Unpredictable Patterns #38: Lists of lists
Negotiating death, capturing life in lists, ranking as the basis for reputation and lists as the last line of defense against the noise society
Dear reader,
In Sweden the leaves have shifted now - and we are in mid-autumn. The darkness is returning, and we fight it with candlelight and tea. It seems to work so far, and if I am honest, I love this season. There is something about the calm and dignity of autumn that I appreciate deeply. Time flows more slowly in the autumn dusk. It is also a time to reflect and - well - make lists. So this week’s note is about lists and how we can use them better.
Lists
Umberto Eco famously observed that we make lists because we fear death. Lists are our way to tame infinity and diversity, and the list is - he noted - the basis of all culture. Using lists consciously as a tool is an important technique, and surprisingly often the simple task of making a list will clarify any complex problem. Sure, it is simple, but it is not simplistic.
Lists draw our attention. It is well-known that clickbait is easiest designed by using headlines like ”5 things that will change the way you eat” or ”The ten best books on New York” - we click on through, hoping to find structure and order and some sense of how to learn more about the subject of the lists. In this sense lists are compression algorithms - they compress unordered and near-infinite networks of information into a single hierarchy - and they help us get a sense of where to begin.
Lists are, in a sense, keys to complexity that allow us to start navigating more freely in a problem or issue - keys, then, but also maps.
The first kind of list we often use is the unranked list - think of a shopping list. Whatever you write down on that lists needs to be bought - but there is no intrinsic order to the list. A shopping list does not tell you that milk is more important than bread, just that out of all the things you need to buy, these two need to be bought now. A shopping list is a selection of a myriad of things without order.
Such unordered lists look simple, but they are worth exploring more closely. They can be used as a very efficient first step in any learning process, for example, just list the ten things you know about a subject and then start from there. Or the ten books you can find that seem to be interesting - and then read those. By limiting the list selection you force yourself to chunk the complex and unwieldy into something that is more manageable. You are likely to abandon your first list after a while and that is fine - as you update your list your map of the subject is also updated.
Other uses of unordered lists are lists of membership in different groups or projects - list the ten people you want to be working on something or the 5 people you think should be notified about something you are working on - this helps create a context for any piece of work.
The unordered list is a selection from a much larger set, and the act of selecting is in itself a useful way to understand something at a deeper level. Think about anyone making a syllabus for a course - listing the key headings and subdivisions of the subject, mapping it out. Now imagine that you are making a syllabus for the company you are working at - how to understand it, learn it - what is the best way to educate someone about what you do? This syllabus - an outline - will help you understand more deeply how you think about your organization. And what if you were to make a syllabus but consisting of people? Who are the ten people that can best help someone understand your organization?
Producing lists
Unordered lists are helpful, but the lists become much more powerful when we start to impose formal requirements - and there are plenty of such formal requirements that you can apply to get even more out of your lists.
The first, and most obvious one, is the number of things on your list. Are you making a list of 10, 100 or 1000 things? What if you move from 100 to 10?
As you start limiting the items on a list you have to start thinking in terms of priorities - if you are asked to reduce a list of 100 to 10 you have to start comparing the items in different ways, and that is when you start ranking.
Lists can also be constructed by more than one person - we can vote on and discuss lists in groups, and that can be a useful mechanisms to construct a list that aggregates information and assessments.
Lists can be nested - so that you start thinking through how things are structured. Such outlines are key to more complex thinking and there are many tools that help you do that, and even just a simple disposition in a document will help you do so efficiently.
These tools for list construction are all important, but the one that stands out is ranking. Ranking things is absolutely essential, and we rank things all the time. In Ranking: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play Péter Érdi notes that social ranking is often seen as a deeply human phenomenon - but the reality is that even animals rank all the time.
Ranking is an evolutionary phenomenon.
Ranking is the most fundamental version of the ordered list - a list in which the items appear in their order of some value that you have used as a ranking criterion. The algorithm for ranking is simple: establish the set of items to be ranked, decided for the ranking criterion and then apply the criterion to the set to produce an ordered list. Yet the power of this really simple mental model is enormous: with ranking we are able to produce powerful concepts like ”bestsellers” or ”public enemy no.1” - concepts that have power in social discourse beyond what their simple origins on a list suggest they should have.
