Episode 20: Command and Control Business Leadership

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:10]  Bruce: All right, welcome back to The Theory of Anything podcast. We are continuing our conversation with Bart about applying Karl Popper's Theory of Knowledge to management and to business and to knowledge creation within business. So Bart, welcome back.

[00:00:28]  Bart: Thank you, Bruce. Happy to be back.

[00:00:30]  Bruce: And of course we got Cameo. How's it going, Cameo?

[00:00:33]  Cameo: I'm great. Thanks, Bruce.

[00:00:36]  Bruce: So where we left off is we were still talking about the remark that I made that triggered you. And we talked about some of the barriers. Why is it that people don't utilize kind of our best theory of knowledge in business since it's primarily about knowledge creation. We talked about that, but we didn't really get a chance to talk about what are the drivers and enablers that can get it more accepted. So maybe let's talk about that first. So Bart, kind of give us your thoughts on that first.

[00:01:04]  Bart: Yeah. Yeah, so exactly, as you say, we talked about the unpopularity of philosophical theories in management. And that's one point, but apart from the fact that it's philosophy, it's also like a theory that could be put into practice, as I've tried to show. Then there is still this remaining question, what keeps it from getting introduced? And I thought about this a lot. I'm not sure I have the perfect answer, but in the beginning, I thought that management was dealing with simple questions and therefore they could live with simple answers. This is going back to the first theories about management. I think it was the theory of Frederick Taylor, who really has systemized management and boiled it down to very simple rules, rules of productivity, rules of how to behave, what roles to adopt, et cetera. And this was basically the idea that given the fact that problems aren't that complex in management reality, we can do with simple answers.

[00:02:21]  Bart: We can automate, we can make very simple rules on who should do what. We can set very clear metrics on how productivity evolves and we can apply simple steering mechanisms if that productivity or whatever KPI is going out of range. And so that is what I think a little bit the idea of keeping management as solving simple problems with simple answers. And I think that worked for long. And it got us into even the classical command and control philosophy or command and control approaches. And so there's this other thing that the last 10 years with the advent of not only globalization, but the internet, global competition, disruption of industries and all those things, problems for sure have become more complex. There are more requirements to fulfill for any organization in order to create value for a customer and continue to create value for customers.

[00:03:34]  Bart: That has become more complex as opposed to, let's say, 30, 40 years ago. And so that could be a trigger. Once problems become more complex, probably we'll have to look for answers that are not that simple, that we may want to keep a little bit open in terms of getting and growing towards better answers, that we'll probably have to look for those answers much more collectively, through more cooperation, through more ideas and idea evolution across many people. Organizations themselves internally have become also more complicated. And so the necessity for good knowledge creation that satisfies the different individual objectives of all the complicated structures out of which an organization is made up of these days, is also probably a trigger for these kinds of approaches towards problem solving. I haven't seen it really going that way, but I'm let's say quite hopeful in that sense that I don't think we can get to any other way than this more open creation of knowledge with more cooperation, simply because the problems are growing more complex and our structures are getting more complicated.

[00:05:06]  Bart: And to get out of that kind of situation, I think we'll have to evolve maybe with many errors still that we still need to make and with many mistakes, but eventually we'll have to get there because problems are simply getting more complex. And so we'll have to adopt better and better epistemology in order to cope with the problems and continue to prosper and to create value in organization. So I'm quite optimistic in that respect. The way we will get there and the speed with which we'll get there is another question. There I'm a little bit less clear on what exactly is going to happen.

[00:05:53]  Bruce: So a couple of thoughts. First of all, Cameo and I had a conversation later. I don't know if we wanna get too far into this, but she actually does know of some examples of management companies that are basing their stuff at least around philosophy, not necessarily Karl Popper's philosophy. So she came up with some examples of how philosophy does sometimes work its way into the management world, which I thought was interesting. Did you wanna mention that at all, Cameo?

[00:06:23]  Cameo: Oh yeah, that was just some random side conversation. You know, the particular example that I was using wasn't even a management company. They were a finance company.

[00:06:35]  Bruce: Finance company, wow.

[00:06:36]  Cameo: That had built their method, their everything was built off of Ayn Rand's philosophy essentially. And that was kind of their guiding business principles were essentially Randian.

[00:06:53]  Bart: Okay, it's interesting.

[00:06:56]  Bruce: The other thing that I wanted to kind of mix into this was, so when Bart was talking about how we're dealing with increasingly complex problems, and so we may have to move away from the command and control, this I think is arguably what we're facing in modernism altogether, right? I mean, you think about the failures of institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post, or a lot of the crazy stuff that's just going on in politics. I know we touched upon this in politics in the previous episode. They seem to, a lot of them stem from the fact that the old command and control structures aren't working anymore. And there's a great deal of, if nothing else, fear about what's going to happen as a lot of these structures break down, as the internet breaks them down is usually the way people put it. It used to be that there was gatekeepers to knowledge and information flow.

[00:07:58]  Bruce: And you trusted the New York Times and you didn't have tons of alternatives anyhow, right? It just, and they put a lot of effort into trying to seem very unbiased and things like that, even if that wasn't really true. And now they're not even trying to look unbiased. They'll put right up in the headline, the headline is Trump falsely claims, of course Trump is falsely claiming something, but you're not supposed to put that in the headline, right? And they're not even trying anymore. They're just saying whatever it is their opinion is, and that's the headline. And it's interesting to watch this happen. And I had a friend who took journalism in college, and she's like, I just can't even believe the types of things that the best newspapers in the business are starting to do in their headlines that used to just be considered journalistic no-nos altogether.

