The third dumb thing I did was post a note about how LLM writing will soon have its “Deep Blue” moment. Already, I would rather consult Claude than go through the horrible experience of reading my Subaru Outback’s brick of an owner’s manual. Anytime I encounter a new machine or tool that I don’t know how to use, I can just snap a photo and ask an LLM. This is exactly how I fixed my dishwasher last month after it started thumping during cycles.

Practical communications, like operating guides, owner’s manuals, software documentation, recipe books and LEGO instructions, are difficult to create. About half of Canadians and Americans fall below high-school reading levels. Technical writers whose job is to help people use their tools face a tension between precision, which requires both verbosity and vocabulary, and accessibility, which requires brevity and familiarity. Creating a singular piece of text that balances that tension is very, very challenging. Fortunately, as demonstrated by my no-longer-thumping dishwasher, LLMs are solving that problem.

If you’re not familiar with Deep Blue, it was a custom IBM supercomputer designed to play chess. One month after I was born, it beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. By the mid-2000s, few humans on Earth could beat a top engine in a single game. Today, not a single grandmaster could beat the strongest chess bot on your phone.

Soon, few technical writers will be able to outperform LLMs when it comes to practical comms about the real world. No surprise that I got a ton of flak when I posted a note saying that. A few people labeled me a shill, saying that AI would never make innovations in literature. Ironically, had they used an LLM to translate my note – committing what they apparently regard as criminal possession of AI writing – they wouldn’t have misinterpreted it.

Literary quality is more subjective than the quality of technical documents. The former can only be judged by whether or not the reader liked reading it; the latter can only be judged by whether or not it helped the reader complete the task at hand. Perhaps for that reason, writing manuals and similar materials is relatively drudging work. Practical communication is a bounded, tedious function that requires ten times as much patience as creativity.

My lay understanding of LLMs is that they’re capable of liquifying what was once solid content into a flexible stream of data, which can be customized based on several factors – including their user’s specific dialect, technical aptitudes or preferred degree of manners. The transition from solid content to liquid content is a win for both consumers and producers.

It constitutes an efficiency gain for businesses, because they can now instantaneously pour content from one container to another (think news outlets, which need to convert stories from audio to text to summaries). And it’s a thoroughness gain for consumers, who can now turn on a tap and get a flow of instructions in real-time, based on the feedback that they’re providing.

Obviously original documentation about microwaves and Subaru emergency brakes still needs to be created. Facts about what things are made of and how they operate can’t be left unspecified. But these things no longer have to be drudgingly written, translated, organized or stylized for human eyes. And readers no longer have to trudge through boring documentation written for a tool’s most lackluster user.

Thus, the paradigm of liquid content relieves a tension that park rangers have wrestled with for decades: it’s impossible to design a perfect bear-proof container when “there is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist”.

I expect we’re entering a new golden age for documentation. Even if AI hasn’t yet concretely affected the broader economy, AI is impacting home economics. Almost every day, I hear of people that are now able to initiate and complete projects that would have otherwise required tradesperson. LLMs are YouTube on steroids. They lower the barrier to entry for technical fields. One of my jobs as a kid was to hold wires and operate the breaker while my dad did DIY electrical work around the house. After seeing him shocked several times despite his working knowledge of wiring, I concluded that YouTube was not sufficiently powerful for me to put my local electrician out of a job. But with LLMs, I actually am literate enough to safely solve some problems – like a car battery with a parasitic drain.

One way to look at this is to look at previous shifts in how documentation works. Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge sequences the history into four episodes: job printing, typescript and near-print, xerography and PDFs. Companies like Adobe were players in the last episode, who made their name by making bits behave like paper. According to Gitelman, the authority of any document depends on its “know-show function” – PDFs were an innovation because they smuggled the fixity of paper into digital substrates, allowing for cheap and fast reproduction of both facts (the “know” function) and instructions (the “show” or teaching function).

Today, that know-show function is decoupling. But how far can that go?

Gitelman edited another book, titled Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Data isn’t a natural resource, but an artificial one that needs to be generated. As LLMs melt the existing landscape of documents into an oozy soup of liquid content, a new layer of fixity will grow. Canonical, versioned, machine-facing documents are still a type of technical writing, even if they are decoupled from the show function. Those docs are what stop your new tutor from hallucinating wire colors and getting you electrocuted, which means that they are an important, valuable asset. We will not see the death of the technical writer, but their work – and the authority of the PDF as a subgenre – is quickly moving upstream.

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Companies and governments who create products, infrastructure, nutrition guidelines, assembly instructions or any other type of practical documentation should be transforming how they make such documentation. Customers and constituents will be better off when technical writing turns into a machine-facing role, because the precision-accessibility tension is relieved. Writers can afford to be increasingly precise as LLMs become stronger and readers have infinitely patient, multilingual tutors with access to superior documentation. What Gitelman calls “knowing” is limited by precision and "what she calls “showing” is limited by accessibility. To try and make this essay look smarter, I’ve turned Gitelman’s know-show function into an equation:

Document Utility = Precision x Accessibility

Switching gears into the organizational side of this paradigm shift: the utility of an org’s docs depend on how much they increase the agency of your customers / clients / constituents. If someone’s been hounding you for AI transformation project at work, technical writing is a strong candidate. It’s been clearly validated by anyone with even a drop of DIY in their blood – which is most people – whether they’re doing it to avoid the hassle of contracting a tradesperson, for economic purposes or simply for love of the game.

This shift to liquid content will affect more organizations that it might first appear to. Obvious ones include manufacturers of cars, appliances and furniture – all of which must produce good manuals for their products. But it will also affect more unique organizations, like public health agencies, emergency services and mechanic shops. More and more people will interface with nutrition and exercise guidelines through LLMs rather than consult official government websites. Common triage practices are now used by both first responders and people chatting with their phone, debating an emergency room visit. Newfound ease of preventative maintenance, thanks to liquified mechanic knowledge, could result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in savings.

While some of these gains rest on open-source knowledge created over the past several decades, there exists a clear incentive for knowledge creation. Machines, tools and information products with good, machine-facing documentation will outperform those without. If you take that to the extreme, it’s possible to imagine a world where hardware stores start putting carpenters out of work. I don’t think we’ll get to that extreme, but directionally it’s correct – liquid content is radically increasing people’s agency, moving technical writing upstream and forcing institutions to rebuild fixity.

Time for a new golden age of documentation.

No such thing as bad weather, just bad gear.

Next week, I’ll be hiking the Tombstones with a couple of my college buddies. To get to the foot of the mountains, we’ll have to drive along the only road in Canada that crosses the Arctic Circle. We also need to be prepared for a lot of contingencies. As of today, the forecast is characteristically unsettled:

• Saturday - Rain

• Sunday - Sunny with clouds

• Monday - Snow

• Tuesday - Rain

• Wednesday - Sun / Clouds / Rain / Snow

My addiction to reliability means that I have almost as much fun preparing for an adventure as I do adventuring. We’ll go through a series of checklists and arrange our loadouts on the ground to make sure we’re not missing anything (and to take a cool photo). Besides bear spray, shelters and other Maslowian items, there’s one thing that we are all bringing that’s harder to notice: meteophilia – a love of weather.

From a young age, the neutrality of weather was drilled into me. My brother and I were set loose in the yard no matter what the conditions (thunder and lightning included!) and always had a good time. We grew up on the west coast of North America, bouncing around from Vancouver Island to Washington State to the Yukon, across all sorts of climates. Vacations were outside and wild. Sadly, that meant no trips to Disneyland. We went camping, canoeing, fishing, hunting, hiking, sledding, berry picking, or my dad’s favorite: collecting firewood with free labor.

Had we grown up in Norway, we might have already had a name for this style of living. Friluftsliv means “free-air life” and constitutes a kind of philosophy among Norwegians. Life is best spent outside, no matter what time of year. It’s no wonder that the country is famous for excellent outdoor gear. Without appropriate clothing and tools, appreciating the weather in a place like Svalbard – a large rock in the middle of the Arctic ocean – isn’t conducive to a long life. When life gives you frostbite, make Helly Hansen.

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Meteophilia is a particularly portable aspect of this philosophy. Even if outdoor living is touted as an unassailable ideal, it’s not for everyone. But everyone does have to deal with changing climates, both literal and metaphorical. Just as masochistic backcountry hikers have to deal with rainstorms and heatwaves, businesses must deal with their own types of headwinds.

The reason I prefer to go on adventures with fellow meteophiles is because they separate difficult situations from bad attitudes. Being a grincheux won’t help solve any practical problems, so you might as well keep your head up during the process. My octogenarian running coach says there are only two things you can do when running into a headwind.

“Shorten your stride and don’t feel sorry for yourself.”

Same goes for difficult work climates. Retreating and feeling sorry for yourself pretty much renders you a useless teammate. You can grow an appreciation for the weather, whatever the weather, and you should. That means taking a step back to consider what crucial pieces of gear are necessary to endure the elements (regardless of your meteorologic preferences). What “gear” means to you will depend on the specifics of your work, but I have picked up a few patterns for fostering an appreciation for ever-changing work climates. These are from my past 5-7 years of work, which featured some challenging periods:

• Work friends – Having a couple of people you can (temporarily) bitch and moan to is super helpful.

• Time off – Real time off. Ideally without a predefined end date. Even if stuff breaks while you’re gone, you will feel refreshed enough to rebuild what matters and pick up where you left off.

• Back-up projects and running to-do lists – Sometimes the best thing to do when you hit a wall is to procrastinate. And the best way to procrastinate is to work on something else for a while.

• Walks – Even though I don’t see a correlation between physical fitness and performance in the workplace (other than perceived charisma), there’s nothing like a good 30-90 minute walk. Basically has a coin-flip chance of temporarily fixing your mood.

• Portfolio views – Taking a step back to do a “loadout” of all the things you’re working on and how they fit together gives you a chance to spot opportunities to do two things at once or drop some low-priority things altogether.

• Replanning – Plans are exhaust. What matters is the planning engine, which should run constantly. If you replan on a regular basis you can anticipate what gear you need and slowly build your perfect kit.

If you liked this post, check out the book I’m working on. It’ll include everything I know about solving problems without brute force. Subscribe for new chapters as they come out.

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No Blundercheck next week, since I’ll be out enjoying some inclement weather and avoiding grizzly bears with the fellas.

After starting his career as a doctor in Bavaria, Tarrasch moved to Munich in 1914. Some say he was “more German than the Germans”. By all accounts, few people liked him. He dressed impeccably but was self-loving and looked down on others. Younger players would routinely get worked into a rage by Tarrasch because of his harsh, unsolicited analyses of the game they had just played.

A subsequent generation of talent – the hypermodernists – considered Tarrasch’s play to be lifeless; his rank was acquired through diligence rather than talent.

There is some truth to that. I wouldn’t say Tarrasch was a simple grinder. He had some incredibly useful heuristics and hacks, many of which were based on managing his intervention bias – our instinct to meddle and play the first seemingly good move. If you for whatever reason find yourself at a chess event, it’s likely that you’d see some younger players literally sitting on their hands. Eventually, they’ll learn to figuratively sit on their hands, but until then the posture helps prevent impulsively moving pieces.

Since most of my career has been spent as an analyst, I was more alert to the risk of analysis paralysis than of getting caught in a reactive loop. But after doing more operations, project management and portfolio work, it’s become clear that I was safely on one side of an ETTO distribution, where I faced diminishing returns to thoroughness. Now I routinely land on the side where hyperefficiency is the likely failure mode. It’s often worthwhile for me to proverbially, if not literally, sit on my hands.

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Tarrasch’s amour-propre – his self-love – led to an obsession with being “proper”, which extended to his playstyle as a master. A rule of thumb already four centuries old by the time Lasker and Tarrasch were duking it out for the world title, is to always look for a better course of action, even if just for a few more moments. Tarrash was obsessed with finding a more proper move.

My version of this, in games other than chess, is that I frequently need to take a beat. My goal, of course, is not to get into a place where inaction is optimal, but to make sure my actions clear a bar that impulse can’t.

Operators have to be more passive than they might assume, especially if they are trying to get big things done with limited resources. It takes time to find creative, indirect options.

Other fields are full of examples where impulse can be harmful:

• Soccer – goalkeepers almost always dive during penalty kicks, but statistically standing still is a good choice (if not the best).

• Investing – among retail traders, activity is negatively correlated with returns.

• Wildland fires – total suppression banked fuel for megafires.

Passivity is not a winning strategy by default, but it is worth hedging against intervention bias by taking a bit of time to consider the null move. This trick is stolen not from Tarrasch but from chess engines: pretend to pass. Engines do this to measure their opponent’s real threats. So if your position appears fine after you model a pass, there’s no a real urgency.

One problem is that inaction can look bad. Goalkeepers who don’t dive look like they’re not trying, even if the null move is the right one. So if you’re a busy bee by nature, but feel like impulse is getting in your way, you might want to get comfortable feeling uncomfortable.

Slow is safe, safe is smooth, and smooth is fast.

P.S. have you checked out the site for my book project?

Shortly after Laurie and I met, she signed us up for a half marathon. Like most soccer players, I was prone to boasting about my fitness. Fast forward to the day after the race, when my knees and ankles were so swollen that I could barely walk, and I was no longer feeling so cocky.

But I kept at it. This summer’s training includes six(!) half marathons. Last weekend, I managed to get my big run done while volunteering. Our local ultramarathon, the Raven, is an 80-kilometer race over three mountains. On Saturday I swept for the race, running 32 kms up and across a ridge line, picking up flags and supporting stragglers. This gave me copious amounts of time to ponder the question, “Why the hell do people do this?” shortly followed by, “Yikes…am I one of those people?”

Eight hours constituted a lot of time for my mind to wander, which led to some other, arguably more productive thoughts.

Enduro-Execs

If you haven’t already, one perplexing thing you’ll discover about management executives is that a huge proportion of them are into endurance sports. There are two generations of enduro-execs, but each has a different motivation.

The first generation probably emerged for good reasons. Running is difficult in interesting ways, and it produces interesting benefits: discipline, pain tolerance, a mental connection between easy work and big results, enjoyment of the process, lower blood pressure. Plus, it can just be fun. A lot of people who are into long-distance running / cycling / skiing seem to have traits that make them steady team members in the workplace.

Then you have the second generation, who basically swapped the status game of expensive wine and whiskey out for the status game of Strava and VO2 max estimates. This is more like private school students who get into Harvard or Yale to row crew, even if they’re not that great at math. Yeah, it teaches you some stuff, but it might be more about being in the club than the sport itself.

A key difference between the two generations is how they approach training. Gen I has run or trained for years, accumulating thousands of hours of training and building a good base. Often without much measurement besides “time on feet”. Gen II tries to hack their way to good scores via interval training, gear and gear.

The biggest downside of this is that you can no longer use someone’s interest in endurance sports as a gauge for their ability to go the distance at work. Minus one for the bullshit detector.

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Sutherland’s Pyramid

Too much creativity is a bad thing. When you go over to a buddy’s house who’s recently gotten into cooking, but who’s also just watched Chef’s Table… their ambition might put your palate in trouble.

During the Raven, a few types of fast runners stood out:

• Actual runners, who had done the work.

• New runners, who didn’t know any better.

• New and experienced runners, who just couldn’t help themselves but run fast.

That last group suffers from the same problem as overly creative people. They might hit their peak performance sooner, but their peak will not be very high. I’m calling this Sutherland’s Pyramid, because it applies to artists just as much as athletes.

Racing outcomes depend on the quality of your base, which is a factor of how many easy, simple hours of training you’ve put in. Creativity is similarly constrained by your knowledge and real-world experience. Look at any talented marketer and you will see that they spend an enormous amount of time observing the world around them. They are good at their job because they can tell it like it is unlike anyone else. Rory Sutherland, for example, is insanely good about talking about the mundane, quotidian things around us – dishwashers, Coke, speedometers – while making it all interesting. Creativity without a connection to reality is just… bullshit.

Another point about this framework: performance is not about your position on the pyramid. Everyone has their own pyramid. It’s about creating a maximally tall pyramid, which requires you to build a wide, durable base. That means avoiding going too high on the y-axis, which builds up performance debt without contributing much to the accumulation of easy, simple, stackable reps.

Sutherland’s Pyramid is why systems thinking is brain rot for analysts. It’s also why I need to rewrite the About page for Blundercheck. Most of my writing verges on too creative, which means that it’s better suited for people who already have a solid base of experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s worse than useless for self-declared creatives. I’ve found that my most common source of writer’s block is a lack of hands-on experience. The more I feel like I’m bullshitting, the harder it is to write.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy my post on mentabolism.