Rankings separate societies into segments and classes, and the social ranking criteria determine who succeeds and who fails. These are truly this lists that dreams are made of!
Èrdi notes that reputation at its heart is ranking - something that is often missed in work on organizational reputation. If we recognize that reputation is a function of how we are ranked on different criteria - then we can start to look at those criteria and establish our own assessments of what the list underlying our reputation looks like.
Reputation, then, is less like the color of a company and more like our place on a chess board (and our value as a piece in the game) - it is relative others, and sometimes it is dragged down by the industry as a whole, because one of the criterion in ranking an organization is which industry it belongs too. This is evident not least in the recurring Gallup polls that show that different industries inspire different amounts of trust.
Anyone working on reputation then should think hard about what the ranking criteria look like - on what basis is the organization ranked? This is a much more concrete question than if people trust the company or even would recommend the company’s services to others. If we can get to some clarity around the existing ranking, the ranking criteria and the list’s other members - then we can start understanding where we can move, and what the limits are (your rank can never be higher than the lowest common denominator - and that will very often, depressingly often, be the ranking of your entire industry).
This is why the idea of throwing competitors in your industry under the bus never works - you harm your own ranking based on the perception of the industry as well. Sure, you can advance beyond them within that limit - but you will be capped out as they drag you down with them.
Ranking is powerful, but also frowned upon. The idea that there is a rank in society and in organization runs counter to our cherished ideals of equality and liberty - if you are ranked last, your liberty will be impacted - and the very fact of social ranking belies the idea of equality. And ranking in organizations - in, say, performance management - is a thoroughly depressing model of thinking about individual’s contribution to the team. So, should we really rank or is it morally indefensible to do so?
The facile, but true, answer is that we cannot avoid ranking. What we can do is to consciously work on having more than one set of ranking criteria and exploring those criteria for fairness and equity. We should not fear ranking in society, but we should fear those societies that are employing a singular ranking condition that is unchanging and immutable. Those societies produce caste-systems, social stratification that is essentially nothing else than coagulated rankings grown sclerotic over time.
So we need to admit that we rank, be explicit and transparent about our conditions of ranking and then ensure that those conditions evolve and change over time. The dream of a society without rank is unfortunately just that - a dream.
As we explore the criteria for ranking more closely we find that they have evolved to encompass two main mechanisms. Èrdi writes:
”There are two distinct mechanisms for navigating the social ladder, dominance and prestige. Dominance is an evolutionarily more ancient strategy and is based on the ability to intimidate other members in the group by physical size and strength. In dominance hierarchies, the group members don’t accept the social rank freely, only by coercion. Members of a colony fight, and the winners of these fights will be accepted as “superiors” and the losers as “subordinates.” The hierarchy formed naturally serves as a way of preventing superfluous fighting and injuries within a colony. Prestige, as a strategy, is evolutionarily younger and is based on skills and knowledge as appraised by the community. Prestige hierarchies are maintained by the consent of the community, without pressure being applied by particular members. It is not a surprise that those with different personality traits adopt different strategies. People using dominance to secure their status tend to be more aggressive, manipulative, and narcissistic. By contrast, people who use prestige instead tend to be more conscientious, confident, and diplomatic. Both strategies might have some negative consequences. Dominant leaders place a higher priority on maintaining power than achieving group goals, while leaders with prestige sometimes prioritize their social approval over group goals.
Érdi, Péter. Ranking (pp. 45-46). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
This is a key to how to think about a better form of social ranking - and also to understanding how public discourse works. If we take the example of the tech lash, we find that the opponents of the tech companies uniformly accuse them of dominance - of being too powerful and have too much influence. This is a classical move in social ranking fights - the opponents want to cut tech companies down to size, and so they suggest that they are ranking so high because they are using dominance tactics (note that dominance language crosses over between law and sociology and etiology here).
It also suggest that the best response strategy for any company or organization defending against the charge of being dominant (in all the senses) is to explore a way to achieve a ranking that is based on prestige - on the consent of the community, based on skills and knowledge.
There is nuance here: the strategy cannot be to pretend not to have rank (or power) at all (that will never work, since we all know that companies have rank!) - but needs to be one that recognizes rank, but seeks to base it solely on skills, knowledge and the consent of the community. A campaign focused on building a recognition for skill, sharing of knowledge and the acquisition of consent is the best evolutionary response to accusations of dominance.
