First, small technical feedback — do you think there’s some classification of these factors, however narrow or broad, that could be sub-headlines?
For instance, #24 and #29 seem to be similar things:
#24 As the overall maze level rises, mazes gain a competitive advantage over non-mazes.
#29 As maze levels rise, mazes take control of more and more of an economy and people’s lives.
As do #27 and #28:
#27: Mazes have reason to and do obscure that they are mazes, and to obscure the nature of mazes and maze behaviors. This allows them to avoid being attacked or shunned by those who retain enough conventional not-reversed values that they would recoil in horror from such behaviors if they understood them, and potentially fight back against mazes or to lower maze levels. The maze embracing individuals also take advantage of those who do not know of the maze nature. It is easy to see why the organizations described in Moral Mazes would prefer people not read the book Moral Mazes.
#28: Simultaneously with pretending to the outside not to be mazes, those within them will claim if challenged that everybody knows they are mazes and how mazes work.
While it’s hard to pin down exactly what the categories would be, It seems that the first cluster is about something like feedback loops and the second culture is about something like deceit, self-deceit, etc.
The categories could even be very broad like “Inherent Biases”, “Incentives and Rewards”, “Feedback Loops”, etc. Or could be narrower. But it’s difficult to follow a list of 37 propositions, some of which are relatively simple and self-contained and others are synthesis, conclusion, and extrapolation of previous points.
Ok, second thought —
This is all largely written from the point of view of how bad these things are as a participant. I bet it’d be interesting to flip the viewpoint and analysis and explore it from the view of a leader/executive/etc who was trying to forestall these effects.
For instance, your #4 seems important:
#4: Middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess. Maze behaviors systematically compound this problem. They strip away points of differentiation beyond loyalty to the maze and willingness to sacrifice one’s self on its behalf, plus politics. Information and records are destroyed. Belief in the possibility of differentiation in skill level, or of object-level value creation, is destroyed.
Ok, granted middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess.
So uhh, how do we solve that? Thoughts? Pointing out that this is a crummy equilibrium can certainly help inspire people to notice and avoid participating in it, but y’know, we’ve got institutions and we’ll probably have institutions for forever-ish, coordination is hard, etc etc, so do you have thoughts on surmounting the technical problems here? Not the runaway feedback loops — or those, too, sure — but the inherent hard problem of assessing middle management performance?
On editing note, I think that subheaders requires that things happen in header order, but I want to go in timeline order, and I don’t think you can do clean breaks given that restriction. I’m presuming you could group them into types of steps in useful ways if you were so inclined and had a reason to go in that direction.
On second note, I do worry that people will think that #4 is both more endogenous and does more work than I see it as being and doing, and use that as a reason to think of this is a localized and conditional problem. But in terms of how to solve that?
It’s hard and important. Enough so that it’s often going to be worth designing and/or splitting the whole structure in order to keep this problem in check, even if such splits don’t otherwise make any sense. And in general there’s a whole set of thoughts I could give on how to try and measure performance more accurately. I’ll put that in the stack of possible future things to say, but long series already super long and I don’t think I have anything great to suggest here, unfortunately.
On #4, which I agree is important, there seems to be some explanation left implicit or left out.
#4: Middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess. Maze behaviors systematically compound this problem.
But middle managers who are good at producing actual results will therefore want to decrease mazedom, in order that their competence be recognized. Is it, then, that incompetent people will be disproportionately attracted to—and capable of crowding others out from—middle management? That they will be attracted is a no-brainer, but that they will crowd others out seems to depend on further conditions not specified. For example, if an organization lets people advance in two ways, one through middle management, another through technical fields, then it naturally diverts the competent away from middle management. But short of some such mechanism, it seems that mazedom in middle management is up for grabs.
Two thoughts.
First, small technical feedback — do you think there’s some classification of these factors, however narrow or broad, that could be sub-headlines?
For instance, #24 and #29 seem to be similar things:
#24 As the overall maze level rises, mazes gain a competitive advantage over non-mazes.
#29 As maze levels rise, mazes take control of more and more of an economy and people’s lives.
As do #27 and #28:
#27: Mazes have reason to and do obscure that they are mazes, and to obscure the nature of mazes and maze behaviors. This allows them to avoid being attacked or shunned by those who retain enough conventional not-reversed values that they would recoil in horror from such behaviors if they understood them, and potentially fight back against mazes or to lower maze levels. The maze embracing individuals also take advantage of those who do not know of the maze nature. It is easy to see why the organizations described in Moral Mazes would prefer people not read the book Moral Mazes.
#28: Simultaneously with pretending to the outside not to be mazes, those within them will claim if challenged that everybody knows they are mazes and how mazes work.
While it’s hard to pin down exactly what the categories would be, It seems that the first cluster is about something like feedback loops and the second culture is about something like deceit, self-deceit, etc.
The categories could even be very broad like “Inherent Biases”, “Incentives and Rewards”, “Feedback Loops”, etc. Or could be narrower. But it’s difficult to follow a list of 37 propositions, some of which are relatively simple and self-contained and others are synthesis, conclusion, and extrapolation of previous points.
Ok, second thought —
This is all largely written from the point of view of how bad these things are as a participant. I bet it’d be interesting to flip the viewpoint and analysis and explore it from the view of a leader/executive/etc who was trying to forestall these effects.
For instance, your #4 seems important:
#4: Middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess. Maze behaviors systematically compound this problem. They strip away points of differentiation beyond loyalty to the maze and willingness to sacrifice one’s self on its behalf, plus politics. Information and records are destroyed. Belief in the possibility of differentiation in skill level, or of object-level value creation, is destroyed.
Ok, granted middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess.
So uhh, how do we solve that? Thoughts? Pointing out that this is a crummy equilibrium can certainly help inspire people to notice and avoid participating in it, but y’know, we’ve got institutions and we’ll probably have institutions for forever-ish, coordination is hard, etc etc, so do you have thoughts on surmounting the technical problems here? Not the runaway feedback loops — or those, too, sure — but the inherent hard problem of assessing middle management performance?
On editing note, I think that subheaders requires that things happen in header order, but I want to go in timeline order, and I don’t think you can do clean breaks given that restriction. I’m presuming you could group them into types of steps in useful ways if you were so inclined and had a reason to go in that direction.
On second note, I do worry that people will think that #4 is both more endogenous and does more work than I see it as being and doing, and use that as a reason to think of this is a localized and conditional problem. But in terms of how to solve that?
It’s hard and important. Enough so that it’s often going to be worth designing and/or splitting the whole structure in order to keep this problem in check, even if such splits don’t otherwise make any sense. And in general there’s a whole set of thoughts I could give on how to try and measure performance more accurately. I’ll put that in the stack of possible future things to say, but long series already super long and I don’t think I have anything great to suggest here, unfortunately.
Just tracing the edges of hard problems is huge progress to solving them. Respect.
On #4, which I agree is important, there seems to be some explanation left implicit or left out.
#4: Middle management performance is inherently difficult to assess. Maze behaviors systematically compound this problem.
But middle managers who are good at producing actual results will therefore want to decrease mazedom, in order that their competence be recognized. Is it, then, that incompetent people will be disproportionately attracted to—and capable of crowding others out from—middle management? That they will be attracted is a no-brainer, but that they will crowd others out seems to depend on further conditions not specified. For example, if an organization lets people advance in two ways, one through middle management, another through technical fields, then it naturally diverts the competent away from middle management. But short of some such mechanism, it seems that mazedom in middle management is up for grabs.