Last Friday, I went to the new-to-me and apparently secretive Foo Camp, hosted by O’Reilly Media. As a bit of a pun fiend, I can appreciate the name. The original event happened shortly after the tech bubble popped in 2000. In response to widespread layoffs, Tim O’Reilly and some buddies decided to throw a conference (their idea of a party). There, people could share what weird and wacky things they were doing in their newfound free time. According to sources familiar with the matter, planners of the inaugural event first named it after the military-turned-software acronym FUBAR – Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. This morphed into Foo Camp, where Foo now stands for Friends Of O’Reilly.

I guess they’ve got a friend in me. I received an invite to share my knowledge about protocols and field-building. On Day 2 of Foo, I gave a short talk on cognitive ergonomics – applying ideas from traditional occupational health and safety (OHS) to the context of AI tools. My hope was to take a meaningful step towards an applied science of fitting these new tools to the people that use them, rather than the other way around. The central provocation of my talk was:

At least 30 of the ~150 campers tracked me down over the weekend to talk about my talk. Which was great, since I’m a pretty reluctant networker. And because of all of those excellent conversations I felt the need to extend my lightning talk into an article. My colleague and I are also working on a DSM-style database for cognitive ergonomics of AI. If you feel like helping, feel free to share some anecdotes – whether symptoms, hazards or actual protocols for improving cognitive ergonomics.

Procrustean Tools

I was on the lookout for AI vampires when I flew into San Francisco last week. Sure enough I saw plenty: bags under their eyes, terminal sessions open, Clawd dispatch open on their mobile device… and avoiding direct sunlight.

When workers adopted the typewriter, they did so for its amazing efficiency. But the early versions of this tool were mechanical, so buttons needed a lot of force. After extended use, writers, clerks and court stenographers began to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. To realize its potential, the typewriter required its users to act in unsustainable ways. Technological developments have always impacted workers. Today, we have a new type of computer. To promote the wellbeing of workers and get the most out of AI tools, we should address these impacts as soon as possible.

The typewriter is a case of classical ergonomics. User interfaces of large language models (LLMs) and world models don’t present any direct hazards that we didn’t already know about. Office workers are prone to musculoskeletal and metabolic disorders due to the nature of their work. What you might not know is that the top work-related risk factor in the 21st century is stress, especially from long working hours. That’s a problem for workers, employers and insurers. Stress alone is unhealthy, but adaptations to stress – smoking, drinking and hyperpalatable food – are often made outside of the workplace and can compound the original issue. Traceability is the Achilles’ heel of contemporary workplace health improvement initiatives.

We are entering even trickier territory now: cognitive ergonomics. When tracing root cause and responsibility is such a difficult problem, workers are left with little choice but to create health and safety protocols without permission, relying on a mix of empirical evidence and peer support.

Before I go further, it’s worth saying that I like using LLM tools. We wouldn’t be able to run and scale the Protocol Institute without them. They’ve been instrumental in my work as both an Idea Guy^TM and an Execution Guy^TM for the past three years. Despite the utility, I sometimes wonder if these tools are like back braces – if I use them all of the time, won’t my strength atrophy?

It’s been a while since I’ve heard “AI is a bicycle for the mind” used in earnest, but that tagline is illustrative. Bicycles are fun, but obviously they’re a little dangerous. So what’s the best way to reduce your risk of a cycling accident?

The best way to reduce your risk of a bike crash is to never get on a bike.

But that’s just one way of thinking about safety.

Typewriters were never just going to go away. Nor email. Nor LLMs. While we must strive for improved occupational health and safety outcomes, we should also keep in mind: while all accidents are preventable, it is not possible to prevent all accidents. Cognitive ergonomics for AI is about figuring out how we can all ride our bicycles more, not less. It’s in the long-term interest of both AI labs and workers if these new tools don’t disfigure practitioners.

Agent, not agentic

I’m an OHS professional, not a philosopher. Whenever people bring up AGI, runaway self-recursive improvement or anything related to existential risk, it’s time for me to Irish exit. That sort of debate is categorically different than the kind you find among AI adopters in the real world. Accordingly, it’s useful to frame LLMs not as agents in the principal-agent sense, but as agents in the chemical sense. Different chemical agents possess different qualities that make them useful and dangerous. Acids are great for cleaning equipment, but they’re indiscriminately corrosive.

WHMIS, the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System, protocolized the handling of potent chemical agents at work. Employees could rely on standardized symbols and procedures, allowing them to work efficiently and intelligently manage risk. Categories are clear, bounded and manageable.

We should really be thinking about how to handle AI agents safely, without atrophying our own cognitive capacity, without poisoning our knowledge with slop and without melting critical web infrastructure by accident. This is a much more tractable problem than solving “alignment” up front. It starts with figuring out how people – like you and me – use LLMs to do good work, then working hard to reduce exposure to the hazards of this new class of technology.

Another difference between cognitive ergonomics and mainstream AI safety discourse is that the latter assumes the worst about humans. That workers and individuals are malicious, unreliable and error-prone. But it’s worth asking: what makes humans error-prone? The answer is variability. Humans vary in their performance. Variability is not just a source of error, but a source of adaptability. We are only able to adopt AI at this point because workers are adapting themselves to the tools.

So the starting point for CogErgo is what’s going well and a positive view of human variability, rather than a full-stop attempt at solving alignment up front. (As an aside, I’m on board with Emmett Shear’s view; alignment between agents is a capability enabled by protocols.)

Towards a manual of cognitive ergonomics for AI

There are a few kinds of syndromes or disorders that might be the result of AI tool usage. Remember that these typically appear in the context of people doing good work. It’s important that our first instinct be to manage, not solve, these problems, even if the ultimate goal is of course to remove the source of the hazard.

Some early disorders and loosely-defined protocols worth noting:

• AI Psychosis – entering into distorting feedback loops with an LLM in a chat interface – protocol: contact with the real world, socializing and touching grass.

• AI Vampirism – insomnia, stress, long working hours that can translate to poor metabolic and musculoskeletal health outcomes in the long run – protocol: meeting movement guidelines and reducing or managing work-related stress.

• Executive Overfunction Syndrome (EOS) – domain-independent hypochondria, where users become acutely aware of how things could go wrong without a good sense of their actual probability, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed (coined by ) – protocol: have not heard of an effective one yet.

• Default Skimming – a.k.a. atrophy of reading comprehension; LLMs produce an immense amount of text and code, which is impossible to review. In the absence of effective layers of abstraction or spot-testing techniques, workers quickly develop a habit of skimming any text they need to read – protocol: be extremely selective in what you actually read.

• Rabbitholing – often caused by LLM follow-up prompts, which can take you way off tangent from your original work; a risk driver for EOS – protocol: write down intentions prior to starting up the tool.

I’d appreciate any anecdotes that you want to share, especially in the comments so others can benefit from your experience. Thanks again to everyone at Foo that came up to chat with me about this!

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When we treat problems in our life directly and aggressively, opportunities can get caught in the crossfire. It’s often smart to delay reaching for final solutions. This chapter explores how people use the image of a seed to think about indirection, strategy and changing the world – and how it helps them become more patient in the process.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) was a potent insecticide. Its deadly effect on pests made it important during the two world wars – helping prevent the spread of disease among soldiers, as bugs and rats were primary vectors. Agricultural enterprises also adopted DDT as a way to eliminate plant-destroying insects. Crop yields improved more or less overnight.

However, in the 1970s, DDT was banned. Rachel Carson’s exposé, Silent Spring, alerted the world to the profound and long-lasting consequences of toxic insecticides – including cancer.

The utility of DDT didn’t outweigh its mutility and, once again, through the pursuit of a total and final solution, we created a new class of problem. In this case, we flooded our food supply with bioaccumulating, cancer-causing chemicals. This is a common pattern.

1. Symptom appears

2. Eliminate root cause

3. Symptom disappear perfectly

4. Nasty, iatrogenic effects appear

The first-order logic of insecticide is seductive. Seeds are amazing, but relatively delicate. They contain a mind-blowing quantity of information that somehow unfolds into an organism several thousand times its original size. Whatever kind of crop you are trying to grow, seeds are the beginning and end of the cycle. They are the first layer of indirection. Any small changes you can make to seed survival rates or growth rates translate into big wins on yield. It’s natural that we possess a strong desire to eliminate any potential threats, once and for all.

Identifying the Image

The seed is a rich and familiar metaphor, often deployed in the world of work as a means of thinking about indirection – and I’m sure you’ve heard it used before.

Phrases like these bring to mind a particular mechanism of change: that of a tiny seed, which has the potential to grow and spread, and even to terraform the entire landscape of a business. The image opens up a new possibility: rather than changing things through force, you could change them by altering the code of things around you.

It’s common for teams to frame new ideas, initiatives or ventures as a seed. Leverage is still a more common metaphor, but it’s interesting for exactly the opposite reasons as this image. Using it leads to different strengths and blind spots; those who think like foresters are less easily seduced by final solutions; others fall into the trap of naïve evolutionary thinking.

Having a healthy analogical range can help you make creative strategies. The Seed is a complement to the Lever in your starter pack, thanks to the two images having inverted logics (Lever: push x aimed, Seed: encode x diffuse). Plus, biomimicry is an established trick in organizational design, so the Seed is both easy to grok and go deep on. There’s plenty of reading available – from classical management theorists like Henry Mintzberg to the more trippy thought leaders of the late '90s, like Stewart Brand.

Let’s get into the details of our second Image of Indirection before examining its strengths and weaknesses.

Infringing upon Mother Nature’s Copyrights

While I dislike Henry Mintzberg’s silly use of the word quantum, his writing about management holds up. In a 1987 HBR article, Crafting Strategy, Mintzberg illustrates the difference between treating strategies like tomatoes grown in a greenhouse in pristine conditions versus treating them like weeds (dandelions, specifically). I’ve worked with many people who are fond of using organic analogies to break away from typically mechanical ways of thinking about indirection. And it’s usually easy to identify which page – tomato or dandelion – they tend to borrow from Mother Nature’s playbook.

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Tomato growers use indirection in a thorough way. They meticulously adjust the greenhouse in order to create optimal growing conditions for a handful of carefully selected (or even modified) seeds. Pests, cold weather and competing species are kept out of the greenhouse. Mintzberg notes that this mindset tends to grow good tomatoes, but might not produce a strong tomato plant. This is how some excellent marketers work: they pick promising anecdotes, remove them from their context and grow them into something special.

Dandelion-types prefer a more efficient approach, where strategies grow like weeds in an organization. Since you cannot, according to Mintzberg, distinguish between good and bad strategies at their conception (at the seed stage), you must allow them to grow before taking your pick of the crop. This has downsides, too, like the cost of observing all of the strategies growing at any moment. Venture capitalists have solved the observability problem with term sheets, which give them legal rights (equity) to winning weeds (startups).

It’s a fun game to sort your colleagues into the Tomato and Dandelion buckets, but the real point here is that the Seed is a classic and widespread image of indirection, with its own theory of change.

In our taxonomy, this image sits at Encode x Diffuse. The initial action is Encode; inject a packet of information into the environment. That packet contains some “code”, which allows it to grow, affect its surroundings and, importantly, propagate across settings. Once released into the world, these packets execute their blueprint repeatedly and autonomously, to the extent that environmental conditions are favorable.

Sometimes conditions are extremely conducive to growth, as one might see with an invasive plant species like Scotch broom. What entered Washington State as a singular, tiny seed has now terraformed the entire landscape. This is why the seed image fits into the Diffuse column. For what you gain in efficiency (seeds are small, dense and can be self-sustaining) you lose in control.

Attempts to achieve direct command over the outcome of a seed tend to have nasty second-order effects. Such was the case with DDT. Mintzberg makes the case that weeds are a far more realistic depiction of the processes through which strategies are formed, where the role of a strategist isn’t to 3D print a perfect tomato, but to plant seeds, create conditions conducive to growth and pay attention to what emerges.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Seed

These strengths and weaknesses are to help you understand the limitations of popular mental models – not to establish a winner.

Strengths

• Discourages final solutions and promotes management instead. In the context of an organization, this preserves optionality – and therefore the ability to change.

• Balances the mechanical view of work, of inputs and outputs, which we inherited from the 19th- and 20th-century theories of management. Creative work in particular requires discontinuous methods and defies simple divisions of labor.

• Orients you towards two important focus points – content and context. Content is what you can control, like product characteristics or characters in a narrative. Context, the environment that a seed must grow in, is something you can merely monitor, and sometimes influence.

• Forces you to compress ideas. The image of a seed is that of a maximally dense tangle of data that unfolds into a living organism. The lighter and smaller you can get an idea, the further it can travel.

• Enriches your analogical range. The space of adjacent concepts, including forestry, gardening, jungles and bugs, is rich. For some modern examples, see: Of Termites & Tokens, Only Openings and Black Swan Farming.

Weaknesses

• Lures people into an anarchic standpoint, from which they perceive workplaces as peaceful gardens full of wise, decent and mutualistic species. In reality, plants fight to the death over limited space and against insects. Seeds might be cute little plant babies, but there is a necessary degree of structure and responsibility required for their success.

• Suffers from poor observability. Seeds diffuse into the landscape, slowly grow, then diffuse again. They are cheap to deploy but expensive to observe. When a project is designed in the image of a seed, more energy tends to be invested into encoding the seed rather than determining a follow-up strategy.

• Appears simpler than it is. Most thinkers using this image do not differentiate between the different types of seeds. In biological terms, there are three types of seeders: C-, S- and R-strategists. I’ve explained these at the end.

• Smuggles in the naturalistic fallacy: because nature is the result of 3.8 billion years of evolution, it’s easy to assume that copying it is the right move. However, recycled patterns carry assumptions about context. A (mostly) failed instance of indirection was the paleo health movement, which suggested that we adopt ancestral lifestyles. That ship has sailed. Not only is our environment irreversibly different, it is also objectively better in many ways. Do not equate natural with good.

Using the Image

The point of metaphor is to think creatively about something – to make a discontinuous leap in logic that helps you win. However, especially with metaphors that have a lot of hidden details, it can be nice to have a couple of proven templates.

Modern plant strategy work suggests that there are three types of seeders: Competitors (C), Stress-Tolerators (S) and Ruderals (R). This is based on the theory that plants navigate disturbance (like grazing, fire, pests) and stress (resource limitations).

• Competitors (C), such as oak trees, seed into densely populated environments where new plants must grow quickly to monopolize resources. Seeds are evolved for early and rapid growth.

• Stress-Tolerators (S), like cacti and shrubs, handle stress well, but exist mainly in stable environments. Seeds must withstand drought, heat and cold.

• Ruderals (R), including dandelions and other weeds, are fast-growing, short-lived and rely on huge seed volumes with low individual survival rates.

Irrigation is another one of my favorite templates. Rather than aim for a stable configuration of species and invest into specific individuals, you focus on saturating areas of interest with the ingredients for success. Control and planning are expensive. Providing resources without tight oversight will always produce losses, but it’s worth considering if those losses are lower than the costs of administrative overhead and of maintaining accurate knowledge of the area of interest. I’ve seen a handful of projects fail because they were too selective upfront.

Sometimes, the goal is not to reap what you sow, but to seed a new landscape altogether. Consider a watch company that relies on a single manufacturer for a certain sensor. Imagine that watch company develops a new sensor technology, but makes it open-source. What happens? They plant a seed that can grow into a competing sensor supplier, driving down prices for a critical component of their watches.

Using the seed as an image of indirection was part of a needed diversification. Machines and mechanisms captured our imaginations during the 19th and 20th centuries. Seeds offer a fresh foil for thinking creatively about achieving big things. However, personally, I think we’re close to the peak of this analogy – naturalistic thinking is widespread and a little naïve. Evolution is a great theory but a borderline useless concept in practice, where you don’t get multiple generations of efforts. And don’t even get me started on all the people using the word “metabolism”…

But perhaps this image’s biggest strength is its discouragement of final solutions. I think people often rush into problems intent on solving them once and for all, when they should perhaps simply be managed. I talk more about this in The Voyage of Theseus.

Now that we have our feet planted firmly in either corner of the taxonomy, it’s time to dive into the remaining seven images of indirection: River, Virus, Gravity Well, Lens, Domino, Clock and Catalyst – some of the most common mental models for oblique problem-solving.

P.S. Hellooo, and thank-you, to the 77 new subscribers since the last post dropped.

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Even as children, we quickly intuit the dynamics of simple machines like the lever and its fulcrum. Almost everyone has pried open a lid or rocked a seesaw. This shared, almost magical experience of mechanical advantage makes the lever an ideal starter image for more difficult problems in work and life. Indeed, Archimedes’ famous quote inspires many to dream big from a young age.

However, this quote is both a blessing and a curse. Like any metaphor for indirection, the Lever has several persistent blind spots. Even if you don’t wish to expand your repertoire, you should know how to wield this image. Carefully, like a sword that cuts both ways – not just a blunt instrument.

