Balance and Flexibility

"Life is difficult."

- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled. Chapter 1, Sentence 1.

So much of life can seem complex and ambiguous. In the face of this cacophony of cause and effect, it's normal to feel a very strong urge to make simplifying assumptions.

Unfortunately, the classic assumption of the absolute is giving way to a new intuition of relativity, context, and spectra. Where there was once absolute velocity and length, we now have the flexible measurements of special relativity. Even gender, socially atomic for millennia, is now seen as a spectrum - neither one nor the other, but defined on a sliding scale between two opposites.

I see this come through very strongly in my personal experience. There are no absolutes, only notional distance between opposites (because every property has an opposite in it's being absent). Context is critical and can alter the meaning of even seemingly simple interactions.

In order to confidently step into this new world, and I believe we must step forward, we need to learn a few new skills.

The Death of the Absolute

I want things to be simple because I need to make decisions, and decisions are easy to make when trade-offs are straightforward. But simplicity is always an illusion, and there is a cost to ignoring complexity. Sometimes this cost is negligible. Often it is not.

"I use a simple heuristic: assume complexity. Assume there is substantial missing information. Assume you are wrong."

This can be difficult. It just isn't natural. For so much of our existence as homo sapiens, being wrong has carried a significant cost. It could mean loss of social status. It could be the the difference between passing your genes to a future generation, or into the digestive tract of your neighborhood apex predator.

But today being wrong carries substantial benefits, if you can realize quickly that you've made a mistake and see it as an opportunity. And there is really no benefit to ignoring the fact: you are going to be wrong more often than you are right.

Flexibility and Decision Making

In a world of missing information, flexibility is always top-of-mind for me. It is the only way to approach the complexity of the modern world. But ditching the definite doesn't mean abandoning decision making or process. It is still important to make decisions, and to make them quickly and effectively.

I like to set a cutoff for when the decision will be made, get the most material information I can before the cutoff, and realize this: even though I've made a decision, that doesn't mean the decision was right (or wrong), or that it represented all the information, or that I should to make that same decision the next time around. It was simply the best move based on my judgement and the information available at the time.

At its core, the notion of right and wrong is no longer necessary. If I decide that I'm right about something, this implies I have all the information and that context is irrelevant. You can never have all the information, and context cannot be categorically swept under the rug. Thinking this way might cause me to filter out new information that I could potentially benefit from.

Balance: Navigating Errors

Often when I realize I've misunderstood something, there is a temptation to make sweeping changes to my worldview based on the new information. I over-correct.

Error correcting is an art. Imagine the truth as a balanced canoe floating down a river. The river is life, and you are piloting the the canoe. If you wander too far from the truth the river will usually push you back in the right direction. You'll never reach perfect balance. Instead you will shift between opposite ends, bouncing back and forth between directions of wrong.

The optimal way to live is at its core an exercise of realizing when you are off balance as quickly as possible, and then making appropriate corrections. Being careful not to over- or under-correct. Once you are off balance a bit, there is a gravity that will pull you off further. It becomes more difficult to make a correction.

Once you are off balance a bit, there is a gravity that will pull you off further. Over time it becomes more difficult to make a correction. Often it can take some work to get back on track.

If you make (or the river forces you to make) a particularly large correction it is likely you'll be pushed off balance in the complete opposite direction. Again, it's not about being correct but instead about realize you've made a mistake as quickly as you can.

Attention and Honesty

How do we make corrections quickly? For me, two practices rise to the top:

Attention: If you aren't paying attention, you'll never realize you are due for a correction. Every moment you let pass by without examination is a lost opportunity!

We have a limited capacity for attention and certainly need to disconnect from time to time. So I'm not saying we should thoroughly analyze each moment, but I am saying we should be careful to analyze some moments. As many moments as we can. Over time, presence and contemplation will come naturally and won't require as much effort.

Not every moment needs to lead to new insights, but by simply taking a moment to think about things you will store information. Later, you can connect this information and create insights which will lead to better decisions.

Honesty: If new information makes you uncomfortable, that's ok! But do your best to not let that keep you from making corrections. It'll only get worse as time goes on.

If you aren't honest with yourself it will be more difficult to identify when corrections need to be made. This can be tricky - what does it really mean to be honest with yourself? You won't figure it out tomorrow, and you may never get it exactly right, but striving for it will certainly be beneficial, and you'll get better over time.

Flexibility in Business

In my professional life, I design for flexibility from the very start. I'll make a plan and an expectation, and you have to make assumptions in order to get started, but more important than that is the flexibility of my process. Because I know I'll be wrong and it is critical to realize it and react as soon as possible.

• How will exceptions be handled when they inevitably occur?
• If we are going to be wrong, how can we increase the odds we'll be wrong in the right direction?
• Put tight monitoring processes on key indicators so the model can be adjusted (or abandoned) quickly.

This resonates with Google's 8th Pillar of Innovation Never Fail to Fail.

"A great process is like a work of art, it is never really finished."

The more flexible you are, the easier it'll be to get inside the turning radius of your competition. You'll waste less time and money on late corrections.

Flexibility in Policy

My ideas here are much less mature - but the old notions of right and wrong, and absolutes in general, are heavily embedded in our politics. I'd really like to see thinking on incorporating flexibility in:

• Civil Penalties: Context matters when it comes to crimes committed. Science is clarifying the part that mental health and brain chemistry plays in crime. If the objective of prisons and fines and sentencing is changing behavior and creating a net improvement in society, a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be the optimal solution. How can we make our sentencing and corrections more flexible? Can we bring flexibility in as a core tenet of law in a way that doesn't incentive taking advantage of the system?
• Legislation: Our legal system heavily relies on absolutes. It is extremely difficult to make corrections to law. When a law is passed, especially a federal one, it often will apply to the entire population, thus ignoring context and restricting flexibility. I'd love to see laws that automatically expire after a time unless they are ratified every few years. And more localization of government to allow for regional differences.

Reproduced from my blog.