NOTE: In the interests of experimentation I’m posting the entirety of Section II. This is a much longer read than my typical posts, but I’m hoping to see if it’s easier to tie all these concepts together if presented all-at-once. Enjoy!

Time, Evolution, and Morphogenesis

The next step in our intentional evolutionary journey is to “nudge’’ our CASTeS into movement (Newton’s Second Law of Motion) in the direction of our new egregore. We have created our common knowledge and rituals to help it spread, but now we need to utilize the most important resource available to any CASTe: its people. We need to identify key individuals who will not only be most willing but also most helpful to our CASTeS to make this change for the better. We are then going to leverage those individual’s talents & interests, as well as some behavioural hacks to get our CASTe well along on its evolutionary journey. But to start, we need to change how we look at not only time, but evolution itself; most people have a well-defined ‘’frame’’ of how they view these topics that we need to not only challenge but change.

Primitive man viewed time as chaotic; due to a multitude of factors our ancestors viewed time as something that passes, but they did not have any insight or ideas into how it passed, and how decisions could flow through time and impact the future. Man at this point was very much thinking “the sun went down and the moon went up because we sacrificed our firstborn child to X god, so we need to continue to do so.” Their view was that history has no path, and things just happen.

As humanity evolved we came to view time as cyclical; as we developed intelligence we began to create linkages between the cycles of nature and the cycles of human activity. In a sense we began to believe that we could reduce, and in fact conquer chaotic time by repetition. If we just keep repeating the good behaviours and stop repeating the bad behaviours, good things will always happen.

Further yet, humanity now views time as linear. Us modern homo sapiens think “time is unique and always moving along a path”, or “progress is inevitable.” This view of time has led us to create the modern world as we know it, full of the internet, dating apps, and food delivery on demand. The ancient Greeks had a word to describe this: chronos. To them chronos could be considered to be quantitative time…we can measure it, it’s linear and moves in a sequential pattern.

In light of this quantitative, linear view of time, I believe that in order for us to be successful in intentional evolution we need to move to another way to think about time: kairos. Once again stealing from the Ancient Greeks, kairos is qualitative time. Kairos time implies that there is a right time, or an opportune moment for something to occur. While chronos is how scientists view the passage of time, we need to think in terms of kairos: time is dynamic in the sense that it will speed up and slow down depending upon our perspective, and there are opportune moments in nature where we should carpe diem and act accordingly. Kairos is more about perception than anything, and if we change our outlook to always be looking for opportunities, we’ll be quite surprised at how many there actually are that we missed previously!

Now that we’re rethinking how we view time and its opportunities, we need to examine how we view evolution.

I daresay that everyone is familiar with the story of Charles Darwin. After spending however many months aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin authored what is now considered the backbone of evolutionary theory, On the Origin of Species. Darwin was the first scientist to propose the branching pattern of evolution as a result of natural selection. What he proposed is that two members of a species come together and create offspring, which over time and survival permitting find another member of the species to create another generation of offspring. The offspring that survive are a result of natural selection i.e.-they are the most genetically and behaviourally suited to propagate the species. This view of evolution has been around since 1859 and is widely accepted as scientific fact…but what if there is another way to look at evolution?

Let’s start with the human body; inside our body in our digestive tract are bacteria. This gut biome is responsible for digestion primarily, but recent advances in scientific study are positing that this gut bacteria could also be related to things such as mood as well as overall physical and mental health. We are starting to consider that our microbiota are more responsible for our happiness and survival than we realize…so what happens if we remove this microbiome? Have you ever taken antibiotics (which are known to kill off bad bacteria as well as good) and then afterward suffered from an upset stomach, irritable bowels, and the like? These bacteria are as vital to our continued survival as we are to theirs.

I bring this up to say: our gut bacteria are directly tied to our evolution as a species, but we’re not creating branches of the human/gut biome that survive via natural selection. What we are doing with our microbiota is evolving together via fusion. Now we introduce the term that defines this section: the holobiont.

As we cannot separate our gut biota from ourselves, we as humans could be considered as a discrete ecological unit; this unit has joined together through a process of symbiosis to create a distinct species which will co-evolve as time progresses. This holobiont is made up of complex interactions between the host and other species, and as one goes so goes the other. This concept was best popularized by Dr. Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist and along with her work in symbiotic evolution is a co-creator of the Gaia Hypothesis with James Lovelock. Both of these scientific theories include the concepts of life as balance and a living, self-regulating system ...doesn’t that sound like your modern CASTe?

We established in Section I that CASTes have a living culture inside them. I will add to that and say that all CASTes are living, breathing organisms that evolve. And not only do they evolve, they evolve by forming a symbiosis amongst the parts and people that make up our CASTeS; instead of looking at our company with a mechanical metaphor of a “machine,” we need to look at them like living organisms: a holobiont.

Remember our friend Rupert Sheldrake from the last section, and his concept of morphic resonance? Well believe it or not he’s got a theory that ties to the frame we’re developing. Part of his work discusses how the forms that he believes influence development and evolution come into being, what he calls “morphogenesis.” He has identified two different types of morphogenesis, and both are relevant to our path forward.

The first type is called transformative morphogenesis. This is defined as a process where pre-existing cells in a pre-existing structure rearrange themselves to create a new form of varying complexity. A biological example of this would be how cells form organs inside living beings during gestation; we could also apply this to how our CASTeS typically approaches a change program...let’s rearrange currently-existing parts to create a new structure (or form.)

The second type of morphogenesis is called aggretive, and this refers to a process where individual cells come together to create an entirely new form, also of varying complexity. The best biology example of this is the slime mold, where individual slime mold amoeba come together to form a larger, more complex slime mold.

For our purposes, we are going to utilize aggretive morphogenesis to create, evolve, and scale our egregore. We are going to combine different pieces of our CASTe to form a new being; some of which may currently exist, others may not exist inside our CASTeS yet. But regardless of where they are originating from, we need to update our frame to view this action as combining new and different pieces in a new and different way to create a symbiotic organism that will evolve with intention as we scale. If we view our egregore as a holobiont, then we can get ourselves in the right frame of mind for purposeful evolution via aggretive morphogenesis in our time of kairos……an aggretive holobiontic egregore!

Wow, that’s a mouthful. I promise that’s the last time I use that term.

Now that we have sufficiently updated our frame, we need to understand the current environment that we are operating in, so that we can start identifying the pieces that will best help us scale in a healthy way.

Protocol: Organizational Physics & The Law of the Few

First we’re going to deepen our understanding of our CASTeS; specifically we are going to redefine how we view our internal network(s) to add clarity and create the opportunity to find the parts we need to help us evolve.

In his book Organizing for Complexity, author Niels Pflaegling introduces the concept of organizational physics; he uses this term as an umbrella to encapsulate the different types of networks inside the CASTeS, as well as the power that they wield. The three types of networks are:

• Formal Network: this is your official hierarchy. Think of this in terms of the pyramid-shaped “org chart.” This group has power in our CASTeS via its hierarchy.

• Informal Network: this is an unofficial network of the people who while not necessarily reporting to or working with each other have strong connections and share information and knowledge. Think of this network in terms of a social graph, where a few strong connections serve as the main graph, and weak connections around the periphery. This group has power via the influence it wields.

• Value Creation Network: the value creation network is the network of people who “get things done.” These are the “go talk to Mary, she knows how to get this sorted” types that are relied on for their productivity, predictability, and general overall willingness to do what needs to be done in order to be successful.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, these networks exist inside our CASTeS; I would also posit that they exist inside of ALL CASTeS…non-profit, sports and entertainment, etc. There are always the people with titles, who are looked at as higher up the totem pole, regardless of whether they have demonstrated the skills, proficiency, or behaviours that the title would suggest. And in any group of people there’s the informal network, there’s the “friend of a friend” who knows person A or B, there’s strong connections between people who have established bonds, and there’s weaker connections with people viewed as on the periphery. Lastly, we all know who to go to when we really need to get something done…these are the value creation people, those who we know are competent and can help us get over the finish line.

In order to scale our egregore we’re going to need to utilize these three networks in the best possible ways in order to be successful…but whom inside these networks would be our best ally? What if I told you that there are people that sit across these networks, and they would be the best allies we could find…what would those people look like, and at what intersections would they sit?

Now we’re going to dive into some “pop science”...renowned author Malcolm Gladwell has written many books that fit into the description of popular science, and his first book was an examination of how ideas spread titled The Tipping Point. Per Gladwell, ideas are said to have reached their tipping point when they become mainstream and “tip over” into a socially-acceptable idea/practice/methodology (common knowledge anyone?). In the book he states “the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” Gladwell also references the Pareto Principle (80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the causes) to help drive this point home; a vital few people can greatly influence the odds of success. Gladwell puts narrows these archetypes into 3 categories:

• Connectors: these are the people who are in the habit of making introductions; they have large social networks and have no problems navigating them as well as crossing over boundaries between. They are the social equivalent of a network hub.

• Mavens: this archetype Gladwell describes as “information specialists.” These are the people in your CASTe that seem to accumulate knowledge, but also know how to share it with others. This is the person you run into at company events that seems to always be caught up on everything worth talking about, and can share it in ways that doesn’t overwhelm people who may not be up to speed. Gladwell also describes these people as “pathologically helpful”; they are always willing to throw out new ideas and concepts to help you in your journey.

• Salesmen: these people are your “persuaders.” Possessing powerful negotiation skills and a healthy dose of charisma, these are the people that when they get talking, or lecturing, you feel the natural urge to agree with them. It’s not that they’re trying to sell you something, per se, it’s just that their personality combined with their raw magnetism makes you want to smile and follow whatever they’re saying or trying to get you to believe.

As you were reading this section, I will bet that upon reading each description your mind automatically jumped to someone you know, either currently or previously worked with, that fits these descriptions. Remember that guy that whenever he got up and started talking, you automatically had the urge to follow him into battle? Or what about that one woman leader who everybody loved and respected, regardless of her title? How about that one developer that seemed to know ‘’everything about everything”, and whenever you went to them with a problem or to pick their brain you walked away feeling over-full? These are exactly the archetypes we’re talking about!

These types of people are the ones that we need to identify and engage early if we have any chance of successfully establishing and evolving our egregore. The influence and connections they wield (many times inadvertently) will greatly amplify the common knowledge and connections we’re looking to leverage. These archetypes, when working in concert, help create that gravity well we spoke about in Section 1. This combined effort will act as an attractor to this new egregore, greatly accelerating us towards the 5% embedded target we are striving for. Keep in mind, that you may naturally attract these people without needing to identify and sway them to your cause; most forward-thinking individuals fit these archetypes naturally and may have already glommed on to what you’re trying to do without any effort whatsoever!

If we view the 3 different types of networks as a Venn diagram, you notice there are overlaps between the networks and in these overlaps are where we find the “vital few”.

• Connectors: Connectors sit between the Formal and Informal networks. They have authority by virtue of their position but also due to the myriad of informal connections that they maintain. They connect those in “power” by authority with a larger population inside our CASTeS than those in power could typically reach. Many CASTeS have a ‘’Member At Large” who acts as a representative of the power structure but also our CASTeS itself, and functions as the conduit across the two. Another way to think about this person would be somewhat of an ombudsman; many times problems originating in either the power structure or the body politic will be brought to this person to help diagnose and resolve.

• Salesmen: The Salesmen can typically be found sitting in between the Formal and Value-creation networks. These types of folks have the reputational cachet of being one of the people who are looked up to for their ability to get things done, but they also have the authority that is part and parcel of their position in our CASTeS. They are respected not just for their abilities but their accomplishments and are highly valued. Their messaging is highly resonant due to the large level of respect they garner.

• Mavens: If you’re looking for a Maven, you want to find the people that have a highly-respected reputation but also seem to know everyone. Mavens sit between the Informal and Value-creation networks; they not only know a ton of people and have numerous connections, but they also have a stellar reputation and are always talked about as being “in the know’’ when it comes to various topics, trends, and goings-on in our CASTeS. This unique combination gives them the ability to introduce new ideas and concepts to the broader CASTe in a highly informal and “bottoms-up” way.

The benefits of finding and enlisting these people to our cause are many; this will increase the speed and ease in which your common knowledge works its way through our CASTeS, by both spreading the ritual invitation but also the common knowledge itself. Another benefit is that when these archetypes are engaged it adds to the narrative that this idea of a new egregore originated from inside our CASTeS (organism) itself; it looks less like a “planned, CASTe-wide change initiative” and more like an organic groundswell of belief and interest in a new concept. Lastly, this effort will be coupled to the reputations of those involved in its propagation…the people we’ve engaged will lend this egregore an air of automatic respectability, which will exponentially increase as the egregore grows!

