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31 Days in May — Day 8 — Reasonable Men (and Women)

Reasonable vs Unreasonable, sociopathic vs altruistic

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw

“You can either make money or sense”
R. Buckminster Fuller

So writing last night about “Doers” and “Beers” seems to have been an extremely salutary experience because it’s resulted in this two-by-two matrix, much loved of business writers. It also put me in mind of the above quotes, about reasonability and sense. There are some really interesting things about this diagram. One is that it’s easy to name real, famous people to put in the boxes on the right-hand-side. I’ve dashed off this diagram but along with Steve Jobs, you could put Thomas Edison, Christopher Columbus, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Rebekah Wade.

It’s also easy to name apostate losers — those who stuck to their crazy dream and there are a lot of women in this box as well — including people like Rosalind Franklin — the woman who took the x-ray crystallography pictures that lead Watson and Crick to discover the structure of DNA.

But it’s much harder to name anyone famous on the left-hand-side of this diagram. That’s because, on the whole, the people on the left hand side of the diagram didn’t make waves, they went along to get along. They got paid, they went to work, they retired, they got pensions. They died.

Anyone who’s worked in a large organisation will also know the tremendous pressure that there is to move to the left in this diagram. Working on the right of this diagram is dangerous, job security, your health, and your finances. So, why would anyone do it?

I think the answer is different for apostate losers and sociopaths (but it might not be).

In order to explain this, I think I might need another diagram:

The World — and A Model of the World

The important thing to get from this diagram is that the real world is a messy place that cannot possibly ever be totally described and understood. Any organisation is a model of the world, like any model, it’s only a partial model, but that’s what it is. The checked-out-losers and the clueless work inside the model of the world. They don’t question the model.

Apostate losers and sociopaths try to change the model of the world, quite literally, for fun and profit. Apostate losers try to change the world because they are in love with their subject of study, they want to do a good job, they want to create something which is novel and of value. Sociopaths do it because it’s a quick way to power and riches, and this is attactive is you’re prepared to either ignore the risks, or think that you can recover from the risks if they actually become real issues.

So what has this got to do with the OODA loop, and John Boyd?

Well, the OODA loop is often described as a decision loop, but in truth, of course it is a learning loop. And a learning loop operates not inside the model of the world, but on the boundaries between our model of the world and the real, messy, world itself. This is going to be threatening to the checked-out losers (what if the new world doesn’t require their skills — the ones they haven’t bothered updating for 10 years?) and it’s going to be threatening to the clueless (they don’t think the system is a model of the world, they just think it is the world).