[00:08:50]  Bruce: Like you just get failed in your class if you did something like this. And now you've got the real guys doing it for real. It's interesting to watch a lot of these failures and what's going on. And now there really are alternative sources of information. And of course, a lot of it's bad, right? I mean, the New York Times is actually probably superior to most sources on the internet, but it's interesting to see what's happening as they kind of just lose their power and the gatekeepers losing a lot of their power. And to some degree, it's almost freeing, feel like it's democratizing information. In other ways, it's scary. The degree to which fake news is flooding around and things like that. The fact that we now even consider New York Times to be fake news very often. A lot of these seem to stem from the same problem that we used to have very command and control type structures.

[00:09:46]  Bruce: And those were at least effective, right? I mean, it's easy to point to them and say, you know, that's bad. And we can look at Karl Popper's philosophy and here's the reasons why authoritarianism is bad. But they worked, right? And they've worked for years. And that's not saying something small. They worked for decades, for centuries. Yes. And so it's interesting to watch them kind of break down and to be forced into a situation where we have to come up with more interesting, more distributed ways of trying to deal with things like information and control of, or control may even just be the wrong word at this point, control of society, trying to keep things “going to the crazy” [wording unclear], things like that. So-

[00:10:33]  Bart: Yeah, and it's interesting to see them break down indeed, as you say, but the question is then whether we will learn or we won't learn it. That's still a bit unclear, right?

[00:10:43]  Bruce: Yeah, and I kind of believe, I'm optimistic that we're gonna get something better in its place, but I couldn't tell you what it is, right? It's not at all clear where we're going, right? We're going somewhere interesting, but it's really hard to say what it is.

[00:11:00]  Bart: Exactly, exactly. And it's exciting to see, and we can only hope that we'll learn from the reasons of why it has broken down.

[00:11:13]  Bruce: Yeah, I think this is where you're trying to come from with your management philosophy. You're trying to say, look, we understand how you should really handle things. You should handle them in terms of knowledge creation. You should handle them in terms of trying to get everybody putting their ideas out there, being transparent, criticizing the ideas, coming up with the best error corrections. Of course, that's what we should all be doing. I mean, it just sort of makes sense, right? I suppose the hard part is, is that it's not immediately obvious how to implement it. And I suppose that's why people pay you to go in and to be a consultant for them, so that you can explain. If it was obvious, then they wouldn't need you, right?

[00:11:52]  Bart: Yeah, there are two things. There is indeed the know-how of doing this, because you cannot say, this sounds good. As of tomorrow, we're gonna work like that. It doesn't spontaneously emerge from simply the instruction that we're gonna let go of rules. We're gonna let go of a little bit of authority and control. And then magically, this new way of working will emerge. So there is know-how on how to implement it. But on the other hand, there is also the enemy or the rival epistemology, which has to gradually fade out, which is the justificationist approach, because if you want problem-solving in the sense of Popper, with an open-ended perspective on knowledge creation, many of the managers that are used to give the answers and justify the answers, even with know-how and even with approaches, they will have to go through some evolution in their perspective on justification-ism versus a more open problem-solving, criticism-based process.

[00:13:15]  Bart: And yeah, I think we came to that also last time, in the sense of which type of managers are then most likely to go into such kind of evolution, and which will have a much harder time to appreciate and to at least try it and give it a chance, and look at it in the sense of trying to learn from it.

[00:13:45]  Bruce: All right, interesting. Cameo, any thoughts?

[00:13:53]  Cameo: I'm so fascinated just in how it plays out on the day-to-day as a management consulting process. Yeah, it's really very interesting to me.

[00:14:05]  Bart: I think we had an interest… I'm steering a little bit towards it with some purpose, but we had an interesting discussion the last time, which we didn't finish, which was which kind of manager would want to take the risk between parentheses of engaging in such a wildly new approach. And I think I then answered, among other things, that I have quite some success with female leaders, but I came back a little bit to that claim afterwards, because it's, well, I obviously don't have any explanation how and why it would be linked to simply the difference between men and women. In any case, I can make it a little bit more, let's say, neutral in the sense that any manager who doesn't necessarily want his or her answer to a management problem, but is more interested in how a team comes up with an even better answer. I would say that would be a good demarcation between managers that I could engage with and where I could be engaged with for a long time versus managers who would probably tell me after a couple of months, this was a nice experiment, it doesn't suit our culture or anything like that.

[00:15:39]  Bart: And we're not… So I think that is a little bit of distinction. It's really about whether you're interested in really having the answer yourself or whether you believe that a better answer can be found and that it doesn't matter where it comes from. Not only the individual who had the answer or even the process in which the answer even got still a little bit better than what the original answer was. And whenever you prefer or you're interested at least in the second option and not the option in my domain of expertise, I need to have all the answers to all the questions in that domain at all times for all people. I think there is a dividing line. And I know still a lot of managers whom I have good relationships with who eventually, let's say, are transparent in saying, no, I'm more of the first category. I really need to have my vision, to have my answers, to spread my word in my teams, across my teams.

[00:16:53]  Bart: And for me, it's too big of a step to say, I'm going to engage a process in which I only ask the question and the best answer will be found in a process. And it doesn't matter if it's not anymore my answer.

