Managing Leadership^®

Those of you who have read Nassim Taleb‘s The Black Swan (see here for review) know that he has a penchant for illustrating his key points with exuberantly expressive phrases. In particular, he described the bell curve as “that great intellectual fraud.”

Mark Buchanan, in his intriguing and intelligent book Ubiquity, also makes it clear that the bell curve has some inherent limitations that cause it to represent reality in misleading ways, and which then lead us to draw impractical conclusions. It does, of course, have a use: it helps us understand things that have regular, predictable characteristics, together with dramatically less frequent but equally predictable variations from the norm.

But Buchanan shows us that many of the natural events that so dramatically effect our lives, from earthquakes to forest fires – and even social events from traffic jams to revolutions – aren’t susceptible to comprehension by the bell curve. Its inherent plausibility as a mechanism for understanding events, and our instinct to find them susceptible to understanding, combine to cause us to try to press them in to bell-shaped curves.

However, they really turn out to express a statistical feature that suggests there is no understanding their precedents, their nature, or the timing of their occurrence. That’s a rather sobering thought, isn’t it?

Buchanan uses the sandpile game as the vehicle for explaining why this might be.

Many things, such as atmospheric storms, can be predicted because they are composed of discernible, discrete components, the nature and combination of which we can measure and track.

But many other things are more like the sandpile. Imagine dropping a grain of sand from a specific distance onto a flat surface. Then, drop another from that same height, and continue. Eventually, they will pile up, and on occasion, the dropping of one will cause some of the others to cascade down the pile.

The thing about the sandpile game, though, is that even though its components and features are essentially indistinguishable and fully understood, the consequences of their occurrence are unpredictable and widely variable. Sometimes when we drop one, we get a minor tumbling of a few grains, and sometimes we get a major collapse of a whole face of the pile. There is no way to understand why one drop of a grain produces one result or another, much less to be able to predict what the result of the next grain drop will be.

All we can do is surmise that each dropped grain affects the others in the pile in subtly complex ways that cumulatively build up what are called “critical states” at various points within the pile. If one of these points is affected by a grain drop, it may cause other grains to shift. If among those are others which were in critical states, the influence of the event could expand, perhaps catastrophically.

Buchanan shows us how critical states like this are ubiquitous in many natural and social phenomena. Indeed, he states at the outset that

In our social and cultural networks, there can be no isolated act, for our world is designed – not by us, but by the forces of nature – so that even the tiniest of acts will be amplified and registered by the larger world. . . If every individual act may ultimately have great consequences, those consequences are almost entirely unforeseeable.”

There is an even more profound conclusion that inevitably derives from his discussion:

In our world, beginnings bear little relationship to endings . . .”

It is in such a world that we need to find a way to understand and predict both our own lives and our collaborative enterprises. The irony is that so many things about those enterprises themselves may turn out to be, like the sandpile, inherently incomprehensible.

But that is all the more reason to read this book, and to think more deeply about what we can manage, and how we can manage it. You will find the insights you gain a great resource in your own efforts to do so.

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Today’s tips: Speaking of incomprehensible, how many of you feel that way about your bosses, especially when they keep piling the work on? If that includes you, read this BNET piece about how to delegate upward – you’ll find it good advice for any form of delegation – and even negotiation.

On the other hand, some things only seem to be incomprehensible, but are actually wholly within our ability to appreciate and influence. It is advisable to take a moment to do so before actually creating our own “critical states” by plunging ahead unthinkingly. Please see a great discussion about this by Carmine Coyote, author of Slow Leadership.

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