We all work within intractably large and complex systems. How much agency do we really have? This was the question Harry and I explored on episode 40 of the Traction Heroes podcast.
Harry read a passage from Eric Ries’s new book, Incorruptible (which I haven’t read.) It starts by citing John Steinbeck’s story of depression-era farmers dealing with bank officers who’ve been rendered impersonal as agents of a large organization. Organizations are a kind of being:
Living things maintain boundaries between themselves and their environment, resources into energy. They grow, adapt, and reproduce. They exhibit behaviors that emerge from their parts but can’t be predicted by studying those parts in isolation. Most importantly, they display a will to survive that shapes every action they take. Organizations exhibit every one of these properties.
The organization is a superorganism that demonstrates emergent properties. Among these, is a kind of intelligence. This is the entity the farmers were interacting with through its agents.
We’ve all had experiences dealing with such complex emergent systems. One might feel disempowered when considering the organization forms part of a broader socioeconomic system that incentivizes it to act in particular ways.
Incorruptible sounds like an antidote to that kind of thinking. Our socio economic systems provide alternate structures and ways of being — and we can choose them: As Harry put it,
the default world that we’re in is just a construct. You really have an enormous amount of flexibility. You have many more degrees of freedom than you are probably aware of. It doesn’t serve the system to inform you of what those are because those degrees of freedom give you more control and give you more agency.
This conversation was empowering and energizing. As I said in the podcast, this book has moved up my queue — check out the show for more.
(On a separate note, this is the first episode we’ve released as a proper YouTube video. We’d love to know what you think — please comment in YouTube itself.)