In this chapter, we’ll dive into the strengths and weaknesses of the Lever image, and dip briefly into its long history. But before we start, it’s time to introduce the taxonomy behind Images of Indirection. During my initial interviews it became clear that managers and knowledge workers tend to have a 2-4 image repertoire and there were some nascent clusters emerging. Those clusters mapped nicely to two axes: Driver – what drives the initial effect and Relay – how the initial effect finds and affects its target.

Each image has a unique combination of Driver and Relay types, which together explain in which contexts each image tends to (under)perform. Each Driver type – Push, Shape, Encode – describes the initial move made by the actor in the system. The spectrum of Relay types – Aimed, Channeled, Diffuse – characterize how the initial move routes to its target and what is affected along the way. By mapping the nine images of indirection according to these types, the grid layout reveals if your default way of thinking about indirection is specialized or diversified. You might prefer Aimed images that map nicely onto real-world metrics. Or all of your analogies could be computer-like, fitting into the Encode row. Perhaps you have your own metaphors, which I haven’t named in my set of 9, but that still fit nicely into the grid.

By the end of the series, this taxonomy will comprise a complete framework. Beyond the individual deep dives, the whole set should be helpful in a few ways: i) to spot patterns in how you think about change, ii) as a structured exercise to augment your planning process and iii) as a “periodic table” that you can use to upgrade your literacy and help others think about indirection.

For the record, these are the same things I’m hoping to get out of this project. I want to be practical AND dangerously creative.

An artifact of mechanical thinking

I was once in a boardroom where an executive said, “We should take stock of the levers that we have available to us.” Their team was proactively managing fallout from a reorganization project, which was expected to be unpopular with staff. That phrase could not have been more on the nose. It’s representative of how many executives picture their role in an organization: at the helm of the vessel, looking at their dashboard, instrument panel and an assortment of levers.

Since the industrial revolution it’s been common to portray organizations as machines. And the ability of a manager – the driver of the machine – is a function of the quantity and quality of levers available to them. Robert McNamara, briefly president of Ford and former U.S. Defense Secretary, was the epitome of mechanical thinking.1 From industry to government, he insisted upon collecting data as a way to uncover the most effective levers available, to improve the furnishings of an organization’s cockpit. While McNamara’s particular track record is spotty, particularly in the case of his involvement with the Vietnam War, this style of management – and its default image of indirection – has had its successes. An outright focus on just a couple of effective activities can lead to great results.

Andy Grove’s High Output Management is likely the most explicit and influential formalization of the lever metaphor.2 He published the book in 1983 and titled chapter 3 “Managerial Leverage”, defining leverage as the relationship between a work activity and its level of output. High-leverage activities generate high levels of output; low-leverage activities, a low level of output. He even turned it into an equation (L1 x A1 + L2 x A2 + …) that sums leverage coefficients by their activities. This equation is just as popular and useful as it is wrong and illustrative of this image’s biggest weaknesses.

Grove claimed that mechanical advantage exists in organizations and can lead to disproportionate returns on investment. I’m paraphrasing, but variations of this claim are widely accepted. If you push in the right place, you’ll beat someone who applies force in a less intelligent way. Thinkers like Andy Grove, Richard Koch, Donella Meadows, Joseph Juran and Michael Porter all popularized the use of leverage as a mental model, including the notion that identifying leverage points is a skill that can be developed. They were right, too – to this day, this frame leads many people to discover clever ways of improving organization, increasing profit and making bigger impact.

However, the image of the lever contains very strong assumptions about the world and it fails miserably in certain contexts.

Strengths and weaknesses of the lever as an image of indirection

A lever possesses several components and characteristics which make it an efficient, simple machine:

• An arm (the lever itself) which is of a certain length and, most importantly, extremely rigid and strong.

• A fulcrum, around which the lever arm rotates, providing usually just a single axis of range. Most levers go up and down, like a seesaw.

• One side upon which rests the object of change, like a very large boulder, or a pallet full of bricks, or a conceptual change object like a company’s reputation or a country’s birth rate.

• A force that acts upon the side opposite of the change object.

The simplicity of the lever is part of what makes it such a great metaphor. It’s portable across contexts from policymaking to investing in financial markets, to more mundane settings like loading a stove into the back of your buddy’s truck. In our taxonomy, the Lever is an Aimed Push. You have a specific target and you apply force locally, at a connected target, in order to achieve your bigger, more ambitious goal indirectly.

An investor can turn a 1% return into a very, very large financial gain in nominal terms by using debt to increase the size of an investment, like shorting some shares of Acme Co. This is called leveraging up and works by extending the length of the lever arm. Debt allows you to easily short 10x more Acme Co. shares. But the beauty of a lever – that it faithfully transmits force from one end to the other – is also its primary weakness. The image of a lever assumes that there exists a tightly-coupled chain of events that connect the initial force (in this case, the purchase of shorts) and the outcome (the stock price). Contract law does that to investors, which is why a very small decrease in investment value was enough to bankrupt Lehman Brothers during the great financial crisis.

This assumption of tight coupling holds across all contexts where we imagine indirection as a lever. The mental model fails both when leverage turns negative and catapults you off your end of the seesaw, and when there actually isn’t a rigid lever. Going back to the case of McNamara, his views influenced the Ford company to issue an edict that workers were to use all inventory from one car model before beginning production of the new model. The company’s line workers simply dumped the old parts into a nearby river. The company culture and systems at Ford were not tightly coupled enough such that this type of command-and-control style of management would work. There was too much slack.

Another strength of the Lever is that it prompts you to look for better fulcrums – places in a market, environmental or organizational landscape that allow you to use your actually-strong levers to their fullest. Strategists like Michael Porter might have referred to this as positioning. Enhanced creativity, even if temporarily, is one of the best reasons to use metaphors in our professional life. They allow you to look at a situation in a new way and notice new things. But the landscape is always shifting – companies that rely on lever thinking might build their whole model around just one good fulcrum. Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle captured the logic of leverage in another aphorism, more modern than the one of Archimedes:

“Conventional wisdom is not to put all your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.”3

Unfortunately, as soon as the landscape shifts, your eggs crash onto the floor.

A final weakness of the Lever was pointed out by Donella Meadows, ironically one of the most effective popularizers of the lever image. Her magisterial paper Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System has inspired many people to search for new sources of mechanical advantage. She went on to publish many more papers, essays and books on systems thinking that have influenced generations of analysts. The weakness that Meadows eventually pointed out was that while you can easily train professionals to find leverage points (ready combinations of a fulcrum and lever) most of them will push in the wrong direction. The simplicity of the model leads to simple conclusions and excessively confident action. In the end, Meadows concludes that levers are not such simple machines after all.

“Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.”4

Ultimately this image is not equally useful in all contexts. It’s better used where dynamics are relatively simple, the environment is predictable and where the relationship between input and output can be mapped and estimated with reasonable accuracy.

How leverage stole indirection’s lunch

As we’ll see throughout the rest of this series, the lever has simultaneously promoted awareness of indirection while monopolizing the conceptual space. There are many other images of it. Most people are reasonably averse to “brute forcing” their way through a problem, or at least tend to become averse after a few attempts.

But we almost always talk about indirection in terms of the lever, rather than the many other metaphors that might work better in particular contexts. For example, Koch talked about tipping points – an obvious and unexpectedly rich domino metaphor – in lever language. Grove spoke of high-leverage activities that are brief but affect behavior across a long time frame – that sounds more like a seed to me.

The metaphor of the lever has expanded to fill the entire conceptual space of indirection action, flattening important distinctions and dampening creativity. Unbundling this space will be difficult, but I think it will be immensely rewarding. I’m excited to do it.

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Thanks for reading the intro. Check out the minisite for this book.

Mr. Douglas Petriw is colorblind, has a moustache that would make a walrus blush, and is a brilliant chemist. I took physics and chemistry with him in my last two years at F.H. Collins high school. During that time, Petriw issued me 16 report cards – 4 per course. Written at the bottom of each and every one, under Remarks, was the same sentence.

“Timber would do better if he applied himself.”

After about seven of these report cards I started to expect the remark to reappear, but always kind of hoped it would be something different. It wasn’t. Even when my grades swung from A’s to B’s to D’s and back again. Even when I was his son’s soccer coach. Petriw wasn’t lazy or uncreative. He was a role model in both respects. Looking back, he was making a disciplined effort to teach me something important. But I never felt like I wasn’t applying myself. In fact, I once created an ester so aromatic that it caused a fruit fly infestation when I forgot the beaker in the chem lab over the weekend. So what was I missing?

Petriw wanted me to try harder. The phrase “apply yourself” is vague but meaningful, because it is forceful. It requires narrowing your focus and raising your PSI of effort. I have a feeling that the image which Petriw had in mind was that of a lever – where concentrated cognition and disciplined routine on one end could move mountains and molecules on the other.

Later, after I graduated from UVic, I found myself working in boardrooms, not chem labs. There were still report cards (performance reviews, key performance indicators, and OKRs) and overarching goals, like getting acquired or taking a company public. In government offices, there were similar concepts.

And, in both worlds, there was lots of talk about leverage. Leverage ranks high in the world of management jargon, up there with words like efficiency and liability. That’s because people who want to change the world do not weigh as much as the thing they seek to change. In order to achieve ambitious goals, whether mandated or self-assigned, one must have a creative approach. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve realized is that we are profoundly unimaginative about how change actually happens. We reach for leverage, apply more force, and once again jump to the conclusion that the gap between effort and outcome is best closed by pushing harder.

When people say “leverage”, they are actually using a specific metaphor to talk about a broader concept: indirection.

The lever, an image which we inherited from Archimedes, is an overdetermined mental model. It helps us think about how to achieve more with less, but also constrains us in underappreciated ways. Why is that important? The vast majority of managers, entrepreneurs and policymakers use leverage as their primary image of indirection – creating systemic blindspots. As business theorist Gareth Morgan illustrated in his seminal book Images of Organization, several prior generations used machines as their primary metaphor for thinking about how to lead an organization. That had enormous effects on business strategy, including how to treat employees. Imagining indirection as a lever is useful, but if you aren’t aware of the limitations you’ve adopted, you’re fated to make more blunders than necessary.

Indirection is a central design concept in computer science. David Wheeler, one of the pioneers of the field, put it this way: “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.” The idea is simple: instead of acting on a thing directly, you act on a reference to it — a pointer, an abstraction, a layer of remove. This buys you two things: decoupling, the ability to change what’s underneath without disturbing everything built on top; and amplification, where a single well-placed change propagates to every place that depends on it. Fix the function, fix ten thousand call sites at once. Write the standard, and everyone who adopts it does your work for you.

Computer scientists have been thinking rigorously about indirection for seventy years. The rest of us are still calling everything leverage.

The Nine Images of Indirection

Over the next year, I will cover the most popular, underappreciated and promising images of indirection I’ve encountered over the first 10 years of my career. Each time someone mentioned a new metaphor, I noted it down. Phrases like “What’s the bottleneck here?”, “Let’s zoom out on this.”, “How can we catalyze this market?” and “We’ve planted the seed, now we just need to water it.” came up again and again. Indirection goes by many names. It’s time to compare their strengths and weaknesses. One month, one image, until the book is complete.

You might already think about indirection in these terms, but I figure most people use just 2 or 3 at MOST. That leaves a lot on the table. The nine images – lever, domino, virus, clock, catalyst, gravity well, lens, river, seed – each illuminate something the others don’t.

After starting to use this framework myself since last November, I can say it’s rounded out my perspective. For example: how could I get more executives to improve their business protocols? A targeted campaign would be direct. But by sketching this idea as a virus, it was intuitive that executives are inoculated against stray information. They tightly control what reaches them. A better target “host” would be the analysts and advisors – the voracious readers that support the executive class. If my image of indirection was stuck as a lever and fulcrum, I doubt that this approach would have come to mind.

Another example: I once ran into a problem when brokering a data sharing agreement between two firms. Approvals stalled on one end. The default approach, had I just tried harder, would have been to continue following up via email or, if push came to shove, escalate the issue. But, by thinking about the issue like a gardening problem, my focus shifted from pushing to growing. We had already planted the seed – that shared data would help improve workplace safety – but we hadn’t invested enough into improving conditions for growth. What ended up fast-tracking the signature process was when I got the two counterparties to bond over their shared love of canoeing. All of a sudden, they were texting, and the problem dissolved! As my colleague likes to say, “Never push on a string.”

My goal is to provide a set of images that rounds out blind spots and increases the depth of available metaphors.

Each month I’ll research one image to better understand its actual dynamics, strengths and weaknesses. I will also interview practitioners whose jobs require them to think competently about indirection. A monthly cadence gives me enough time to do both groundwork and fieldwork, while maintaining a focus on my main project. By the end of the year, I’ll have a complete draft of the monograph.

This grid has a hidden structure. Three rows, three columns, and a taxonomy. I’ll reveal it properly in the first real essay. For now, just let the images sit together. Notice which ones feel familiar and which feel strange. The nine metaphors divide along a surprisingly simple axis that I think will change how you see all of them.

This tempo also lines up nicely with the poll I ran in January. Readers like you stated a preference for monthly posts. Subscribe to Blundercheck and get one email per month with the latest chapter of Indirection.

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I’m extremely, selfishly excited to write this and I hope you find it useful as well. This project started as a personal problem: I have more things I want to see happen in the world than I have time or energy to make happen directly. I suspect you might feel the same way.

The serialized version will be free. If you want to help make the final version of the monograph as excellent as possible, sign up for an interview. I’d love to talk to you more about your work and how you think about achieving big goals without, necessarily, applying yourself.

See you next month with the first image. It’s the one you already know – which is precisely why we need to examine it carefully and urgently.

If someone sent you this, you can subscribe to Blundercheck, the home of the Indirection book project, here. If you want to follow my other project, Protocolized is here. Thank you to Ann & Liam for providing feedback on this post.

Happy holidays everyone. Last post of the year for Blundercheck – see you in January.

Typical writing wisdom dictates that confidence reads better. Don’t say “I think…” Just say what you think. Normally I follow that advice, but today’s post demands an exception. This is a little guide to personal branding, which I do an egregious job of. Read at your own risk!

Internet branding basics are well-covered: consistent profile picture, polished copy, updated social media pages, post regularly, stick to one topic, etc.

Instead, I want to focus on a (paradoxically) more human approach to personal branding. It’s probably wise to candy paint your brand afterwards, using the more traditional methods I mentioned, since this guide will turn you into a monster.

Frankenstein, the monster dreamed up by Mary Shelley, is a sapient assembled from different people’s body parts. Its monstrosity is partly rooted in being a zombie, but mostly in being a meat puzzle.

Few people would take inspiration from Frankenstein regarding how to construct their own image. In practice, it’s a common methodology, hence the phrase: “We are the best parts of the people we meet.” The only difference is that interesting personal brands are assembled from living people’s traits, rather than dead people’s limbs.

Two examples before I share some tips, tools and tricks. First is Timm Chiusano, whose reels about thriving in Corporate America and practicing appreciation are like catnip to me. Second is Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery and analytical powerhouse, who many of you reading will be more familiar with. Chiusano and Thompson have slightly different approaches to Frankenbranding, but are clearly both good at it.

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Case I: Splicing

Timm Chiusano is a content creator and writer best known for short, quietly charismatic videos about work, appreciation and navigating corporate life without losing one’s humanity. His online presence – primarily on Instagram and LinkedIn – sits somewhere between career advice and gentle social critique.

Rather than offering optimization hacks or hustle rhetoric, Chiusano focuses on tone, posture and mindset: how to show up well, how to notice what’s working, how to be generous with credit and how to build a life inside institutions without becoming flattened by them.

He also provides an excellent first case study for this guide because of his transparently Frankensteinian approach. Obviously, he’s got his own personality, vibe and style (gentle, high-achieving and hip) but in terms of his brand, you can see the stitches connecting its constituent parts.

Chiusano’s not shy about it. In a recent Instagram story, he shared a list of people whose parts he’ll build a brand from in 2026, such as famous vlogger Casey Neistat and American TV personality Mister Rogers. It was a really good list and I’m sure it’ll work, just as it has in the past. No surprise from me when his account crosses 500,000 followers in the next couple of months.

People have been doing the same thing with vision boards for a long time. There’s a liberating element to splicing personalities and styles together. It’s very unlikely that you’ll find a commercial, off-the-shelf brand that will fit you. And if imitation feels wrong, it’s temporary. Unless you totally lack curiosity, you’ll naturally branch out looking for new genetic material for your brand.

I’ll save my jeremiad against self-reflection for the next case study, but safe to say that our friend Frankenstein would approve of Timm’s splicing approach.

Case II: Patchworking

Ben Thompson is an independent technology analyst and writer best known as the founder of Stratechery, a subscription newsletter launched in 2013 that helped define the modern category of paid, single-author internet analysis. His work focuses on the strategic dynamics of technology companies – particularly how distribution, aggregation, incentives and business models shape outcomes over time. For many readers, Stratechery functions less like news commentary and more like an ongoing seminar in applied strategy.

