In which Wolf explains why you shouldn’t improve things just for the sake of improvement. Watch this video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/pltYvt4NORU
In my last video I discussed the difference between control and influence. If we’re talking about a manager in an organization, the decisions they make to the processes of their department (which is within their control) lead to certain outcomes (which depend on many factors, and are thus not within their control). Let’s say a manager makes good decisions, and good outcomes result: say, an increase in efficiency. This is to obviously to be encouraged, so the company gives the manager a bonus.
But when we reward people for improvements entirely within their span of control, what is the natural reaction? Paradoxically the natural reaction of our manager would be to to narrow their span of control as much as possible, to define its boundaries as sharply as possible from other parts of the system, and to focus entirely on efficiency within their particular component (division, department, cubicle, etc.)
This behavior results in suboptimization, which is maximizing or fine-tuning a part of the system without considering the (often detrimental) effects of doing so on the entire system.
On a more personal level, video games give you very a lot of control over a system with narrowly define metrics, and strong rewards (dopamine hits) for achieving them more and more efficiently. The thing is, whatever you do in a video game has absolutely no influence on the rest of your life. You can fine tune your performance all you want, and it won’t make a single other aspect of your life better. I’m not saying don’t have any fun, but realize that of all the games in life you can play, video games are the worst at bringing positive change to your life.
On the other hand, what happens when we reward people for improvements within their entire sphere of influence? In this case, their desire becomes to extend their sphere of influence outwards as far as possible. As I mentioned previously, acting in one’s sphere of influence requires coordination and cooperation with others, which in turn encourages an awareness of the system as a whole. The end result is optimization, where people orchestrate their efforts together, toward the fulfillment of the system’s goal.
In the case of our manager, it would encourage him to focus not just on the narrow metrics by which his department is evaluated, but on how the company as a whole is doing.
In the case of video games, it involves (as I hinted at a moment ago), looking at all of life as a great game. I mean, think about it: it’s realistic, fully immersive, open world, has awesome graphics and physics, and you’re already playing it whether or not you asked to. Why not get good at it?
Learning how to optimize the high level outcomes of a business or your own require learning systems thinking, which is looking at a system not as merely a collection of parts but as a unified whole, and then applying this systems thinking to the goal of process improvement. How you define a “goal” is something will be talking about in future videos.