Unpredictable Patterns #25: I’ll teach you differences
About differences, analogies, lists and the enormous importance of diversity
Dear reader,
Midsummer week is coming up fast, and in Sweden that is a big deal. The island is increasingly seeing summer guests and others gather for the celebration and the dance around the Maypole. This year, however, we are unlikely to gather in any large numbers in the shadow of the pandemic. I do believe celebrations will be interesting next year when the pent-up demand for ritual can finally be met.
This week’s note is about differences, and why we should focus on them. It is easy to forget that it is within the differences that a lot of the dynamic in the world plays out. We can certainly explore that more.
Teaching differences
Wittgenstein reportedly thought about using the Shakespeare quote “I’ll teach you differences” as a motto for his Philosophical Investigations. It is an intriguing anecdote, and if true seems to fit well with his method; the meticulous analysis of what we say and how we act in language. In a sense you could argue that his idea of a “grammar” of concepts really is about the pattern of differences that you can discern when you look at how a word is used and how it moves in a language game.
Differences make up our concepts. It is in a web of differences that we understand the world, and make sense of it.
A difference is easiest to think about as a set of qualities that distinguish one thing from another, and the opposite of difference here is identity. Two things are identical if and only if they all have the same qualities and no other qualities, as Leibniz teaches us in his principle of the indiscernability of identity.
But teaching differences is really, really hard.
One reason for this is that we think in analogies and maps of analogies in analogy you reduce the number of differences to a point where you can start using the same models and frames for one problem as you can for another. You economise on thinking through analogy, and this means that differences are only allowed to a very limited degree.
In fact, we shy away from differences when we try to solve hard problems, and we seek more and more general analogies. Take an example of tech policy - the idea that there is such a thing as “platforms”. This is a useful concept, but it allows for very little difference between companies that have entirely different business models, contracting practices and impact on the world.
Politics, as we will see, ultimately abhor fine differences. It needs the broad analogy to be able to regulate properly. We will come back to that later in the note, and discuss what this means for policy work.
Making differences
We have all sometimes heard the expressed that we would like to make a difference. The meaning is clear enough: we wish to do something that changes the state of the world, hopefully for the better. We want to make a difference to the future and to other people. Not making a difference means not mattering at all.
But we do not spend enough time on exactly what this difference is or should be. Yet, it is one of the most useful tools for prioritization - in work as well as in life. If you are looking at what projects to pursue you can always ask yourself two questions - what difference will this project make in the world and what difference will I make for this project?
Where the two differences meet, you can - yes - make the difference.
This is something often neglected in planning. Planning tends to start from an analysis of risk. This analysis is, in the standard case, two-dimensional: we look at impact and probability. High impact, high probability risks look like the ones we need to address, right? Well, that should depend on a second two-dimensional graph that we too rarely explore. In this we should order the risks according to yield and effort. How much difference will us engaging on this matter really make?
And prioritisation does not start from the upper right-hand corner. In that corner you find risks that are high yield, and high effort to address. These make for heroic quests, but the ones you should absolutely not address first. First you need to look at the upper left hand corner: the high yield, low effort risks. These are the low-hanging fruit. Tend to them before you go on a heroic quest.
This yield / effort question is a question about differences. About what differences we can make with the resources that we have, rather than about which risks currently attracts the most attention.
It is often far more interesting to ask where we can make the most difference rather than how we can make a difference.
Our differences unite us
The idea that differences ultimately make us more whole is interesting. It seems to say that we complement each-other when we are not exactly the same, and that in some way that makes it possible for us to act together. I think that is right; this is one of the reasons (although not the only one) it is so important to get the work on diversity, equity and inclusion right.
Scott Page showed in his masterful book, The Difference, a pure logical model of why diversity of opinions create better outcomes for groups and organisations. Some misread that book to say that the only reason to aim for diversity was the you get better decision quality and smarter groups (no small advantages, to be sure), but Page openly objected to that reading and noted that there are moral and philosophical reasons for working on diversity as well — but, he noted, that did not make the logical argument unimportant.
Page identifies conjunctive tasks and disjunctive tasks in his work - the first tasks that can only be solved by everyone working together and the second tasks that can be solved by any member of a group - and noted that while it seems as if diversity in a group improves chances for disjunctive tasks (because if there are differences between us we are more likely to create a wide variety of different solutions), we can also imagine clear cases where group tasks to be completed together - the conjunctive tasks - actually also benefit from diversity in our teams and organisations; we can accomplish more kinds of tasks with a greater diversity of experiences and traits in a group.
Differences create if not unity, at least strength.
There is a paradox at the heart of many companies here. While they embrace the theories - moral and logical - for diversity, they also implement performance management systems that do not look to the difference a person makes, but only to that individual.
Teams are made up of differences - between team members, between perspectives, tasks - but most performance management just focuses on the individual’s accomplishments and then - to make things worse - also grades on a curve.
This teaches us something interesting.
When we study differences we must decide if we are looking for differences that allow us to rank individual entities in different ways, or if we are looking for differences that combine to a greater whole.
I can ask you to rank chess pieces in order of importance, and you will be able to make up a list of them (we love making lists, as Umberto Eco noted, because we are afraid of dying and the lists work as a kind of sorcery that bewitches death). But assume I give you a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces and now I ask you to rank these pieces - how would you do that?
Ranking puzzle pieces makes no sense, because they all are needed in order to complete the puzzle. Ranking chess pieces, however, is something we routinely do.
Modern organisations are, however, much more like puzzles than chess - and our insistence on performance management - ranking - undermines our commitment to diversity.