Protocol: The purple squirrel - the super spreader

If you notice in the above Venn diagram, there is nothing in the middle of the diagram…so does that mean that no one inhabits that space between all 3 networks? In the sequel to the original book, Malcolm Gladwell explores this idea in Revenge of the Tipping Point, and he identifies a new archetype: the super spreader.

Using the COVID19 virus as the primary metaphor, Gladwell talks about individuals that have a disproportionately large amount of influence when it comes to transmission and impact of anything…a virus, a concept, or an idea. The historical example in this same metaphor would be Typhoid Mary; Mary Mallon was a cook in turn-of-the-century New York City, and she was an asymptomatic carrier of the typhoid fever virus. She has been credited with spreading the virus to somewhere between 50 and 100+ people and was quarantined no less than two times by the Department of Health (she eventually died in quarantine.) We are looking for (conceptually) someone with the same type of ability: someone who has an outsize influence on our CASTeS.

We all have either known or experienced that one person…that person who no matter where you go in the company, their name comes up. They seem to be involved or in the orbit of every meaningful conversation about our CASTeS, where it’s going, what the future holds. They are consistently sought out for their opinions, ideas, and observations about our CASTeS and its concomitant culture. Even those in the upper echelons of the Formal Network seek out their counsel….THIS is the exact person you’re looking for!

The experience of finding this person will tell you much about how successful you’ve been thus far in creating your egregore; if you find yourself having to track this person down and educate them on what you’re trying to do you have obviously misjudged the effectiveness of your rituals, or miscalculated how resonant your common knowledge is amongst the greater, unfamiliar population. If both of these things have been successful they are probably already in your orbit and greatly contributing to the growth of the egregore!

Protocol: Change from the edges: the trickster

Now we’re going to talk about a different type of ‘’role’’ in our CASTe; this role has no official title and you won’t find anything about it on anyone’s resume. This role, however, is a gatekeeper of sorts regarding your CASTe’s culture, and helps create the opportunity for us to introduce the evolution we are trying to prompt in our system. This role is called the Trickster.

As someone who’s a bit of a jokester himself, I came across a book titled Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde. In the book the author decomposes and explains what a ‘’trickster” is, what they do, and the role that they play in our lives. I didn’t pick up this book for the purposes of my writing, but I will confess that after about ten pages my brain automatically made the leap into “oh…this is highly applicable!”

Let’s start by defining who the trickster is and what he does. The best examples come from mythology (and by extension the Marvel Cinematic Universe): think of the character Loki, the Norse god. The analog to Loki in Greco-Roman mythology would be Hermes, or Mercury. This is a character that is seen to operate according to their own plans and desires; they’re not antagonistic, but they do what they deem as necessary as a means to an end. In his book Hyde calls the trickster “...the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.” This is the type of person that operates at the boundaries of right and wrong, and sits there comfortably. They have the ability to cross back and forth between those worlds to suit their own intentions…and that ability creates opportunity.

As someone who can cross over into multiple worlds (or universes, per the Loki television show) they can bring concepts, ideas, and opportunities into places that one who’s isolated to a particular side cannot. This is where the trickster acts as an ersatz gatekeeper; they decide which ideas can transcend and which cannot. By extension of their actions they add validity to an idea…but they can add scorn or ridicule as well. This is why they are important to identify, as they can act as ambassadors to an idea, or they could inadvertently strangle the idea before it has a chance to thrive.

“Change comes from the edges.” - Mark Twain

The power to cross over from one world to the next, to introduce concepts that are foreign but by dint of the trixter’s reputation will automatically be attributed provenance, it becomes very obvious to us how this archetype can assist in our journey. The intentional evolution we are trying to accomplish will be greatly aided by injection into the current culture, giving it a chance to establish itself, grow, and thrive. Along with this ability, there is another attribute of the Trickster that in conjunction with crossing boundaries can improve our odds…and that is their ability to call bullshit.

We are all aware of the role of the court jester; they serve at the behest of the King in his court, and they have permission of the court to call the court on its own behaviour, it’s hypocrisy…it’s bullshit. Stories about of the jester pointing out inconsistencies in the King’s behaviour, the actions of his court, and even though this is potentially offensive and or biting commentary the Jester is excused for it; “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’’ and in this case the Jester is the one-eyed man. Resembling the child at the conclusion of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the Trickster/Jester has the ability to publicly address the elephant in the room. They give people the ability to break what’s called pluralistic ignorance, they grant the people the ability to acknowledge that “yeah, this is a terrible thing/idea, and I don’t know why others would support/enable it.”

Take a moment to think about the true power of this ability…every company regardless of size has things that they do, processes that they follow, that the large majority of the population dislikes or doesn’t understand or even disagrees with. Over time these types of cultural artifacts become embedded and as a result of Lindy’s Law become even further entrenched. The Trickster has the option to (without fear of reprisal) call out these things for what they are, unencumbered by the baggage of doing so. This skill has uses in social settings, but even greater so in the corporate world. Someone with this type of power not only helps create and cement the boundaries of a CASTe’s culture, but also is responsible for helping to disturb those boundaries and introduce intentional evolution. If one thinks about it, this person is the person responsible for changing culture!

Which brings us to the question of identification: how can we find this person/these persons? A great way to identify these folks is at all-colleague meetings, also called town halls. Are there typically one or two people who, whenever the Q&A section of the meeting starts, seem to always not only have a question but also have a pointed question that challenges leaders but also seems a bit on the nose? In your CASTe, are there people who everyone always talks about as being “a bit out of line, but also correct” in their observations? These are the people you’re looking for. You want them involved in your common knowledge process, and you also want them to help design and or change your rituals; again, these types sit at the edges of the culture and will be the first ones to identify not only opportunity for what we’re trying to accomplish but also they might recognize things that will be highly-difficult if not nigh impossible to change…adding more fuel to the fire of necessitating a new culture, yes, but also giving you insight into what to design for and AGAINST. This archetype is up there with the superspreader as far as importance and irreplaceability if we really want our egregore to take root and thrive.

***

Protocol; The “counter-elite”

At this point we’ve identified the “vital few’’ that can help create a new egregore inside the CASTeS, and that might not seem like enough people to reach the 5% (and then 20%) targets. However, in all CASTeS there exist a population that can potentially tip our efforts over and make them mainstream overnight…this population could be called the “counter-elites.”

Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist who specializes in a field he calls cliodynamics, which is mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. His work involves modeling history to find similarities in societies that rise and fall, and one of his theories is that revolutionaries occur when there is an overproduction of “elites” in a culture; basically, there are more people who have ambitions to move into the higher levels of a society than open spaces. These people historically are the ones who not only have expressed their displeasure with the current state of the culture/society but also have the exposure and recognition to push back against it: the “counter-elites.” A quick perusal of the French Revolution, the rise of Communism in many countries to see this in action…who are the ones carrying the flag the highest, extorting the virtues of the “new culture” the loudest? They’re the elites who feel left behind.

Building on this concept: this egregore will surreptitiously be revolutionary to the current culture while appearing evolutionary. And when the current egregore realizes that a revolution is at hand our CASTeS antibodies (“The Powers That Be” i.e.- the current “elites”) will mobilize to defeat it and or to blunt it. This is why a cohort of counter-elites will be vital; they should have both achieved much in the current egregore but are wanting for more/better/different enough that they will embrace this new cultural construct and push back against our CASTeS inertia that will try to countermand this creation.

Back to our rituals: the rituals we described earlier contribute to the culture of this new egregore, and these are created by what is seen as the “authority” of the culture. Consider the town hall example: the “authority” behind these rituals is typically the leadership and/or executives of CASTeS who utilize this ritual to create common knowledge…they’re the stewards of this knowledge creation. In our new egregore these counter-elites and vital few should be leveraged to assist in creating the rituals to spread the common knowledge that this new egregore will need to survive, and their reputational cachet will increase the odds of this not only survival but success!

This protocol unfortunately comes pre-loaded with potential conflict and casualty: we need to be wary of their help but also be on the watch for a “wolf among the sheep” who may try to usurp our efforts and the egregore itself. We need to be wary of sociopaths.

Author David Chapman wrote an article that I find highly relevant to this particular chapter, its title being “Geeks, MoPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution.” If you take a moment you can see how referring to our nascent egregore as a ‘’subculture” makes rational sense, and Chapman discusses how these seemingly small cultures grow and then sadly go off the rails, which provides us potential warning signs to look out for.

Chapman states that subcultures start off with a small, highly invested few…he even uses the term fanatic. This small group creates what could be called a “scene” wherein these fanatics get together to obsess over their shared interest. They create positive energy around this scene with their excitement and oftentimes joy, which acts like a beacon to attract others to the thing they are jazzed about. These early adopter fans could be considered the ‘’geeks’’ from the aforementioned title.

Over time this subculture grows and begins to attract the “MoPs”; short for “masses of people”, these are those that have expressed an interest in the thing but are not as fanatical as the geeks. These subcultures grow especially fast if there isn’t a need to go deeply into the details around the thing or if it isn’t so obscure as to create a high barrier to entry (think common knowledge and rituals.) Over time you’ll attract more and more MoPs and the culture will quickly escape its niche footing and move into the mainstream of acceptability…now you can see where this concept applies to what we’re trying to do with CASTeS and their egregores.

The MoPs in conjunction with the geeks will help our egregore grow and evolve, fortifying our CASTe. But around this corner lies trouble, and that trouble ties to a unique group: the sociopaths.

While the geeks embrace, nurture, and grow our egregore, and the MoPs double down in helping it grow, eventually this “new thing” becomes the “primary thing”; as this is happening there typically is a group that does not buy-in to the new thing, but they see where utilizing the new thing can help them reach their own goals. This might be something as simple as a promotion, or could be something like building a kingdom in the organization that will grant them greater power, to be used for their own ends. Regardless of the end result they are seeking, these individuals are dangerous as they will feign interest and get into our egregore with the express goal of exploiting it, or weakening it.

As stewards of organizational evolution we need to be vigilant for these types of individuals, and I might even go as far to say we should be wary of them. I’m not suggesting that we attribute mal-intent to everyone who’s looking to help our cause, but we do need to keep in mind that when recruiting counter-elites, we may have one or two of these people slip under our gaze and try to use this intentional evolution to their own ends. If a counter-elite only wants to attain power and they see this competing culture as a way to do so they should be avoided. However, if there is someone who’s at the fringes of the current leadership culture and they have a growth mindset, they could be our best ally.

Growing your own Missionaries:

The difficult part? How to identify these people! The one proven and realistically the best way to find these types of “nodes” in a CASTe is to observe the interactions amongst people over time. What leaders seem to always be involved with interesting ideas? What people’s names always seem to come up when discussing our CASTeS’s current initiatives? Who consistently gets called out as “go talk to X, they know what’s up”...these are the types of signals you need to watch out for as they will help clue you into who are the vital few you need to engage in your egregore.

To be completely transparent: there is a distinct possibility that the types of people we named above do not exist in your CASTe; superspreaders are fairly rare, and maybe you lack the time necessary to identify the remainder. And to be honest there is a chance that your egregore grows and thrives organically without them. However, their presence greatly increases your odds of success, so an alternative to a lack of a native superspreader and/or some of these would be to cultivate the behaviours that make them successful in others.

To build this metaphor we’re going to look to Christianity; for the uneducated there is an assumption that all Christian churches and beliefs are the same…priests, ministers, nuns, they all act/behave/practice in the same way. In reality nothing could be further from the truth. We’re going to break down Christianity into two (2) camps: the Evangelical and the Charismatic.

Evangelicalism can be described as ‘’focusing on the core.” Evangelical Christians place a preeminent authority on the Bible itself, and they focus on what would be considered ‘’core’’ doctrines like salvation through faith in Jesus, the need to repent of your sins, and the importance of spreading the gospel. Their worship style is more conservative and solemn; Catholicism could be considered an evangelical form of Christianity.

Charismatic Christianity, as opposed to Evangelical Christianity, places an emphasis on the practice of spiritual gifts in everyday life, such as miracles, signs, or even speaking in tongues. These gifts are a normal expectation of the Charismatic faith, whereas the Evangelicals typically do not believe as such. Charismatic worship is usually more emotionally-charged and expressive; when you turn on the TV late at night and there’s a preacher crying at the pulpit, they’re more often than not from a charismatic sect of Christianity, the most familiar to most readers being Baptist.

