(2017-10-27) Rao The World Is Not Enough People

Venkatesh Rao: The World is Not Enough People. I was recently rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s hilarious riff, You Are Not Enough People, where he argues that most marital arguments are really about the fact that your spouse is “not enough people.” Human social needs are too diverse and conflicting to be met by one person. (Nuclear Family)

Vonnegut argues that this need was traditionally met by extended families.

I argue that it still is, except that we find the extended families we rely on today, for social-psychological sustenance, through work

If I had to distill everything I’ve learned about organizations, leadership, and management over the last decade down to one sentence, it would be this: If you put people in the right story, all hard problems become easy; if you put them in the wrong story, all easy problems become hard.

The right story is the story of a group of people that is both big enough to get something interesting done — the mission/plot of the story — while also being big enough to solve the “you are not enough people” problem for all characters in the story. A good leader solves both problems at once. A bad leader thinks one or the other problem is unimportant.

This idea has an unexpected implication: everybody's favorite economist of the brave new blockchain world of decentralized network orgs, Ronald Coase, was wrong about some important things.

The job of a leader is to get the story to where it needs to be, by directing the everyday slop of narrative energy towards interestingess and coherence: effective John Boydian "orientation"

a healthy distribution of narrative energy is one that has the bulk of it flowing relatively locally, within the 12-40 person, 15-40 year horizon box around you.

What is “local”? Local is the scale at which you have a named role and are an independent, not entirely predictable actor, rather than a non-playing character (NPC) or bot.

Humans need named, active, unique roles and independent loci of agency and identity among "enough people" to be healthy.

Class consciousness is not enough. Tribal/racial identity is not enough. Nuclear family roles are not enough

Recognition must be voluntarily given and received by people exercising independent agency within a shared story, responding together to events in the environment.

Most orgs do “culture fit” wrong because they do it at too high a level, too much of it, and using impersonal ceremonial (Ritual) "recognition" rather than "enough people"

Stories involving creation need an unmet, shared, growth need that is not entirely social psychological. A need that requires action beyond the social sphere.

I think of this as an "action consciousness" (Telic) by analogy to a social or class consciousness. A consciousness that derives narrative energy from non-social sources.

The right story has the right number of not-quite-irreplaceable cast members, in roles that make sense in a specific story, striving for something worthwhile that is beyond-human

A “straight” story is one in which narrative energy flows smoothly

A good "straight story" balances great power and great responsibility and tries do no harm beyond its own limits, while doing net good. It's a sincere do-gooder story. A mission.

Of course, getting the story straight is not easy, but it is 1000x easier than working in behavioral assembly language below the narrative layer of the Human OS.

the easy part of getting the story straight is right-sizing it. The sweet spot is about 12-30 characters in (social) space, and 20-40 years in time.

If you pay attention, you will find that this sizing is often driven by social needs. There is usually no work-content related reason for groups of 12-30

If your cast of characters has less personality/age/gender/culture diversity than a good television drama, you will usually have social fragility problems.

Why 20-40 years as the sweet spot? There is some evidence that people’s behaviors change when they sense mortality to be more than 20 years out.

A 20+ year end-of-story horizon encourages ambition, open-ended growth efforts, and all the other good things that flow from infinite-game orientations

This horizon does not represent a concrete goal being achieved. It represents a fuzzy sense of a “better” afterlife.

operating by this principle leads you to the conclusion, that below a certain critical size, org structure is not determined by Coasean transaction and social costs.

Organizational structure is instead shaped by human social needs. In other words, for human groups smaller than about 150 (Dunbar number), Coase was wrong.

Like many, I believe the digital economy is turning the organization size distribution into a bimodal one: large platform-scale organizations on one end, small orgs (SmallCo) on the other.

I suspect the small end will be a small peak between 12-40 individuals. Below that is "not enough people." The cellular structure of large platform orgs will also be 12-40.

Can AIs count towards "enough people"? I don't know, but I strongly suspect they can, and they don't need to be conscious or sentient in the Strong AI sense to do so.

Stop doing the wrong things: "culture" engineering at large scales through myth-making and ceremony. Work the fractal bottom-up in "enough people" units.