[00:17:10]  Bruce: So people often talk about management styles. And two that you often hear about are people who are kind of authoritarian, command and control versus those that try to be, you know, do it more like a democracy. They're trying to get everybody a consensus. Sorry, not democracy, but consensus. They're trying to look for consensus. Is that kind of what you're talking about here? The type of manager that would be less open to this would be one that's really focused on I know what it is that I believe I want versus one who is—doesn't necessarily—who's looking for the group to come to consensus on things. Is that kind of what you're driving at or is that not what you're driving?

[00:17:49]  Bart: No, that's that's pretty much. Yeah, that is the belief or the having a minimum of interest in the answer that the group can come up with as opposed to the one thing, the certainty that that you have the answer for the group.

[00:18:04]  Bruce: So let me—go ahead, Cameo.

[00:18:06]  Cameo: Well, I actually want you to finish your thought. Mine was about the gender thing. I think we could come back to that.

[00:18:13]  Bruce: Okay, so I was just thinking that this all reminds me a bit of conservative versus liberal. And those are such abused terms. But I was reading an article recently, and it was written by a guy who was self-identified as liberal, but he was talking about how the Trump presidency made him more conservative, not because he liked anything Trump did, but because he had originally thought that Trump's presidency was going to be the gigantic fascist disaster that the left claimed it was going to be, and instead Trump was just ineffective at implementing. He tried things, and the systems checks and balances actually worked quite well, which is something I actually think people should take note of, is the fact that the system really did work the way it was intended. So it's interesting. So he's taking the very negative view of Trump, but he's saying, but it's actually convinced me that the conservatives were more right than I had thought.

[00:19:13]  Bruce: And so he goes on to explain that kind of the typical attitude that he used to have as a liberal was that they see these problems and they want to fix them, and it's those dang conservatives that keep them from doing it. But for the conservatives, the world would be a better place. And that's fairly typical, he claims, of the attitude of people he knows and that he's around and his friends and things like that. And he says what he started to realize during the Trump presidency, even with Trump trying so hard to do things that he disliked, was there was this old saying that conservatives have where they say the liberal comes and sees this gate or whatever and says, look, this gate is a problem. I want to get rid of the gate. I don't see any reason why we need it, to which the conservative replies, well, if you see no reason why we need it, then we need to keep it.

[00:20:09]  Bruce: If once you can see the reason why we need it and you can explain that, then we can talk about replacing it with something better. And so he kind of laughed about that and then came back later and said, actually, I'm starting to see that that's kind of true, that there's a lot of traditions in place. There's a lot of things that sometimes we don't even understand why. And so they just came out of—evolved as part of what made a working society. And removing them destroys the knowledge that's created within these structures that nobody ever intentionally put there to begin with. It was just a matter of whichever types of institutions or things that you, that the societies that had the better ones, even if it was just by chance, those are the ones that happened to survive because other societies disappear. And so you end up with societies that have these knowledge-based structures that they may not have even intended.

[00:21:02]  Bruce: And yet they're important to how that society functions. And so before you tear them down, you need to stop and actually try to understand them and understand what purpose they were serving, and so that you can replace them in a way that doesn't make things worse. And then this was his final point, because conservatives, he says now, are right that we're actually closer to chaos than we realize. And it's not just a matter of trying to just improve things. We have to also not let things slip back. Now, this kind of goes along with my own political view that both sides play a really important role, which I stand by. But it's somewhat similar to this authoritarian versus consensus approach, right? When a manager has the attitude, look, I'm trying to implement what I know works. They're like the conservative, right? They don't even entirely know why what they've seen works works, but they've seen something that they're convinced works.

[00:21:58]  Bruce: So they want to go do that, and they know that the people working for them maybe don't understand what they've seen. They don't have as much of experience or whatever. And perhaps this even explains the success of that management style. I mean, let's be honest, it's been successful for a very long time. It's a more successful approach than being completely chaotic, let's say. Okay, which would be the natural order of things. So it's at least understandable why you would have managers out there. They're not just bad. They actually do know something. They actually have some knowledge that they're afraid to give up on, and for good reasons. And they are putting some risk by tearing down the things that they've seen that have worked before. Maybe that's why sometimes you have to wait until there's a crisis, like we're starting to see on a regular basis here in society, before we're really able to change those structures to be something else, and everybody's really ready to do it.

[00:22:56]  Bruce: Thoughts on that, Bart?

[00:22:58]  Bart: Yeah, I think I fully agree with what you say. There's two side remarks. I think there's difference between politics and organizations we've discussed before. I think you can try much more in organizations. It's on smaller scales, and there's a much wider diversity of problems, which you can choose from, where to start actually with trying a new approach. I think politics is much more black and white. And the stakes and the transparency across the whole nation and everything are all playing along, the media and everything. But that's a side remark—a process remark on where it would have most effect. My feeling is organizations. There you can try and test this and learn it as a way of solving problems in organizations. In politics, I'm much less familiar and a little bit hesitant. But in principle, I agree exactly, I agree fully with what you're saying.

[00:24:08]  Bart: But the second remark was also on the term consent. You can go a lot of ways with the term consent. It can be a compromise, and then it's very often no growth of knowledge, which I'm not in favor of. But consent can also be, you give autonomy to one individual with a great idea and you consent that the individual has the right to take the autonomy and to pursue his idea and then eventually learn from his or her mistakes and grow knowledge in that way, out of the learning of mistakes. And that way of consent I like a lot, because then as a team, you support an individual in using autonomy with an idea, around an idea that he or she has. That's the nice face of consent or the nice side of consent, which I fully support because it endorses the growth of knowledge. On the other side, consent that turns into compromise. I think we talked about this before as well.

