Thinking Outside ‘Outside the Box’
-When a decentralized organization is attacked, it tends to become more decentralized
-When a centralized organization is attacked, it tends to become more centralized
The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
The logic of an entrenched player is to streamline the existing process. If you’re the US Military, you design a billion dollar top-down digital communication system that allows every soldier to carry a camera so that the Generals know exactly what is going on. You see yourself falling behind and finally start to address the problems you’ve been ignoring for a long time.
But in the end it is all strategically irrelevant. You’re never going to be able to add enough horses to the wagon to beat a car. The paradigm is shattered. Utterly shattered. The answer to massive efficiency disparities is not to think outside the box–Boyd told us that the notion of the box itself is constraining. The answer is to stop trying to win that way because winning is impossible. Centralized will never beat decentralized. And from that assumption you can find success again. Like the Stoics said, remember all the people that dug their heels in and fought, did they ever manage to defy nature or were they buried like all the rest?
What an innovative thinker would do is find a way to centralize your enemy (as you slowly decentralize). That probably means giving them power and letting it corrupt. Decentralized movements are able to survive off illegal enterprise, instead of attacking it and pushing them further into it, give them legal enterprise to centralize around. etc.
But look, chances are none of us are ever going to be in the position where we have to deal with a massively decentralized enemy. In real life, we have other concerns that make pure, logical business decisions difficult. That’s not why this important. It matters because it is strategic thinking at its very essence. Instead of looking at the situation from the framed lens you were given, what if you torn it all down? What if you took nothing for granted, got creative and came up with something inspired? I want to beat my fucking head against the wall when I talk to people about this stuff. They just.don’t.get.it.
You get all sorts of cognitive dissonance, rationalization, and this myopic focus on incrementally improving what we already have. That’s because they’ve tied who they are to that system–even if they were never a part of it, there is just too much uncertainty in chaos and speed and decentralization. These always have and always will be the fodder people. In business and especially in war, the last thing you want to be is fodder–a body that gets thrown at a problem. You want to be the person that transcends it. Ultimately, this all ties in to the stuff I have been trying to make sense of recently: vision, curiosity, contrarianism, relentlessness, and efficiency.
This isn’t in direct response to the content of this post, but a general question about you. How do you deal with being so much stronger than your peers? How have you dealt with having goals that are so much different than those of the people you grew up with or met in college? I realize that you are focusing on showing your intellectual development and how you are applying it to the world, but insight into how a real person deals with developing this fast would be very interesting. This is especially true since I think most of your readers, like me, are young guys interested in doing our best in our own ways. How do you keep a sense of humor? How, if ever, do you just waste time? It’s funny how I, and I’d venture most people my age, can’t even fathom how being focused and serious is possible.
Ted, it’s easy to deal with being bigger, faster, stronger or smarter than those your age: just go find new peers. Usually they’ll be older and more experienced, which forces you to raise your game still farther.
The drive for self-improvement doesn’t let me spend much time thinking things like “I am awesome compared to this dude my age.”
Also, we only see what Ryan puts up here and thus miss out on his (increasingly rare) lazy or flippant moments. Just like Max isn’t Caligula all the time, Ryan isn’t Marcus Aurelius 24/7.
Back to the post: It wouldn’t be feasible to get a terrorist Hamsterdam going, would it?
Ryan:
This will seem to be an overly simple question, but it’s not: How do you think “outside ‘outside the box'”? The problem I have is that even after elevating my thought process considerably (though I am nowhere close to where I want to be), I am still thinking in terms of “the box.”
I’m not talking about entrenched strategy, here. I mean, how do you develop that higher level of thinking? I know despite any progress I’ve made over the years that I’m still lacking originality, in its essence. Does something just click, at some point? Is it a gradual shift, with gray areas in between?
It’s still beyond me.
It’s not so much about clicking as it is practice. Robert’s books are filled with examples of people thinking outside the box, especially in the red margins. The biggest part is being around people who challenge your thinking. That’s what Tucker is really good at–he forces you to raise your game and then gives you the freedom to fuck around (on his dime) until you sharpen.
Funny that you post this now, or perhaps more accurately: funny that I believe that I understand your point a bit more now.
Through an analogy related to personal experience, that is.
At the moment I’m studying product-life-cycles, and the need for something new to make money with as the demand for a product goes into decline and dies.
And as you said: the potential just seems a lot better when you come up with something completely new instead of an “innovation” of the prior product.
But thinking outside of the box seems to have become so rare…
I don’t want to say that it’s easy, but it is. Every week we have a staff meeting for Rudius and we toss around more ideas like that than we have time to do or work on.
“Centralized will never beat decentralized”
Surely the quality of execution of the stratgey is the deciding factor. A poorly executed decentralised insurrgency will never beat a brilliant centralised counter insurrgency.