Why this detour into religion? Well, think about the archetypes we’re looking for….Connectors, Mavens, even Superspreaders. What do you think makes them effective at what they do? I posit that the most successful representations of these types embody a healthy mix of the characteristics mentioned above. In order for ideas and concepts to successfully propagate you need people who are excited about the core of the ideas, but also very passionate and expressive when it comes to discussing these things, in a way that becomes infectious…kindof like a really great preacher!

And this brings me to my next point….we’re trying to find these people to recruit them to our cause, but we need to be mindful of their own intrinsic motivations for joining our cause. Unfortunately there are some people out there who will see what we’re trying to do as an opportunity more for themselves than for our CASTeS; these people will glom on to our efforts superficially as true believers but in truth they will jettison their efforts when it suits them. These people could be considered mercenaries, because they’re invested when it benefits them but disappear as soon as the superficial benefits are no longer something they value. Instead of mercenaries we should be looking for missionaries. Missionaries are driven by a deep-seated passion and belief in a cause; they also focus on the long-term impacts of what they’re working on and are driven by creating something meaningful.

Your ability to find and recruit missionaries is a direct result of how well you created your common knowledge and how effective your rituals are. If you created a solid foundation with your common knowledge and then followed that up with helping it propagate naturally and organically with well-thought out and orchestrated rituals, your ideas have most likely escaped into the ecosystem and will inevitably end up in front of people who will become your most ardent missionaries!

The Holobiontic Egregore:

At this juncture we need to take a minute to think about our journey thus far. If we’re successful we’ve created common knowledge that is resonating throughout our CASTeS; this common knowledge is spreading not only through the rituals we have established but also through word of mouth and watercooler talk. We’ve either breached or are approaching the tipping point by which this culture becomes embedded, and we’re working towards the point of inevitability; to that end we have either attracted or recruited all sorts of people with different archetypes to help us in our evolutionary journey.

We would be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to consider what all the above is actually doing to our egregore…by growing and attracting new people we are inadvertently evolving our new culture. These new members aligned to our cause will have their own ideas, their own feelings, their own observations, and we need to be intentional in how we acknowledge and incorporate these ideas into our nascent, ever-evolving culture.

The concept of a ‘’feedback loop” is long well-known and established in manufacturing and software delivery. If one looks up the paper by Winston Royce where he documents what is considered the genesis of ‘’waterfall’’ software delivery, he explicitly calls out the necessity of feedback loops nested in the process in order to deliver a quality product (the fact that this is largely ignored by not only the Project Management Institute but also most practitioners of project delivery is another story.) In fact, one could go so far as to say that Agile Software Development was born to meet this often-ignored need!

I bring this up to remind us as agents on a journey that we must be continuously mindful of the insights that newly-added believers in our cause can contribute. When we go back to the holobiont, and Lynn Margulis, we’re reminded that our organism will evolve not by branching but by fusion, and every time we add someone new to our egregore we’re fusing them to us and we have created a newly-evolved egregore. This is not a bad thing and is actually an opportunity…instead of bringing the culture to someone who has no (realistic) chance of changing it, we’re bringing someone to the culture who helps us evolve in an accretive way. If we train ourselves to recognize that every additional person to our egregore is an opportunity to further evolve, there really are no limits as to how far we can go and what we can accomplish.

But while we’re training ourselves to utilize this new way of thinking, we also need to train ourselves on how to make this intentionally evolutionary egregore more appealing to a greater audience, and to do that we need to understand a bit more about how our HumanOS works, how CASTeS work, and how we can utilize their unique characteristics to help us grow.

Protocol: Memes, Mimetic Contagion & Mimetic Desire

At this point we have created the common knowledge that is the basis of our new egregore, and we have also begun deploying the rituals used to propagate and embed this information in our CASTe. These activities were purposeful with the explicit goals in mind, but what we also did is create something that will help carry this new culture outwards without our explicit involvement…we have created our egregore’s memes.

The concept of a meme was first established by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. He describes a meme as an “idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.” Howard Bloom builds on this concept in stating that memes are “idea replicators” with the power to pull together a superorganism; memes represent a locus for our collective consciousness. They knit those in the group together and are a demonstration to those not in the superorganism of what the group is about. But most importantly….memes can be used to recruit others to join the cause.

There is one aspect of memes that we crucially need to be aware of, and that is their ability to escape from its creator. If you look at many of the internet memes that we see daily (not quite the same as the Dawkins idea of a meme, but close enough), they take on a life of their own and escape away from what was their original, intended use and typically spiral out into new forms of meaning.

“Changing behaviour without changing beliefs results in change that does not stick.” - Todd Goodwin, Infinite Loops

There exists a concept of “mimetic contagion” where a meme that is desired by others begins to be adopted and spread, allowing the meme (and the underlying culture or concept) to grow exponentially and with great speed. Rene Girard (the French polymath) introduced this concept along with the idea of “mimetic desire.” Mimetic desire is when we want other things because others want them; while some social scientists could consider this a “bug” in our HumanOS this can be used positively to recruit others and help expand the superorganism. When this desire grows and starts consuming more and more organisms, it can be considered contagious, and if we’re trying to create an egregore to compete with our established cultural egregore this is a way to “cheat” towards that 20% population that’s unstoppable.

The only way to truly create mimetic desire is to start with empathy. Our egregore’s memes need to touch on something that others may find uncomfortable or undesirable; it doesn’t have to be explicit, but it should poke at something that someone doesn’t like. This empathy will allow others the opportunity to not only open their minds but potentially transcend their current thinking and allow them to join this competing egregore without any fear of guilt or ostracization.

Another way to think about this concept of mimetic desire is the idea of “basins of attraction.” In his essay on Game B the author Jim Rutt speaks of how each one of us resides in a conceptual basin, be it culturally, socially, or CASTeally. In order for us to move (Jim uses the term “dislodge”), a network attractor needs to be created to make us WANT to move…forcing us to move will just make us yearn for the previous basin and we will retreat there at the first opportunity; however if we intrinsically desire to change our basin we will move and stay there. Our memes, built upon empathy, will create the desire for our CASTe to change…thereby we dislodge OURSELVES into a new desired state.

To our ends, we’re going to create and shape memes that represent our egregore. It will take a few attempts to be honest, and some will stick and some won’t, but overall the goal is to encapsulate the most important parts of our evolutionary culture in a way that outsiders can see and grasp with little to no effort. This is how we will generate contagion; the ones that work will be further propagated, while the memes that are not resonant will be discarded and replaced with a different attempt. As these memes move through our CASTe’s current egregore, they will hit a “nerve” for people in regards to something they want/need/desire/find lacking in the current CASTe. As a result this will create desire and further draw people into what we’re trying to accomplish.

Protocol: Using (non-)Conformity to your advantage:

Whether we like it or not, there is a part of the HumanOS that desires to be part of the “herd”; humans feel ostracization from the herd as strongly as actual physical pain, and a large part of human history has been driven by the biological need to be part of the ‘’tribe”, and to feel a sense of belonging. Right, wrong, or indifferent, this is a part of our programming that is hard to overcome. We need to understand what drives the need for conformity and how it’s strengthened for us to be successful; we will then use this knowledge to assist us in growing our new egregore inside the currently-existing culture. At the same time, we need to understand how dissent is realized and utilized in these types of systems so we can use it to create separation between the current egregore and the one we’re trying to create and evolve.

Let’s start with understanding a bit more about conformity. There are two types of conformity in humans: compliance and acceptance. Compliance is when we defer to others that we (privately) believe are wrong, but the costs of disagreement we feel are too great. Think about how the Overton Window has been shifting as of late, and ideas in the public discourse that for a long time were considered verboten to discuss are now not only openly debated but also openly disagreed with. The other type of conformity is acceptance, which is when we internalize the narrative that the group holds; there is no difference in our beliefs be it in public or in private. This is deep conformity, and is driven partly by the fear of ostracization but mainly by the deep belief in the idea itself. These are the types of people that CASTe change initiatives run headfirst into and stall with little to no progress.

Along with the fear of being ostracized and shunned, what else causes people to conform? There’s a few reasons:

• Difficulty - if what we’re asking of people appears to be difficult (change in beliefs, change in structure, unknowns) people will conform to avoid that challenge

• Tribe makeup - if people feel the ‘’tribe’’ is composed of people they look up to or admire, they are more likely to conform; this leads us to the realization that conformity isn’t about obeying a leader as much as responding to someone whose good faith and or attributes you trust.

• Informational cascade - at a certain point people stop relying on their own opinions/information, and just ‘’go with the herd.” This is an example of an informational cascade, and these cascades become a self-fulfilling prophecy and are hard to break. People defer to the tribe (for the same reasons listed above) which creates a runaway effect.

This is just a small sampling of the reasons why people conform, but the most destructive and prevalent reason why people ‘’go along with the flow”, in my opinion, is defined as pluralistic ignorance. This is defined as when you as a person are ignorant of what someone else thinks, and assume that they believe something that they may/may not…and is the biggest driver of conformity. The existence of pluralistic ignorance further cements the belief from the last section that in order to successfully create this evolutionary egregore we need to be explicit with our common knowledge and rituals, so we can generate an environment of transparency. CASTes that prioritize transparency create systems that produce higher-quality outcomes.

So what drives non-conformists? Why do certain people dissent, and what are the effects of their dissension?

The presence of a dissenter is amazingly powerful; a single dissenter (or ‘’voice of reason”) DRAMATICALLY reduces conformity in a system. Dissenters are typically extremely confident in their views, and may or may not have high status in a system. Much like the Trickster from earlier, they suffer the courage to be disliked, and their dissent confers benefits onto others who may be interested in dissenting but are afraid of “looking stupid”. In any population it is found that around 25% of people are consistently independent; these are the people that whether they acknowledge it or not are fighting against the ‘’tyranny of the prevailing opinion.” In systems that reward conformity, early dissenters typically suffer the most…however a single dissenter can be the one voice needed to begin the avalanche that leads to the demise of the prevailing narrative.

I posit that inside CASTeS there are a contingent of dissenters who are unhappy with the status quo; they’re the ones who are vocal in Town Halls and All-Hands meetings, offering up suggestions, critique, and criticism of how things are currently working/organized/etc. Like the section above, they might be counter-elites, or they might just be people who have ideas that are unheard/unrecognized and they are looking for a nibble on said ideas for them to truly, fully engage themselves. These are exactly the kind of people we will either explicitly or implicitly attract to our evolutionary culture, as they are looking for an opportunity to change the system, to strive for something MORE.

Regardless of if they fall into our basin of attraction or not, we need these people for two major reasons:

The first reason is that we need these dissenters because they help us create the acknowledgement that the current egregore is no longer optimal for our needs; as a result of their public dissent they do that they are helping to plant the seeds of that culture’s demise. By saying out loud ‘’the Emperor has no clothes”, these dissenters help deepen our basin of attraction by pointing out that maybe what everyone believes isn’t true, or isn’t the best thing for us or our CASTeS. This challenges the pluralistic ignorance that’s prevalent in any complex system and creates an opening for our intentionally evolutionary egregore to grow and thrive.

The second reason is: dissenters keep us honest. Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragility references systems that by encountering disruption grow to be stronger as they use that disruption as a fulcrum to create a stronger, more resilient and adaptive system. By cultivating people whose first instinct is to buck the “current thing” we knowingly (and i would go as far to say, lovingly) create the opportunity to make our egregore ‘’antifragile;” we are inviting criticism, pointed observation, and the shattering of our frame by encouraging dissenters to make their views known. While we will not be able to turn all of their observations into actionable feedback, any feedback we can utilize to make our egregore more antifragile and adaptive to change is a win!

Protocol: Creating the opportunity to Exit

Chances are that if you’re reading this you’ve had more than one job; maybe it’s been a while since you’ve changed jobs, but realistically you’ve had to give notice and leave one CASTe for another in the past. Now, take a second and think back to when you gave that notice…why were you leaving? Was it because you were unhappy and/or unchallenged? And how long were you in that state before you actually made the decision to leave? What made it so tough for you to take that next step and exit our CASTeS?

German economist Albert Hirschman wrote a book on this topic (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty) as an extension into his research and authorship around why customers stick with certain brands when their quality declines, and what options they have or how they react to said decline. His theory is that when customers notice a decline in quality they typically stop using the brand and switch to another product offering the features that the customer is looking for. I am just one person, what does Brand X care if I move to a competitor?