[00:25:15]  Bart: A typical compromise hampers the growth of knowledge. And David Deutsch also famously writes about this in the beginning of Infinity, in Chapter 13, I guess. And he gives a great explanation for why compromises are typically leading to or not fueling growth of knowledge. And it's a brilliant argument, and it's a very relevant one. But if consent turns into compromises, then it has a negative impact on the growth of knowledge. If consent turns towards, we as a group endorse the autonomy of the individual with an idea in supporting his or her efforts in pursuing it, then I'm fully with you.

[00:26:07]  Bruce: Let me try to restate what you just said in my own words. Make sure I've got this. So it may well be that the consensus manager is the one that's more open to your ideas, but you're not necessarily endorsing consensus. You're not necessarily saying consensus is what we're after, because that may result in just some sort of hodgepodge of ideas that gives everybody a little of what they want, and so nobody gets what they want, and we end up with an easy to vary approach that could only be bad at that point. Is that really kind of what you're getting at? Okay, I could definitely follow that, and that makes good sense to me. And just to kind of explain Deutsch's argument here, so Deutsch argues against compromise. And I want to be careful here, because the word compromise actually can mean more than one thing. So the way he's using it in this context, I agree, is a bad thing.

[00:26:59]  Bruce: So imagine a legislature in politics that you've got the left and the right, and they both have an idea of what they want to do. And so they end up with not implementing either the left's idea or the right's idea, but some hodgepodge of both. And you end up with something that nobody wanted, nobody feels responsible for, and if it fails, nobody fails with it. And so there's no incentive to defend it or to try to make it really actually work, because both sides kind of want it to fail because it's just this compromise that nobody wanted. If that's what we mean by compromise, then I would completely agree compromise is a bad thing. And the reason why is, according to Deutsch, is because that's now easy to vary. A good idea would be hard to vary, just like a good theory. And so it should be that we want someone to come in to win and to implement their ideas and that we try them.

[00:27:59]  Bruce: And that somebody's responsible. And if they don't work, then we know who's responsible for the idea and we oust them from office. We put somebody else in. That would be a good government that creates knowledge. One that operates by “both sides have to constantly just—we take a little bit from this side, a little bit from that side”— and the final policy is something nobody believed in— that's bad. That won't create knowledge. Now, I think the word compromise though, does have another possible connotation. And that would be, I've got this idea and I'm trying to implement it because I believe it to be a good idea. It's a hard to vary idea. And it's creating problems for the other side, something that they don't like. So I try to error correct my idea and I try to improve my idea to reduce the resistance to my idea by modifying my idea to still be hard to vary and I'm still responsible for it so that it now addresses the concerns they have so that they now are possibly on board with the idea.

[00:29:03]  Bruce: I've convinced them because now this idea addresses my concerns and their concerns. Or at least it reduces their resistance so I'm able to get it passed and I'm able to get myself elected or implement my policy or whatever we want to do. This could also be called compromise and there's nothing about this form of compromise that is not knowledge creating. It's still hard to vary. There's still somebody who's responsible and that form of compromise is okay as far as I am aware. So I wanted to kind of differentiate there about the two different ways we might use the word compromise. Sometimes compromise can be okay if it's the right kind of compromise. If it's an actual solving of the other side's problems while still sticking to my plan, my approach.

[00:29:51]  Bart: Yeah, I agree.

[00:29:52]  Bruce: Okay, good, good, good. So we're on board with that. Cameo thoughts?

[00:29:59]  Cameo: I've still been thinking a little bit about one thing that Bart said around autonomy of idea and the idea, and I know this is central to your management processes, the idea of somebody coming in saying, I want to solve this and having full autonomy. And I was just thinking for a minute about how rare it is to let somebody go and do something. And maybe it's just because I have an excessively bossy personality, but to go and I think loading dishwashers is a great example. Somebody goes and loads a dishwasher. If somebody else comes and puts dishes in, they almost instantly want to say, you did this wrong. Why would you do this this way? And then they want to change it, which I think ultimately is again, still falling within your philosophy. But I think we don't necessarily want each other to have autonomy.

[00:30:56]  Unidentified speaker: I agree.

[00:30:56]  Bruce: In fact, if you really pay attention to the way people speak about politics in particular, we're all mini tyrants. We believe we know the right way to implement whatever. And if we could just be put into power, we would fix everything. And we are all very deeply mini tyrants. We don't have in general a fallibilist attitude towards politics or the way things should be done. And we should, because that's the truth, that I probably don't understand what the right policy is any more than the person currently in power, and I would probably make bigger or worse mistakes if I were to go implement my ideas. And that's true of probably all of us. So I definitely think that we kind of don't see ourselves entirely clearly. We don't see our ideas maybe entirely clear. It would be a more accurate way to say that. But we kind of think we know when in reality, we don't know as much as we think we do.

[00:32:00]  Bart: Yeah. And it's a great question, Cameo. And I would respond to that in the following way. We always have to be somewhere between full autonomy of an individual and cooperation. Well, there are actually three things. There is full autonomy of the individual. There is perfect cooperation in the team. And there is the hierarchy above that either sets the, you know, either commands and controls or gives some freedom to the team. What I mean with an individual should have autonomy that is in the sense and in our process, in the conception of idea owner. And we talked about this, but an idea owner has some autonomy to pursue his or her idea, but has the responsibility to actively seek criticism and actively seek for enhancement to the idea. And there is a balance. You're very right. There is no way to define when you should let the individual go with his or her idea versus when you should stop her or him.