Èrdi’s model of dominance and prestige is interesting also in the sense that it gives us a way to understand power. When we analyze power overall, and seek to find those that are most powerful, we will find that the people and organizations that build their power on dominance generally rank lower than those who build on what Èrdi calls prestige.
The curious case of the to-do list
Ordered lists are useful in many other cases than in analyzing power and reputation. The very idea of an ordered list is often held up as the best way we have to tackle the time management problem we are all struggling with. Making a list and then ordering it according to weight and importance is how many of use get through our days.
The to-do list is one of the most curious examples of the power of lists that we have in modern working life. There are numerous apps and whole practices - like Getting Things Done - that are built on lists trying to master time and the busyness of our every day lives.
And it is interesting that some people swear by theses lists and systems - and others completely dismiss them. Some prefer to keep a ”to done”-list, just listing what they have done, and some pick a single thing a day that they want to focus on - rather than walking through an endless list that just grows. Yet others are stuck in that special kind of hell that consists of using your inbox as the list of priorities that you are working on - something that creates the illusion of usefulness as the present and urgent completely devours any long term impact or change that you could contribute to.
Making lists of priorities is powerful - and if used right it can be a great tool. Are there any pointers as to what is the best way of making these lists or designing the lists? How should one produce a list of things to do?
There is a well-known story about Warren Buffett being asked this question by his personal airline pilot (it may well be anecdotal, but it is a good story so we will include it). In the story the pilot is looking to develop his career, and Buffett asks him to list the 25 priorities that he has. After he has done this, Buffet asks him to list the top five, and the pilot does this as well. The pilot, who may at this point have been dismayed at the simplicity of the advice, noted that he would get to work on those top 5. But this is where we learn something important - because when the pilot suggested that he would also keep the other 20 items, Buffett corrected him and noted that those - the 20 he had not circled as priorities, were actually also a list - but not a list of things to do if he had time, but a list that Buffett called the ”avoid at all costs”-list.
If you want to reach your goals, you need a list of things that you know will tempt and distract you and then ensure that you keep this ”avoid at all costs”-list as diligently as you maintain your list of goals.
This idea - that we should list the things we will not do and share it - is surprisingly powerful, and controversial. Especially in extraordinarily “helpful organizations”. I have had the pleasure to work in many such helpful organizations where people are so kind as to really want to meet every new idea and request, and it is detrimental to focus. There is no request that goes unmet or undiscussed, no task that does not get written into some plan.
Using an ordered list to not just rank what to do, but also what not to do at all is perhaps one of the most powerful uses we have of lists - but it requires that we recognize that focus is not a sign of someone being unhelpful.
The subject of to-do lists is endless, and there are so many different kinds of advice here that there is no simple way to explore this mental model. That in itself is interesting - at the heart of modern work life is a list that we all disagree around how to use and structure. What is it in the to-do list that captures the restlessness of our time so well?
A quick scan across Harvard Business Review suggests that noone is getting their todolists done - headlines such as ”Taming the Epic To-Do List” and ”Stop Feeling Guilty About Your To-dolist” speak volumes about how these lists are malfunctioning.
It seems as if we are, as Eco suggests, making lists because we are afraid of death, then to-do lists are not helping. If anything they make people more unhappy and scattered. It is telling that in a recent article where the author tried 4 different to-dolist methods, she found the most useful one being the method where she focused relentlessly on one single thing at a time - a method that is reminiscent of the so-called pomodoro-technique where you pick something to work at for 25-45 mins and then forget everything else.
An alien anthropologist studying human culture could write a really interesting essay about how we humans relate to time by focusing only on our tendency to try to master time with these lists, through apps and diaries and entire systems. We negotiate death in these lists, and it even becomes obvious in the much more explicit idea of the ”bucket list” - the list of things we want to do before we die.
And interestingly, this is where to-do lists connect back to social ranking. Both our daily ones, and the bucket lists, establish ranks. As Carter Chambers (played by Morgan Freeman) in the movie the Bucket List puts it: ”You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you” - and often that measure is the list of things you have to do and your ability to get through them, add to them - and yes feel guilty about them.