That’s all well and good when it comes to laundry detergent, or a brand of underwear, but what happens when the quality declines in a system you’re a member of, like a church or your employer? Hirschman’s studies showed that in this instance the first option of a customer/member is their voice. If you do not like the direction your church is going in, or the nonprofit you donate time to, or even your employer, your first avenue is always your voice. You may put something in the suggestion box, or bring up your concerns in a group meeting, or ask the uncomfortable question at an all-colleague town hall. All of these scenarios are examples of someone exercising their voice to try and change a system they are part of. Think back to the last section on conformity, and even back to the Trickster…maybe this lone voice is the voice that creates the groundswell that leads to positive change.

…or maybe it isnt. Maybe this voice gets ignored, or drowned out, or placated while little to no observable change occurs. At a certain point when a person in the system realizes that their voice isn’t making a difference, they make the hard choice to exit said CASTe and move to another one, one that’s more aligned with what they’re looking for.

Exactly how long this person stays with our CASTeS once they’ve realized that it is not going in a direction they agree with is, per Hirschman, a result of loyalty. One may wonder, how was this loyalty created? In most systems loyalty is created by two mechanism(s):

• Severe Initiation - this is what Hirschman calls the perceived “high costs’’ of entering an CASTe. Think about that last job change: the interview gauntlet, the reams of paperwork, signing up for benefits, all the administrative ephemera that comes with going from one CASTe to another. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, those are all initiation rites that are part of joining an CASTe, and they can be very complex and time consuming.

• High Penalties for Exit - this is the other side of the above-mentioned coin. When you leave an CASTe for another you consider a whole different set of questions…what are their pay periods? Does this coincide with my current bill cycle? How long until their health benefits kick in…and what if I have a family? Do I have to move my 401k? What about my stock options that I purchased? These aren’t things that we typically consider “penalties”, but they have an absolute impact on our decision to exit an CASTe.

Before we go forward, please do not use the above to say “CASTes are evil and are trying to manipulate you.” While that may be true for some CASTes in general this is just a common outgrowth of how the corporate world functions, and many times our CASTeS will create those mechanisms inadvertently, not as a deterrent but an outcropping of them doing business. To attempt to anthropomorphize our CASTeS and then deem it sociopathic is utterly false, those firms are more the exception than the rule.

These two mechanisms create loyalty, sure, but so do other facets of a CASTe. A clear vision, a purpose aligned with one’s moral compass, inspirational leadership, colleagues of equal yoke and respectability are just a few of the other attributes that can contribute to you being loyal to an CASTe. And because you worked hard to become a part of our CASTeS, and you now feel a sense of loyalty, your first instinct will be to use your voice when you notice something is no longer aligned or trending in a sub-optimal direction. You will go to your manager, speak up in the Town Hall, you will bring attention to what you see is a deviation in the company’s character in an attempt to rectify and get the company back on track.

Another one of Hirschman’s observations regarding loyalty in CASTes is the presence of what he terms unconscious loyal behavior. This phrase is meant to describe when someone is acting in what can be perceived as a loyal way but are doing so unconsciously; they are either not noticing the change and/or decline in the system, or have subconsciously chosen to ignore it. The prevalence of this in an CASTe can be tied to, again, the difficulty of entry as well as the high penalty for exiting. CASTes with high amounts of this type of loyalty notice very little attrition if at all, and minor if at all utilization of voice regarding change and or drift of the culture. But, like the aphorism of a frog in a boiling pot of water, eventually the change will be too great and a metaphorical dam will break.

“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” - Ayn Rand

By now you’re probably catching on to where this section is going. We keep going back to this idea of ‘’evolution by fusion”, and we’ve identified various archetypes of people and groups that if we engage with them and our ideas align, they could be powerful additions to our intentionally evolutionary culture. This concept is another tool in our bag of evolutionary accoutrements, in the sense that there are those that participate in the current culture and want to change it but feel helpless to. There are those in our CASTe who realize that the current culture is drifting, or is making poor decisions, and even though they use their voice they feel impotent, and the ‘’exit’’ option is weighing heavily on their minds….these are EXACTLY the people that we should find and speak to!

We should look to understand these people’s concerns about the current environment, in an exploratory way. During these conversations we can educate them about what we’re doing with our new egregore, and what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s not a guarantee that our goals and ideas will be 100% aligned with theirs, and honestly we may end up commiserating with people who after learning more about their concerns we do NOT want them engaged in our efforts. However, if there is a healthy amount of overlap we may have just found even more like-minded souls to come with us on our journey towards 20% unstoppability.

Put yourself in one of these people’s shoes: they feel loyal towards our CASTeS, loyal enough that they are using their voices to speak out against decisions or changes that they feel are sub-optimal, in the hope that they influence our CASTeS. To do so, they must realize that there is a chance that their pleas will go unheard, and they may be exposing themselves to some type of retaliation, but their belief is strong enough that they feel using their voice is worth the risk. That is EXACTLY the type of person we need to evolve and survive…and what does it cost them? The reality is they’re already unhappy enough to say something, and eventually the loyalty wears off and exit becomes the only option…if they embrace the band of non-conformists, trixters, and the like that are part of this new culture they may save themselves a painful exit and also develop pride in having influenced our CASTeS back to where they feel it should be. By creating the opportunity for them to ‘’exit’’ the old culture and enter the new, we have in actuality offered them what could be described as the best of both worlds…they end up creating a new CASTe inside the old.

Protocol: The Empire Strikes Back - fortifying your holobiont:

As our evolutionary holobiontic egregore grows (I’m sorry, I said I wouldn’t use that word again, I lied) and gets closer and closer to its unstoppability target of 20% saturation, those in the culture will notice that it is getting seemingly harder to grow….the new ‘’thing’’ has established itself but has reached a point where it appears that growth has plateaued. We have added different archetypes to help us thrive, and thrive we have, but we seem to have hit a glass ceiling. It is at this point that we need to lean deeper into the HumanOS to understand what our next steps will be, but before we do: a note on “culture.”

When we think of the term culture, we often think in terms of large-scale culture like nation-states or religions, and what we forget that inside these “macro-cultures” there exist many “micro-cultures.” Micro-cultures are smaller parts inside a larger cultural entity that have a sub-set of commonality aside from the larger commonality. For example: my music tastes could be defined as extreme metal, which is a macro-culture composed of micro-cultures such as deathcore, power violence, or thrash metal. This is an example of a micro-culture being a smaller, attribute-defined subset of a macro-culture. The interesting thing about macro-cultures is that they cannot sustain a person or a movement; this giant monolithic thing doesn’t provide the lower-level needs that one requires to maintain their community. What this “mass culture’’ does do, however, is it can shape perceptions and the behaviours of people inside of it.

Our evolutionary egregore has reached a point where it’s grown too large to be considered a micro-culture inside the macro-culture, and is striking out on its own. And this is where our enterprise’s antibodies are rising up to defeat what it views as a threat. It’s not malice, it’s a superorganism (which, per Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle, is another way to think about macro-culture) that is trying to survive. This superorganism feels threatened by the upstart as it’s rising in importance and relevance in our CASTeS, and it fears its own descent in what’s called the pecking order.

Back to The Lucifer Principle: in the book author Howard Bloom talks extensively about the “pecking order.” Based on studies by Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe (a Norwegian zoologist) and his observations of chickens, this theory has come to be known as an example of a dominance hierarchy. The scenario could be described as where a ranking order is established amongst members of an animal group; in the zoologist’s case he observed in chickens that when a new hen was introduced to the flock there was a jostling for power and position amongst the other hens. As a result of this jostling, the hen with the lowest position was typically eliminated, thereby establishing the newcomer’s place in the hierarchy at the expense of another. This behaviour has been observed in various species, ranging from different types of primates and as far down as insects such as ants and paper wasps.

In our CASTe we have now introduced a second cultural organism which is challenging the current dominating culture i.e. the old egregore. These two egregores will be at odds with one another until one transcends the pecking order and becomes the primary; the way we have been approaching this has been through the passage of time with the establishment of common knowledge and rituals, while also utilizing mimetic desire. This approach has been successful up until now, but that sense of a plateau comes as a side-effect of our success; the members of the established egregore have now noticed us, and what previously could be described as them being dismissive of our efforts, or ignoring them has started to transcend into pushing back against our intentional evolution, if not outright hostility towards our effort. The “elites’’ of the current system have noticed the counter-elites rising up and they’ve got some perceptible momentum. And in order for us to fully-utilize this momentum, in order for us to transcend and fully establish this evolutionary holobiontic egregore (that’s 3) as the “new normal”...we need to find a scapegoat.

Rene Girard (through Luke Burgis and his book Wanting) observed that when there are times of mimetic crisis, the way that a challenged group defends itself is by creating a scapegoat. This scapegoat is typically a proxy for the thing that the group is fighting against; creating this archetype unifies the superorganism (by creating a scapegoat meme) and provides an outlet for the superorganism to expel or eliminate, thereby relieving the conflict as an ersatz “blowoff valve.” And how else should the egregore expel this scapegoat, but with a ritual sacrifice.

As we established earlier, rituals are an efficient way to create common knowledge, and sacrificial rituals have historically been used by cultures in times of mimetic crisis to give members of the superorganism the peace of mind that comes from the message “it’s going to be ok.” The historical equivalent of this would be when primitive Mesoamerican cultures would sacrifice someone to the gods to get rid of a blight plaguing their crops…logically we know that there is absolutely zero correlation between that act and the blight subsiding, but to the superorganism the sacrifice of the scapegoat meme gave them an outlet to restore order and it helped to quell the tension.

In our context, the cohort(s) that are creating the new egregore should sacrifice something that is part of the old egregore as a show of their commitment to the new egregore. In our CASTeS’ this could be as simple as publicly proclaiming “NO MORE STATUS REPORTS!”, or by canceling a long-running meeting series that has traditionally been used to reinforce the previous culture’s egregore. Ideally the scapegoat that is sacrificed is so large that it horribly weakens the old egregore, but depending upon our CASTeS that might not be possible or might actually be counter-productive (as we may inadvertently create a counter-revolution to our OWN counter-revolution.) The thing to keep in mind is the scapegoat needs to be large enough to be visible, and be “present” enough in the current established egregore that it sends an unimpeachable signal through our CASTeS.

Another way to think about a scapegoat is to think of the “10-80-10 rule.” Famed college football coach Urban Meyer talks about this concept in his book Above the Line. This book discusses his opinions on how to build a high-performing team and/or CASTe, and in it he breaks the population that makes up said team/CASTe into three (3) groups:

• Top 10% - these are the people who are most interested in success; they are typically highly disciplined and have a resolute work ethic. They’re highly motivated and work tirelessly to achieve their goals.

• Middle 80% - these are the people in the middle; this is the majority of your CASTe/team and do good work and are reliable

• Bottom 10% - these are your “problem children;’’ this population is defiant, unmotivated, and in many cases resentful. The team/CASTe success doesn’t interest them, and in many cases they actually create more work for others than what little they perform themselves.

You can see where this is going…a truly transcendent leader will loudly and relentlessly empower the top group to drive the overall success of the many, and at the same time this type of leader is not only able but willing to publicly execute and/or cast out this bottom percentile. This is the “easy’’ choice as far as scapegoats go, however if executed poorly or with limited/no communication the leader will do irreparable damage to their reputation and personal brand. If you decide to go this route, it needs to be done tactfully and transparently along every step of the way, so that it leaves no room for interpretation as to what you are doing and what you are trying to accomplish, and most importantly, WHY you are taking this approach. It goes without saying, “Here be dragons…”

At this point you have read all of Section I, albeit in chunks. For the upcoming Section II, I’m going to try something different and publish the entire thing all in one post. I know this will be a lot for most, but I want to see what the reactions are for readers that get everything all at once instead of piecemeal. I have a theory that it will make for a more enjoyable read, but…who knows!

Now about Section III…I have to confess that my muse is taking me in a slightly different direction. You’ll note after reading Section II that there’s virtually no mention of anything “A.I.’’ in my writing; part of that is my disinterest in the topic. The other part is that I don’t see a natural tie and don’t want to shoe-horn the topic into my writing. Section III of this book is to be around entropy, and how to design systems at scale with resiliency, antifragility, and adaptability. When you take a minute to see the speed in which our world is moving in, and how AI will influence organizations going forward, I think there’s a giant hole around how to design organizations that will scale while utilizing more agentic workflows and processes than human-centric. This is where the muse is taking me, and that’s what I’ve begun writing.

