AI lets us prototype faster than ever before. That’s great, as long as you remember there’s underlying work to be done. Specifically, production systems require structural underpinnings “screen-level” prototypes often miss.
Ironically, this means prematurely-rich prototypes can impede traction. So I wanted to discuss these issues with Harry. I kicked things off with a reading from Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now:
In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.
This is a succinct articulation of pace layers, an important idea popularized by Brand. Complex systems are made up of diverse components and subsystems that change at different rates and scales. Resilient systems use the faster layers to experiment with new approaches and the slower layers to “remember” those best fit to purpose. Thus, the system evolves while maintaining coherence.
Brand showcased an early version of this model in his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. As the title suggests, that version focused on explaining how buildings evolve. The model in The Clock of the Long Now casts a larger net, explaining how civilizations change over time.
Which is to say, this model can be generalized to other complex systems. That’s why it’s at the core of my book, Living in Information, where it explains how information environments remain resilient. That version offers five layers. Here they are, in order of fastest- to slowest-changing:
- Form: the user interface
- Structure: the underlying information architecture
- Governance: how the organization manages change
- Strategy: what the organization does differently to win
- Purpose: why the organization exists
Pace layer model from ‘Living in Information‘
As with Brand’s version, the slower-changing layers are more powerful. But the fast layers also play an important role. A healthy system needs both. Therein lies the challenge: AI’s ability to produce rich prototypes can lead us to hang out too long on the fastest layer. Eventually, alignment and coherence require heading down the stack.
What’s exciting is that this isn’t a return to the slow old days. The same tools that can help us with form can help us with architecture and strategy. But they do require attention. You can start by asking yourself two questions:
- What layer am I acting on?
- What layer should I be acting on?
If there’s a misalignment there, you want to fix that first.
The form layer is easy now. And that’s great: it means we can better describe what we want. But you can’t leave it there. Somebody must look after alignment with the underlying layers — especially strategy, governance, and structure. That’s the work I’m increasingly doing, so it was great to discuss it with Harry.