Thompson’s approach to branding could be called patchworking. First and foremost he’s a technology analyst. But he’s also a fan of the Milwaukee Bucks, a (now former) resident of Taiwan and a thorough Wisconsinite.

What’s less obvious about personal branding is the role it plays in, well, your personal life. Most people can’t sustainably base their entire lives on work. It’s important to have outlets, escapes, backup plans, external motivations, non-work friends and curiosities that aren’t directly profitable.

The default approach to this problem is to pick an existing bundle. You live in a city, climb the ladder at a local company HQ, cheer for the nearest football team in the state and pay attention to your national elections. Obviously, logistics can make this an impossibility.

While soul-searching via patchwork might feel alien, Thompson argues that it’s not just an alternative approach, but an objectively better one (bold mine):

It’s tragic that personal branding has become so deeply associated with knowing thyself and introspection. More important things in life require enough of both of those. Personal branding should be fun and less limiting.

Frankensteinian self-assembly > Freudian self-reflection.

How to Frankenbrand

Again, this is not my forte. However it’s a current project and I’m slightly qualified to comment on it. Blundercheck is a frankenbrand – a mix of safety, tactics, chess, risk and work content. It was hard to find a word strong enough to stitch those ideas together, but incredibly satisfying when I did.

Here are some methods and heuristics that I’m using:

1. Gravedigging: unlimited use of parts of other people, such as those whose work I admire in some way, like Chiusano, Thompson and others like chess player Daniil Dubov. It’s useful to have a diverse mix of “cadavers”.

2. Backronyms: this is a naming technique, but the logic applies. Choose a desired word or end state, then backfill as needed to create the whole. For example, C-3P0 is the protocol droid in Star Wars and if I wanted to create an institute called C-3P0, I’d pick 5 suitable words starting with C, P, P, P, O… Center for Protocolization Policy and Progress Observation.

3. Venn diagrams: write down the names of different people or ideas you’re interested in. Draw a circle for each, overlapping them where you feel there might be some shared elements. Describe and name the overlaps. This should get exponentially harder with the number of overlapping circles.

4. Counterprogramming: define a couple of things you refuse. Otherwise, you’ll feel tempted to incorporate everything into your frankenbrand.

5. Multiple Objective Principle (MOP): every post, product, or piece of content should do at least two things or emulate at least two of constituent parts of your brand. Always accomplish two things at once. Always be mopping.

6. Electrification: it’s okay to leave the stitches showing, but the thing needs to come to life. Jamming 2+ ideas or vibes together is just a perverted act of taxidermy unless it forces a creative synthesis.

7. Frankenstein’s compass: if a personal branding project begins to feel like therapy, journaling, or self-reflection you’ve gone too far. It should feel more like collection and curation.

Many people are feeling pessimistic about how their relationship to the internet. However, you have access to inspiration, ideas, communities and fresh problems to solve like never before. Branding like Frankenstein is monstrously fun and the superior outcomes it generates are a reason for optimism in a media landscape sorely in need of it.

Similarly, there are people obsessed with scale. Some obsess with the macro (large-scale) view; always making an effort to zoom out, take a 30,000-foot view, talk about "leverage points”, or say something about losing the forest for the trees. Then there are those who shrink to the micro scale, obsessing instead with minutia like self-improvement, biohacking, and parking ticket enforcement. They scale down their attention to maximally small units that provide a relative sense of power and control.

You should be careful not to become a habitual megalomaniac or pushover. You should exercise caution with your preference for micro or macro perspectives.

One way to play the game: mesolomania – the obsession with intermediate scales and, importantly, the avoidance of power struggles.

Mesolomaniacs intuitively build niches and bridges, and are excellent at playing long games. Those strengths, of course, come at a cost.

The agency gambit

This post isn’t about generalists, but the career of a generalist presents a good toy example to prime your intuition for the agency gambit. Generalists don’t have access to either the systemic levers (macro) or contextually optimal tools (micro) of specialists. They cannot act as independently or as powerfully.

Focusing on the middle ground costs agency.

For example, the Bank of Canada has the ability to set overnight interest rates that tilt the entire economy. Investment specialists, at the micro scale, know which financial instruments are optimal depending on the context. A generalist with a functional background in multiple domains, including finance, will know quite a bit about both of those things, but won’t ever be in a position to use them. Generalists sacrifice professional agency on both ends of the scale to develop richer perspectives.1

When played poorly, the agency gambit fails in a routine way: a lack of skill development. That’s why the term gambit is appropriate and not just a clickbaity Harvard Business Review coinage. Gambits are, by definition, suboptimal moves. You have to survive with less material until your opponent’s onslaught fizzles out and you can reap the positional rewards of your sacrifice.

Same goes in our toy example – generalists must accumulate enough knowledge, context, and literacy to compensate for their relative lack of skill / agency.

A mesolomaniac’s value is in the quality of their maps.

More broadly speaking, but still in the business landscape, obsession with the meso is about avoiding perspectival knee jerks like: “let’s zoom out” and “let’s double click on that”. Not only are those annoying NPC scripts, but a good map has a consistent scale. The micro or macro cannot accommodate each other, and the meso scale exists as a third point of view with a different set of pros and cons, like the ability to build relatively uncontested niches.

On being mid

Mesolomaniacs are, of course, mid. Legible excellence would be antithetical. Doing exceptionally well is only observable if there’s an existing benchmark to score yourself against. That immediately puts you in the realm of the macro or the micro, because at intermediate scales there are often not established metrics. For a mesolomaniac, what gets measured gets the selective incompetence treatment.

Mesolomaniacs are averse to competition, but don’t mind being adjacent to it. There’s a big difference between knowingly, wantingly being mid and being frustrated about being mid in the context of competition. The former can develop a positional advantage whereas the latter cannot. Part of niche-building is rapidly allying with those who are better than you. Especially if they’re better than you at something you already do.

Politics, process, and perspectives bifurcate with scale, splitting into distant poles. The logic of macroeconomics vs. the logic of family economics, strategy vs. tactics, global vs. local. That opens up a middle ground.

That middle ground between the twin peaks of a bimodal distribution is no man’s land. It’s the Valley of the Mid.

Bridges and trolls

It’s lonely in the Valley of the Mid… until a bridge is built. To most people, a bridge is for transport. To a monster, a bridge is a house. Mesolomaniacs naturally build bridges, and those bridges then serve as a protective niche.

It’s approximately the same dynamic as constructing a moat, but positive sum. Eventually, the bridge becomes a well-travelled piece of infrastructure and, therefore, a house with better furnishing. Indeed, bridges are a superior way to think about moats, in the classical business strategy sense. As Ben Thompson from Stratechery explains:

“…the naive approach to moats focuses on the cost of switching; in fact, however, the more important correlation to the strength of a moat is the number of unique purchasers/users.”

I use the suffix -maniac because mesolomaniacs are somewhat monstrous. They are odd and troll-like in their tendency to buck this vs. that thinking and go for a third option. They’re kind of like the evil twin of what Seth Godin calls linchpins, people so full of soul that they become indispensable to an organization.

Mesolomania creates a linchpin effect obliquely, by avoiding and mapping the extremes of an ecosystem, rather than by directly targeting a niche. It’s not about finding your particular magic so much as disciplined avoidance, observation, and looking for ways to create value without competing.

Trolls don’t have competition. There’s one troll per bridge, because each valley-dwelling monster has the opportunity to make its own bridge. They are antisocial but integral to the formation of new landscapes. As a troll grows in its valley, it requires a larger and larger home. Over time that home will fill the gap between the mutually exclusive peaks that comprise its walls.

I got a bit ahead of myself writing this because I was excited about the metaphor. It’s actually more accurate to think about the bridges that mesolomaniacs build as elevators. So they’re a weird, contemporary troll species that inhabits the elevator shafts that shuttle people’s attention between small and large scales.2

Mesolomaniacs thrive in Nakatomi space – the air ducts, corporate moats, the cc section in email chains – where other people don’t even think to tread, because there is no path to follow. It’s the ends of the horseshoe that are most legible and provide clearer marks of progress and rank, but therein lies the trap.

The horseshoe trap of scale

Micro- and macro-scale modes of being, when used chronically, fail in the same way. The more extremely and consistently you choose to tackle problems at a certain scale, the more your approach resembles its scalar opposite.

For example, consider how many people substitute self-improvement for strategy. That’s why nudge theory became so popular and, at its peak, grandiose. The idea of a nudge is to tweak someone’s environment in a way that makes it more likely that they’ll do the right thing. That’s a very micro concept. It got turned into a macro-scale, almost global approach to policy – then fizzled out. Same went for the intellectual dark web, which found no solution to society’s ills other than insisting that we all become more intellectual.

People who approach problems at a macro scale by default also fail for a lack of implementation mechanism. There are very few levers available to effect change at scale and few people that have access to those levers, so macro thinkers end up tilting at windmills. For the same reason that Systems Thinking sucks, macro scale perspectives breed hacks that don’t have much chance of working out.

More specifically, approaches at both extremes of the scale fail regularly because their ideas fail to translate into action. The macro needs the micro, and vice versa, but they often lack the professional neutrality that’s required for coordination.

On a personal level, playing at just one scale leads to the substitution of rhetoric for reality. Strategy starts to look like a matter of self-improvement. Or vice versa, when any kind of self-improvement can’t happen without a five-year plan.

Long games

This article outlines a rough idea – rough, in large part because scale is relative – but it’s promising. Take it as a “you know it when you see it” level of clarity. There are serious shortfalls to thinking small and thinking big, including rampant competition and an overly mechanical view of the world. The meso scale is under-occupied in most contexts, which means that even if you don’t like how it looks, at least it won’t be crowded.3

Just as we’re often pressured to pick a side, we’re often pressured to pick a scale. I suggest you pick the intermediate option more.

Ultimately, mesolomaniacs have less agency both in terms of tactics and strategy, but more in terms of shaping the board or field of play. They own the map and build the bridges. They’re a kind of monstrous infrastructure species in the business world. In Norse mythology, trolls are chaotic neutral – neither Godin’s chaotic good linchpin nor Machevialli’s lawful evil prince.

The world is bifurcating, polarizing, and leaving behind gaps, valleys, and trenches. At first, those spaces might not provide a sense of place. In time they will. The Valley of the Mid is where players of the long game will grow and build themselves a bridge to live under, creating stable ground for the new world, which struggled to be born, on which it can learn how to walk.

First of all, hello to the hundreds of new people here! I hope you’re getting some stuff out of this project / newsletter while I wrestle it into a coherent shape. Here’s why I call it Blundercheck, in case you’re curious.

Second, my next few weeks are busy – I’ll be juggling some live events and travel on top of my usual work – so I’ll take a short break from posting. The next Blundercheck article, Mesolomania, will go live in December.

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Seven ideas I’ve been stewing on

1. Heir gapping– There’s an inherent competitiveness between people close in age. That takes a roughly generational gap to go away and it’s why you should not pick a PhD supervisor that couldn’t be your parent. Many organizations implement heir gaps by accident, which reduces the odds of a coup, internal culture war, and so on, but also hides the necessity of succession planning.

2. Intermediate advertising – End users have cared for years about how things are made. We’ve gone through the wash several times now. Greenwashing, eco, organic, craft, free-range, ethical, grass-fed, handmade, homemade, new age, traditional… I even know several suppliers of intermediate products like lumber or chemicals that have gotten trapped in this cycle. Time to get out and sell your product for what it is.

3. Subtle standards – I have a few people in my life that really appreciate music. They have a higher bar for what they listen to. Not like “Ugh, Taylor Swift is too mainstream”. Musical taste is a near-mathematical literacy, whether it’s natural or developed through education. Food is like that too, but chemically. Furthermore, good music and food shouldn’t try to trick you. I’ve been trying (leisurely) to level up the depth and honesty of the things I listen to. Setting subtle standards is oddly satisfying.

4. Randomized audits – Audits are a really good tool if used well. But audits almost like antibiotics. Used too much, the audited function will develop resistance. Randomized audits can be a smart move to delay that adaptation.

5. My fitness checklist – I’ve been on the road a lot, and not playing or coaching soccer, so I’ve been slacking on exercise. My checklist approach to nailing the basics: 8-12k steps daily, 20 minutes of mobility or strength every other day, lots of veggies, don’t sweat the small stuff. Easy volume > intensity.

6. DBEM – Decision-Based Evidence-Making is still on my mind. I recently learned about something called effectuation, a kind of entrepreneurship and a bricoleur’s approach to getting things done. A link to that below.

7. Process safety vs. personal safety – These different domains requiring almost totally separate logics, but are bucketed into the same function at most workplaces. One notable difference: processes have steeper downside potential and are sometimes impossible to insure. Personal health and safety is far easier to insure.

Five articles I recently enjoyed

I’ve been in a real reading slump this year. Not sure why and as much as I hate to admit it, that’s a me problem. If you want to read more you gotta read more. Here are some short pieces I recently enjoyed:

• The Five Principles of Effectuation - A light intro to effectual logic, which powers a certain style of management or entrepreneurship.

• Trophic Cascade - A poem recommended by my aunt, since I keep bringing up the wolves in Yellowstone.

• Two Hundred Years to Flatten the Curve - Part of a series of articles about invisible infrastructure that we so, so, so take for granted. Some are paywalled.

• Collaboration Sucks - A great post from one of the hilarious minds at Posthog.

• Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance - Maria Popova asks, “Why are we asked to live in parts?”

A class I taught on protocol thinking

Teaching is totally new to me and I kind of suck at it, but I gave a short class as part of the 2025 Protocol Symposium. It’s now available online, along with the rest of the course. The subject is applied protocol thinking, and while I have a long way to go as a teacher, the content is solid. If you enjoyed Systems Thinking is Brain Rot for Analysts, you might like this.

Protocol thinking is about targeting the connections between actors to unlock interesting options elsewhere. Part of the reason I prefer this to systems thinking is that it’s easy to implement yourself and far more observable. Frameworks that require you to exit the system by “zooming out” trick you into thinking that you have more control over the situation than you do.

Take the self-paced version of the full course on the Summer of Protocols website.

Say hello to Doris

Doris is a 5-year-old aussiedoodle and canine chess prodigy. She’s a herding dog, speaks only French (therefore reports only to Laurie) and turns herself inside out trying to keep everyone in the house assembled. I’ll provide an update when Doris finds a checkered bandana.

A chess puzzle for the road

Fall and winter are here in the Northern hemisphere, which means it’s chess season. Classical chess is a bit of a snoozefest (rapid is a more spirited time format) and FIDE is a old boy’s club of washed-up, hidebound traditionalists… but this year’s world cup has been pretty good. A lot of players sense that they have a shot at toppling the defending world champion, Gukesh, should they qualify for the candidates tournament. The top 3 world cup finishers qualify.

We just recorded Bridge Atlas - Episode 3 with Yancey and Trent Van Epps. Trent is one of the brains behind Protocol Guild, a project that supports open-source software commons by funding its maintainers.

Blunderchecks are about enabling yourself to play the long game. Chess is really a terrible game if you lose in the opening. My first game, in high school, was like that. I thought my pal was an easy mark, then I waltzed into the cringeworthy scholar’s mate. The game was over in three moves and I didn’t play again for three years.

Now, I’m pretty good. In 2021, I won the UVic alumni chess tournament. It’s a nice hobby and part of me wishes that I learned earlier. A live, long game of chess where you get to take your opponent into a dark forest and see who comes out alive is a joy – but it requires not blundering.

The Ingroup Trap

The joy of the long game is what makes learning the dull parts worth it. I use the word dull because a cut from a dull knife hurts a lot more than a sharp one. Like having your ego stabbed with a cheap chess opening. Better to avoid such things altogether rather than make the mistake yourself.

Life is full of long games worth playing. Art. Building a brand. Physical training. Business. Family. Tuesday Night Music Bingo.

One common way to lose your path to the long game is a jury of mirrors. To aim at impressing your peers. To fall into the ingroup game. Why do you need to avoid this?

Because the long game is always played with the outgroup, not the ingroup. As one of my colleagues likes to say, “The future isn’t just today plus your thing. It’s today, plus your thing, plus everyone else’s thing.”

Unless your group is in charge of the future, you’re playing a game with many other groups. The math is simple: your ingroup is a fraction of the total system, so the long game—by definition—is decided elsewhere. If your moves don’t land beyond your peers, you’re not actually playing the long game, you’re just winning practice rounds.

Insulating yourself from others is an easy way to lose the game.

Avoiding the Edges

Efficiency-thoroughness-openness trade-offs (ETOTs) are the reason that groups are eliminated from the long game. Survival is out of the question if you become too extreme. It’s easy to become extreme if you’re in an arms race. Just like in chess, you want to carve out a position in the center of the board.

