The Illusion of Certainty

This essay asks the question, <i>why</i> are larger organizations so <i>bad</i> at performing feats of brilliance most of the time?<p>The author sees two obstacles. One is what he calls <i>&quot;the boredom threshold:&quot;</i> The creative individuals who <i>could</i> perform those feats quickly get bored with the mind-numbing minutia of bureaucratic processes at larger organizations and leave.<p>The second obstacle is <i>&quot;the illusion of certainty:&quot;</i> Conventional operational improvements, cost-cutting efforts, legal reorganizations, etc. can easily be &#x27;proven&#x27; to work in advance, but more interesting lines of inquiry come with career-threatening unknowability. Many bureaucrats and businesspeople, the OP argues, are attracted to the illusion of certainty.<p>Quoting from the OP: &quot;If you engage engineers, you don’t know what you are going to get. You may be unlucky and get nothing. Or their solution may be so outlandish that it is hard to compare with other competing solutions. On average, though, what you get will be more valuable than the gains produced by some tedious restructuring enshrined in a fat PowerPoint deck. But in business, let alone in government, it is only in crises that people find a budget for probabilistic interventions of this kind.&quot;<p>The essay concludes that &quot;one reason why the world is in a mess is because, for a long time, the ratio between &#x27;explore&#x27; and &#x27;exploit&#x27; has been badly out of whack. Entities like procurement have been allowed to claim full credit for money-grabbing cost-savings without commensurate responsibility for delayed or hidden costs.&quot;

I disagree with his opening statement: &quot;Formula 1 teams have been able to design, prototype and manufacture essential health equipment incredibly quickly&quot;<p>As far as I can see they have done none of these things and are only helping in providing manufacturing capability [1]. The ventilator they are helping to manufacture is an iteration on a previous design made by a medical specialist Penlon [2].<p>Not that there is anything bad with that strategy: experts in a given field are the experts so best to use the medical expertise of one company and the rapid batch production capabilities of companies like Formula 1 teams. Racing teams often have to turn components around for an update at the next grand prix e.g. 1 - 2 weeks. This means having processes and suppliers that can operate at that fast pace.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inceptivemind.com&#x2F;penlon-prima-eso2-newly-adapted-ventilator-design-gets-approved-uk&#x2F;12781&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inceptivemind.com&#x2F;penlon-prima-eso2-newly-adapte...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penlon.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penlon.com&#x2F;</a>

F1 teams making ventilators is probably a pretty bad example. I bet these ventilators are very expensive, hard to maintain and have probably a lot of little problems. I work in medical devices and if there is one thing I have learned it’s that there is a big difference between having something that works somehow and something that’s ready to be produced and maintained in the long run. I agree that big companies tend to stifle innovation but they are also very optimized and there is a lot of invisible work that has to go into achieving that state.<p>I see the same in software. We sometimes have interns whip up some system that on the surface looks good and innovative and makes the old timers look bad and unimaginative. But once you try to deploy them they usually fall apart because they ignored some inconvenient real world details.

Why one team can create a project during a 2-day hackathon, while it takes a year to finish professionally?<p>(Game, chat app, anything.)<p>Well, large organizations have overhead for communication, management, etc (see v). But also there is a statistical effect - if we get many, many shots - sometimes we get lucky (in most cases - not; think of a typical hackathon project - usually it never gets properly started). So, in short, we see a huge survival bias.<p>...and it takes time to polish rough edges. For example, game Superhot started as a hackathon demo (with a single scene). It took Kickstarted crowdfunding, and a year of work to turn in into a fully-fledged commercially-viable game. (Personally, I think it is one of the most creative game ideas in the last years, especially for VR. I am happy that I crowdfunded it. :))

This is also why the evolution of multicellular creatures has (meta-)evolved to proceed by discrete generations (birth &amp; senescence) and Darwinian rather than Lamarckian inheritance.<p>Otherwise you over-adapt (overfitting) and lose the reservoir of variability required to cope with extraordinary circumstances.<p>Gregory Bateson describes it in one of his essays, I haven&#x27;t had enough coffee yet but if you&#x27;re interested bug me and I&#x27;ll go look up which one. (It&#x27;s in &quot;Steps to an Ecology of Mind&quot; or &quot;Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity&quot; IIRC.)

I love this, having seen it in operation so many times. Accountants promoted to senior managers whose only way of increasing profits is to trim the costs, reducing all flexibility and removing any resilience from the organisation. Good ideas for new stuff getting veto&#x27;d because they&#x27;re &quot;risky&quot; (risky to the management bonus if they fail).

The last 3 paragraphs talk about explore&#x2F;exploit ratio in bee colonies - most bees &quot;exploit&quot; what others found, small number of bees &quot;explore&quot; new grounds.<p>We do exactly the same. We exploit in the times of plenty and explore when the going get tough. The same evolutionary forces act on us as a society as on the bees, so it is unfair to say that bees know better than us how to get that ratio right.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-armed_bandit#Optimal_solutions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-armed_bandit#Optimal_sol...</a>

I think the point he’s making is some groups (currently too many?) outweigh certain costs compared to uncertain benefits— limiting innovation. It’s along the lines of “nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM.” I don’t think it generalizes beyond the single organization level well considering all the money going into venture capital as of late. And I don’t see it at Apple&#x2F;Alphabet&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Amazon where some of the world’s largest companies continue to innovate and pivot. But, you do see it in terms of Berkshire Hathaway’s investment strategy (which interestingly includes investments in Apple), which is exceedingly conservative by some measures. But part of that is because Buffet is risk-averse (which is different than uncertainty-averse).<p>I think the article stops short of saying how we would know enough resources are being put into innovation. And for that, I have no idea either.

&gt;One problem with this pretence of certainty is that cost-savings are more easily quantified than potential gains — so business and government are increasingly geared towards providing people with more, poorer things at an ever-lower price. Yet much evidence suggests that people like fewer, better things at a slightly higher price.<p>I would dispute that paragraph. The popularity of &quot;Primani&quot; is proof that there are plenty of people like to be able to buy a larger range of cheap stuff. The number of times I&#x27;ve heard female friends, on being complimented on a garment, say &quot;and it was only a fiver&quot;, or &quot;10 quid at Primark&quot;.<p>I would say there&#x27;s plenty of both types in this world. Those who prefer quality over quantity, and those who don&#x27;t.

To quote: <i>No one ever got fired for buying IBM.</i><p>If you&#x27;re working for a large, bureaucratic organization, producing a radically different solution can be a career-limiting move, even if it&#x27;s a success and the problem is quite important. (Or perhaps especially if it&#x27;s quite important.)

:fire:<p>Two things:<p><pre><code> 1. From my own personal experience, I think the observations here are _accurate_ 2. I really appreciate that is article offers an implicit good-side to tough time. That is, success in tough times is made by ditching safe behavior</code></pre>