Lack of contact with base-level reality sounds like something that could maybe be mitigated with a kind of sampling, where e.g. some of the people at the bottom object-level matters go and interact a bunch with some of the people in the top-level matters such as the CEO. This won’t solve the problem for the CEO in getting good information because the sampling will inherently be narrow, but it seems like it would make them able to notice when the information streams are broken.
I read about things like cross-level meetings between levels X and X+2, Elon Musk randomly grilling his engineers about the work they’re doing in the moment, or “listening tours” in which the CEO who’s accomplished a corporate takeover will travel to all the company locations and listen to the lower-level employees’ takes on corporate dysfunction and what to do about it. These seem like examples of the “sampling” you’re talking about.
I think a takeaway here is that organizational maze-fulness is entropy: you can keep it low with constant effort, but it’s always going to increase by default.
Apparently Jeff Bezos used to do something like this with his regular “question mark emails”, which struck me as interesting in the context of an organization as large and complex as Amazon. Here’s what it’s like from the perspective of one recipient (partial quote, more at the link):
About a month after I started at Amazon I got an email from my boss that was a forward of an email Jeff sent him. The email that Jeff had sent read as follows:
“?”
That was it.
Attached below the “?” was an email from a customer to Jeff telling him he (the customer) takes a long time to find a certain type of screws on Amazon despite Amazon carrying the product.
A “question mark email” from Jeff is a known phenomenon inside Amazon & there’s even an internal wiki on how to handle it but that’s a story for another time. In a nutshell, Jeff’s email is public and customers send him emails with suggestions, complaints, and praise all the time. While all emails Jeff receives get a response, he does not personally forward all of them to execs with a “?”. It means he thinks this is very important.
It was astonishing to me that Jeff picked that one seemingly trivial issue and a very small category of products (screws) to personally zoom in on. …
Lack of contact with base-level reality sounds like something that could maybe be mitigated with a kind of sampling, where e.g. some of the people at the bottom object-level matters go and interact a bunch with some of the people in the top-level matters such as the CEO. This won’t solve the problem for the CEO in getting good information because the sampling will inherently be narrow, but it seems like it would make them able to notice when the information streams are broken.
I read about things like cross-level meetings between levels X and X+2, Elon Musk randomly grilling his engineers about the work they’re doing in the moment, or “listening tours” in which the CEO who’s accomplished a corporate takeover will travel to all the company locations and listen to the lower-level employees’ takes on corporate dysfunction and what to do about it. These seem like examples of the “sampling” you’re talking about.
I think a takeaway here is that organizational maze-fulness is entropy: you can keep it low with constant effort, but it’s always going to increase by default.
Yep.
Apparently Jeff Bezos used to do something like this with his regular “question mark emails”, which struck me as interesting in the context of an organization as large and complex as Amazon. Here’s what it’s like from the perspective of one recipient (partial quote, more at the link):
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba