Note: this is a “little” post processing some half-baked thoughts; I’ve got a more standard research-based post about cancer therapy queued up as well. Soon!
After wrapping up the Roots of Progress conference, which was spectacular, I’ve been thinking about people and organizations in a new and seemingly more “mature” way.
Within the range of the kinds of work I care about (roughly, advancing science and technology & their applications to human benefit), there’s a “radical/moderate” spectrum and a “small/large” spectrum.
The “radical/moderate” spectrum is about how sharply the project diverges from the status quo. Radical things are calling for bigger changes and also have more risk of failure; moderate things are calling for more incremental changes and are safer bets.
My sweet spot on that spectrum, the place where I feel most comfortable working, is in a medium zone when it comes to scientific risk. My ideal “scientific thesis” is mature enough to be supported by published research from “credible” institutions/journals1 but is new enough that I can easily meet people in the field who haven’t heard of it, or controversial enough that I can easily meet experts who don’t buy it. It’s at the point where early-stage startups and FROs are viable, but usually way too soon for Big Pharma or the NIH. In my “sweet spot”, there’s usually one or two unproven ideas that entail substantial technical/scientific risk…not lots and lots.
E.g. with transcranial focused ultrasound there’s a lot of literature that shows that ultrasound does modulate the brain’s activity. There’s scientific risk in “what neuromodulation protocol will be effective against a disease or for enhancing cognitive/emotional function?” and there’s technical risk in “building a hardware device and software protocol that maximizes safety/effectiveness/convenience” but those are both sort of iterative search-and-improvement processes that seem tractable to me. “Where do we go from here” seems very concrete and operationalizable: what’s the R&D roadmap, what sorts of expertise do we need on board, etc. But, nobody’s done it yet and plenty of people are still skeptical that it can (or should) be done. That’s my “sweet spot.”
My “sweet spot” is mine, not the single objectively correct place.
When I meet someone who’s proposing something “big if true” and cool but way more risky than my “sweet spot”, something that feels like it has too many moving parts and too many leaps of faith, my instinct is to be really negative. But I’ve seen a fair number of things I thought were impossible turn out to be real. When thinking systemically, about “what’s the best way for the ecosystem-as-a-whole to progress”, it’s actually valuable to have projects at varying risk levels going on in parallel. I want there to be hair-on-fire wild men (and women) trying shit I personally think has virtually no chance of success, because sometimes I’ll be wrong and they’ll succeed.2
To be clear, I do think there are projects that are so out of touch with reality that they’re more like pseudoscience/scams than merely high-risk.
The prototypical high-risk idea that I’m trying to be more supportive of, is more like “smart layman or student has a cool-sounding Plan that assumes a bunch of buzzwordy things will Just Work” when people in the field are like “uh oh, none of those things work reliably the way you’d imagine if you only read pop-science articles.” Once in a while, the Plan does work, or can be adapted to work if given a chance.
On the other side, there are valuable things more moderate than my “sweet spot” in terms of scientific risk; stuff where my gut reaction is “well, this is good, but it’s already being done, it’s mainstream, it is Known to be the Way Of The Future, all the Best and Brightest are pouring into the field, what does it need me for?”
E.g.: of course immunooncology is really good. It’s awe-inspiring; the results are real. But if someone said “we need a new IO research institute” I’d be like “we do? don’t we have that?”
But that’s clearly more about where I fit personally than about what the world needs. It’s entirely possible for something to be huge already and yet for there to be great ROI in continuing and expanding the work.
In politics and culture, radicalism is defined by how different the world you want is from the world we live in.
As with scientific risk level, there’s value in a mixed strategy.
A communications expert told me that, if you want policy X, it’s still politically valuable for there to be radical activists calling for X+1000. They’ll never get their way, and maybe you wouldn’t even want them to, but they can still widen the Overton window for you.
I’m not sure this is always true — I’ve also heard that radicals who come across as stupid or dangerous are hurting their overall cause, and I could believe that as well.
My current model is, there’s a “rapid cultural ferment” part of the world — think (social) media, activism, parties, more young people — and that’s often a laboratory for radical deviations from the status quo that are angling to gain “market share” in public opinion. Lots of these things sound way more original and interesting than what the “normies” are up to…but they are also more likely to be objectively terrible, and more likely to remain ingroup chatter and never progress to a visible practical change in how the world works.
Then there’s a “normal professional” side of the world: skews older, more likely to actually work on policy, or traditional media, or nonprofits/industry, more likely to think in terms of the organizations they lead/work-for or the projects they push forward than just “vibes”, and usually more modest and incrementalist in aspiration.
I’m culturally between those two extremes, leaning more towards the “normal professional” side (I’m a 36-yo mom and have low edginess tolerance)… but politically my views are outside the Overton window3, which means that I shouldn’t work on policy even for incremental changes I’d view as positive. My poker face just isn’t that good.
I can be glad that there are people pushing for incremental positive changes, though. The right person for that job is someone genuinely more moderate than me, who will enjoy the process and not feel conflicted about it.
The flip side is that there are people “more radical than me” in the sense that they think it’s meaningless to work inside existing systems, and can’t even get along with people who do, so at best my attitude has to be “I hope your project works and where relevant I’ll try to support it towards becoming something more real, but yeahhhh the odds are long, man, and I’m no longer interested in brilliant analyses of why there are only three people in the world who aren’t morally bankrupt. Joni Mitchell had it right.”
The small vs. large axis is about organizational scale. I’m more of a novice in wrapping my head around this.
The smallest unit of work is the individual with a solo project. The largest units are maybe organizations with millions of employees, or maybe nations.
One angle on scale is how much money are you managing?
As an individual contributor, that number is zero at work, and the size of your personal bank account at home. Very simple. Most people live here.
When you run a small organization (a small business or nonprofit, let’s say), you’re responsible for maybe $100,000-$5M, and you might be leading a team of several people.
I’ve done this. It’s a mind-expanding experience. You learn how to be responsible for a budget, how to delegate work to other people, how to get enough revenue to keep the lights on.
It’s so transformative that, in certain circles, even a failed startup is a credential, and for good reason. Being responsible for making payroll makes you a “grown-up” in a certain sense. And when you look out and see a world of “children”, you’re more likely to want to rely on a fellow “grown-up” even if they didn’t get everything right the last time around.
In a strategic sense, a budget and plan for a small team for a year or several has a certain level of granularity. You basically have to know what you’re going to do, down to maybe the quarterly time scale. You certainly have to know what the roles are in the organization, and what goals/milestones you’re going to aim for given your budget and timeframe.
Nobody can see the future, of course, but there’s a (fairly coarse) degree to which you can pencil things out ahead of time, check that they make sense, and make a good-faith effort to stick to the plan, barring drastic changes in circumstances.
I can pretty much wrap my head around this sort of planning.4
At larger scales…this model begins to break down, it seems to me.
I don’t have a full picture of it, at all. But the gist is that something more like a “portfolio approach” or “meta” or “open-ended” thinking becomes necessary.
For instance:
You might have high-level early discussions where you don’t yet know what you want even at the “two-page” or “ten-page” budget-and-timeline level. You might extend the seeking-input-and-idea-generating stage for longer than would seem natural in the “seed-stage startup”/ “new FRO”/ “lab PI” context.
You might do meta stuff for letting other people generate ideas and plans — prizes and calls for grant applications, workshops, training programs, etc
You might also delegate sub-sections of planning to members of your team. There may be whole sub-projects that are just “this is A’s baby, she can do what she wants with it” to a degree that wouldn’t make sense in a single org with a team of five.
You begin thinking not just about “what is my plan” but “what are our methods, processes, etc, for when it’s not “my” plan any more.”
there’s a difference between “yes, I want feedback and I want to make sure this is beneficial for everyone involved but I wrote this document and I basically made the decisions and got minimal edits” and “I gave this project to someone else to take point on”.