Politics and difference
Here is a frustrating fact: politics abhor differences. Not all differences, but fine differences that force particularistic analysis of problems. All politics, and all law, exist on the premise that there are individual cases that are analogous enough for us to subsume them under a single rule or set of rules.
This means that at some point politics is about ignoring differences.
Politics will entertain differences to a certain level and then say “stop, I understand that you are unique, but your uniqueness does not trump our social need of rules and regulation”.
We all know that there are enormous differences between what the European Commission terms “platforms”. The term has been variously applied to app stores, operating systems, e-commerce sites, search engines, social media…all of them wildly different. But the differences here have lost all political salience.
This process is important to manage. The way you lose in policy work and in influence work overall is this: you lose the ability to make the differences that matter to your client.
Good lobbyists know this and work hard to try to reintroduce differences in the legislative process that were eliminated in the much lower resolution political debates. Political debates are coarse grained, low pixel debate. Platforms sum up all things that are vaguely the same and the analogy between platforms and different companies grows broad and deep in the political process.
When the process then turns to legislative language, you need to have your differences ready at hand. What are the meaningful differences that you will be able to introduce into the drafting of the law? Are there ways to exempt some of the things that were bundled into a single whole?
Much of lobbying work is about parts and wholes. About carving out parts of wholes and ensuring that they are treated - differently.
A good policy development exercise is to simply do this: list all the things that are different about you and pick the ones that you think you are most likely to be able to differentiate in the legislative draft.
You have to know your differences.
A map of differences
Good planning usually starts our with a diagnosis. The core question in any diagnosis is the Rumelt question “what is going on here?” - and an organisation that can answer that question will be much better at creating a strategy and a plan than an organisation that has no clue.
One component of this question should be “what is different this time?” - and tracking differences over time in planning is actually really important. A lot of good plans that I have seen actually has this at the very top of the planning document - but what is missing is a reference to what we thought was different last time.
We need to document the evolution of differences to see both where we are going - the difference between difference is your direction, just as the sum of your assumptions is your destiny. Indeed, as Gregory Bateson noted, the best definition of information, over all, is that it is the difference that makes a difference.
Your map of differences slowly reveals the underlying mechanisms that drive change, the forces that shape the landscape you are acting in and they allow you to predict some of what is likely to happen next.
Another way to map differences is to ask different people the same question. Rather than a map over differences in time, you then get a map of differences in space. Both are very helpful as you examine what is going on. Asking the top 20 people in an organisation what they think the greatest threats or opportunities are, or what they believe is the most important competitor will reveal differences that will carry enormous amounts of information.
Babbage called the first computer a difference engine. If you build a team or a function that articulates the differences in your organisation you will be able to manoeuvre much more efficiently.
Different differences
A recurring thing that we see many companies do is that they conduct employee surveys and then they worry over the results. What is very rare, though, is that they compare surveys across companies. The result is that we do not know what is a difference in the organisation and what is a difference across organisations and the labour market over all.
Having been through a few of these there are patterns that seem to recur: more tenured employees are more unhappy about career prospects. Newer employees are enthusiastic about the company leadership. These are patterns that do not differentiate out any company, but seem to be true for the sector, industry or for working life in general.
This leads me to suggest that we need to think - in all situations, not just this - about endogenous and exogenous differences in every analysis we make. Which differences that we can see are caused by the organisation and which differences are actually structural and exogenous to the organisation?
I am not saying that we should not address the exogenous differences if they are in any way bad for someone, but that the differences that are exogenous require other means and can perhaps only be changed through broader political commitment.
Studying differences
An interesting way to do competitor analysis is to study differences between yourself and other companies. Rather than obsess over what they do in isolation, look for differences. What are they doing differently in marketing? How are they working with customer support? What differences can we see or hear about when it comes to their engineering process? Are they allocating resources differently?
These differences are not just illuminating to understand a competitor better. They are essential if you want to predict a competitor. Their behavioural pattern is hidden in the differences, and if you are able to then project what you would do modulo the differences you should get an interesting picture of their future strategic choices as well.
It is important to remember that we do not study differences to simply emulate the other’s behaviour. If we look at Apple’s government affairs work the study of differences there is not a reason to copy the way that they do government affairs, but to understand Apple better - and to understand how Apples’ differences are possible within the larger framework of the tech policy debate.
Differences are often adaptive strategies and they also reflect on you. A company that tries to keep a low profile can only do so if there is another company that happily does press and answers the phone and sits on all panels. The differences tell you something important about the over all ecosystem you are operating in, but it is not always - perhaps even rarely - possible to just copy another company’s different strategy.
This is easy to see if we make the comparison with evolutionary niches. Just jumping into another organisms evolutionary niche will not do — you will be outcompeted by an organism that is far better adapted to that niche. But you can find different niches and explore the ecosystem as a whole!
So what?
The human mind is drawn to analogy. Politics abhor differences. But yet still it is within the differences that a lot of policy is decided. Studying differences diligently is likely to help understand the operating environment we are in much better.
Make difference maps tracking differences in the organisation over time and space. These help you understand the organisation’s dynamic a lot better.
Craft difference lists for legislative work - what are the differences you wish to teach? And how can they be effectively framed and defended?
And, more than anything, take diversity seriously. Diversity is, among other things, about creating and curating the differences that make a difference - logically and morally. And it is not diminished by understanding that it provides a core capability in an organisation to make meaningful difference.
As always, thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you with any comments or ideas!
Nicklas