“A knight on the rim is dim.”

Take, for example, three different groups: bodybuilders, runners, and academics. It’s very easy to assemble a jury of mirrors by accident. The judges for Mr. Olympia are all former bodybuilders, and those competitions have become extremely niche with nearly no popular appeal. Runners push each other to the point of developing arrhythmia, thanks to Strava-like dynamics, and academics get into citation circle-jerks.

It’s a product and marketing concern too. A lot of products are developed by engineers who are bored and trying to do something impressive for their peers. Then they take a Plumbus to market and nobody wants it, even after everyone inside the firm was confident in it.

Bodybuilders should try to impress runners, academics, and engineers. Engineers should try to impress non-engineers. One of the fundamental implication of the ETOT concept is that you need to avoid the edges (see below). That’s not enough to guarantee a win, but that’s not the point. The point is retaining your option to play the long game.

You really want to avoid falling into the ingroup trap. It feels paradoxical in practice, at least partly due to the common adage, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” This is excellent advice for anyone planning an outdoor excursion, but requires some nuance before being ported over to other long games.

Niches vs. Arenas

The long game is about finding a niche. Narrow ingroups don’t have niches. They have arenas, which are fun and can help you grow, but you can’t live in an arena—at least not for long—because there’s not enough safety or interdependence. If you spend all of your time in arenas, you’ll eventually lose your spot near the top. Humans are fortunate to be only partial tournament species. We can have a foot in both the world of arenas and niches.

When you fall into an ingroup trap you lose the ability to secure a niche. Let’s go back to the examples of lifters and runners. These loosely correspond to two broad cultural movements, both of which have formed a jury of mirrors. Lifters compete on muscle mass and machismo. Runners on 5k times and VO2 max.

You can kind of see how these might map to political ideals at a macro scale. The lifter’s bulk-cut cycle corresponds to ideas about intentionally crashing the economy. Degrowth rhymes with endurance training methodologies that emphasize building a solid base before ramping up.

Both at a micro- and macro-scale, lifters and runners have fallen into the ingroup game. Elite runners have arms that look like spaghettini. Elite lifters look like the Michelin Man. “Runner States” and “Lifter States” both fail in their policies, because their policies are written by wonks, for wonks.

This sort of feedback loop becomes bad when it turns chronic. Avoiding it isn’t enough to win, but it’s enough to not lose. And in long games, not losing is almost equivalent to winning. We’ve seen enough people fall into this trap (like poor Grade 10s falling into the Scholar’s Mate) to now avoid replicating it ourselves.

A Checklist

There are many ways to avoid constructing a jury of mirrors. Avoidance strategies are also context dependent, but there’s some underlying logic from which we can make a checklist. I’d follow it if I were you. The jury of mirrors is a common failure mode in all kinds of long games. You have to avoid it.

1. Turning winners into judges. Pushes things too far via aggressive one-upmanship.

2. Trying to impress your competitors. Your competitors aren’t your audience, the judge, or your friends. Who cares.

3. Confusing dominance for mastery. Conquering an arena doesn’t translate to other skills automatically. Great players don’t always make great coaches.

4. Mistaking speed for progress. Confirmation from peers accelerates, input from the outgroup often slows things down – but can harden things.

5. Over-specializing in your admiration. Don’t become someone else’s mirror. Only admiring work like yours is a dead end.

You need to stay alive long enough to find the forest, where all the fun happens. Thanks and for shaping my thinking on this one.

One issue I’ve run into explaining protocols to people is that they pretty quickly begin to call everything a protocol. And that’s hard to correct, because any word can be conceptually stretched into fresh spaces.

Imagine if Tupperware wanted to make even better products or create an entirely new market. They’d commission a project called Summer of Containers (SoC) – a temporary research program that would create insights for Tupperware, based on a deeper understanding of the class of things—containers—that Tupperware belongs to.

You can understand many things as a container. Some are obvious: a bucket, a car trunk, a trash can, a cup, etc. Then you can go deeper: a cup is a container for coffee or beer; it’s also a container for energy and good times. You could also imagine a chair as a container. Or a book. Or an agenda for a meeting.

Pretty soon, everything around you looks like a container.

Obviously, not all of these things are primarily containers. A chair is better understood as a chair than as a container, but seeing it as a container can help you understand it better. Likewise, strangely, the designers at Tupperware can learn from how a chair acts as a container.

Once you have a bunch of examples and studies, then comes the hard work of boiling down what a container really is. Why do people need them? How do we make them? What’s the process for improving a container?

Ideally this could become a kind of science of Tupperware. There are likely too many degrees of freedom for a “grand unified theory” but containers do have important mathematical principles in their design. For example, if you want to stack containers inside of each other they need to have at least a 3 degree taper. Otherwise they’ll vacuum-seal together.

But you don’t even need to get to that point of formal theory to have useful intuitions about container design. If you’re immersed in container studies long enough, and if you don’t get caught up in impressing your container-nerd peers, that could well translate to a great skill.

Containers are such a fundamental part of everyday life, from mayonnaise to macroeconomic currents, that even a small improvement in how you think about them could create some great benefits.

They’re the backbone of the meal prep economy, bootleg Lego kits, your dad’s garage, friendsgiving, global supply chains, and extraterrestrial networks of satellites (ever heard of a CubeSat?). Even if you don’t become a full-fledged container expert, acquiring a functional literacy is certainly enriching.

Containerwatching is like birdwatching, but more cerebral, less dorky, and you can do it anywhere.

This is kind of what it’s like to study protocols. Not many people do, but they’re the bottom 80% of the civilizational iceberg. If you enjoyed Marc Levinson’s The Box, you’d probably enjoy the Protocol Reader – a collection of essays on protocols.

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Imagine two maps of the contiguous United States of America. One map color codes states by Republican and Democrat leanings. The other shows which states prefer Keto and which prefer Vegan. They line up almost perfectly.

Obviously, ideology is upstream of diet in terms of causality. Religions issue strict food preparation protocols. Eating a pork chop with applesauce won’t make you believe in God.

Wrong… I fell into that trap a while ago.

Narrative Food Wrappers

It’s diets that spark religious beliefs. And eating a pork chop can make you believe in God. This is why we had – and still have – such brutal dietary tribalism. We’re past the peak, but the feud between Seed Oil Bros and Plant-Based Bros isn’t over.

There are a few ways this can happen and one is particularly common. It starts with Bob, who wants to lose a couple of pounds or get a six-pack to impress girls (actually, it’s only his buddies that will care). In order to do that, he needs to get into a negative energy balance. Calories in minus calories out, so a CICO of less than 0.

To be a bit more precise (and to make it clear that I’m not completely bullshitting on this topic) here’s how energy balance is calculated:

Caloric Intake - BMR - NEAT - TEF - Exercise = 𝚫 Energy

Caloric intake is what you eat. Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is how many calories you burn at rest / to stay alive and alert. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) includes things like when you nervously bounce your knee or pick your nose. Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) accounts for the calories burned by the digestion of some foods, like insoluble fibre.

BMR, NEAT, TEF, and plain old exercise add up to your caloric expenditure – “calories out” of the metabolic system.

It’s not realistic for Bob to increase his BMR, NEAT, or TEF to lose weight. They’re either genetically determined or too marginal to matter. His only options are to reduce caloric intake or exercise more. Bob is busy and going on a diet is less time-consuming than exercising more.

Blundercheck: when faced with the choice between eating less or exercising more, choose exercising more.

But who’s selling the diet that tells you to eat the same stuff, just 20% less? No one. Despite accomplishing the same thing—a CICO of less than 0—every diet has a unique ideological wrapper that makes it easier to adhere to.

• Keto: Reduces caloric intake by restricting the intake of carbohydrates. Story – carbohydrates are ruining your metabolism.

• Vegan: Reduces caloric intake by restricting the intake of animal products. Story – we evolved only to eat plants.

• Christian Orthodox: Reduces caloric intake via date-based limits on the intake of fish, dairy, and red meat. Story – something about gluttony.

• Paleo: Reduces caloric intake by elimating non-“ancestral” foods. Story – our digestive systems have not kept up with changes in food.

• Slow Carb: Eliminates refined carbohydrates. Story – fast carbs don’t satiate your appetite and are designed to get you to eat more.

• Peat: Eliminates most vegetables, nuts, and seed oils. Story – some BS about supercharging your metabolism.

• Whole 30: Restricts diet to combinations of 30 base ingredients.

• Atkins: Basically Keto.

• So and so forth…

Whether or not these diets are effective depends a lot on the individual. But one thing is consistent: adherence requires buying into the narrative of the diet. For example, it’s much more potent to say that seed oils are inflammatory peasant food than to be like aw, geez, I should probably cut back a bit on french fries. Not only that, but blaming some sort of industrial complex, conspiracy, or macro-level trend is an antidote to guilt.

I should know. Unlike most people, I have tried most of these diets – from carnivore to vegan. Indeed, few others have as much claim to being a centrist as I do, having journeyed to both ends of the horseshoe and back.

In some ways, I have a natural defense against dietary tribalism: my severe allergy to peanuts, cashews, lentils, chickpeas, and all other sorts of legumes and tree nuts. Because I was, effectively, born with an preassigned elimination diet, I’ve had no trouble staying lean.

Obviously that defense wasn’t enough. Like most lads with a partially developed prefrontal cortex, I really wanted to get jacked. It was no contest. I went down the dietary rabbit hole from the opposite direction. I needed to get to a CICO balance of greater than 0.

That led me to buying into this whole weird narrative of different body types: ectomorphs, mesomorphs, and endomorphs. As if humans spawn in three distinct phenotypes… anyway. I self-identified as an ectomorph (who have trouble gaining weight). Miraculously, after consuming a disgusting amount of protein powder, oatmeal, and eggs, I finally managed to put on some pounds.

Satisfied with that, it was time to get lean again, and after another 30-second search for a suitable regimen I encountered the concept of a paleo diet. The narrative was simple: we have evolved over millennia, but our food systems have completely changed in the course of a couple centuries.

It was terribly appealing to me. The idea that I would not only get more ripped, but that I would also solve my allergies AND sound erudite while doing so? Hard to say no to that. By buying into the narrative, it was easy to stick to the diet. In fact, it hardly felt like a diet. More like a belief system.

I did wind up in pretty good shape. Physically and energetically, I felt better.

But I also became frustrated with things far beyond my circle of control. Big agriculture. Glacial action against Covid-19. Seed oils. Cultural feuds. The food pyramid. Unions. Things that I had rarely even thought about before, yet alone had strong opinions about. Through my self-indulgent search for content that would entertain these frustrations I found a lot of folks who felt the same way as me. No surprise, they also ate same way as me.

It’s not coincidence that the narratives that explain and enforce the paleo diet lead to such conclusions about life today – that its features are effectively alien to us, because they emerged so quickly and humans evolved independently of them. It’s a valid argument, but also horribly myopic. There’s more to life than what you eat and little reason to think that the logic of what food to eat should extend to political matters. Although, as I will explain later, there are some parallels.

There was a deep irony to the paleo and paleo-adjacent crowd’s obsession with ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Those people consumed a lot of bread and grains. Including the especially jacked gladiatorial class.

The fact is, diets do work. Many of us do experience physical and metabolic benefits from adjusting our caloric intake relative to our activity level. However, there’s a colossal heap of BS out there, which is easily picked up and sold by health influencers with something to sell. Unfortunately they’re pretty good marketers – in the Grabowskian sense that they’re able to make new customers with effective narratives. Narratives that are the roots of dietary tribalism.

The Origins of Dietary Tribalism

Our zeal for diets that are Trojan Horses with ideological payloads isn’t a new phenomenon at all – it has deep roots. Many ancient societies codified food rules as divine commandments or cultural taboos, complete with myths and moral rationales. Again, it was food first, faith second.

These protocols often had practical benefits for health or survival and were, notably, enforced through the powerful glue of belief. People did not need to understand the underlying microbiological mechanisms in order to benefit. In essence, diets had religions. Eating (or not eating) certain foods could indeed make you a believer – or at least a more cohesive community member.

Consider one of the oldest and most pervasive examples: religious dietary laws. Judaism’s kosher rules and Islam’s halal code include similar prohibitions – for example, the complete avoidance of pork.

On the surface, these are framed as matters of ritual purity or religious orthodoxy. But there are practical reasons below. Pigs were difficult to raise in hot, arid Middle Eastern climates and often carried parasites and disease. Marvin Harris and others argued that the taboo against pork had a utilitarian origin: in a region short on water and grazing land, pigs competed with humans for resources and harbored Trichinella worms and other pathogens.

Avoiding pork would have improved a community’s health outcomes (fewer parasitic infections) and conserved resources – even if ancient Israelites or Arabs didn’t know about microscopic parasites, they knew pigs made people sick and were costly to feed. Thus, “unclean” swine became religiously off-limits – edict of a diet, bolstered by sacred narrative. The practical effect was a healthier, more resilient population.

Many food taboos around the world show this blend of medical/ecological insight and spiritual enforcement. Traditional kosher law mandates specific slaughter methods (draining blood) and rejects any animals found already dead (carrion). These rules sound like unthinking traditionalism, but they align with food safety – ensuring meat is fresh and free from blood-borne illness.

In tropical regions, cultures often tabooed eating certain carnivorous fish or bottom-feeders, which we now know tend to accumulate toxins. Snakes or other venomous animals are shunned as food in traditional lore – unsurprisingly, since the risk of catching and consuming them often outweighs the nutritional benefit.

A Hindu example: strict Hindus refrain from eating after sunset and traditionally avoid harvesting fruits at night, a practice born in an era before artificial lighting when groping around in the dark for food meant more snake bites and injuries. In all these cases, what might have started as sensible precautions became wrapped in ritual. By obeying the taboo, people reaped health benefits, and by cloaking it in spiritual terms, the community ensured prosocial compliance.

When a whole tribe agrees that only food prepared a certain way is acceptable, it means you naturally eat mainly with your tribe. This limits commensality (shared meals) with outsiders, which in turn preserves cultural cohesion. As one research review on food taboos notes:

“…any food taboo, acknowledged by a particular group of people as part of its ways, aids in the cohesion of this group, helps that particular group maintain its identity in the face of others, and therefore creates a feeling of ‘belonging’.”

Even arbitrary or extreme food taboos carry a kernel of ancient trial-and-error wisdom. In some Pacific Island tribes, only the chief’s family could eat a certain delicacy like a large fish or wild pig. Selfish? Perhaps – but it limited depletion of a resource by the whole population. And if you broke these rules, it was a sin, punishable not only by the community but by the spirits or gods.

In these ways, food and faith intertwined to guide behavior. Diets are defended with a violent fervor. Indeed, history is rife with examples of brutal dietary tribalism. In medieval Spain, inquisitors famously checked whether converts from Judaism were secretly still keeping kosher – something as simple as refusing pork could arouse deadly suspicion. That’s how defining these diet identities were.

And this was the origin of dietary tribalism: shared beliefs about food that confer both survival advantages and a sense of “us vs them.” It’s a pattern that continues today in new guises. A Paleo dieter railing against “industrial grain subsidies” or a Vegan condemning meat as “violence against animals” are, in a way, echoing priests and prophets – wrapping what might be sound nutritional advice (eat more whole foods; eat more plants) in a grand narrative of good and evil.

The big difference is that now, ideology has been replaced (at least in theory) by secular science and policy. And that brings us to the next phase in the evolution of how we eat: the secularization of diets.

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The (Mostly) Successful Secularization of Diets

From the 1800s to late 1900s, humanity’s relationship with food transformed. In much of the world – particularly the West – the old religious food laws began to lose their grip on daily life. Nation-states and scientific institutions stepped had begun the secularization of dietary guidance.

Instead of priests or village elders telling us what to eat (and what it means symbolically), we got doctors, nutritionists, and government agencies issuing guidelines.

“Thou shalt not eat pork” evolved into “For a healthy heart, limit saturated fat to under 10% of calories.” The language changed from moral to medical.

How successful was this secularization? Massively. While heart disease is still a leading cause of death, new protocols launched by scientific institutions reduced many other ills, like goiter, rickets, pellagra, and neural tube defects. Nutrition research and development saved millions of lives. However, as we see today, it also set the stage for new conflicts and tribalism, just with new high priests (or influencers) and new heresies.

The rise of nutrition science changed everything. For the first time, researchers identified vitamins and minerals and traced specific diseases to their deficiency. This new knowledge quickly translated into public health action. Governments began intervening in the food supply in a very practical (and entirely religion-neutral) way: fortifying foods with essential nutrients.

Fortification

To illustrate how effective this was, here are a few landmark achievements:

• Salt Iodization (1920s): Starting in 1924, common table salt was fortified with iodine to prevent goiter – a thyroid disease that was rampant in inland areas due to iodine-poor soil. Iodine deficiency disorders vanished in countries that adopted iodized salt. The swollen thyroid glands of the “goiter belt” in the Great Lakes region of the US became a rarity. No religious edict necessary.