There’s a solo-to-collaborative transition in work (which in many ways is still my current “edge” despite having managed people before). Which is about wrapping your head around “oh, I can delegate that thing instead of banging my head against doing it myself?” or “oh, I should be communicating about this even though it is Not Done Yet?” or “remember to be considerate of people’s feelings but don’t necessarily back down on decisions just because you get pushback” or “yes you do in fact have to tell people what to do and remind them of things, it’s not rude if you use standard professional language”.
The solo-to-collaborative transition is somewhat independent from the employee-to-founder transition; I first experienced both in parallel but there are lots of experienced managers who have never had parts of the founder experience, and there are parts of the founder (or, really, small-business-owner) experience you can have as a solo freelancer/practitioner.
But that’s just the first transition! I can see subsequent transitions over the horizon, with the next one starting at the scale of “manager of managers”, or “funder of a portfolio of projects”. And I’m quite sure that’s not the last!
One thing worth mentioning: managing a portfolio is not necessarily a “bigger” or “higher status” personal contribution than executing one of the individual projects in that portfolio. That’s a sloppy concept, but we often have this intuitive set of assumptions about power/importance that’s based on an org chart — the “top of the tree” is the Big Man. This does not actually make sense in portfolio-based structures.
To think about it financially for a moment, a good VC firm has typically made less ROI on its portfolio, maybe by an order of magnitude, than the founder of the best startup in its portfolio made. Obviously, the investor also has much lower risk. They occupy different spots on the variance/expected-value landscape. Neither is “better” than the other…but if you absolutely must rank them, if you’re a good investor, the brightest stars in your portfolio will “outshine” you.
Working at a more “meta” spot in the ecosystem is a good move if you, personally, are good at meta, not because it’s “greater” generically in the same way that better success/results/performance is “greater”.
Higher levels of meta become accessible with greater age and experience, which can to some extent link meta with “seniority”. But, let’s say, an eighty-year-old concert violinist is 0% meta — he just plays the violin, that’s as object-level as it gets — and that has no negative implications about his wisdom, maturity, or skill.
Also, there’s such a thing as ecosystems that have too much “meta” work going on relative to the object level, but that shouldn’t be oversimplified down to “meta isn’t real work”. I’ve seen examples where you absolutely can’t make progress in a field beyond a very primitive level without a meta institution to provide funding, set context, seed culture, encourage entrants, etc.
When you are thinking at the meta or portfolio level you are “taking as object” what, at the object level, is someone’s whole full-time job and personal mission, and treating it like a card in your hand, and you have like twenty cards at once that you shuffle and move about and see what they can get you in aggregate. It’s a dizzying little perspective shift to go “down” to the object level (let’s say, my blog) and then “up” to a meta level (let’s say, what it’s like to be running a fellowship that supports many blogs) and then “up” some more (the fellowship is only one “thing” in an ecosystem of related things of similar scale). We each only live one individual life, so something can be a huge deal to me as an individual, but be like a grain of sand from the “professional hat” perspective of someone who sits in a more meta place. Very strange and illuminating.
i.e. not technically-a-journal-but-actually-an-unprincipled-fan-club stuff like “the Journal of Melatonin Studies finds melatonin works on everything!”
I’m not a Space Person but I’m told that nobody would have guessed, five or ten years ago, that you could catch a rocket with chopsticks.
nothing spooky, just free-market stuff, except it’s a much bigger deal to me than to most people
Not everyone can. Some people — who have other strengths — literally can’t make a spreadsheet or a budget or a timeline. If you are a planner, you can make a big difference in the world by being the “right-hand-man” of someone who’s extraordinary at something else but really scattered. One archetype is the “high-voltage compassionate firebrand whose charitable org is always on the brink of financial disaster” — she needs a spreadsheetbrained #2!