[00:33:19]  Bart: And that is something that grows in a team, but that grows only if you allow for a process which allows to learn this. And for sure, you can give too much autonomy to individuals, and they run against the wall and learn nothing and be disappointed afterwards and never give their own ideas anymore. On the other hand, a group, and that is the remark of compromises, a group can spoil a very good idea of an individual just because we have this ideal of let's do everything together and let's ask everyone's opinion. And so I see three extremes. The individual with too much autonomy who runs into the wall. The other extreme is that the group actually spoils the entire quality of the idea just because everybody wants to say something about it. And then the third extreme is that you have the hierarchy who invents all the answers. And you could look at these three extremes as a triangle.

[00:34:27]  Bart: And the sides of the triangles are always bad. All of those three extremes are bad. There's no knowledge creation, there's no value creation, there's no learning, there's no engagement along any of the three extremes. So where you want to be is somewhere closer to the middle of the triangle, where the hierarchy is not preventing autonomy, where the individuals are not taking too many or too much autonomy to run into the wall, probably. And where the group is not spoiling the idea too much and enhancing it as opposed to spoiling it or as opposed to bringing it down to some wishy-washy compromise that is indeed easy to vary and not effective at solving the problem. And this is obviously a little bit disappointing in the sense that I cannot give any clear-cut rules about when to go for the individual, when to follow the group or when to follow the manager, the three extremes of the triangle.

[00:35:32]  Bart: But still, I'm convinced that you have to be somewhere in the middle. And the group has an important role to enhance ideas of the individual. The individual has to learn to cope with the criticism and to allow for the enhancement and not go for a stubborn way of pursuing only his or her idea. And then the hierarchy, the third party should allow enough room that this team dynamic can eventually take place because they could ruin it as well, of course. And so that's a little bit, I think, the triangle that matters here.

[00:36:14]  Bruce: So it's interesting, like in politics, since we're comparing this with politics, and admittedly politics is quite different, there's an immediate loser, winner-loser type situation, right? You get elected or you don't. You get unelected, you get removed from office if your ideas weren't working and people aren't satisfied. Somebody else gets to try their ideas. There's always somebody ready to take over with their own policies and ideas that they want to implement. So in business, where we're doing this, it's not really quite the same thing. We're looking for the best idea. We're looking for, and you connect it with an individual to try to address that it doesn't become this kind of consensus idea that compromises and it's really nobody's idea, nobody likes it. But we're not really looking, you know, the idea owner doesn't have the same personal stake in it that George W.

[00:37:06]  Bruce: Bush did, right? Or Trump or whoever, right? They've got risk rewards all over the place. And they have to have the motivation to come in and to get their own people and to implement their idea because they're gonna lose their office if they don't or they're not gonna get in the office in the first place if they don't. So how do you handle that? Because it is enough of a different environment. And you would probably, if you required people to become superstars or languish into oblivion based on if they raised a good idea or not, probably nobody would raise ideas in a business environment. Only the people who are gonna be executives anyhow would raise ideas. So you wouldn't want to go quite that far as we do in politics where the ideas are so directly connected to that one individual and the ideas and the individual rise and fall together, if that makes any sense.

[00:38:05]  Bart: Now, it's a good question. I mean, how do you deal with it? I think we need both. Every individual in a company who wants to contribute needs both. They need autonomy and they need cooperation. They need to have the feeling that they at least contribute someway, somehow to what the group does. And on the other hand, they also need autonomy in the sense of experiencing that their idea has made it into some tangible realization that was successful, that creates value. And so it's in between those two things, given that the hierarchy allows for at least autonomy and cooperation. In very black-and-white command-and-control structures, you do not even start to address the topics of autonomy and cooperation, but assume that the hierarchy doesn't prevent autonomy to be given and cooperation, a real cooperation in a team to be developed. Then I guess every human or every person in an organization needs both.

[00:39:17]  Bart: For some ideas, you have to sense that your autonomy was at work, that it was your idea, maybe a little bit enhanced by the group, but that the core of the idea was your idea, and it made it into implementation and realization. But on other problems or other ideas, it can feel really good that you as an individual just contributed a small piece of the puzzle, and it was somebody else's core idea. And I think you need both. You need to experience enough autonomy for as long as possible until one of your ideas really gets… And it can be small ideas. I'm not saying that they all have to be big ideas and with big rewards, but you at least have to experience that some of your ideas after enhancement and criticism have made it into realization and have made it into something that has improved something. That's one thing. I think every individual needs to experience that.

[00:40:25]  Bart: And on the other hand, there needs to be cooperation. It can be that it's all separate ideas endorsed by separate people and their autonomy, because then you're working one against the others and there's no cooperation. There's no contributions of other people onto your ideas and vice versa. So I think it has to be enough of both to be lasting, to be engaging in the end, to be performant.

[00:40:56]  Cameo: It's really reminding me of when you see the most healthy versions of Agile in teams, Scrum teams that are operating really well, that are truly self-organizing, which always implies that they're also in an organization that has already made a decision to be hands-off as far as dictating to a team about what they're going to do. In most places that claim to be Agile, that's not actually true. Team structure is typically defined for a team, but when you see Agile done really well and you see it really, that autonomy be given to a team to decide for themselves how they're going to organize and then to be constantly working together to define autonomy for everybody within the team and then using things like retrospectives to constantly criticize the process, but also to celebrate both individual wins and collective wins. But it's rare to see it done well.

