Many teams are being measured for the wrong things: tokens used, agents deployed, etc. Their orgs have focused on tech adoption rather than value creation. It’s a mistake.
I wanted to discuss this with Harry in our most recent podcast, so I read a passage from one of my favorite books, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. To my surprise, he’d read it too.
I won’t cite the whole passage, but it kicks off with a familiar distinction:
Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, compared the hedgehog, who knew “one big thing,” to the fox, who knew many things. The scientific forester and the cadastral official are like the hedgehog. The sharply focused interest of the scientific foresters in commercial lumber and that of the cadastral officials in land revenue constrain them to finding clear-cut answers to one question. The naturalist and the farmer, on the other hand, are like the fox. They know a great many things about forests and cultivable land. Although the forester’s and cadastral official’s range of knowledge is far narrower, we should not forget that their knowledge is systematic and synoptic, allowing them to see and understand things a fox would not grasp.
Scott then unpacks how flattening an ecosystem to a few legible variables leads to a kind of myopia. This is assuming the variables are meaningful, as with land productivity for cadastral purposes. Token maxxing, on the other hand, is folly.
Legibility — instrumenting processes so we can track progress — is essential for traction. But we shouldn’t focus on things we can measure (e.g., tokens used, numbers of agents created) rather than those that matter to the business.
It’s harder to focus on the right measures when we’re acting urgently and/or from fear, as is the case for many teams now. How can we measure what really matters? That’s what Harry and I explore in this episode.