All this being said, I will be putting out parts of Section III as relevant, but they will most likely have an AI bent. Depending upon how I develop this concept I may even pivot the book entirely…I have a healthy outline written and I’m working on it mentally, but I’m still not sure. I guess in summary I’m asking you to be patient with me while I explore this serendipitous turn of events!

Thanks again for reading, I hope you stick around for the rest of this adventure!

Let’s talk about homeostasis. Think about the human body; a healthy human being maintains a stable heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, etc. This is homeostasis in action: the maintenance of a stable environment. Now think about our CASTes; absent unplanned perturbations, our environment is mostly stable and predictable. I daresay that most if not all large CASTes have organized and optimized themselves to both maintain stability and predictability as well as minimize the opportunity for risk and or unplanned events to sneak in and unbalance the system.

What we are trying to do is to in effect move the CASTe out of a state of homeostasis; we are trying to do this by purposeful evolution of a new egregore that will lead to lasting change. However the system, being optimized to maintain stability, will “push back’’ against our attempts to change it. This may not be intentional, but more like antibodies attacking an infection; there is no conscious thought in our antibodies, they are doing what they have been programmed and optimized to do. “If all this is true,” you’re saying, “how do we get the system to become open to and in fact accept change?’’ We do this by creating a…catastrophe.

I’m assuming that your face right now is scrunched up with a grimace, as the word ‘’catastrophe” probably evokes a visceral reaction. Maybe you pictured the ending of the movie Deep Impact (showing my age) or 2012 (that’s a bit younger.) The Latin roots of this word translate to ‘’down turning”, and most people view catastrophes as an event with a negative connotation, typically as a synonym for a ‘’disaster.” I’m going to challenge that notion and offer up this counterpoint: what if a catastrophe could be a good thing?

Another way to think about a catastrophe, which suits this book best, is a catastrophe as a phase shift; like ice melting to water, we are going to define a catastrophe as ‘’something that happens that prevents us from going back to the way things were.” This is not necessarily bad or good, it’s an occurrence that one it happens it marks a change in the environment that cannot be undone (at least without major energy expenditure and minor loss; you can re-freeze water into ice but it requires a freezer, electricity, and there will be some loss of the ice cube’s size.) What we are going to be talking about is things changing into whatever the “new normal” will be.

Believe it or not, there’s some mathematical science behind catastrophes! Rene Thom was a French mathematician whose primary work was in mathematical topology (oversimplified: geometry and its attributes.) What is today called Catastrophe Theory comes from his work in bifurcation theory in dynamical systems…think “shifts in behaviour, sometimes sudden, which arise from many smaller changes.” Thom was studying systems and how they can take on a trajectory where they ‘’tip over’’ into a new state, and as a result he created a bunch of models to show how these catastrophes work. The cusp model below is an example.

As you can see by the diagram, there is an upper stable state which represents the current normal. From there two options for phase shift exist: a stable, gradual movement towards the lower stable state (“the new normal”) and a sudden jump into the lower stable state…these sudden jumps are catastrophes. You’ll also notice that there are two sudden jumps, one early on in the curve and one later as the curve takes on a more drastic bend; we can interpret this as there are at least two opportunities for us to move into the “new normal” at speed.

So how do we find these catastrophes? By creating common knowledge and using rituals to help it spread, we’re already on our way, but we can purposefully create catastrophes to aid our evolution by maximizing how far these new ideas (and by extension, our new culture) spread into the CASTe. What we’re looking to do is create a large enough surface area of the egregore that will maximize exposure to it, while not over-extending too far, too fast, and running the risk of a premature end to our intentional evolutionary journey. The first marker we should target in this effort is defined by a number: five percent.

Everett M. Rogers was an American sociologist and communication theorist. What he is best known for is also arguably his biggest contribution to his field: his seminal work, Diffusion of Innovation. This book describes how and at what rate new ideas spread in a system/culture/society. His theory is that when five (5) percent of a population accepts a new idea, said idea becomes embedded within a culture. Once an idea is embedded it is considered “stuck”, and virtually no amount of force or effort will be able to dislodge this idea from the prevailing corporate culture. I’m confident many readers can think of an CASTeal change program they’ve been aware of or involved in, that while it failed to get mass adoption, there are pockets inside the CASTe that have really taken the concepts in that change to heart and are actively utilizing them, regardless of where the CASTe has gone since…those are embedded ideas.

Applying this theory to our efforts, we are looking to ensure that 5% of our population has been exposed to and is actively adopting and contributing to our evolutionary egregore. We do this by monitoring the stories and narratives that are currently being passed around the CASTe. We can also do this by noting the attendees of our rituals, and who consistently attends these conversations, and more importantly, who is bringing others into said rituals. Monitoring this activity will help give us insight into how much additional effort we need to put into our intentional evolution to hit the NEXT marker…

The next marker in Everett’s Diffusion of Innovation is twenty percent; Everett states that when an idea hits 20% adoption in an CASTe that idea is said to be unstoppable. This means that the idea has reached a point where it is virtually impossible to remove it from the CASTe, and the idea has now become part of the definition of the “new normal’’ that is represented by our evolutionary egregore. At 20% we have created a catastrophe that there is no going back from, and we are now solidly moving in the direction that we wish to go.

One way to visualize company culture is by comparing it to a gravity well; this is a giant funnel that is typically paired with a black hole in astrophysics. A gravity well is a giant drain that pulls everything and anything in its vicinity towards it and deep into the black hole below, which is much how corporate culture works. No matter who joins the CASTe, no matter how long an employee has been with the company, eventually ‘’gravity wins’’ and they end up pulled into the well that is the overriding norms of the CASTe.

Building on this metaphor…our evolutionary egregore is a competing gravity well, and what we’re looking to do with these catastrophes is perturb the culture so that we pop up out of the current gravity well: that creates the optionality of either ‘’going back into the well we were just in”, or going somewhere novel. Our hope is that we create enough of a basin of attraction (h/t Jim Rutt) that when perturbed up out of the well, people end up in our new well, and by extension part of the evolutionary egregore we’re creating.

We’ve seen so many of these headlines over the last few months, it feels like we’ve been seeing them for years:

“Company X lays off Y employees, says due to efficiency gains from AI”

All industries, all role types, all size companies, the refrain is the same….’’we’re getting more efficient in utilizing “AI”, so now we don’t need as many people.”

The simplest response to these types of statements is “Bullshit. You overhired and overpaid during COVID and now your financials are trash.’’ EVERYONE knows this to be true, but no company will ever admit that in public, even though it’s being said in board rooms, around the watercooler, and in Teams messages.

Regardless of the truth, we will never be able to convince companies that laying off massive amounts of people to invest in a dubious “AI” technology that is quickly reaching its zenith (LLMs, sorry not sorry, don’t @me). One thing that these companies should be paying attention to in all this disruption is the insurmountable damage they are doing not only to their brand but more importantly their long-term success and survival.

‘’But Jay,” you ask, “how can you prove that?”

I can prove this argument by utilizing two words:

Throughput. Accounting.

***

Throughput Accounting isn’t taught in any school, in any MBA program, at any University/College/institution of higher learning. It has some very simple, easy to grok principles that when properly utilized can help drive corporate decision-making for the better, and yet it’s basically been forgotten about. Today I’m going to dust it off and demonstrate that when companies use this as a conceptual backdrop for how they make decisions they will be more successful than if not. And this includes ‘’should we fire a bunch of people under the auspices of AI?”

Slightly O/T - hat tip to Peter Merel and Graham Scott, the two people who first exposed me to this wonderful concept

I’m going to walk through a simplification of throughput accounting and explain how getting rid of a bunch of people (for whatever reason, OpEx reduction, AI efficiency, etc.) is typically a bad idea and will lead to the eventual demise of your organization. And I’m going to include a bunch of hand-drawn diagrams to help do so.

***

Let’s start with the setup diagram. This diagram is meant to represent an organization’s Revenue over time. As we can see, the company Revenue grows in fits and starts, but it should be continuously growing nonetheless(if your company revenue is flat and/or decreasing, you have bigger problems than either AI or layoffs could possibly solve. Again, sorry not sorry don’t @me.)

Now let’s break down that revenue. Revenue can be divided up into three(3) buckets:

• Operating Expense - this is the money it takes to run the enterprise. Salaries, benefits, office supplies, rent, utilities, etc.

• Truly Variable Costs - these are expenses incurred when a product is produced and sold. These costs disappear if production stops; raw materials, purchased components, subcontracted services, commissions, direct consumables.

• Net Profit - this is income that remains after expenses.

If you combine your Net Profit and Operating Expense, you end up with your throughput. This is the equivalent of your I/O for your organization.

The most important part of this diagram is your throughput; lost throughput can NEVER be regained (unless Elon invents time-travel, and even then we won’t be able to go backwards. Sorry not sorry, don’t @me). That being said, your organization should always be optimizing for maximum throughput; we need to ensure we’re always getting the most value through the system at any given time. This is where Theory of Constraints comes into play.

I’m not going to turn this into a TOC deep-dive, but I will throw out that: in order to maximize your throughput in your organization’s current configuration you need to deeply understand this concept and where your constraint is, as this will allow you to change things that inhibit throughput. Any company can find themselves behind the eight-ball performance wise, and by judicious application of TOC you can rescue your enterprise and make a hard turn towards profitability and long-term survival.

***

Before we dive head-first into the AI argument, let’s start with a story that’s as old as time itself: “Our Operating Expenses are too high.”

Hang around in corporate America, you will hear that refrain at least once if not multiple times. It’s a sign that sales are stagnating, that leadership is bereft of new ideas, of a market that’s fully saturated. When you hear this message from companies, it means ‘’we’ve been successful until now, but the costs of us operating are growing faster than our revenue, and we need to cut those costs to protect revenue.” And how do most organizations cut these costs?

They reduce their “headcount.” They minimize the amount of heartbeats they employ. “Layoffs.” ‘’Strategic Realignment.”

And what have we accomplished with the above? We have reduced our Operating Expense, sure. And with that reduction we’ve increased our Net Profit, sure. Was there fat to be trimmed? Absolutely (although most organizations don’t ever trim the proper fat, they cut the lowest rungs where they can least afford it).

But have we refined our process to prevent this creeping OpEx from happening again? Nope.

Have we truly tried to find efficiency, or did we just lop a bunch of salary off that bucket and say ‘’we increased profits!”...somewhere there’s a pig wearing lipstick that takes umbrage with this approach.

If we take a moment to take a deep breath and a step back, what have we accomplished, in a lasting sense? We’ve slaked the thirst of the profitability monster for now…but for how long? How long before that OpEx starts creeping again? Even if we reinvest that capital and find new markets, new products, how long before those new opportunities create more organizational expansion that this same problem rears its ugly head? There’s no way to tell, but it’s as inevitable as death, taxes, and me complaining about the humidity in August.

The more worrying aspect of this “OpEx Cutting/Net Profit generating chicanery” is that you can only cut OpEx SO FAR. Eventually you start to degrade your operations ability, you start to degrade your ability to deliver value, to service your customers, and what results is a product that is declining in quality with a support structure that is declining in its ability to handle said decline in quality. How often are Customer Support Representatives the first to go during a layoff? “Low hanging fruit”, some leader with an MBA would say, but are they really…?

***

For Valentine’s Day this year I ordered my wife one of those fancy cardboard pop-up cards that has dogs and flowers and the like; I was fed this ad through social media and figured I’d give it a try. I placed the order in late January to ensure that the card would be here in time, and per their materials I was told I should expect it in a week; within 48 hours I received a tracking number. I actively followed the package, and I ran outside excitedly when I got the notification that the card was delivered.

No card. Not on the front stoop, not in the mailbox, nowhere.

I contact the vendor, and they apologize and tell me they’re sending a replacement. Expect it within a week. And this time, I don’t get a tracking number but I do get a date by which to expect it.

That date comes and goes. No card. Not on the front stoop, not in the mailbox, nowhere.

At this point I reached back out to the vendor as we’ve been corresponding through email, and they’ve been prompt in their responses, however the response time was too fast, too proper for what you’d expect, and the grammar was impeccable. I ask for the tracking number of the replacement package, and what do I get but the tracking number from the initial package. I ask again, and get the same response. At this juncture the light bulb goes off over my head…”I don’t think I’m talking to a real person…”

Serendipitously while I’m having this epiphany I get an email from a third-party review company, asking for me to rate the vendor and their product. I reply “This could be the best card in the world, I would never know. I never got the initial delivery or the replacement. Oh, and customer service is a clanker.”