[00:42:02]  Bruce: It is rare to see it done well. That's something I've wondered about a lot, right? And it makes sense.

[00:42:08]  Bart: What are the reasons according to you guys? What are the reasons that it is hard to have it work well?

[00:42:15]  Cameo: Well, I think one of the reasons is because companies want to tell people how to do a thing. Hey, we're going to be agile. Here's how you do it. And here's the makeup you're going to have. Here's what everybody in those roles—here's what their roles and responsibility… That's the responsibility. We know exactly what a product owner is supposed to do and what a scrum master is supposed to do. A true self-organizing team, I think, using these kinds of concepts, you'd have teams that had the skills, but maybe some of the developers want to be writing the user stories versus the product owner. Or the individual, what am I going to do every day, is rarely in the actual team's domain to determine.

[00:43:08]  Bruce: You know, I think I'm going to give a different answer on this. And this is the conservative in me. I think doing it wrong is easy, and doing it right is hard, because it's hard to vary. And so the norm would be doing it wrong. The norm, if you don't very carefully get everything right, you will be doing it wrong. And so let me give examples of this. So Cameo and I have talked quite a bit about what's the role of a project manager. So I'm a project manager. I used to work for Cameo. And what's the right role of a project manager? And I think the role that we normally want to assign to a project manager is often counterproductive. Even though it's popular and people like it, and they paid me lots of money to do this role, that in many ways it was actually counterproductive. And one of the ways in which it is, is the ease with which a team will give their autonomy away to a perceived leader.

[00:44:12]  Cameo: Absolutely.

[00:44:14]  Bruce: The ease with which they don't want to have to take on the responsibility that goes with that autonomy. And if they can give it to somebody else and give the responsibility to that person as well, they likely will. Because there's, you know, it's desirable to not be responsible to some degree, right? And I think a lot of times, when you have a self-managing team, it's hard to be a self-managing team, because you're responsible for everything, right? And you have to really take your role seriously, constantly deciding, oh, we had this commitment for this two-week sprint, we're going to work overtime. Even though we know, in the big scheme of things, it's not that important to the overall project, we made a commitment, there are different attitude changes that require a level of personal responsibility that are a little harsh at times, right?

[00:45:10]  Bruce: And there's some really big benefits, too. That's why when teams actually do this and do it well, they prefer it this way. But trying to get there along the way, there are so many opportunities to just go, yeah, it's not for me.

[00:45:25]  Unidentified speaker: It's interesting.

[00:45:26]  Cameo: It's an interesting perspective.

[00:45:29]  Bart: Yeah, I agree with both of your arguments. I see them, too. And they're my source of motivation to fight it.

[00:45:40]  Cameo: It makes me sad when I see teams being dysfunctional either because nobody on the team feels like they have autonomy, or they have a leader that's dictating to them, or sometimes just teams just can't seem to get anything done because they have the opposite, no clear leadership, no strong leadership, and no ability to self-manage.

[00:46:11]  Bruce: And if you have to choose between a team that is dominated by one person and they make all the decisions themselves, and a team that is completely dysfunctional and can get nothing done at all, having the one person in charge is the better choice. And I think this explains the success of the command and control structure for centuries and millennia, in fact, right, is that it's an immediate improvement, easy to implement improvement. I shouldn't overemphasize how easy it is. It's not that easy, but easy by comparison to implement improvement. Julius Caesar comes in and makes himself the emperor and gets to immediately run things the way he wants to and has an idea and has a theory about what he wants to implement. And it's probably going to actually improve things, right? And this is why dictators are often popular, is they actually improve things.

[00:47:13]  Bart: Okay, Bruce, I hear you, but I'm going to twist it a little bit. More and more of the problems in big organizations are not necessarily vertically where you can appoint indeed an authority and give the authority enough control and use his or her experience to get things done. But more and more of the problems are lateral. And you have just departments at the same level of hierarchy that have to solve problems that were never used to come together even because they were working in silos and the entire silo was solving their problems. But now, given increased complexity on the side of the customers and the market, there are many more problems that require cooperation between same levels of hierarchies. And then it's not even trivial to appoint which one of the two will be the leader here, because they will both be candidates. And there's not one of the two departments that will always say, yeah, you can take the lead and I will follow you.

[00:48:19]  Bart: So you get into much more conflicts if you want, because of this lateral cooperation, where there isn't the availability of this leader who has always been there in the past to take care of his or her silo. And that becomes a problem. That's where command and control is even not an option anymore, because you'll have two leaders standing up at the same level of hierarchy and they will have to cooperate and find solutions together, unless if they escalate everything. Because if they're stuck, they will escalate, and then all those problems end up at the desk of the next one in line above. But that's also not an effective way, because that's slowing things down. The one above doesn't have all the information to then solve the problem, because he has not the insights that both of the leaders below him have. So you're getting into more and more difficulties to get away with the idea that Command and Control will still and for a long time be and remain the prevailing and successful model.

[00:49:37]  Bart: I'm a little less convinced of that.

