Thinking about my own experiences of seeing these bottlenecks in action, I don’t think either is a subset of the other. It seems more like there’s a ton of situations where the only way forward is for a few people to grow a spine and have the tough conversations, and an adjacent set of problems that need centralised competent leadership to solve, but it’s in short supply for the usual economic reasons plus things like “rationalists won’t defer authority to anyone they don’t personally worship unless bribed with a salary”.
I agree, but I also think there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem there too. Leaders fear that enforcing order will result in a mutiny, but if that fear is based on an accurate perception of what will happen, telling leadership to grow a pair is not going to fix it.
Causality and dependency are two things that people want to be neat and unidirectional but they’re not. There are feedback loops and mutual dependencies.
One part of being a good teacher is figuring out how to take a mutual dependency and explain just enough of one part in a “fake way” such that people can get it enough to understand the second part, which in turn allows them to “truly” get the first part.
Nod. (To be slightly more clear: the OP was less me expressing bewilderment about how to solve this problem, and more of me leaving some kinds of breadcrumbs about what I was currently thinking about while I mulled over what post to write next and how to construct it. Upon reflection a more useful shortform would have been “which of these concepts resonate better or are you more interested in reading about first?”)
Sometimes when I can’t explain a concept except into relation to another concept, I use that as a sign that I need to approach one of the concepts from a completely separate/unique angle to get a handle on it.
I’m not sure which of these posts is a subset of the other:
The Backbone Bottleneck
The Leadership Bottleneck
Thinking about my own experiences of seeing these bottlenecks in action, I don’t think either is a subset of the other. It seems more like there’s a ton of situations where the only way forward is for a few people to grow a spine and have the tough conversations, and an adjacent set of problems that need centralised competent leadership to solve, but it’s in short supply for the usual economic reasons plus things like “rationalists won’t defer authority to anyone they don’t personally worship unless bribed with a salary”.
I think leadership also depends on backbone tho.
I agree, but I also think there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem there too. Leaders fear that enforcing order will result in a mutiny, but if that fear is based on an accurate perception of what will happen, telling leadership to grow a pair is not going to fix it.
Causality and dependency are two things that people want to be neat and unidirectional but they’re not. There are feedback loops and mutual dependencies.
One part of being a good teacher is figuring out how to take a mutual dependency and explain just enough of one part in a “fake way” such that people can get it enough to understand the second part, which in turn allows them to “truly” get the first part.
Nod. (To be slightly more clear: the OP was less me expressing bewilderment about how to solve this problem, and more of me leaving some kinds of breadcrumbs about what I was currently thinking about while I mulled over what post to write next and how to construct it. Upon reflection a more useful shortform would have been “which of these concepts resonate better or are you more interested in reading about first?”)
Sometimes when I can’t explain a concept except into relation to another concept, I use that as a sign that I need to approach one of the concepts from a completely separate/unique angle to get a handle on it.