Grab bag (Week 15/2025)

Mixing metaphors; a fine paste; describing consulting; workshop economics; experimenting well; alt-farming; wet sandwich logic.

Hello friends,

Now that I’m mostly based in Singapore, I’m building up a book of consulting business here and in the region. Southeast Asia has always felt less tolerant of non-standard offerings, so I’m taking some time to walk the forest again and figure out which fruits are the edible ones.

Sign of fruit.

But. The wheels of the commerce I have sold elsewhere, they grind on and they grind exceedingly fine, leaving behind them only a fine paste. Most recently, a procurement functionary insisted that I provide a detailed description of my consulting services before I could be formally invited to submit a RFP response. Writing that up took more than a week, much longer than I’d planned for.

While writing, I realised again how hard it is to explain work that addresses situations which are emergent and not yet well-understood. What I call amorphous consulting is designed to understand and fix these problems you don’t have names for yet. And these are the really material issues that organisations need to address to survive or thrive in an increasingly uncertain (not just risky) world.

So, having sunk a whole week into this, I decided to put the description up: www.vaughntan.org/consulting. Tell me what you think. Even better, if you know someone in Singapore or Southeast Asia who wants this kind of amorphous consulting — forward them this email.

Writing

Even as an inveterate developer of functional workshops, I always underestimate how much work (both research and time) it takes to develop a workshop design that understands the problem that needs to be solved, and presents an elegant way to try and solve it. I’ve now spent over a year working on a public sector strategy workshop intended to fix an important but not well-understood problem in how central government bodies work with line agencies on the ground. Quite like the result though.
👉 Unlocking transformative public policy work

A very long coffee chat a few weeks ago with someone senior in local biotech about making research pipelines more effective — their entire approach was predicated on making their experimentation (to find molecules with therapeutic potential) more efficient and more effective. Makes sense. Then, this week, coffee with a commodities company VP of sales who has been plagued by an ineffective sales team and a leaky sales funnel with too few leads coming in at the top, most of whom fail to convert. You would think that they’d consider this a problem solveable with a strategy of good experiments (small, low-cost, fast tests of better ways to qualify leads and increase their conversion rate). And you would be thinking wrong. The strategy they actually adopted is too silly and expensive to disclose in public. It was another reminder for me that too few organisations realise that experiments can take many forms, and that good experimentation is valuable almost anywhere in an organisation.
👉 Why experimenting well matters (and how to do it better)

Featured

Last year, I recorded a short segment in Marseille for a documentary about skills and the future of work. I talked, unsurprisingly, about negotiated joining and open-ended roles as a more adaptive, emergent way of bringing people into organisations. You can watch it here (though annoyingly pay-per-view).

Other peoples’ writing

I’ll be in Bangkok all next week for a protocol studies workshop funded by the Ethereum Foundation. The organisation of activity is the backdrop for the workshop, especially the particular flavour of organisation in Southeast Asia as inflected by its mix of geographic concentration and dispersion and largely non-Western culture.

The three pieces I’ve gone back to ahead of the workshop are

1. Stanley Crawford’s Mayordomo — about the organisation of labour for maintaining a community irrigation system, and an illustration of an appropriate-technology (i.e., almost no-tech) fix to the tragedy of the commons. Crawford was a writer and also a garlic farmer, so his autoethnography is a joy to read. And you learn about ditch-digging.

2. Masanobu Fukuoka’s One-straw Revolution — about a fundamentally different conception of effort, action, and success in farming, and incidentally one which has had remarkable influence on the low-intervention wine world. Fukuoka was a microbiologist and plant pathologist for the Japanese government who, late in life, grew to question the intensive and extractive model of agriculture he’d been trained in and came up with a different way.

3. E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful — about many things but mostly the actual subjectiveness of value that is purported to be objective. I assign the title chapter in nearly all my syllabi, generally to the mystification of my students. It’s worth reading. Schumacher was a staff economist for British Petroleum who, late in life, grew to question the precepts of economistic thinking he’d been trained in and came up with a different way.

See y’all next week,

VT

Sign on fruit.

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And a sandwich discursus (I ❤️ sandwiches)

Helen Graves emails to say:

“I’m writing a piece about ‘wet sandwiches’ — for example, the torta ahogada and the Turkish ‘wet burger,’ and wondered if I might trouble you for your thoughts on the sub genre? I fondly remembered this piece in Vittles (for which I have also written on BBQ), and I loved your comments on the structural integrity (or otherwise) of most sandwiches. So, when I began writing this piece, the thought occurred to me: what on earth would Vaughn think about wet sandwiches?” 

Well. I always have time to articulate a sandwich heuristic, he said inaccurately. This is what I have sent back:

i have thoughts

bland and soggy bread is always bad. this is why undried lettuce and watery industrial tomatoes have no room in a sandwich (arguably not even with a protective barrier layer).

intensely flavoured saturated bread can be fine. the intensity and complementarity of flavour is crucial. hence french dip, ahogada, burrito mojado etc.

i personally am not big fan of the ones where the saturating liquid is pre-applied as part of the design parameter. a french dip type thing gives the user control, which is also better for the eating because it allows the combination of structural integrity, neat eatability, and on-demand saturability. not incidentally, such a sandwich can be easily held and be a wet sandwich (conceptually) at the same time.

my main problem with wet sandwiches is that the bread needs to be correctly chosen and it rarely is.

wheat tortilla never correct for saturation — becomes slimy and there is no matrix to absorb liquid. 
brioche or pullman-style enriched rarely correct — it deliquesces or oversaturates. 
focaccia usually wrong — outside too greasy and gets wet but does not permit penetration; if saturates, alveoles too big so ratio of liquid to crumb is way off. 
sourdough wrong — crust and inside saturate at diff rates both of which are too slow; also alveoli often too big. 

telera or banhmi-type roll are probably the only kinds of bread i would intend to saturate, and then it would be a dip form of saturation because the property that makes them good for wetting (they absorb relatively quickly into a tender internal crumb) also makes them not good for prolonged saturation (structural failure).

is it possible that the french dip originated from the need to make not very good meat sliced very thin and served in not very large quantities into a delicious sandwich? is a good strategy, but if one loves sandwiches, maybe one should just make or find properly architected sandwiches? (On which more here, here, and here.)