[00:49:42]  Bruce: You know, I agree with what you're saying. And if I can, so to take a term from machine learning, there's this concept of, and this isn't only in machine learning, but this is kind of where I came to it, is this idea of collective intelligence, right? There's, if you have, so we look at like a communist society, which of course they never get to the supposed communist level, they're always socialism. You could be the smartest guy in the world, right? And you're never even going to come close to the level of intelligence that's going to exist in a capitalistic society where prices get set by actual supply and demand versus somebody trying to figure out what they think it should be, right? It's the collective intelligence, when you tap into it, when you properly tap into it, it's amazingly smart compared to any one individual. We know it can go wrong too, and I'm not trying to say otherwise, but things like capitalism tap into collective intelligence.

[00:50:41]  Bruce: Democracy, in its own way, taps into collective intelligence. You try to look at a dictator running a country. They never do anywhere near as good a job as a well-run democracy that is able to tap into collective intelligence, and problem-solving happens faster, and knowledge creation happens faster. This is why monarchies and dictators and various types of tyrants, they really just don't succeed long-term. That may have been a good model back when the alternative of democracy didn't exist yet. That may have been better than anarchy or whatever. But it surely has not proven to be the best model even now, in most cases.

[00:51:35]  Bart: Yep. I agree.

[00:51:38]  Bruce: All right. We're running out of time. I actually still wanted to get Cameo's take on her comments on women versus men. Yeah.

[00:51:49]  Cameo: Yeah. This had come out of the statement that it seems to be, that the female managers seem to adapt to this concept and this idea better than the men. I think that was what the trigger was from last time. Am I remembering that correctly?

[00:52:14]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's right.

[00:52:16]  Cameo: So this is my theory.

[00:52:18]  Bart: It was a wild conjecture from my part.

[00:52:20]  Cameo: It was wild conjecture. Well, here's what, when you said that, and I was like, oh yeah, that doesn't surprise me. And Bruce said, why is that? So I think that in management, you see men who come in and have a very aggressive, over-the-top style, that is what gets them ahead. And so they're rewarded for that behavior. And so that's kind of all they ever know is that really harsh command and control. I think it's more difficult for that personality to be rewarded for females. I think for a woman to achieve leadership, typically, she's still going to have that, but she's learned to temper it, because unless she can get the consensus, nobody's going to let her rise up in organizations.

[00:53:20]  Bruce: So a certain amount of sexism is what you're talking about.

[00:53:27]  Cameo: Yeah, definitely a cultural sexism that we are less tolerant of asshole-edness from women than we are from men. And in fact, I was just reading this article this last week about some of these really prominent tech leaders that you see that have risen and have been incredibly successful, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. They also have a reputation for being absolute jerks again and again and again. And the article argued like you would never see a woman be able to get away with that, because a woman has to be able to get people to work together, or at least maintain a level of likeability that's higher than a man would have to maintain.

[00:54:29]  Bruce: So I agree with your assessment. I actually have read some things that are very suggestive, and you think about the way messages are given to men and women throughout their lives. It would stand to reason that what you're saying would be true. Let me give another side to this that's probably going to be a little controversial too. When you do look at women in those positions, they come across to me as very alpha male-ish, right?

[00:55:00]  Cameo: Well, yeah, I have some thoughts about that, but yes.

[00:55:04]  Bruce: And it seems to me that the other side of this, without at all saying anything against what you just said, because I think you're completely right, it does seem like we culturally expect a leader to behave in what you might call an alpha male, as an alpha male. And I could give you examples of people who just really fit that profile and therefore get promoted, even though it's not super clear that they're doing anything.

[00:55:32]  Cameo: Sure.

[00:55:35]  Bruce: And men who don't have that as a personality, and most don't, right? They're not likely to ever get promoted, right? They're going to be pursuing some other path, most likely, because it just isn't something that the feedback coming to them is ever going to suggest that this is going to work for them. And they may go into technical fields, and nothing wrong with that. They may go into other sorts of fields. So it's interesting that even when we do see women successful in this way, they fit that mold still really heavily. And that mold seems to be what we're looking for, for some reason. I'm not even sure I could tell you why. I mean, I can tell you why, but I can't tell you a reason why.

[00:56:17]  Bart: If I understood Cameo well, I think our point is that women can do it in two ways. The way you describe, but they also have an alternative way. And when they find the alternative way, they're doing it in a completely different way than males do. But I don't know if... Was that what you wanted to say, Cameo? Because I followed that point completely.

[00:56:40]  Bruce: I don't think she's saying completely different. I think she's saying tempered. So I think her and I are agreeing more than we're disagreeing.

[00:56:46]  Cameo: I don't feel like I'm disagreeing with you at all, Bruce. And I don't think it has to do... I think it has to do with how women learn to get along with other people and to temper their own natural aggression if they want the leadership path. Because just like a non-aggressive man would struggle to get promoted to jobs that really do reward kind of a more command control type of personality, a woman who has too much of that is just as rejectible as a man who doesn't have enough.

[00:57:30]  Bruce: Right. No, I see exactly what you're saying, and it makes sense. And I think I see that too. Even when I do see women in those positions that come across to me as very strongly alpha male, they're almost always tempered more so than the men in the same positions. Not always. These are such generalizations.

[00:57:47]  Unidentified speaker: These are such generalizations.

[00:57:50]  Cameo: So it's interesting because I am this woman, right? You know me. I'm pushy. I'm over the top. I'm also really friendly. I'm really, I think, generally easy to get along with in spite of the fact that I'm also really, really pushy. Now, when you said that though, I got to tell you, this has always been like this weird thing for me. I dislike that the part of me that feels almost the most like me is identified as male. And I know that those are male behaviors, but I don't and have never felt male, you know? And I don't feel like the fact that I walk into a situation and want to take control of it is like a male marker at all.