By the time I woke up the next morning I got an email from the vendor that apologized as well as included a tracking number to a replacement that was overnighted. And this reply was absolutely from a human.

If you’re sharp, you can see where this is going…

***

Now let’s talk about the AI elephant in the room. There are so many companies that have announced layoffs due to “efficiency gains utilizing AI” that I won’t even attempt to name them, let alone include the numbers which have been honestly staggering. Granted, we all know that AI is being used as a boogey-man to cover up over hiring during COVID as well as Machiavellian removal of senior colleagues who have large stock options, but in that noise is a signal of some organizations legitimately thinking that they can replace their “meat-widgets” with AI agents and save themselves some money. Visually:

This is all well and good, and makes total sense as long as you can guarantee stability in the future.

Read that sentence again.

Now once more.

Can we really call the current AI landscape ‘’stable”?

First, consider that when companies think of AI they picture an LLM-based solution that is owned by a vendor. You’re building the future of your company on a vendor whose survivability mandate may not align with yours, and they make decisions that you have no countenance for, and you’re stuck with whether it works or not.

New model made your current application obsolete or non-functional? Oh well.

The AI you were using gets deprecated? Oh well.

Secondly, think about how the current pricing model is set-up….you pay the equivalent of a seat license. $N per month per seat, regardless of how many tokens you’re utilizing. For every dollar you spend on your Anthropic subscription, they’re using somewhere between $8 and $13 of compute (allegedly.) THE MATHS DONT MATH.

At some point in the near future (very near, IMO) these LLM vendors are going to switch to a cost-per-token model, and the results will be DISASTROUS for those who go all-in on AI to replace their staff. To whit:

EVEN SCARIER…what if you signed a contract with an LLM vendor and there’s a revenue disruption, or COVID-20 happens, or a myriad of other circumstances that lead to decreased profit…THAT OPEX IS STILL THERE.

The other option would be to pass-on the costs of tokens to our customers, if you’re in the service industry (IT service, not restaurants...when AI comes to restaurants I look forward to the first lawsuits when the robot accidentally sends someone into anaphylactic shock due to ingredient pollution.) For every feature or capability to generate for them, you add the cost of the token into the bill, and you add the cost of the token into the service contract. This would move these AI-related charges into Truly Variable Costs and out of OpEx.

Either way, you’re cutting into your profits. The benefit about TVC is that it is truly dependent upon consumption/sales, and if you’re not selling nor consuming there’s no revenue impact. It rises and falls based upon demand. However, it’s inherently unpredictable…to whit: what if the customer decides they want to move to another company? Yeah, that TVC goes down but so does your revenue.

This is a ton of diagrams and a lot of words to demonstrate the crux of Throughput Accounting as a lever for decision making: you should prioritize whatever work will open up your constraint to create more throughput which in turn GENERATES PROFITS.

Instead of reducing OpEx…ask where you can change your process to move more work THROUGH it.

Instead of hiding costs, billing back customers….ask how you can increase your throughput.

Instead of fake efficiency gains by investing in AI…figure out how AI can help increase your throughput in concert with your current employee base.

Leaders inside organizations should always be trying to find a way to “make more with what you’ve got”, and 99% of the time the answer is in their current organization, it’s just hidden by bad process, politics, and the inability to acknowledge that “it could be better.” Invest in creating throughput and your long-term success is all but a non-issue.

Anything less would be uncivilized.

***

Final thought - you may be wondering why I brought up my story with my disastrous Valentine’s Day purchase; I brought that story up to offer up my larger thesis, yet unexplored:

In the near-future great customer service will be the ONLY differentiator between vendors and products, and customers will be more than willing to pay extra for it.

Sorry not sorry, don’t @me.

I first came across this term in Fuzzy on the Dark Size by Ahmad Hijazi; in this book he offers an observation about how human perception and cognition work, in service to answering the question of “how do we perceive and understand what each other is saying?” He uses the term “approximate thinking” to describe how when we humans are learning something new, or trying to understand a novel concept, our brains use the shortcut of making an approximation between the “new thing’’ and something we already know. This heuristic can help us understand something that might be conceptually challenging, but Hijazi argues that it can also create blind spots where we make a false equivalence between two concepts…an approximation, if you will.

Here’s an example: picture a red fruit in your mind…what did you see? Did you see an apple? If you did, and that’s also what I was thinking, the resulting equation would look like this:

• My “red fruit”=apple = A

• Your “red fruit” = apple = B

• B-A=E (the error, or the delta between what I was thinking and what you were thinking)

• In this example E=0, resulting in no miscommunication/misunderstanding

In this example your approximation is correct and the chances for miscommunication later are greatly reduced…but what if I was trying to be funny and pictured a tomato in my mind? In this example the equation looks like this:

• My “red fruit”=tomato = A

• Your “red fruit” = apple = B

• B-A=E

• E does not equal 0, which will always result in miscommunication/misunderstanding

This loose equation can be applied to the new egregore we’re trying to evolve; if your communication around your common knowledge isn’t clear, if there is a lack of rigidity/repetition/redundancy in your rituals you will create deviation resulting in E to not equal zero, which will negatively impact your forward progress (we will discuss how to plan for and address this deviation or entropy in another section of this book.)

Now you can see where clear and concise communication becomes highly important, as well as ensuring that everyone agrees on the definition of the words being used. If you begin to create your new culture and leave things open to interpretation you are inadvertently sowing the seeds of your own failure at maximum, the introduction of “wobble” from your intended state at the minimum.

Another thing to consider: when creating your egregore’s common knowledge you should try to make the language as simple as possible. By simple I mean “easily understood”; the intent is not to dumb down what you are trying to say, but you want to create knowledge that does not have a heavy cognitive load. To this end you will want to avoid any usage of what Mike Burrows calls “tribal shorthand”. This includes the typical jargon and business-speak that gets utilized frequently in most CASTes, even unintentionally. Yes, we all know that this new culture is table stakes and part of the low-hanging boiled ocean, but you don’t need to include that in your knowledge you’re trying to propagate.

“For every visible inconsistency there is an invisible consistency.” This quote is by philosopher Reza Negarestani, and I think it’s relevant when it comes to misinterpretation; if we identify that invisible consistency, that gives us stable space that we can then reiterate via ritual and common knowledge to prevent conceptual drift.

As we start creating the rituals that will allow our common knowledge to propagate, we need to acknowledge something that many leaders( and by extension CASTes) fail to grasp: the difference between a narrative and a story.

If you and I were standing at the office watercooler, and I remarked to you that I think my boss is great, that is a story. This story is dependent upon many things:

• My perception of my boss

• My perception of my CASTe

• My perception of my role inside my CASTe

• My pre-existing mental models

Along with a host of other things which based upon my thoughts, feelings, and observations contribute to this story. However, one must consider that this story is one data point in a sea of data points…maybe I have a teammate who feels the exact opposite? They would have a story that says “my boss isn’t great.” Maybe I have yet another teammate who doesn’t feel strongly in either direction, and their story is “my boss is neither great nor not great.” All of these stories are merely data points that are collected to form…a narrative..

A narrative is a collection of stories that share a common connection, or in this case a theme. Back to my example: if I’m one member of a team and I say “my boss is great!”, that’s a story. But if my team is composed of many individuals who all say “my boss is great!”, we have now created a narrative that our boss is great. This narrative is based upon a shared perception; if more stories say “boss is great’’ than ‘’boss is not great”, the narrative will be “boss is great.” Does that mean the narrative is right, or correct, or accurate? No to all three of those questions…the narrative represents the prevailing common story amongst the components.

Let’s now lay this story/narrative idea into our quest to create an evolutionary CASTe: the currently dominant egregore has a narrative. No matter what the individual members of the CASTe think, in the aggregate this will be the dominant perception of culture and acts to define the CASTe whether it is truly accurate or not.This ties directly to our goal of creating an evolutionary culture; we are in effect “starting from scratch” by creating a new egregore which will have its own narrative! And how do we do this? We do this by creating rituals to help spread our common knowledge.

A ritual in this context is an activity that helps us create common knowledge; we may have an intrinsic understanding of what we want our common knowledge to be, but the utilization of a ritual will help not only define but also refine that knowledge. Rituals help us make sure this knowledge is truly common i.e.-”you know that i know that you know that I know”. They unify the members of a particular culture and when used well actually create a bulwark against invasion (again, this is why we’re creating a new egregore.) Another key feature of rituals: they prevent generation loss.

Sony Pictures in 1996 released a movie starring Michael Keaton titled Multiplicity. In this movie the main character (played by Keaton) meets a scientist who offers to clone him, ostensibly so he can dedicate more time to his family. As the story progresses more clones enter the story, the final clone being a clone of a clone, or a “copy of a copy.” As anyone who is old enough to remember a Xerox machine, when you copy an original, and then make subsequent copies of the copies, they become blurry and eventually unrecognizable from the original source…this is called generation loss. A ritual, if adhering to the attributes that make a ritual successful, will prevent generation loss.

What attributes make a ritual successful, you ask? To answer this question we turn to the work of Dmitri Xygalatas. Dmitri is a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, and author of the book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. As part of his research he studied what he calls “high-intensity” rituals, things like firewalking or extreme religious processions. When he observed these activities, he came to the realization that all rituals have a few shared attributes that make them particularly effective.

• Rigidity: The first attribute that an effective ritual has is rigidity; that is to say, the ritual actions are always performed in the same way (which is the “right” way). It is important that every ritual event is done the same way as its precursor, and any subsequent ritual to be performed in the same manner as this one. This rigidity also prevents generation loss by removing the ability for any deviation in how this ritual is performed. The best examples of ritual rigidity would be religious institutions; the Catholic Church has performed the ritual of Communion the same for hundreds of years, and it is probably safe to speculate that hundreds of years from now it will still be the same. We will communicate our common knowledge in pre-defined rituals that are the same no matter the audience, how often we perform them, or how much time has passed between creating the knowledge and the ritual’s occurrence.

• Repetition: Another crucial attribute in successful rituals is repetition. Rituals must be repetitive in their performance, and they must be performed with regularity and in accordance with how they had been performed before (rigidity.) The Rule of 7 in marketing tells us that people need to hear things at least seven times in order for the idea or concept to truly take hold; in marketing this translates to you being exposed to a product a minimum of seven times before you are familiar enough to purchase the item. In our context, we will use repetition of our rituals to continually expose people to our common knowledge, and the rigidity will ensure that every attendee has the same experience.

• Redundancy: The last attribute of a ritual is redundancy; a ritual should be repeated multiple times even if the prevailing opinion is “everybody gets it.” The continual repeated actions of a ritual with no deviation will work to cement the common knowledge in an almost universal setting…the same message in the same ritual, spoken the same way, numerous times. When I think about the COVID lockdown, I think about how I ran out of bleach cleaning spray, and since then I keep a stockpile of a few bottles, replacing any opened bottle with a new one, my thought being “it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.” This same rationale applies to ritual redundancy: your common knowledge will not lose fidelity no matter how many times you repeat the ritual (as long as you’re being rigid in your approach.)

The end goal of all these rituals is to create connections amongst people in your CASTe; these connections via common knowledge will help your egregore establish itself amongst the employee population and create the space for it to grow and thrive. This ability to grow and thrive will be dependent upon the type of connections you create, and for our purposes we’re looking specifically at what we will call strong connections and weak connections.

Going back to Rational Ritual, strong connections (Chwe uses the term links instead of connection) are connections between friends. And not just any type of friend, but a close friend. These types of connections grow slowly as they have a basis in trust. Another interesting aspect of strong connections is that typically a close friend of your close friend has a high probability of also ending up as your direct close friend! For example: you have a close friend, Bob; that person is a strong connection. Bob has a close friend, Susan; Susan is not only Bob’s close friend, but over time Susan will more often than not end up as your close friend. When it comes to common knowledge, and ritual adoption, strong links tend to have a strong correlation with participation…if my close friend is in ‘’the know’’ and participating, odds are I will be drawn to (and adopt) this new common knowledge quicker than if we were not close friends.

Think about the last time a close friend introduced you to something you were unaware of; it could be anything, from a restaurant, to a movie, to a musical artist, you name it. I would posit that you were excited by the fact that this person found something in your shared relationship that you were unaware of, that based upon said relationship you had a greater than average chance that you’d appreciate it. And I would bet that after experiencing it for yourself you became a fan who was just as if not more interested in the thing you were just introduced to! That excitement is what we’re after with strong connections; that shared excitement helps overcome inertia, and we’ll need that energy to evolve our CASTe.