Lists of lists of lists
One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is the lists of lists of lists. This page lists lists, and so is a list of lists, literally, then a list of list of lists. It is on its own list, of course. This self-referential game is not just a game - it reminds us that the collection of lists matter. Eco has noted that our culture is made of lists - and this is obvious not just in the way that we catalogue in museums and libraries, but also in most organizations. Organizations have lists of principles or behaviors that they care about and the sum of these lists aim at being the foundation of organizational culture. Sometimes that succeeds, sometimes it fails - it depends not least on how the lists are produced and by whom.
The lists we keep are fundamental to what we do. A team in an organization can often be described in an interesting way by just asking what lists they keep. A comms team keeps a list of issues, journalists, questions and answers, spokespeople and stories. A product team keeps a list of users, features, bugs, tests and releases.
Articulating these lists and curating them is a great way of building the intellectucal capital of an organization. Curation is key, here - a list is not a static thing, it needs to come with a rhythm, a cadence of change. When do we update the list? How do we update it? When do we update the criteria we use to produce the list? These are all questions that help a team evolve and grow.
Process can be captured in another form of list - the checklist - that is often undervalued. Checklists for launches of products, policy maker meetings, weekly reviews etc can be tremendously powerful tools.
As Atul Gawande puts it in his excellent book The Checklist Manifesto:
We have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavor. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear. Take the safe surgery checklist. If someone discovered a new drug that could cut down surgical complications with anything remotely like the effectiveness of the checklist, we would have television ads with minor celebrities extolling its virtues. Detail men would offer free lunches to get doctors to make it part of their practice. Government programs would research it. Competitors would jump in to make newer and better versions. If the checklist were a medical device, we would have surgeons clamoring for it, lining up at display booths at surgical conferences to give it a try, hounding their hospital administrators to get one for them—because, damn it, doesn’t providing good care matter to those pencil pushers?
Gawande, Atul. The Checklist Manifesto (pp. 158-159). Profile. Kindle Edition.
Building a portfolio of lists does not sound very glamorous, but it is a powerful way to really increase both productivity and quality in any team. If we can get over the somewhat dull impression we get from the word ”list” we can make great strides in building out our teams through good lists. Take the example of a policy team:
Lists of influentials and who they listen to
Lists of potential allies
Checklists for meetings and outreach
Lists of issues and the arguments in them
Lists of venues, podcasts and press where the debate is shaped
Lists of internal spokespeople
Lists of the best industry associations and checklists for joining new ones
Checklists for events and conferences
Checklists for speaking slots and hearings
Lists of detractors and lists of their arguments
…and so on. You have to pick to construct your list of lists!
Having these lists is just the first step, then the curation needs to be set in motion, and a health discussion about the criteria we use for compiling the lists are also important. Updating these lists should not be routine as much as an intellectual discussion, and ranking the issues, people, venues, detractors and allies obviously is a great way to discuss and shape a shared model of reality.
One can do a lot worse than conceive of knowledge work as working with lists, and as we expand and collect our lists they turn into dictionaries and encyclopedias, collections of structured knowledge that can be shared and evolved together. If you want to really dig into the importance of lists of lists of lists you could consider that this is how we build libraries and store knowledge. A library is based on a catalogue that is a list. Wikipedia is a list. Search returns a ranked list of results, and the way that Google organizes the world’s information is to display it as a list of ranked results.
Lists are what stand between us and the noise horizon of the information society.
So what?
The use of lists is common in most organizations and this note is not a recommendation to start using lists. Most people do. It is a recommendation to be much more carefully constructing and articulating our lists, understanding rankings and the criteria we use to produce those lists. It is a suggestion that maybe it would be worthwhile to make a list of the lists that your team manages and curates - and then develop those lists into real assets that compound over time.
Producing checklists to capture the tacit knowledge of experts in your field is a great way to constantly become better at what you do and think about how your criteria for those check lists should evolve as well.
But here is also a warning - lists can capture and distract us. The to-do list at the heart of modern organizations is a strange beast, and one that needs to be carefully tended to. The cutting edge between lists and time will probably always be difficult to negotiate, since we are in essence playing chess with death in our to-do lists.
As always, thank you for reading! Do spread the newsletter if you think there are others who could be interested in it!
Nicklas