[00:58:41]  Bruce: And I agree, even the fact that we're calling it male is sexist to some degree, right? Because we're identifying certain genders with certain ways of behavior, and there's no particular reason why we should, other than some combination of stereotypes. And let's be honest, stereotypes usually exist for reasons, right? But not necessarily good reasons.

[00:59:02]  Cameo: Well, and the fact that maybe less women have this trait shouldn't for us identify it as male. But we do, and that’s how we have traditionally been, and we use this, stereotypes are there for a reason. You'll see it in the comments section anytime people think women are getting up on their high horse, like, hey, there's a reason we don't want women flying airplanes. And it's because...

[00:59:38]  Bruce: Yeah, you're right. And this comes back to the discussion we had. I can't remember if it was on one of our episodes or not about they tried to give extra time on a math test.

[00:59:49]  Cameo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember. That might have just been you and I noodling.

[00:59:52]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:59:53]  Bruce: So yeah, there was this, I can't remember if it was an episode or not, but Stanford or somebody decided that for the undergraduates, they were going to give 15 more minutes on a math test because they were wondering if that would cause more women to score higher because maybe being a woman correlated with being more careful and taking a bit more time and maybe that policy of having a timed test would therefore favor a masculine style over a feminine style. And so I actually think that was a fantastic idea because to be honest, timed math tests, it's really not clear why that shows that you're better at math because you can do it faster, right? I mean, that's not the way real life is going to be. So I really approved of them trying this and seeing what would happen. And so I had a problem with this with newspaper articles that were trying to portray it as they would write the headline to get the click bait.

[01:00:58]  Bruce: It would sound like they were giving women an extra 15 minutes and not men. But in reality, they were giving everybody an extra 15 minutes. They were just trying to see if it affected the style. And people were getting so angry over this. And even when I would explain what the truth was, they're giving 15 minutes to both, they are still so angry over it. And it was the Shiri's Scissor. We did talk about this in the Shiri's Scissor episode, Cameo.

[01:01:22]  Cameo: Oh, yes. Yes, I remember.

[01:01:26]  Bruce: And it's interesting that, I mean, there's so many things we could unpack here, right? The fact that it did make some difference between the scores between men and women, but only in the second quartile, not the first quartile. So it ended up, I would even say it was a somewhat successful experiment, but it didn't make some drastic difference, right? It made some difference, but it didn't really affect the top performers and things like that, right? And one of the things I was looking at, I was looking at my own tweets, and someone was arguing with me about this. And they made some big argument about, well, we don't want to lower the standards for pilots, or we don't want to lower the standards for being Marines or being in elite corps or whatever. And I said, you know, if taking a math test was to get into some sort of organization, then your analogy would have made sense, but it's not.

[01:02:20]  Bruce: It's just a math test, right? It's not at all clear why we shouldn't change this. Even if it turns out, I mean, it's not even clear that it makes that much of a difference, but if it does, then we probably should change it, right? Why should we favor fast over accurate?

[01:02:37]  Cameo: Well, and the thing that came up out of that was just that anytime you start talking about almost anything that has gender implications, out of the woodwork, you will see so many people who want to use this argument of, hey, obviously men and women are, these stereotypes are here for a reason. They're indicative of truths that must be universal and are thus justification for us to continue to maintain the system in the way that they have always been maintained.

[01:03:15]  Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, that was a bit of an aside.

[01:03:20]  Bart: Yeah. Can I make one comment on this? Going back a little bit to the term tempered, I struggle with it. I may make a bolder claim in saying that to me, and maybe Europe is different than the US, but to me, female leaders at least have a broader repertoire that they can dispose of in terms of using as managers. A broader repertoire, including the bit of the alpha male-ish style and everything, but as a whole, still a broader repertoire compared to men. That is what…

[01:04:01]  Bruce: That's a fair point. That's a much better way of saying it.

[01:04:04]  Bart: It's not only tempered. It's not the alpha male-ish tempered version. I think it is a broader repertoire in my perspective.

[01:04:13]  Cameo: Well, and I agree. And what I'm claiming a little bit here is that we are training women to have those skills because of some sexism within our society that women just have to learn those skills to be able to rise up as leaders. Whether or not that's true, I don't know.

[01:04:41]  Bruce: That's your conjecture. It's at least a reasonable conjecture at this point.

[01:04:45]  Cameo: Then there's no way to prove it at all anyway, because we would need a different society that didn't tell girls from a young age that if they're going to be bossy, they also need to be very nice and smile pretty while they're doing it and probably look good, you know, wear a nice dress.

[01:05:04]  Bruce: All right, fair enough.

[01:05:10]  Cameo: That's probably where we should end for today, right?

[01:05:13]  Bruce: I was going to work cry pretty in there somewhere. You know, you need to be able to cry pretty. Wasn't that Jessica Alba that they told her she had to cry pretty for?

[01:05:24]  Unidentified speaker: Cry pretty. That's a good one.

[01:05:26]  Cameo: No one wants to run [unclear] a crier.

[01:05:29]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:05:30]  Bruce: Well, thank you guys. This has been an awesome discussion.

[01:05:34]  Cameo: Very much.

[01:05:34]  Unidentified speaker: Great.

[01:05:35]  Cameo: I'm honored to have you again on this episode.

[01:05:38]  Bruce: Yes.

[01:05:38]  Bart: Thank you a lot. Enjoyed it a lot.

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