• Milk Vitamin D Fortification (1930s–40s): Rickets, a crippling bone disease in children, was found to be caused by vitamin D deficiency. The solution was simple: add vitamin D to milk. By the 1940s, rickets went from ubiquitous to uncommon in America and Europe. No ceremony.

• Enriched Flour and Bread (1940s): In the early 20th century, pellagra (caused by niacin deficiency) was killing tens of thousands in the American South. Joseph Goldberger famously showed it was a dietary issue, not an infection, despite facing ridicule. Once niacin, along with thiamin, riboflavin, and iron, were mandated to be added to flour (War Order No. 1 in 1941 and US standards soon after), pellagra virtually disappeared by the 1950s. No taboos.

• Folic Acid in Grains (1990s): Scientists realized that folate deficiency in early pregnancy led to neural tube defects in newborns. Rather than implore would-be mothers to eat liver or lentils (rich in folate) the U.S. FDA decided in 1996 to require folic acid fortification in cereal grains. This took effect by 1998. The result: a significant reduction in birth defects like spina bifida in the following decades.

Four cases where a secular fix achieved what no amount of individual sermons or tribal fervor could. Three even reached everyone through their daily bread!

These examples highlight a key aspect of secular diet interventions: they tend to be universal and inclusive. Unlike a religious rule which might apply only to believers (and exclude or even ostracize others), a public health measure like iodized salt or enriched flour quietly benefits anyone who eats. Nutrition became a field of statecraft and scientific progress.

Dietary Guidelines

Alongside fortification came public dietary guidelines – essentially a secular gospel of eating. The United States pioneered this with the USDA’s food guides.

That pyramid (see image above) neatly stacked food groups with breads and grains at the base (to be eaten in greatest quantity) and fats and sweets at the tiny apex (to be used sparingly). This was essentially a visual codification of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which had begun in 1980 and were updated every 5 years. It was secular and intended for everyone, from any background – a stark contrast to, say, kosher laws that concerned only Jews or halal only Muslims. Here was one diet to rule them all, based on the best nutritional science of the day.

Of course, no single diagram could capture the complexity of nutrition science, and the Food Pyramid was not without flaws or critics. For one, it lumped all fats together at the top as “bad” and all carbs at the bottom as “good,” which we now recognize was an oversimplification (avocados and olive oil are far healthier than white bread, yet the pyramid’s design might suggest the opposite). Furthermore, the pyramid’s high-carb base was later blamed for inadvertently promoting refined starches – some argue it contributed to the 1990s boom in processed low-fat, high-sugar foods, as people swapped butter for Snackwell’s cookies. There were also accusations of industry influence: lobbyists from the dairy, meat, and grain industries certainly had input in shaping the guidelines. The result – a fairly carb-heavy, dairy-heavy pyramid – conveniently aligned with agricultural subsidies and food company interests, critics noted.

Yet, even with those caveats, the secularization of diet largely succeeded. By the 1980s, virtually no one in developed countries was dying of scurvy or beriberi anymore. Instead, the focus turned to metabolic syndromes – heart disease, diabetes, hypertension.

Here too, broad diet recommendations and public education made an impact. It wasn’t all due to diet – better medical treatments helped – but diets low in sat fat were part of the public health strategy, and they did coincide with improved cardiovascular outcomes

Nutrition Facts

One of the most powerful tools of diet secularization was the introduction of the Nutrition Facts label on packaged foods. This came about in the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, with labels becoming mandatory on most packaged foods by 1994.

For the first time, a consumer could just flip a box and see a standardized panel telling them calories, grams of fat, protein, carbs, and percentages of daily vitamin needs. It’s hard to overstate how transformative this was. The symbolic implications are huge: it essentially secularized and democratized the knowledge of what we’re eating.

Instead of trusting a butcher’s word that the meat is “clean” per religious law, you could trust that it was inspected by the USDA and then decide for yourself if the fat content was within your personal health goals. The label became a kind of secular scripture, universally recognized – that black-and-white table is now on products in over 50 countries (with variations).

And it keeps evolving with science: in 2006, trans fat got its own line on the U.S. Nutrition Facts label, which led many companies to eliminate hydrogenated oils rather than have the dreaded number on their packages. More recently, “Added Sugars” earned a line, reflecting concern over excess sugar consumption. All of this is about giving people information and letting them make choices according to secular health principles.

Allergen Management Protocols

A final aspect of this history is how we handle food allergens and intolerances. In the past, if you were allergic to, say, peanuts or shellfish, it was just your tough luck and you navigated at your own peril, often relying on personal vigilance and social kindness.

Today, it’s a matter of policy and law. Packaged foods in the U.S., EU, and many other countries must clearly indicate if they contain any of the major allergens – for example, a label will say “Contains: milk, soy, and wheat” in bold letters if those are ingredients. This became law in the U.S. with the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 (effective 2006).

As someone with severe allergies myself, this regime of labeling is a lifesaver. I don’t have to stick to some traditional diet to stay safe; the whole food industry accommodates my needs (to a reasonable extent) by informing me what’s in the food. Of course, we should be more diligent with exposure therapy (things like the LEAP protocol) in order to reduce population-level rates of allergies, but labels are important too.

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All these developments – fortification, guidelines, labeling, allergen policies – represent a secularization of diets in the sense that they apply to everyone and are justified by reference to universal human health and scientific evidence. Notably, they are relatively narrative-free. You don’t see government pamphlets saying “Eat whole grains because that’s what our ancestors intended” or “avoid trans fats or you’ll anger the gods.”

Instead you see reasoning like “whole grains may reduce the risk of heart disease” or “trans fats increase bad cholesterol and heart attack risk”. It’s rational, factual, and inclusive.

Importantly, secularization also means pluralism. A government can recommend an ideal diet, but unlike a theocracy, it won’t typically enforce it by law (except in specific contexts like school lunches or banning truly harmful substances). People remain free to follow their eating patterns – vegan, keto, halal, kosher, gluten-free, you name it – as long as they don’t harm others.

Yet this hasn’t eliminated dietary tribalism – it has merely changed its form.

When the U.S. government put out the Food Pyramid, it inadvertently unified a coalition of critics ranging from Atkins diet devotees to paleo enthusiasts who would later rail against that pyramid as “the grain-heavy, insulin-spiking nonsense that made America fat.” The backlash against official dietary guidelines has been fervent in some circles.

In the 2010s, we saw open conflict between the low-carb tribe and the low-fat tribe, each citing dueling studies as scripture. Online communities formed around eating philosophies (from raw vegans to carnivores), many of which defined themselves in opposition to the “mainstream” nutrition narrative. Horseshoe theory of nutrition, anyone?

There’s another layer to this analogy of diet and ideology – one that goes beyond individuals and even cultural groups. What happens when we apply the concept of diet to entire nations or civilizations? Just as a person or a religion can have a guiding diet, so can a country or an economy.

In fact, today’s global conflicts over climate and energy can be seen as a form of dietary tribalism at the planetary level: a clash of “metabolic regimes.” Are we, as a civilization, going to stick to our fossil fuel diet, or switch to a renewable energy diet? And what narratives are springing up around those choices? Let’s zoom out to that macro scale.

Zooming Out: Metabolic Stacks and their Narratives Apparatuses

What if we viewed a country’s economy as an organism with a diet? In a sense, nations “eat” resources to survive – they consume energy, minerals, and food to fuel their growth, just as we consume calories to fuel our bodies.

This is a tested analogy. Economic historians and political scientists increasingly use terms like “metabolic rift”, “energy regime”, or as historian puts it, the “metabolic basis of modern industrial society.” They argue that much of geopolitics and ideology comes down to the question: What is your society’s primary energy source and consumption pattern? What’s your macro-level diet?

I only have a little bit to add to this discourse, since many others are taking it on. Right now, the world is experiencing a profound conflict that mirrors patterns of dietary tribalism and its origins in narrative-wrapped protocols. A nation’s choice of diet has obvious implications for its dominant ideology.

On one side, we have regions shifting to a new diet of renewable, clean energy – solar, wind, hydro, etc. On the other side, we have those clinging to the old diet of fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas.

It’s almost as if we have vegans vs. carnivores again, but this time at the level of nation-states and with the planet’s future at stake. Let’s outline the two main dietary blocs in this global bifurcation. What’s remarkable is how each side tells a story that gives meaning to its diet:

• Green Energy

  • Net importers of fossil fuels and have strong incentives to kick the habit.

  • They are investing heavily in renewables and framing it as the path to prosperity and survival.

  • The European Union and China stand out here. Europe, lacking abundant domestic oil and gas, sees transitioning to wind, solar, and other renewables as not only environmentally responsible but crucial for energy independence (for example, after experiencing the geopolitical blackmail of relying on Russian natural gas.

  • China is positioning itself as the leader of a new green metabolic order – not because its government woke up one day as environmentalists, but because renewables offer a form of energy that China can produce domestically (sunshine and wind are sovereign resources) and thus reduce reliance on foreign oil.

  • Chinese leaders openly talk about becoming an “ecological civilization” and are exporting solar panels and high-speed rail the way the US once exported oil derricks and gas-guzzling cars. Europe and China, though very different politically, share these “metabolic interests” in shifting energy sources.

  • Their narrative: “The future is clean and electric. We will modernize and save the planet at the same time.” It’s a narrative of progress, innovation, and also, subtly, of liberation – liberation from the geopolitics of oil and gas. For Europe, green energy means not bowing to Moscow or Riyadh for fuel; for China, it means wielding the keys to the next energy era.

• Fossil Fuel:

  • In the other corner, we have nations whose economies (and often political structures) are deeply tied to coal, oil, and gas extraction.

  • These include the obvious petro-states like Saudi Arabia and Russia, but also the United States – at least under certain leadership.

  • Their narrative is one of tradition, sovereignty, and in some cases denial. Take the U.S. under the Trump administration: it rolled back renewable energy supports and loudly promoted coal, oil, and gas as the backbone of American greatness. This was more than economic policy; it became a cultural narrative – a kind of crude populism (ba dum tss).

  • Fossil fuels are cast as symbols of national strength and self-reliance. Environmentalism was recast as the creed of meddling globalists or effete urbanites, out of touch with the heartland where real men dig oil wells and coal.

  • Saudi Arabia and Russia also couch their fossil fuel focus in nationalist terms: it’s the source of their geopolitical power, and any move to cut emissions is seen as a direct threat to their way of life.

The renewables diet narrative is about innovation, moral responsibility, and the promise of a cleaner, egalitarian future. The fossil fuels diet narrative is about heritage, strength, and skepticism of change. These narratives often borrow language from older ideological struggles and, similar to those wrapping contemporary diet fads, are an almost subconscious apparatus to enforce adherence.

For a moment, forget the content of these macro-level diet-narrative pairs and just look at their structure: each side in the energy war sees itself as good and the other as bad – classic tribal thinking. One side sees petroleum consumers as reckless destroyers of our common home; gluttonous runaway consumers. The other side sees green proponents as utopian tyrants, trying to force a new ascetic diet on the world that will rob people of jobs, comfort, and tradition.

These mirror the moral tones we find in personal diet debates. It’s the same dynamic, zoomed out to industries and carbon emissions.

Where does this go? Well, just as we’ve seen with the secularization of personal nutrition guidance, there has been progress in defining universal standards for maintaining a healthy planetary metabolism. Carbon accounting is a step in that direction, for example. Of course we’ve also seen a corollary in the backlash: secularization didn’t defeat dietary tribalism (petroleum vs. renewables) but permanently changed the dynamic. We’re in the late middlegame of regions choosing diets and opting into the supporting ideology.

It’s tough, but I’m optimistic. Things are very noisy today in the nutrition world but there continue to be major improvements in technology, medicine, and monitoring. I still think we need a better open-source standard for wearables and personal health data, but overall we’re trending in the right direction. With parallel improvements in how we approach measuring planetary functions, maybe we’ll get towards a functionally better place (even if the ends of the horseshoe remain intensely tribal).

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More on Metabolism

First of all, read (macro) and (micro) for more sophisticated takes on this at different scales. If you want a more mesolomaniac view of things, there are a few recent Blundercheck articles worth checking out:

1. Mentabolism

2. Cardio Before Chemicals

3. Anabolic Note-Taking

4. Black Blobs, Not Black Boxes

5. Deep Marketing

Sometimes you must flip a gestalt switch to see the bigger picture.

When you learn about someone’s philosophy, it’s not like you suddenly become convinced. There’s just too much to unpack and too many things about yourself that would have to change right away. It’s a lengthy process of immersion, where you have to become saturated with someone else’s thoughts and feelings. At some point in that process your gestalt switch flips.

In other words, our perspective is weighed down with inertia.

The phrase “let’s look at this through a different lens” should bring to mind an image of a gigantic magnifying glass too large to move without a crane. It takes a lot to change your focus. The only way to really get it is to immerse yourself.

One obvious example of immersion’s necessity is cultural dexterity – the ability to pop between different cultures. There are plenty of heuristics that chart cultures on aspects like power distance and openness, but those aren’t enough. I’ll share a bit more about my two years spent learning French in Québec in a moment, but I’m already overdue for an example of Gestaltism.

I bet you’ve seen a few images that illustrate the principles of gestalt psychology. They look like trippy optical illusions. And, since our eyes aren’t the only way we perceive the world, doesn’t it seem likely that there are many other gestalts (organized wholes different than the sum of their parts) that we miss for the trees?

It would be convenient if we could zoom out, but we can’t. The only way to pull your perception out of a mix of incoherent parts is to map them, like a lone, blind man touching an elephant. The acquisition of each data point is laborious, if not dangerous.

But there’s no alternative to immersion.

1. A fact will never change a mind as much as a friend can.

2. Raw, objective analysis is too flat, too slow, and too cold.

3. Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

4. It’s more fun.

Anyone who’s learned a language or binged an author’s work will understand how immersion triggers a gestalt switch. I’m still not silver-tongued in French, but the majority of my lessons were weekends spent with friends and family in Québec, not lectures in a classroom.

Classrooms treat you like a piece of mud. They pile you with layer upon layer of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. The hope is that those layers of sediment will form a stable structure that you can carry with you, but most people who stop taking lessons simply erode.

The superior way to learn is through immersion – through an igneous process of learning, not a sedimentary one. Getting a rock to melt and snap its molecules into new formations requires a lot of heat.

Every time I immersed myself in a francophone environment, I could feel my brain melt and snap into new shapes… just to get me through the weekend. It’s far more effective to learn French from people who don’t really speak English. Being in those environments was a sure way to flip my gestalt switch – I might not have known the language, but I definitely felt like I got it.

We learn through association, not argumentation. It’s easy to bounce off another person’s ideas when they explain it logically. Indeed, we’ve already made up our mind. So have other people. You change your mind by hanging out with people who see things differently than you. You might not ever be persuaded to your core – but you’ll get it.

“We can know more than we can tell” – Michael Polanyi

Seeing many sides to one picture is a double-edged sword. The more times you trigger a gestalt switch, the more perspectives you expose yourself to. When the world is full of multistable objects you can become metastable – unable to commit to a side.

It might very well be a good thing to have that inertia in how we perceive the world. On average, our beliefs aren’t transformed or hijacked by simple phrases and sentences. That’s a good defense against enterprising advertisers.

That said, being able to flip a gestalt switch is valuable. Without that ability you would lead a myopic life. It’s a nauseating process sometimes, especially with things as difficult as learning a language or studying a new field. Like writers typically hate sitting down to write, but enjoy having written, flipping a gestalt switch through immersion is a similarly enjoyable process.

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Protocols, like languages or philosophies, demand immersion. It’s not enough to just observe them. You can’t work around or ignore them. Working with protocols is an immersive experience, both in terms of adoption and design. They’re a clear example of non-visual gestalt switches.

Protocol adoption results in a non-naïve version of learned helplessness, in which outsourced actions or decisions enable focus on more important things. Design requires one to work through the protocol, to see the gestalt (the protocol’s argument), before you can re-engineer it.

“…it is through protocol that one must guide one’s efforts, not against it.” – Alexander Galloway

This idea of gestalt switches fits into a couple of recent ideas on my mind, namely mentabolism and analytical brainrot. It might also have relevance to marketing (in the Grabowskian sense) because, essentially, you must flip other people’s gestalt switches if you want them to buy something that’s fundamentally new. And you need to find clever, persistent ways to do that because people’s views are inertial.

There’s no shortcut to flipping a gestalt switch – only the long, difficult work of staying in the picture until it starts to look back at you.

Your project spends one hundred times too little on marketing, he said. The marketing budget should be at least as much as your engineering budget. Why?

Otherwise, no one will buy what you’re selling. Grabowski’s advice: track the Marketing / Engineering Investment Ratio™️ – and make sure it’s greater than 1.

