#65 - When slow meets fast and the myth about connecting dots
Plus: Who’s your Bigfoot?
Hello, dear readers! Welcome to issue #65 of Curiosity > Certainty 👏
This issue is happening in the future. For me, that is. Because, for the first time, I’m scheduling an edition of this newsletter a week in advance. This is something I’ve never done, mostly because I want to wait until the last minute and curate what I think are the best pieces for you. I don’t know how that stands up to scrutiny because I may be prone to recency bias. In any case, it wouldn’t matter because I’m taking a holiday this coming week. So while I put my feet up, or try to (I’ve a two-year-old), here’s some food for thought for you.
When slow meets fast, or vice versa
I’ve had a new recruit upon joining the firm tell me that things were refreshingly fast and another call the same state of affairs slow.
I didn’t have any reason to discredit either. I believed both.
What they said was perfectly reasonable once you understand something called the Buxton Index.
Named after its inventor, Professor John Buxton, the Buxton Index of an entity is defined as the time horizon (in years) over which the entity makes its plans.
Entity could be an organization, a team, a person AND ‘makes it plans’ can be taken as a heuristic for the planning or decision-making cycle.
The Buxton Index for a government would be four or five years; a business, a quarter; a household, a week; and a person (unless a bureaucrat), a day.
Buxton Index signals the pace at which decisions are made. So when you move from a big to a mid-sized company, the pace appears brisk. Like jumping from a cart to a train. But when you leave a small startup to join the same mid-sized company, things crawl. Think parachuting out of an airplane onto the same train.
This difference in the Buxton Index of their previous organizations was what had manifested in the marked difference in perception between the two colleagues who had confided in me about the pace of things.
When a system that rapidly updates itself meets one that rarely does so, tension ensues.
Without an awareness of the Buxton Index of the group you’re working with, you’re likely to end up complaining and passing judgment on the other party. A higher BI entity would seem unmotivated; a lower BI entity, myopic.
In my early twenties I had once griped about the slowness of things on the company intranet–an action that caught the attention of my CEO and led to a career breakthrough. And later on in my career, as the representative of a business unit, I had to on occasions slow things down to match the natural frequency of change in my unit.
A salesperson with a quarterly target to hit may find glacial the speed of response from the enterprise account (one with an annual planning cycle) she’s been chasing.
Or, the procurement department may find the repeated requests from business to quickly close a long-term purchase decision short-sighted.
Buxton Index doesn’t make things go faster or slower, nor prevent tension between groups moving at different speeds. But it makes you more aware of the needs of the group you’re working with. That helps with collaboration and stops you from moralistic judgment-passing.
This it does simply by giving you a shared vocabulary to use with others.
Note: More on Buxton Index and the related concept of pace layering, which I’m fascinated by currently
The myth about connecting dots
Everybody talks about connecting dots as if it were a glass of clear water, but there’s a common myth around it. They’re looking at water after all the mud has been strained out.
When we hear stories about insights that came to be by someone making sense of independent events or ideas, we may be tempted to see the outcome as inevitable.
It is anything but. Connecting dots is the culmination of the process of forming an insight, much like clear water is the outcome of the process of filtration.
In his book Seeing What Others Don’t, psychologist Gary Klein walks us through the process of connecting dots.
Let’s look at a starting idea and try and see it through.
Say you have a vacation home you don’t live in for more than two weeks a year. Or you have free time and skills that you want to monetize. You wonder if there was a way to put these resources to use. You may recognize this today as the idea behind an on-demand rental or marketplace. Seems an obvious insight looking back but…
There are a number of non-dots to wade through first. These can slow you down. Gotta toss them out.
For example, we all know that customers need to trust service providers to part with their money. So why would customers trust regular folks to provide them with reliable service? Yet, the regulatory framework (companies, brands, shareholders) within which that trust is built is not sacred. Perhaps there are newer ways to build trust.
Then there are the anti-dots, the seeming differences, that must be addressed. These tend to separate what you want to connect.
People need job security. On-demand doesn’t guarantee job security. Gig economy is volatile. All true.
But people are willing to undertake risk if they get a share of the upside. And, a gig job is better than no job. It also has built-in agency–you can quit whenever you want, you can say no to projects, you can take a break. The challenges are multiple but superficial.
Finally, once you’ve ignored the non-dots and tackled the anti-dots, connect the dots that remain.
What you’re left with is this insight: Private assets (property, vehicles, time) have unused capacity. They can offer value through public services in a world where trust can be digitized. This insight is the foundation of Airbnb, of Uber, of Fiverr.
Side note: Sometimes, generalists may find the process of connecting dots easier to pull off because they have fewer older patterns to break. Specialists may get caught up giving their pre-existing beliefs too much respect.
The world has both signal and noise and they don’t air on separate stations. Stories of insight appeal to our imagination. They make us imagine ourselves in an ‘aha’ moment. Only they’re not as much a flash of illumination as we may have hoped for.
Who’s your Bigfoot?
We all have had that one boss or mentor or teacher who always surprised us by how much more she got out of us than the others ever could.
It’s the late 1980s. Anthony Bourdain is 30ish, ‘burnt out from my five-year run in the restaurant netherworld as a not very good chef – in rehab for heroin, still doing cocaine, broke – and reduced to…’ You get the drift.
Desperate, he answers a call for a lunch chef at a new bistro in NYC. While in cooking school, he has worked for this restaurateur he calls Bigfoot. But that’s a decade ago. Bourdain’s well aware that his reputation as a cokehead now precedes him.
On his very first day at work, Bourdain asks Bigfoot to lend him 25 bucks until payday. Bigfoot reaches into his pocket and pulls out two hundred dollar bills.
Bourdain goes on to write: ‘...he must’ve had every reason to believe I’d disappear with the two bills, spend it on crack, and never show up…. I was so shaken by his baseless trust in me… that I determined I’d sooner gnaw my own fingers off, gouge my eyes out with a shellfish fork and run naked down Seventh Avenue than ever betray that trust’.
This reaction from Bourdain – such a reaction – is what’s called the Pygmalion effect. Positive expectation can change behavior positively, leading to better performance.
How we see ourselves often depends on how others we respect see us. In their belief rests our belief. In their doubt lies ours. This is not just as kids. It continues well after.
Those around us are constantly labeling us. Their labels decide the choices we make for ourselves. Their expectations have the power to limit or spur us. This is not a post about breaking free of others’ expectations. It is about finding those who see the best in us. It is about finding your own Bigfoot.
Bigfoot wasn’t always giving. But he was generous where it mattered. Bourdain credits Bigfoot as the guy who ‘transformed me from a bright but druggie fuck-up into a serious, capable and responsible chef’.
Who’s your Bigfoot?
*Excerpts from the book Kitchen Confidential
Tiny Thought #11
Our beliefs may be true for us. But they are not laws of nature. Let’s accept that it is possible that someone may want something for themselves that we may not want ourselves.
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Thank you for reading! I would love to how I can make this newsletter more useful for you. Let me know in the comments or write to me at satyajit.07@gmail.com. Stay well!