamous National Security Law, China has destroyed Hong Kong’s independence and thus its raison d'être—and without economic demand, Hong Kong’s economy (which relies heavily on government land sales to offset near-zero taxes) can’t keep going in its current form.
When One More Lane Isn’t Enough… So You Dig a Highway Underneath (The Transit Guy) — Argues that, when faced with congestion on roads, many urban planners take the path of least resistance by expanding highways (“just one more lane, bro”). Still, due to induced demand, this just increases car volume until traffic is no better than before. This creates a runaway feedback loop: more car-dependent sprawl leads to more highways, which leads to even more car-dependent sprawl. Better public transit is the only solution, but a single line won’t be enough (and it won’t have a good ROI on its own); we need a systematic, top-down drive toward massively building out transit.
🔍📆 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 automation trap.
A routine task takes too much time (and, TBH, is boring), so we decide to automate it. But by the time we build the perfect script, workflow, or tool, we’ve sunk more effort into automation than we would have spent doing the task manually. Worse, the process changes, and our automation breaks—leaving us with even more work to fix it.
This is the automation trap: when the effort to automate something outweighs the long-term savings. We throw automation at our problems, hoping for a quick win. But not all automation is actual leverage. Sometimes, it shifts effort around or locks us into fragile systems that demand constant upkeep.
Not everything that can be automated should be automated. Automation works best on stable, repeatable tasks with a clear effort-to-savings ratio. But if a process changes frequently or if automation adds hidden complexity, it may be better to invest in simplification instead. (Aside: LLMs have notably changed the break-even point of the effort-to-savings ratio, but it still exists.)
The next time you're about to automate something, ask: "Am I reducing effort or just moving it around?" If a problem is messy, automating it prematurely only locks in that mess. Sometimes, the best automation strategy isn’t automation—it’s redesigning the system so you don’t need it in the first place.
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