There are ventures where marketing isn’t important. But the stakes – whether financial or social – are usually so high that you should always check: who cares? What quality or capability do people want to buy with their money? Most of the time, those facts are neither obvious nor simple. Not knowing the facts and nuances is a surefire way to blunder.

“Successful companies think of marketing as the essence of strategy, rather than as a sales and advertising [promoting] function.” - Michael Nevin

You have to invest in marketing. But what does Grabowski mean by marketing?

In the article, he clearly differentiates between marketing and sales. Marketing is what happens before or during product engineering – not after. Sales, promotion, and advertising happen once the product is ready.

It’s not pure semantics. In contemporary terms, people call this “market research” instead of marketing. Thirty years later, it still sounds crazy to suggest that a firm should spend as much on market research as product development. But it isn’t. Upfront marketing is high leverage.

1. You shouldn’t be shy about spending on marketing. Even if you spend a lot, you’ll eventually spend multiples more on sales, promotion, and advertising.

2. On the one hand, it’s insurance. Upfront marketing gives a clearer estimate of TAM (Total Addressable Market) size, user personas, and users’ willingness to pay. Those facts might inform a decision not to make a product.

3. On the other hand, it’s sharpening the axe. Market research basically writes the requirements / spec for the product, and informs sales and advertising activities later on.

4. Because of path dependence, as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to change things (more on that below).

5. Marketing is necessary to open new civilizational frontiers (more on that below).

Thorough understanding of a market now enables efficient product development and go-to-market later. Ongoing marketing efforts are better understood as a promotion activity. Caveat to that: in SaaS firms, like in other service businesses, some marketing informs continual efforts to engineer a better user experience or serve adjacent markets.

This reflects the classic tension between efficiency and thoroughness (ETTO), which I’ve written more about here.

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Path Dependence

High relative marketing investment is like insurance because of what political economists call path dependence. A key feature of our world is increasing returns – particularly when you stick with something for a long time. For example, as you become a better accountant, you become better compensated. That makes you more likely to continue along that path.

Once a firm locks in product design, it becomes really expensive to change. Once a standard proliferates into the built environment, like the 50 ohms standard for electrical wiring, retrofitting costs explode. Going down a dead-end is the most expensive path. From an insurance lens, that’s what upfront marketing helps you avoid.

Consider this much shorter quote by legendary ad man William Bernbach: “A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

Marketing allows you to “fail” a bad product before making it. Perfect never taught anyone, but there are cheap ways to be imperfect, and then there are expensive ways to be imperfect.

Path dependence locks us into costly trajectories, but how does those paths form in the first place?

Field Building as Deep Marketing

At a larger scale, marketing is nearly synonymous with field building. There are interesting technologies, sitting on the periphery, whose inroads to society and the economy aren’t yet paved: genetic rescue, cellular agriculture, zero-knowledge proofs, geothermal energy, autonomous cargo ships, pop-up cities, governance models, new delivery protocols for cancer drugs, etc.

Field building opens technological and civilizational frontiers. It’s deep marketing. Sometimes this is done through mandates, like how the U.S. government made ARPANET users to adopt TCP/IP.

You might assume that the American government’s M/E Ratio™️ was low. Nope. The state created ARPANET – the market for the internet protocol suite was made from scratch.

Field building is driven by a mix of private, public, and hybrid programs. Tech-focused projects (like those in climate, protocols, computing, and energy) are increasingly planetary. They are solving larger, more complicated problems for more people. Consequently, there are larger, more complicated markets to explore.

The stakes are going up as well. For technologies distributed across the planet, switching costs are enormous. Coordinating the use of alternative energy sources, like nuclear, solar, and geothermal, would have been a heck of lot easier, faster, and more efficient if we marketed and scaled those earlier.

As the potential scale of a given technology grows, it becomes more important to capitalize on early windows of opportunity for upfront marketing. (M/E > 1).

The risk of poor marketing might be as dire as not getting the civilization you want.2

Who will buy the future you’re building?

I got more into running a couple of years ago (thanks to Laurie) and since then I’ve thought about that question a lot. In fact, my old boss liked to hire endurance athletes. Running and chess skills rarely transfer to work, but some concepts do – like how to train for the long game, with the right kinds of information, habits, and cognitive ‘macronutrients.’

Call it mentabolism: how we transform information into sustained performance.

Humans burn two main sources of fuel: carbohydrates and fat. Carbs are stored as muscle glycogen, which is used up in intense, fast exercises like sprinting, lifting, and throwing. Fat is a more efficient source of fuel. Vastly more efficient – storing 9 calories per gram, while protein and carbs each hold only 4 calories per gram.

Energy is Necessary but Not Sufficient

When you eat a grilled cheese, all of the macronutrients are jumbled together. Your body does something called fuel partitioning. Fats, carbs, and proteins are broken apart, then routed through metabolic pathways to different tissue types.

Most of the best endurance athletes, like runners and swimmers, are prolific fat burners. Through long bouts of low-intensity exercise, like walking and jogging, their bodies adapt – muscles preferentially fuel with fat molecules and reduce the rate at which they use precious stores of glycogen and blood glucose.

Since your fat stores carry more energy with less weight, it’s worth it to drive those adaptations. Long, difficult races are all about small efficiencies that compound over long distances and times. Thorough training → efficient performance.

It’s not only about winning results. Healthy people are metabolically flexible and can smoothly switch between modes (fasted<>fed; rest<>effort) and fuel sources. Metabolic disorders, like insulin resistance, break those pathways and turn excess fuel into a health risk.

CHO, FAT, PRO

I can’t dive in without mapping the three macronutrients to their equivalents in knowledge work. This schema will be more alchemical than chemical, and more of a spectrum than a schema. Part of the process of metabolic adaptation is exercise-driven, part is determined by the availability of certain fuel types.

For example: athletes looking to tune their engine to burn more fat during exercise, one common recommendation is to do exercise in a fasted state. By reducing the availability of carbohydrate (CHO), muscles will burn fat (FAT) first. Protein is not primarily a fuel. It’s a raw material used in muscle synthesis.

In terms of macronutrients for information:

• CHO - News, emails, reels, summaries, tweets, pop science, memes.

• FAT - Real life, books, history, world models, myths, deep science.

• PRO - Sleep, idle musings, conversation, breaks, walks, touching grass, naps.

That should be enough to give you a richer sense of what I’m talking about. Just like human brains prefer glucose as fuel, it’s clear that our mentabolic pathways default to burning CHO. Another similarity: you’ll rarely get pure doses of a single macronutrient. Lastly, consuming and digesting are actions that require energy, so it’s never a tidy line between inputs and outputs.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably training for the long game. You need to learn how to train your body to use both types of fuel – and recover adequately.

Mentabolism

Fuel partitioning is an key part of physical training and overall health. And I think it applies to cognitive work as well, as a part of a broader set of processes, cycles, and pathways – mentabolism – that help us transform information into value.

The goal of learning isn’t to know more stuff. It’s to acquire literacy and change how you behave. If you went to school but didn’t change, did you really learn anything?

“Change is the end result of all true learning.” — Leo Buscaglia

Careers are a long game. You’re in a marathon and require fuel – the right kind of fuel – plus you need drive adaptations to your mentabolism that will allow you to preferentially burn that kind of fuel.

Times recently published an article covering a study on cognition. Our mental capacity might not peak until our 50s or 60s. This lines up with some common protocols, like minimum age for presidents and prime ministers around the world, and common wisdom, like respecting your elders.

Another striking, primordial case: hunters in hunter-gatherer tribes, who might not start to break even on their production until the ripe age of 25. Now, the world is even more complicated – look at how long it takes young people today to be net producers. It’s a dark forest out there and it takes a lot of energy, capital, and time to become a self-sufficient member of the tribe.

To make matters more dire, there aren’t always apprenticeships in knowledge work careers. One reason that entry-level jobs in banking, diplomacy, consulting, and marketing are so sought after (besides being flashy) is that you get to learn the tricks of a very weird trade through immersion. These jobs effectively work like extended fitness programs, similar to what you would see for someone getting ready for an ironman, comprising 2-3 years of prep, loads of low-intensity training, and training camps that drive metabolic adaptation.

Peak performance age for endurance athletes is far later than it is for gymnasts, wrestlers, and sprinters. A long history of high-volume training, recovery, and smart nutrition can easily compensate for youthful speed. Same goes for careers in thinking, where the races are longer, the peak age is later, and the role of fuel partitioning is even more critical.

Fat Knowledge Work

If low-intensity exercise drives metabolic adaptations, what drives mentabolic changes for knowledge workers playing the long game?

Two weeks ago, I helped run an intensive, online course on protocol studies. Classes started at 8 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m. for five days. Despite the intensity, all forty students at the kickoff made it through the week. The courses weren’t a cake walk, either, ranging from Modeling and Verification of Cyberphysical Systems to Social Science of Protocols. It was like cognitive triathlon. A self-serve version of these courses will soon be available at summerofprotocols.com

During Protocol School ‘25, I taught a short class on Applied Protocol Thinking. In some ways, it was my proposal for an evil twin to systems thinking. But one of the key things that inspired that class was this concept of mentabolism. I wanted students to develop literacy, not just run away with a bunch of buzzwords.

During the class I emphasized building a baseline through moderate exercises (the equivalent to heart rate zones Z1/Z2) such as:

• Protocol watching

• Reading about protocol theory

• Trying to implement existing protocols better

• Reviving dying, small protocols

• Tinkering with existing protocols

Zone 0 is sitting on your butt, doing nothing, scrolling Reels. Zones 3 and 4 are vigorous exercise, like giving talks, writing essays, designing things, event production, and so on. Zone 5 is sprinting – which would be like going all out on a project for months or trying to make a breakthrough innovation.

The point is, we might spend too much time in the extremes – and not enough time in the lower zones that drive positive adaptations. Like the characteristics in the Big-C Creativity framework that pointed out:

“…(1) introspection; (2) knowing your strengths; (3) focusing, persevering, and not being afraid to make mistakes; (4) competitiveness; (5) begging, borrowing, and stealing great ideas; (6) thriving on ambiguity; and above all, (7) a willingness to suffer.”

To play the long game, you have to build a strong base – not just inspiration. Replace the subject in the activities in that list from my class with whatever you’re working on. The more time you spend in Z2 / Z3, the bigger your gas tank will be, the more work you can do.

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Big Tanks vs. Big Engines

Imagine your project will take 20 or 30 years to pull off. Even a slight increase in performance, sustained across the latter half of that project, would compound into a gigantic difference.

A key feature of training for endurance: the more work you do, the more work you can do in the future. Basically, endurance athletes focus on building a big gas tank. It’s fuel, not fitness, that limits development over the long run. The more fuel (knowledge / information / wisdom) that you can effectively burn (not just consume), the better your long-run results will be.

Career performance for knowledge workers is driven by how much of the “easy” work they’re doing. Showing up more days than not. Take this great quote by :

Inability to relax = mentabolic inflexibility. You need to face a lot of low-grade stressors to drive adaptation and get sufficient rest. That means reading, writing, studying, talking, editing, tinkering, creating, communicating, delegating… lots and lots of work, done primarily at a relaxed pace, with dogged persistence.

If you’re constantly trying to set personal records, you’ll burn yourself out. Gold standard: enough discipline to get off the couch, enough restraint to focus on the basics. Your goal should be to build a freakish ability to convert the pedestrian, boring flows of information around you into valuable learnings.

Mentabolic Syndrome

You could view things like brainrot, TikTok kids, and waning attentions spans as mentabolic disorders. Constantly drinking from the firehose of a black mirror is likely to create an information surplus. I think you can “out exercise” that kind of high consumption by socializing a lot, especially with a diversity of peers. But people increasingly lack that outlet. Might be good to reconfigure your usage.

Maybe all that excess energy gets turned into aggressive postures (inflammation). As with metabolic inflexibility, we see the ossification of certain pathways. Aortic hardening is a type of physical maladaptation that increases the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure. That can happen if you lift weights a lot and skip out on cardio (including walking).

In mentabolic terms, that means being tuned too specifically to a certain fuel type. Either being hooked on TikToks and not reading or developing an allergy to what would otherwise be fun memes.

Mentabolic Health

I’ll beat this drum even if it gets me in trouble. Short form video is fine. Long form essays are fine. As you can imageine, there are big advantages to being mentabolically flexible. People who demonize short form content are like hidebound proponents of the keto diet. “Deep work” is mentabolic inflexibility – distractions are not so much a hazard to productivity, but inputs that you haven’t yet figured out what to do with.

Humans are like raccoons – we can kind of eat whatever, provided we live an active, outdoorsy lifestyle. My heuristic for this is further explained in Cardio before Chemicals.

Mentabolic health isn’t just about your information diet or exercises. It’s also about physical health, although the connection isn’t as solid nor does it apply to everyone. Personally speaking, physical activity is like my mental vitamins. Lots of walking, jogging, disc golf, cycling, hiking → baseline training, builds my gas tank, keeps my fuel partitioning systems in good shape. Higher intensity training is a bonus, through things like lifting weights and soccer.

Some people don’t feel any improvement in their professional life from being physically fit. Fair enough. If anything, the main, immediate benefit for me is being a more agreeable person. And getting along with people is valuable.

“The ability to get along with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar and coffee. I pay more for that ability than any under the sun.” — John D. Rockefeller

The other primary benefit is more important. Being in not-bad-shape (I’m not saying become a pro athlete, or even a serious one) means that you’ll be in the game for longer. If your professional peak is decades away… kind of a no brainer to spend some extra time walking, thinking, observing.

A great career isn’t about sprinting harder. It’s about building a bigger tank – and learning to burn the right fuel.

Tactical Coda

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

Robert Service’s famous poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee, is a staple of Canadian education. My old English teacher, Mr. Brown – a wonderful poet himself – used to promise an A+ on their final exam to any student who could recite Sam McGee perfectly from heart. As it happens, our school was only 48 kilometers from Lake Laberge.

One of the haunting things about life in the far reaches of the Northern Hemisphere is the midnight sun. During summer, it’s light well after midnight. More or less every creature there, from moose to humans, mobilizes into a frenzy of activity, making the most out of those months.

And now life, everywhere, feels as if it’s lived under a midnight sun. The lights are almost always on, the information environment glowing hot in an apparently unceasing crescendo, and no natural way to turn it all off.

We are like a polar traveller who toils under an illusion of infinite sunrise; every new crisis and breakthrough seems to raise the pitch but, like an endless Shepard glissando, we end on a higher note of concern with no finality.

What is it like to live in this world?

Music without Musicalization

Turn on the news, and you’ll notice a certain rhythm: one alert rises, then another, and another, but the story never ends with a satisfying chord. Every political scandal or geopolitical incident is framed as an escalation. We keep climbing the scale, but the summit never arrives.

It’s music without the musicalization, as Ben Zucker might put it. There’s a lack of poetry in most feed-based media today, whether mainstream or alternative, despite the feverish pitch it possesses. Even the messaging around elections, like “this might be the last one” hints towards finality, but that never arrives.

Part of the reason we feel endlessly on edge is because of how attuned we are to negative events. Not only do they stick with us, but crises, wars, and glooms make great news – and the more rare they are, the better. The soundtrack to our lives is now made of Shepard Tones. What we deem to be the worst events, the ones with shock factor, are registered and amplified almost automatically – often leading us to overestimate the extent to which they exist.

The availability of these images and sounds grips our mind like a Shepard Tone.

At the same time, we live in a near-constant state of surveillance. But instead of choreographing ourselves around important and chronic issues, we swarm to flashes in the pan like cracked-out moths.

Problems have a certain pattern to them that you can manage. That’s the reason that protocols have a kind of musical element to them. Protocols take the shape of the trade-offs and conflicts that they’re pointed at. But the omnipresence of these Shepard Tones keeps us churning, formless.

Aspartame Martyrs

A machine that produces constant climax must fabricate martyrs and scapegoats. The past several years have put this dynamic on full display, with anyone being able to become not just the Internet’s “main character of the day”, but a serious, real-world totem.

While history has seen its fair share of scapegoating, we’re seeing more aspartame martyrs. Real people, turned into a digital pulp, that let us simulate a fight against evil without really confronting the complex forces at play.

It’s just as shameful to speak ill of the recently deceased as it is to make anagrams of their epitaph.

Even in The Cremation of Sam McGee, the narrator grants his friend the final wish and relief. Closure doesn’t exist naturally in the century of the Shepard Tone – at least at scale. It must be manufactured in vats of acid.

All the world’s a stage and the aspartame martyrs aren’t the only act. Another notable one is the theater of autarky. Some political parties in the West that run on a platform of self-sufficiency (autarky) can’t actually do that. Mature economies depend on a supply of cheap labor, and therefore when fauxtarky platforms win, they must pretend to be hard on immigration and trade. If they actually cracked down, that would obliterate GDP.