Now let’s contrast this relationship with the opposite type of connection: a weak connection. The best way to think about a weak connection is an acquaintance, a ‘’friend of a friend” or a colleague who’s on a different team/in a different CASTe but not one of my close friends (a.k.a. Strong connections.) These connections are formed exponentially quicker than a strong connection as they don’t require the establishment of trust; the most fascinating aspect of weak connections is that they are exponentially more effective for diffusing information. When it comes to sharing knowledge broadly, weak connections are your best friend however that comes at a cost: when there are more weak connections than strong connections there is a negative impact to how quickly common knowledge can be adopted, due to the lack of strong connections.

If we were to combine this understanding of connections with what we’re trying to accomplish, we realize that we need in attendance of our rituals a combination of:

• Weak connections to propagate information across the CASTe at speed, with limited investment in fostering meaningful connection, in tandem with

• Strong connections to aid in adoption and high-quality diffusion of the common knowledge

This combination of strong and weak connections in attendance at your rituals will help you propagate information via a combination of high trust engagement and speed of diffusion. In the next section of the book we will talk about how to think about ‘’recruiting” to your new culture, and how to scale this recruiting activity to even further increase the speed of growth.

A Note on Morphic Resonance:

In an earlier section we talked about morphic resonance; that concept now comes back into play with the introduction of common knowledge and rituals. If you recall, a morphic field is a pattern of the best instantiation of a thing, and this pattern influences and is influenced by the thing’s development. By creating common knowledge and cementing it into the CASTe via rituals, we are in effect contributing to the morphic field of the egregore, and what we’re creating could be considered the morphic germ…this is the kernel embedded at the heart of our new egregore!

Max was an architect and a management consultant whose specialty was Strategic Management. Max’s seminal work was a book titled Knowledge Assets; this award-winning book introduces the concept of “I-Space” and Max’s “I-Theory”. These two concepts are grounded in what is called the “information economy”, which is how we should think when we look at information as a valuable commodity. His I-Space model is an attempt to understand how knowledge is structured, shared, and utilized in CASTes. It examines the relationship between knowledge codification, abstraction, and diffusion, offering insights into how information evolves through social systems.

I-Space is modeled as a 3-D cube, with the dimensions identified as codification, abstraction, and diffusion. Knowledge moves along the dimensions as it moves from one end of the dimension to the other.

Codification: This dimension refers to how knowledge is structured and articulated. Uncodified knowledge is the equivalent of intuition, in the sense that it’s tacit knowledge. Codified knowledge is explicit and shared easily…think of an instruction manual.

Abstraction: Think of this dimension in terms of generalized knowledge. Abstract knowledge has applicability across many contexts and domains(e.g.-mathematical principles.) Concrete knowledge is context-specific, like practices and principles that an CASTe operates under.

Diffusion: When information reaches many people, such as things like sports scores or public data, it is said to be highly diffused. Undiffused knowledge is the world of trade secrets, corporate strategy, and competitive advantage.

I introduce this theory because it helps to set the stage as to how we should think about the common knowledge we’re trying to create. Our goal is to create knowledge that is diffused in the CASTe but also sits somewhere in the middle on the abstraction scale (we want knowledge that’s highly applicable across domains, but also highly dependent upon our own context.) We also would like information that is simultaneously codified in that it is explicit enough to be easily shared, but also uncodified enough that it functions as intuitive knowledge.

Based upon the knowledge configuration in our CASTe, we may end up with different structures:

• Fiefdoms: Undiffused, uncodified knowledge. Think of the department you work with that’s almost like a family business…insular, information kept close to the vest and unshared.

• Clans: Undiffused but codified knowledge. The analog to this would be a Center of Excellence or Center of Practice.

• Bureaucracies: Diffused, codified knowledge. I don’t think I have to explain bureaucracy, it’s the egregore we’re trying to outgrow and outcompete!

• Markets: Highly diffused and abstract knowledge. The New York Stock Exchange is a great example of this structure.

When looking at this bulleted list, one could see where each one of these structures might be useful to us as we try to create this new culture; conversely, one could also see where some of these structures might impede our progress. Our end goal in regards to knowledge is to have it permeate the CASTe at all levels, in all parts…and ideally, it reaches the lowest point where the message is still coherent and comprehensible.

The true art in acknowledging the existence of the above structures will be in navigating and utilizing them to fit our needs (we’ll explore more of this in section two.) But as far as utilizing knowledge to help create and evolve our new culture, it would be prudent to consistently re-assess where our common knowledge is landing, and/or getting stuck, and this theory could provide ideas into how to get un-stuck.

The first step in creating an egregore is to build what is called “common knowledge.” This common knowledge is going to be contained inside the egregore; we are going to establish the norms, beliefs, and expectations of what this new culture is all about. This common knowledge will serve multiple purposes: not only will it act as the bedrock of the new culture we are creating and growing out of, but it will also help to inform others and to help them see themselves inside this new egregore…which will lead to growth of said culture. We’re not only looking for collaborators who will help us develop this new culture but we are also looking for contributors who will join us and add to the egregore itself.

Firstly, let’s start by defining what we will call common knowledge. Webster’s Dictionary defines common knowledge as “something that many or most people know.” This is true but is only part of what we need from our egregore’s common knowledge. We are looking to create something that, along with most people knowing it, also gives people the safety to join this new culture in the face of the pre-existing culture (egregore.) We know that people are typically likely to join in and participate in a group if they know others who share their mental model(s) are in that same group, so this knowledge is needed to help solve what amounts to a coordination problem.

Michael Suk-Young Chwe, author of Rational Ritual, defines “common knowledge” as “knowledge that both parties know but also they know that the other party ‘knows’ “. This might be confusing to read, so imagine this scenario:

• I know something (say, X=2)

• You know the same thing (x=2)

• I know that you know (I know you know ‘x=2’)

• You know that I know that you know (you know that I know that you know ‘x=2’)

• I know that you know that I know that you know (viola, common knowledge!)

In this instance, both parties not only know the same truth, but they know that the OTHER knows the same truth! Not only that, along with the knowledge of “X=2” they have the confidence that everyone else in this culture knows the exact same thing. If that is still confusing, think about this quote from famed Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

What we’re looking to do with common knowledge is to prevent something called “pluralistic ignorance.” Have you ever realized that your spouse, family member, or friend had an opinion about your beliefs that was wholly and completely WRONG? Maybe they thought you supported a particular political candidate, maybe they thought you subscribed to a particular religion, or maybe they even thought you supported a different sports team…what happens when you realize they thought something about you that was totally incorrect? Or better yet, what happened between the two of you that you had incorrect assumptions about each other’s opinions? That situation is the EXACT scenario that we’re trying to prevent by creating common knowledge; the more incorrect assumptions there are about other’s beliefs and opinions, the more of an uphill battle you will have attempting to guide this evolution.

This leads us into the obvious next question of “what should our common knowledge contain?” This is an entirely context-specific question, and it relies on 1). What the current culture is, and more importantly 2). What you want the new culture to be. In a perfect world you could ignore entirely the “old” culture (because continuing to acknowledge it gives the idea behind it more power) but realistically you will have to draw a distinction between the old egregore and the new. An interesting part of our HumanOS (hat tip to Jim O’Shaughnassey for that term) is that we often define things by “what they’re not.” There’s actually a term for this: schismogenesis.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson came up with this term in 1935 as part of his book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind.” He defines this term as a “creation of division”; his theory is that as humans we define ourselves and other people not by what we have in common but where we are different. This isn’t a bad thing per se, because if you think about it there are times in our lives where we can only describe ourselves in comparison to other things that are not ourselves…for example, describe where you are sitting right now without any relational context. How can you tell someone where you are without referencing something other than you?

I mention all this because we need to be aware that whatever common knowledge we create will inevitably be compared to what it isn’t. This is vital to understand because as the egregore grows and inevitably evolves there will arise a need to re-establish what the idea behind the culture IS. And if we know that people will always be trying to find the differences between the new egregore and the old, that will be the fuel for their arguments against moving to a new culture and/or adopting this evolution. We need to remember the Streeten-Kuhn Maxim: “a model is never defeated by facts, no matter how damaging, but only by another model.” This new egregore is the new model to defeat the old!

Back to our common knowledge…when we create our common knowledge, remember this knowledge encompasses the idea that serves as the “kernel” for the new egregore. This common knowledge should not be used to malign or take potshots at the current culture (as that current culture may technically work but be incongruent to the goals of your CASTe) but to support and reinforce the behaviours and mindset of this new way of being. The common knowledge should be more than just a pithy sentence or a few words; it needs to have heft and clearly state where this new culture is going.

Once you have decided what your common knowledge will be, you need to start getting this knowledge out into the CASTe so that it starts propagating. To do this, we will utilize an age-old human practice: the ritual.

***

While we’re on the topic of creating a new egregore, there’s always the question of “how advanced do I want this new culture to be? How can I thread the dueling demands of “advanced enough to enable our new evolutionary stance” with “pushing the CASTe elasticity past its breaking point”? How do we even know how much elasticity our CASTe has left…can we do more? What types of evolution will people be able to stomach without throwing up their hands in frustration/despair? Or, more importantly, how far can we nudge the CASTe without causing the antibodies to rise up and actively fight our initiative? The secret to this lie is knowledge coming from…fashion and design? Let me introduce you to a few luminaries whose wisdom definitely applies to the questions we’re trying to answer…

One of the coolest places in the world, in my opinion, is the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I have been a handful of times and love wandering up and down, across floors and in and out of rooms, just taking in the breadth of creativity that is on display. On my first visit (I still have the note I made on my phone!) one of the exhibits that immediately caught my eye was of Marcel Duchamp. This French painter/sculptor/artist is the creator of a type of art he called “Readymade’’; in this art he took objects he found and made minor modifications to (such as taking a print of the Mona Lisa, and drawing a mustache on it.) This work was meant to take shots at the art critic establishment, as a question of “what constitutes ‘art’?” In our context, we should take from this the concept that “everything is built on something that came before.” Whether that thing is good or bad is irrelevant…what is relevant is that we acknowledge the history of what we’re trying to accomplish. When we are working to create an egregore that represents a purposeful evolution of our CASTe, we need to be aware of what came before: past trials, tribulations, and conflicts. Not only so we can potentially avoid them, but also as a potential enabling constraint of how far we can pull in what direction.

Skipping ahead in time brings us to yet another Frenchman with an eye for design: Raymond Loewy. Loewy was an industrial designer who worked on an impressive number of brands we would recognize; his firm did logos and consumer products for companies as varied as NASA, Exxon, Studebaker, and Coca-Cola. The blue nose on Air Force One? Yeah, that was him. Loewy found success across multiple industries and environments, and that success was built upon his design philosophy: M.A.Y.A.: “most advanced yet acceptable.”

Loewy believed that us humans are stuck between two forces: a curiosity about new things but also a fear of anything too new. By providing something advanced you are stretching the bounds of people’s thinking/perception/behaviour, but by making this advanced thing appear familiar you assuage that caution that is a natural human behavioural response to something new (“Is that new spot of moving grass the wind or a predator?”). The best successful example of this I can give: Apple products. Under Steve Jobs, Apple went from the Ipod to the Iphone to the Ipad to the Iwatch. The Ipod, in hindsight, wasn’t really that novel (it resembled a giant pager with a wheel) and every product iteration after the fact was just new enough that people felt comfortable exploring it, but not so new that people would react negatively and avoid it…THAT is the sweet spot we’re looking for with this egregore. We want to acknowledge and be aware of what came before, and even provide subtle nods to demonstrate we are taking that history into account, but we also want to push forward and advance what we’re trying to do.

In the context of CASTe evolution, these rules could act as an enabling constraint as well as a driver to future evolution. By setting an expectation of ‘’we don’t want to deviate more than n from our current culture” you constrain what you will and won’t be willing to entertain regarding change. This may serve as a heuristic when examining your potential paths to evolve, but it may also have the downside risk of constraining your more than your system will allow i.e.- you don’t achieve what you could have because you were too conservative or short-sighted in how far you were willing to push the CASTe.

