2804m above sea level

and thinking about structural adjustment

Hello friends,

Newsletter evolution update: This issue comes two weeks after the last one — which feels closer to the right tempo. Read on for some noodling on stuff at the beginning (somatic tacit knowledge, not-knowing, discomfort, snowboarding, conversations), and links to writing at the end (about imaginary ethnography, ratatouille as process strategy, fear of failure).

Two weeks ago, I ran the first in a monthly InterIntellect series of discussions about not-knowing. Several hours later, I went up to the Alps to go snowboarding for the first time in 18 years. Both the discussion and the snowboarding were loci of not-knowing for me — and so the cause of huge discomfort, which felt amplified for being experienced in such rapid succession. The affective cost of dealing with discomfort from not-knowing is a real thing, which we don’t talk about enough — see also the link at the end of this issue on emotion, failure, and innovation.

18 years is a long time

In the weeks preceding, I'd spent many moments unsuccessfully trying to remember which foot I usually lead with on the snowboard, or how to get off a chairlift without falling over, whether leaning forward or back makes the board turn in, and other such important details. The profusion of small things I didn't know formed a cloud of discomfort that made me mildly dread going snowboarding. It’s a good thing I went anyway, because all this somatic tacit knowledge (what the body knows how to do which cannot be put into words) came back literally within two minutes. So it was okay in the end, and even Fun.

Thanks to generous friends who had an apartment up there, I was in the Trois Vallées, which claims to be the world's largest area of skiable terrain connected only by lifts and slopes. Navigating and traveling only with lifts and slopes feels like playing snakes and ladders on physical terrain. Directional elevation and mode (go up via lifts and down via slopes) must be intersected with skill level and hazard tolerance (constrain lifts taken to the ones which have skill-appropriate slopes coming down).

All this infrastructure makes it easy to get up to nearly 3km elevation (2804m, to be precise, at the top of Pointe de la Masse). This high up, the horizon is a wide vista of glowing white peaks. This is the type of vista that in earlier times would have been available only to alpine mountaineers with real skill, and only through the expenditure of serious effort, time, and preparation. Now you just buy a lift ticket for €10. Very Majestic and I recommend it.

Snowy peaks everywhere — definitely above the treeline.

Between stopping to look at snowy peaks and critter tracks, falling uncontrollably down icy slopes, and getting hit from behind by over-confident skiers — always skiers — in premium athletic wear, I was subconsciously gathering and processing many scattered thoughts on the discussion session. Here’s the Session 1 summary note.

Structural adjustment

Let’s double-click on what really took a lot of processing to figure out: Why that discussion felt so uncomfortable both before and during. (The discomfort did not evaporate on contact with reality as my snowboarding discomfort had).

I’ve concluded that there were three reasons for this:

1. More people came than I’d expected. This is a success problem, but 38 people seems like too many for a real conversation on Zoom. Even an in-person seminar group that's more than 15 people rarely enters into a proper conversation the way a 3-8 person group can.

2. Backgrounds were more diverse than I’d expected. Probably hard to find common ground quickly in a group that includes chefs, technology product managers, people from the finance industry, biotech R&D managers, and military special operations, among others.

3. There were two fundamentally different approaches to not-knowing.

   1. Approach 1: People who are experiencing not-knowing personally and are uncomfortable with it. The problem is that they don't know how to deal with it. This group wants ways to think about and understand the not-knowing they face and tools for becoming comfortable with it.

   2. Approach 2: People who are experiencing not-knowing professionally and are already comfortable with it. The problem is that their clients (or reports/peers/managers) aren’t comfortable with not-knowing. This group wants ways to talk to others about not-knowing, things they can do to reduce the perceived threat not-knowing poses, and tools for helping others become comfortable with not-knowing.

The third reason was the most unexpected and probably the reason why I was uncomfortable throughout. Different approaches mean different motivations and different requirements. This is a structural problem, not an epiphenomenal problem.

So I'm planning to change the current structure of the discussion series by splitting it into two tracks, each tailored to one of the two approaches. I'll probably do this after Session 2 (which is about not-knowing and its connection to happiness). More on that to come.

Writing recent and not-so-recent

1. Imaginary ethnography. Once upon a time (a long time ago), I thought I would be a Big Data quantitative researcher. Very quickly, I realised that quantitative analysis definitely only works for well-defined constructs and usually only for well-defined questions. Only messy qualitative research — and especially ethnography — allows us to discover new, emergent constructs and questions, or figure out how to define them clearly enough for quantitative analysis to be meaningful. Ethnography is an insight tool that is especially suited for uncertain and unstable times. Read more about imaginary ethnography, and how it can help us think about the future more creatively, more rigorously, and more practically.

2. Ratatouille and process strategies. Several years ago I watched a good cook making a luxury of ratatouille. Though there are ratatouille recipes, the dish in original form is a process strategy not a recipe: A combination of aubergines, courgettes, peppers, tomatoes, and onions, each cooked to different levels of softness and caramelization. The balance between vegetables and the extent to which they are cooked depends on individual preference. This in turn determines the specific processes adopted and how they are combined. Read more about ratatouille as a process strategy, and how process strategies (vs recipes) leave room for adaptation to local conditions and thus for innovation and responsiveness.

3. Fear of failure. There is a connection between emotion and cognition, but we don’t talk about it in useful ways. Unspoken, unacknowledged fear of failure is one key barrier to a big corporation’s leadership committing resources to the failure-prone pursuit of real, transformative innovations. This is how visceral fear of failure becomes an emotional obstacle to innovation, even when innovation is cognitively well-understood and acknowledged to be essential for survival and growth. Read more about emotion, cognition, and the big corporation innovation problem.

See you in (maybe) a fortnight,
VT