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Trails and Bridges

Living under the midnight sun means we must navigate a widening gyre. On one hand looms the macro: planetary issues and systems, from climate to tech. On the other hand, we have the micro: our personal routines, our intimate bonds, which localize the world into hand-held size.

Between these scales lies the meso – communities, institutions, metropolises, and cosmopolises – and it is there that meaning often coagulates. The meso level intermediates between the individual and the global. Without attention to the meso, we either lose ourselves in the glare of sunny anonymity or get trapped in solipsism, retreating to finding the perfect, free-range cordyceps mushroom powder for our morning coffee routines.

Same for Shepard Tones – at the micro, they are just a series of sounds. At the macro, they are an illusion of a neverending rise in pitch. But if you were to focus on the meso, you’d see the thing for what it really is. Maybe that’s a painful degree of awareness, but it’s also what you need to build bridges and trails that are eroding under the constant background radiation of our information environment.

Another reason it’s important to focus on the meso: it’s doable but meaningfully ambitious.

The Art of Filtering Light

Are Pit Vipers and Ray-Bans safety protocols? They might be.

I think the trick in this strange new world is to keep an eye on the ball. And since we’re playing in constant broad daylight, sunglasses can make that easier, since. Plus… they look cool. You don’t want to hide behind them, as some people are apt to, but they are, metaphorically speaking, a good investment.

By default most people start out focused too much on the micro or on the macro. You have to get the right lenses to push your view to the right resolution (to see the meso scale of things).

This is a messy analogy. Our window to the world is usually our phone and its feeds. And those are nebulous things – dialing them just right isn’t easy, as I’ve written about in Black Blobs, not Black Boxes. But that’s just reality; part of living under the Midnight Sun is knowing that you are the second settings panel on all of your devices.

And that’s an uphill battle. I think that social media is a net positive since it sheds light on important issues, but the two main negative externalities are the ubiquitous Shepard Tone and the widespread sapping of attention. There’s some advice on how to fashion your own sunglasses for this world in Black Blobs, but it’s not perfect.

Two other ways to filter light, so you can focus on the meso:

Target the boulders, not the pebbles. Like people that want to get healthy overindex on supplements instead of cardio, it’s important not to get lost in the weeds. Showing up every day, working hard, taking care of yourself, being candid, trying to leave things better than you found them… those are the boulders.

Accept the anxiety. The right amount of anxiety isn’t zero. If you feel like you have surplus anxiety, try using it to move boulders. More on that here.

Sometimes when people visit the far North, they say that it feels alien. They’re right. It’s an otherworldly sensation to live under a sun that never sets. But those Northerners manage – and they’ve developed a reputation for industriousness – so I’m optimistic the rest of the world will too.

Each time I started a new “dream job” it went well. Always seemed like I’d score an offer to return full-time. But after every 4, 8, 12… even a 20-month internship my boss would book an exit interview, then it was time to head back to school. My dream of being a brilliant analyst, a dream that could exist only in the Glass Bead Game that is business school, crushed. Again, and again, and again.

Writing Methodology: Human (sleep deprivation mode).

Systems Thinking has a Problem

It’s kinda silly to glamorize being an analyst. In my defense, I grew up watching James Bond and The Davinci Code, and later on, movies like The Big Short and Moneyball. While I never found much inspiration in buff Schwarzenegger types, there was plenty to resonate with in sleeker, still impactful protagonists. Bond’s skillset comprised mostly social skills and analytical chops, rather than pure brawn. The heroes of Moneyball weren’t on baseball cards.

Now I’m about 10 years into a hodgepodge analytical career. At first glance it’s been a lot like my recurring, embarrassing collegiate nightmare – a few months here, a couple years there – but overall, going well. I’ve gotten my fair share of chances to LARP as an extra in a spy or psychological thriller film, from 6am helicopter rides to extremely tense boardrooms. NDAs hide the nerdiest details, but not the gloss.

If I have a regret, or a cautionary tale, it might be reading Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.

Meadows was apparently a wonderful woman, and she wrote a solid book. But if you’re a twenty-one year old desk jockey, like I was, systems thinking is basically a hard drug. Books like Meadows’, or The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, to name another example, will juice you up with a dangerous amount of hubris and delusion about your agency.

Why? Well, it’s one thing to know where to look for leverage points in a system (places where you can make a lot of change without a lot of effort, basically). But there are some complicating factors:

• Your model of the system will be way too simplistic.

• Awareness does not imply ability to execute.

• Many of the things that look like patterns are actually emergent and cannot be predictably affected, let alone engineered.

• Survivorship bias – anything that’s been identified as a leverage point was not done so through gigabrain insights, but through tinkering.

It’s not just Meadows as an author. Systems thinking books have a nasty ability to transform analysts in to Don Quixotes, who then hurl themselves at macro-level projects with reckless abandon.

The ambition is fine. This isn’t a call to be cynical about the prospect of large-scale change. It’s just about calibrating your ego to the tools you have at hand. But why am I talking about ego? Isn’t this essay supposed to provide career advice for analysts?

Corporate Self-Help

A lot of people have the job title of “_____ Analyst”. The majority aren’t quants. Most analysts deal with numbers on a regular basis, but rarely dip into statistics or probability. The math is rather trivial, even if high-stakes. Rather, the main task is qualitative research and analysis. Looking at scenarios in a particular light. Getting information from people Drawing lessons from historical cases studies. Consequently, a lot of business books are more about personal development – helping you see differently – rather than actual tools, techniques or methodologies (unless you’re a quant).

When you read a corporate self-help book like Thinking in Systems you adjust your perspective. You don’t just swap out your lenses, either. It’s also your view of your place in the world that changes. It’s a necessary part of the job and some people are excellent at it. An analyst plays devil’s advocate, researcher, enforcer, salesman, chief marketing officer, financial planner… all with the same title.

A kind of plasticity is required. Qualitative analysts face the challenging problem of being a contortionist – books, frameworks, and conceptual aids help them stretch into new perspectives. But therein is a the fatal flaw of systems thinking material – it situates readers in the driver’s seat by default.

As an analyst, especially a young one, you are definitively not behind the wheel. Even a wizened, wrinkled eminence gris is not in charge. Perhaps you have a keen eye for the underbelly of a system or its leverage points, but no access to fulcrums or levers long enough to move the system.

Furthermore, despite the language it’s cloaked in, systems thinking puts you in a minigame mindset. Immediately you’re looking for shortcuts. Leverage points = silver bullets. The only game worth playing is the long game.

Business books, like self help books, are about personal development. And that’s hard. Think about how long it takes to change one’s lifestyle, how many new habits must be tried on, how many New Year’s Resolutions must be failed… just for a slight improvement?

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Even then, can you chalk up any improvement to a NYT Best Seller? How much? Or is it mostly that you got older, wiser, more tired, and a little less cocky? Maybe there is some long, boring work that is a prerequisite to get the most out of systems thinking books.

Minimum Reading Age

Perhaps the most damning externality of systems thinking is its tendency to spark an urgent search for causality at a macro level. People already have that tendency – especially smart young people. If anything, as an aspiring analyst, you might want to dampen your own compulsions to do so. Jumping to conclusions is dangerous, especially if your conclusions are disguised as an intermediate analytical step.

Aside: I’ve been told that, like your frontal lobe fully develops at 25, your ability to hold information, including emotions, before processing it doesn’t really kick in until about forty years old. That’s probably around the right age to start looking at books that deal with macro-level dynamics. I’ll let you know when I get there…

Abstracting a system into a model of stocks, flows, and feedback loops can be helpful, but it’s a loaded process. Such models contains a lot of presumptions. Of course, that’s a necessary evil. But qualitative, back-of-the-napkin models like those used by systems thinkers present as way too lucid. An aesthetic, but rotten model is a perfect agency trap. It will delude you into thinking that you can do more than you can.

If you give an analyst a model they’ll be wrong for a day. Teach an analyst how to model and they’ll always be wrong, but sometimes useful.

I think this delusion of agency is a source of burnout for analysts. A silly systems model can turn someone into a corporate Don Quixote. Pretty soon they’ll blow up an emotional Achilles tendon railing against a complex system.

My (perhaps overly daoist) interpretation of the phrase “the obstacle is the way” is neither that you must go through the boulder in your path, nor is that you must go around it. Rather, the solution will take the shape of your obstacle. Most of the time, systems thinking leads you to draw a drastically inaccurate silhouette of a problem space – with far too much confidence.

Blind Spots

My final critique of systems thinking is that it limits your analogical range, which is more or less your key asset as an analyst. Your net worth is your met work – how many metaphors, analogies, and frames you can muster in to help make sense of a problem. And not in a shallow way. A few good analogies will blow a huge range of weak ones out of the water. Analogical range is a product of breadth x depth and is impossible to mimic.

Some of the best advisors I know will hammer the same three ideas over and over. Things like bottlenecks, feedback loops, adoption curves, efficiency-thoroughness trade offs, antifragility, process modeling, stakeholder mapping, etc. You don’t need that many to do good work. Although it’s fun to have a wide repertoire. Others do that very well.

Systems thinking deteriorates your analogical range because it reads (to the unexperienced, as I was) as a universally useful model. You can use it to model anything, so why not just get really good at that one thing?

The blind spots of systems thinking are under-discussed and I wish had known them.

• It’s great at flows and stocks, but not good at picking up on absences like safety, health, security.

• Tail risks are discounted because they don’t show up in the stable dynamics of a model.

• Heterogenous cultures are ignored because systems thinking fails to account for the various directions that stakeholders are pulling in terms of their aspirations at a macro level.

• When you model a system, you rarely place yourself in that system.

• Symbolic comfort tricks you into thinking you have a good feel for a system despite not having gone into its depths and edges.

• Establishes fetishizes causal connections even at scales where emergent behaviors are most prevalent.

Systems thinking, at its worst, is a Great Man trap for analysts – the temptation to specialize in a cool, cerebral methodology, rather than collect a useful set of tools, ideas, knowledge, and contacts. At its best, it’s just another notation. Limited, always wrong, and sometimes useful.

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What’s the antidote?

Well, if you’ve already corrupted your analytical brain with a systems thinking tome – that’s alright. I’m still in the process of recovery from such books. Not to mention my business degree (just kidding, Gustavson). There’s a lot of unlearning to do. Particularly with regards to “leverage points”.

At the macro level is that there are no levers. There are only strings. The further up the micro, meso, macro scale you go, the less you can push and the more you have to pull. You could call this the stringiness coefficient. For example, when you’re trying to launch a new field of study into the world, it doesn’t matter how much money you push at it. You need to create some things that draw people, resources, and influence in – but in a way that doesn’t lead to capture.

At the micro level, levers are so plentiful that you’re best off looking for big TAMs and making some clever marginal improvements. But things like “nudge theory” don’t work. They don’t scale to systems level change in any reliable manner.

You have to unlearn your micro and macro enough to focus on the meso: orgs, units, small market dynamics, political conflicts at city scales, etc.

I have to get back to making a course on this stuff, so if I had to give you a simple antidote it would be: get really good at a few technical forms of analysis, like process modeling or market size estimation or bottleneck analysis… and upgrade your charisma. Get better at talking, presenting, marketing – but don’t push on a string.

P.S. I saw some version of the Bullshit Jobs hypothesis floating around. As much as I like Graeber’s works, especially The Dawn of Everything, his take on office work is too cynical for me. There are better explanations for the explosion of weird jobs – like the Baumol Effect or this piece Most Work is Translation. It’s easy to dunk on analysts… and silly to think that their jobs are useless because they can’t clearly explain it to you. Analysts already have to do translation all day; you really expect them to translate it again, in a new language?

Weekly Puzzle

P.S. The FIDE Grand Swiss wrapped up this week. Anish Giri and Matthias Bluebaum placed first and second, respectively, and qualified for the candidates tournament next year. Bluebaum was a dark horse, at least to me. There was also a 14-year-old grandmaster who absolutely cooked which was fun to watch.

Someone had laced lot MC2880 with cyanide. Johnson & Johnson issued a recall. Two more tainted batches were discovered by authorities in Chicago, then another batch in California was laced with a different poison. Seven days after the initial incident, and after two local recalls, the company issued a nation-wide recall for an estimated total of 31 million bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol in circulation.

That decision cost $100 million. James Burke, the CEO at the time, made the right choice – one that we can learn a lot from. The event was one of largest product recalls in history. Johnson & Johnson later produced tamper-proof bottles.

The acetaminophen assassin was never found.

Today, drug manufacturing facilities and distribution channels are extremely protocolized. The entire medical industry produces both consumer medical products and a dynamic non-event (people not get poisoned). Counterfactuals, like the Tylenol murders, point to the deadly potential of mass-produced over-the-counter medications.

Thankfully, there are tests and records along every step of the way, composing a remarkable piece of hidden infrastructure.

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Principles of Coordinate Leadership

Cases like these have proven to be timeless examples of good incident response. While the crises that most leaders deal with usually aren’t quite that intense, there are some good underlying principles to keep in mind.

Reality has right-of-way. When something goes wrong on the ground, a game of telephone can be dangerous. The clearer of a picture that decision-makers can get of an incident the better. Wishful thinking is pathological and everyone involved should be double checking if their predictions aren’t hopes in disguise. This principle holds even for actor-CEOs whose role is to manage optics and morale. If your story is dissonant with reality eventually that will come back to bite.

Being slow is more expensive than occasionally being wrong. Overreactions are like insurance. You’re not going to get it right every time, but you shouldn’t be trying to. You should try to get it mostly right, fast. A perfect score in pandemic response isn’t a 100% success rate. Cost-wise, it’s more like 130%. False positives in the short run are often prudence in the long run.

Hierarchies should be collapsible. In a crisis the most valuable thing you can do is shorten the feedback loop between frontline signals and executive judgement. Incident response is a team game with a captain. The best-informed person temporarily leads, whether junior or senior. Speed and safety improve when rank yields to situational awareness, and tempo advantage comes from pushing authority to the point of contact.

Executive embedding isn’t just for emergencies. Companies face existential problems all of the time. Especially startups. This isn’t about micromanagement – embedded execs are there to facilitate decision-making by making judgement calls about things that affect other parts of the company. It’s about improving the longevity of a business by launching a siege on key bottlenecks.

In the case of the Tylenol Murders, the first on the scene were media workers – not Johnson & Johnson employees. Burke’s team relied on news outlets to get the word out quickly, both for practical reasons and because they already had captured information on the crisis. J&J’s communications response was lauded as an exemplary case of public relations, but that was really downstream of principled action.

Coordinate Leadership in Practice

There are two types of coordinate leadership modes: acute and chronic.

The first is obvious – accidents, hacks, glitches, breaks, crashes, incidents, spilt milk, falling off a bike in public, and so on. Stuff we’re used to seeing on the news. Chronic coordinate leadership is less common. Some practice it, like Paul Gross, CEO of Remora Carbon or the team at Boom Supersonic.1

For Gross, his job is simple. Each quarter he identifies the top three risks to the company, focuses on those, and delegates everything else. Those risks could be anything from engineering challenges to shrinking financial runways. His main job is to accelerate how quickly the teams on the ground, at the coordinates of the problem, can manage the risk.

For example, a simple design choice about an exhaust pipe might affect customer experience. An engineering team can’t make that call on their own – they’ll need to negotiate with customer service. Customer service might not realize that this is an existential problem, and the engineers might lack the ability to communicate that urgency. An embedded exec can short-circuit that process, dynamically rebalancing the tension in the startup’s operations in order to help the whole firm survive.

Boom Supersonic recently appointed a top engineer as a hiring lead.2 Coordinate leadership doesn’t need to be strictly hierarchical. It can also be lateral. This play was inefficient upfront, but decision speed and quality apparently improved a lot afterward. The company’s headcount grew by 10% – and by having that engineer embedded in HR, the bar for talent was kept high.

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Scaling Coordinate Leadership

It works at startups. It works at large corporations. There are always risks to focus on – so long as you’re ruthless about prioritization and maintaining high situational awareness, Coordinate Leadership scales. Indeed, asking what key business risks someone is accountable for is an underrated way to determine what exactly someone’s job is. The job of a Coordinate Leader is always evolving, but their relative role is constant and simple: compress the right feedback loops, at the right place, at the right time.

But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement. Simple =/= simplistic.

Prioritization is hard. Situational awareness is expensive. Executive embedding can quickly turn into micromanagement. This isn’t the Steve Jobs management stereotype. Coordinate Leaders are more like universal solvents than masters of taste, and they play a much different role than actor-CEOs, rolling up their sleeves in the slimelight – not the limelight – of the business world.

More reading:

• Mechanical Currents

• New Apple Watch Monitors for Hypertension

• Disaster Game by Megafauna

• Novo Nordisk Layoff

• Beyond Szabo Scaling

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