(2018-02-02) Rao Guts The Grand Unified Theory Of Striving or Slacking

Venkatesh Rao: GUTS: The Grand Unified Theory of Striving (or Slacking)

This week, two of my favorite dichotomies relating to work, lean vs. fat and divergent (divergence) vs. convergent (convergence) came together

A 2x2 that answers every question you might have about striving and slacking off at work and play.

Whether the S stands for striving or slacking depends on which side you're looking at the picture from. If it's striving, it is guts as in guts-and-glory. Maximal, optimal, effort. If it's slacking, it is guts as in sensing subtle things in your guts -- while in relaxed play mode.

The critical path is a zone where there exists a sensitive dependence of ends on means

Activities not on the critical path have slack.

This understanding of critical paths isn't wrong per se, but it is incomplete and unilluminating. Why do critical paths exist at all? Why is there only one? Are we really indifferent to slack on non-critical paths?

Critical paths exist where two conditions hold: you're optimizing a system for a single goal, and have a global model of how to achieve it, ie an overall plan.

In other words, you're in a convergent and lean operating context.

Knowing why gives you one half of the information you need to optimize things: the objective function

What happens when you don't know why you're acting? This is another way of saying you're not sure what is of value in the activity, and what is meaningful to you.

Some people (and companies) react to not knowing why with frozen inaction.

Other people (and companies) react with frenzied, overwrought "ROI engineering" turning everything into some sort of portfolio optimization theory.

But the smart response to not knowing the answer to why is to simply pursue many, divergent goals that test different motivations. And this pursuit can be efficient even if its ends are unclear.

You don't even need an abstract goal like "find the most productive oil well" or "find the instrument I'd like to learn to play." Such false clarity can even backfire.

Through exploration, you expose your thinking to novelty, so you might discover entirely unexpected answers to "why" in your peripheral vision.

As the picture in the top-left quadrant shows, the result of optimizing around how without knowing (or knowing but not caring) why is a connected, branching web of critical paths, all exploring a frontier edge rather than a single critical path marching to a point.

Together, the left half quadrants are the lean half of the picture. So long as you know how in some global sense, you can operate lean whether or not you know why you're doing what you're doing.

It's a different story on the right half. Not knowing how kills the possibility of global critical paths. This is running fat. I've written before about fat thinking.

When goals are big and complex, but still defined enough that they can serve as a singular focus, you muddle through, iteratively refining means and ends as you figure it out.

Finally, we have the top right quadrant, which is always the best quadrant in quadrantology. Here you have no good answers to either why or how.

The result is play. Divergent, fat behavior. (Play Ethic)

There are several different useful ways of reading this 2x2. Let me walk you through 4 such views: a values view, a criticality view, a context view, and a learning view.

When you know why, value is concentrated at a point, where explicit goals and utility functions may be definable. We usually call this focus. You can define what you care about.

When you know how, but not why, value is spread out over a frontier

When you don't know how or why, the value zone is spread out all over.

Now for the criticality view

you delete all the green bits, the two pictures on the left will still have a connected red path or tree. But the two on the right will become fragmented into a bunch of red bits.

The third way of thinking of this is context: the top right is the biggest kind of big picture, the most zoomed-out, with maximal context. The other three are various sorts of zoom-ins.

This is why projects have to be "carved out" of bigger, messier pictures.

Focus is why-context restriction

Criticality is how-context restriction

The fourth view is the learning view. Slack (green bits) represent untapped how-learning potential, forks in the critical path represent why-learning potential.

Normal learnings -- refining the why to lower ambiguity, or refining the how to lower uncertainty -- will typically still keep you in the same quadrant.

Under normal circumstances, the only way to move quadrants is to rein in ambition. Make the problem smaller

But there is one exception. When "breakthroughs" or "revolutions" happen, a problem can jump quadrants without narrowing either why or how context.

For these kinds of breakthroughs, you need a different kind of learning. The kind that comes from open-ended attentiveness rather than means or ends-focused attention.

This is why play is the top-right quadrant, the One Quadrant that rules them all

The key to this 2x2 is the interplay of critical paths (the straight red bits) and non-critical paths (the wiggly green bits). This interplay creates effort that is both meaningful (you have a good answer to why you're doing something) and efficient (you know how to do it well) under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. That's what I call flourishing, or eudaimonia.