If your new egregore is too far outside the current norms, too unfamiliar, you may be tempting the fate of failure. I suggest your initial launch of the egregore has enough “change” that it will get your CASTe on the journey to its next evolutionary step, but also leave room for continued evolution after the fact. If you build in the understanding that this egregore is not fully formed, but on a journey to a destination, you plant the seeds of future evolution in the minds of the people in your CASTe, which you can then reference later as you continue to intentionally evolve your culture.

Once we have identified exactly how far we want to go with our new egregore, we need to create the “ideas” that will solidify this new evolutionary path, and we will do this by creating common knowledge.

A Note on Top-Down Change:

I’m sure some readers are shaking their collective heads right now, yelling ‘’Change needs to come from the ground up!’’ And I’m sorry to disappoint those readers but I disagree. Small changes can potentially start in the bowels of a CASTe, and they may even spread across disparate parts of the CASTe, but to truly be successful with this type of intentional evolution it needs to be championed and driven from the top. We are proposing more than a change initiative, we are proposing a purposeful evolution of our entire CASTe, starting with the cultural kernel; a change of this magnitude requires buy-in, endorsement, and support from senior executives in the company.

***

A bit ago I got a call from a coworker who was quite upset. He was just re-organized and as a result ended up with a new manager; this colleague was frustrated because this new manager, in this person’s words, “doesn’t understand what I do, doesn’t understand what I’ve done, and is just going to show up and tell me what to do and how to do it.” This scenario would make anyone uncomfortable, I would think. Said colleague also lamented “He set up a 1x1 with me on Monday (our convo was on a Friday), I’m sure I’ll get my marching orders.”

After letting this person vent for a bit, I offered up the following: “Howbout we look at this the opposite way? This guy is experienced and has been around the block; what if he set up time to talk to you because he realizes he’s not familiar with what you do and how you do it, and he’s looking for that insight as well as what you’ve accomplished in this role to help inform where he can help take this program going forward?” The colleague took a moment to think about what I just said, and then replied ‘’you know what? You’re right, that’s a possibility. Let’s see what happens….”

What happened? They had their meeting on Monday and it went EXACTLY as I predicted…the new manager was curious about what my colleague was working on, and from that point forward dedicated time with the colleague to get his input on what the roadmap forward should look like!

Am I about to announce that I have telepathic powers and can see the future? No. But the power I do have is a power we all have: the power to harness Schroedinger’s Cat to create happiness and success in our own little world(s).

Erwin Schrödinger created a famous thought experiment that included a cat in a box with a radioactive material, as a means to demonstrate the idea of quantum super positioning. I’m not going to explain the entire experiment in detail, but the long and short of it is this: the cat in the box is both alive and dead, and you don’t know which until you open the box. Meaning: both things are true and not true but we only know until we look.

Back to my initial story…my colleague’s meeting with his manager was the ‘’cat in the box”: it was either going to go good or bad, but he wouldn’t know until it happened. With that being true, I merely suggested he visualize the less-stressful option to be the one that is going to happen, and sure enough that was what occurred.

Quite often in life we create mental scenarios for ourselves that are either A) unrealistic, B) burdened by our prior experiences, or C) reflective of our current mental state. This creates a recursive circle that if infected with negativity and/or sour mood will pick up speed and grow, thereby creating this terrible vortex of terrible experience. In order to break free of this mental model, and to create a life for us that is full of both joy and happiness, we need to concentrate on our thoughts and the energy they attract.

We human beings are made of energy; most people don’t realize that we are naturally resonant, and we are always vibrating somewhere in the 5-10hz range. This energy is always moving, and like all energy it both attracts and repels. If we create the situation where we find ourselves in a scenario of negative emotions and thoughts our resonance changes, and that is the type of energy we attract; we inadvertently create a “doom loop’’ where we’re thinking negatively, and as a result we always seem to center on and/or notice the negative things that are occurring in our lives. Even worse, we could in actuality be experiencing something positive but due to our resonance and mindset we’re only picking up on the “bad” and not the ‘’good.”

I know this is true because I have been there, and have experienced this in my own life. Depression runs in one side of my family, and I’ve seen signs of it throughout my years. The way I’ve been able to countermand those feelings and make sure I don’t let it get to me is by paying conscious attention to the energy I’m putting out into this world, and thereby what energy I’m attracting.

Cellphones make it very easy for us to get stuck in a negative feedback loop; doom-scrolling, trolling on social media, there are plenty of opportunities for us to get a dopamine fix by acting badly, and that urge is stronger in some than most. Lately I have limited my exposure to a lot of news and social media (which are both designed to change our moods), and the change I’ve noticed in myself has been kindof wild to see. I find myself smiling unprompted a lot more, and I find joy in the littlest of things (that extra mozzarella stick on the plate cues up smiles AND ska music.) If I find myself wanting to type a snarky reply to something I disagree with on X, I now hear myself in my own head saying ‘’this is not the energy I want to put out into the world” and I delete it. Being conscious of our own mental state, and what type of feelings we’re putting out there, and as a result attracting back, is a powerful way to change our mental model.

The title of this piece is Schroedinger’s Happiness, and it means “all things being equal, why wouldn’t I imagine the happy result?” I urge everyone to try it, you might find you like it.

What’s going to separate this culture from the current one? How should we be thinking about this culture in its new context? In order to do this we need to take a step back and acknowledge the different types of cultures in our world and how they interact. And now we introduce some German!

The name we’re going to start with is Ferdinand Tonnies, sociologist from Germany. He created a dichotomy called “gemeinschaft and gesellschaft”; this translates roughly into “community and society.” Gemeinschaft is representative of the bonds between family and local community, whereas gesellschaft is representative of what we consider modern society, rational self-interest and all. Gemeinschaft is the container of social interactions, how we interact as a community, and all the cultural norms, roles, and values that are included in said community. Gesellschaft is representative of how we interact as a society: associations, corporations, the concept of the modern state.

Now think about the CASTes you work/have worked in, the CASTes you have been/are part of…I would guarantee that they started out as some type of community, but then over time and with growth have come to resemble an organized society. What we are trying to do is to create a community (gemeinschaft) around this new egregore which will intentionally evolve and achieve scale while never leaving behind the things that make the community itself; things like shared common bonds, connections, and values(gesellschaft). This is a daunting task but if we keep this idea in the forefront we can make it happen! (We will cover scaling in the last section of this book.)

Notice what I didn’t say: I didn’t say the goal is to defeat/kill/destroy the current egregore. By now you realize, based upon the conversation above, that you cannot kill an egregore as it is an idea; that idea has transcended death and will always remain. However, the idea will always be present in any future version of the CASTe (due to morphic resonance) and we need to be mindful of this as we proceed. Much like the plot of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the intent will be to bring others over to the new culture so fully that the old culture fades away in power and influence.

***

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” - Gustav Mahler

But what about behavioural consistencies across the species? It’s common knowledge in our breed of a behaviour called the “Shiloh Tuck.” This is a way that the dogs’ sit, where they typically tuck one paw under themselves while they rest. Anecdotally I have never heard of a Shiloh Shepherd owner that has not observed this behaviour (our breed is infinitely smaller than, say, a golden retriever, so it’s not impossible to maintain contact with a large percentage of owners/breeders.) There is a diverse amount of genetic material included in our relatively-young (25+ years) breed, which includes out-crosses (introduction of new genetic material by breeding with a different dog breed) and is distributed throughout North America and Europe. Is it possible that this is coded genetically, and that we just haven’t mapped it yet? Possibly, yes…but is it probable? I honestly don’t know, and in the absence of that science: how do we explain this behaviour being observed amongst a large population of dogs that have never met each other/have different genetic ancestors? Let’s ask Plato!

Plato the philosopher contributed much to human history, and his most impactful and famous contribution is his theory of forms. Plato’s Theory of Forms is a philosophical idea that suggests that the physical world we see around us is not the true reality. Instead, there is a higher, unchanging reality made up of perfect “Forms” that exist beyond our sensory experience. A Form is the perfect version of something. For example, consider a circle. In the physical world, any circle you draw will have imperfections. But in the world of Forms, there exists a perfect, flawless Form of a circle. How does this tie to the Shiloh Tuck? What if, instead of a genetic influence, there exists a “form” of the Shiloh Shepherd that influences the breed regardless of time, location, or breeding history? And said form is a pure instantiation of the thing it represents (in this case, the Shiloh) and will be highly difficult to evolve as it exists as something bigger than even the sum of all Shilohs in existence. What about Darwinism, and the theory of evolution…that doesn’t really serve this example well, so what else could be at play? (Do you see where I’m going with this yet? Keep reading…)

Let’s look at a man by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck was a French biologist and naturalist in the late 1700s/early 1800s. Lamarck was a supporter of evolutionary theory (he was a contemporary of Darwin) and out of this came the ideas known now as Lamarckism. Lamarckism centers on the idea of biological inheritance; it supposes that an organism inherits characteristics from its parents, and typically these inherited characteristics are ones that the parent acquired through use. For example, a blacksmith who developed a strong upper-body from swinging a hammer against an anvil all day passed on this strength to his offspring (this idea was considered controversial for its time and it is only recently that research in both genetics and epigenetics has this theory been given some potential supporting proof.)

If we shift the blacksmith metaphor to one of a large CASTe and apply Lamarckism, we realize that CASTe cultures pass down through generations of new hires the characteristics that are most prevalent in the CASTe’s culture…the characteristics that are most “used.” The continued inheritance of these attributes in newer and future generations creates an almost unbreakable bond between these characteristics and the CASTe itself. I know that right now the skeptical readers are saying “But, this is an idea that was created centuries ago and was derided then, why should we suddenly believe it now?” What if I told you that this idea is not only dead but also evolving….

In 1981 a scientist by the name of Rupert Sheldrake released a book titled A New Science of Life which proposed the concept of morphic resonance; the idea behind morphic resonance is that both biological growth and behaviour can be influenced by what he calls a “morphic field.” This field is the accumulation of past occurrences and lives and grows along with the organisms themselves, and it in essence becomes a pattern for future development. Ergo, this field (pattern) both influences and can be influenced by the development of an organism over time. So while an organism is developing along a pre-existing pattern it will also introduce change (be it subtle and minor or large and major) that may end up contributing and as becoming part of the pattern that the next organism created in this line will inherit. This pattern then becomes the most stable/optimal representation of the organism itself, which is again considered its field.

Why don’t we hear more about this type of thinking? Well, most scientists treat this idea like it’s unscientific; it is said that this idea is unfalsifiable and it’s commonly accused of being pseudo-science. Ok, so if that is true, explain disappearing polymorphs!

A polymorph in something that has the ability to assume different forms or shapes. In materials science an example would be iron, which depending upon the temperature will transition to a different form with the same chemical composition (pretty wild, right?) In crystallography it’s when a compound can crystallize into one or more structures while retaining the same elemental makeup; imagine a crystal that has two structures, A and B. However, sometimes these polymorphs do something strange…they lose the ability to ever go back into one of their structures. What that means is, the crystal now has only 1 structure, B. Or…the crystal now has two structures, B and C, but can no longer be configured in A! A has now disappeared!

This sounds insane, right? Believe it or not, it does happen. There are multiple examples in the pharmaceutical industry of a drug being created, it working, but then somewhere along its development a second form develops (which is typically less effective, if still effective at all) and the manufacturer loses the ability to manufacture the drug in the initial, functional form. Ritonavir was an antiretroviral drug used to treat HIV/AIDS released in 1996, and in 1998 a second form of the drug was discovered that rendered it impossible to create the first formation again; it wasn’t until 1999 that the reformulated drug was able to be created and re-released.

Another example: progesterone. Scientists were able to crystallize both forms of naturally-occurring progesterone, but over time they lost the ability to crystallize form 2, and any attempts ended in form 1. The only way scientists were able to create form 2 was to create a new synthesized compound based upon pregnenolone, which while structurally similar and having the same effect is not the same as progesterone. (As a humorous aside, if you’ve ever read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, the Icenine compound that plays a large part in the book is a result of a disappearing polymorph!)

The current hypothesis around these disappearing polymorphs is that the lab was corrupted by microscopic seed crystals that polluted the lab that the compounds were being created in. But what if instead it wasn’t microscopic seed crystals, but what if it was influenced from the morphogenic form that was created as the crystals evolved? What if that morphogenic form resonated going forward, and that is why it was impossible to recreate the prior state…this might explain a lot!

This was a lot of backstory, I apologize, but if you’ve been following along you are probably already visualizing where I’m going with this:

In every CASTe there is a culture. This culture is defined as values, meanings, and symbols shared by a group; these things act as morphic fields to influence the evolution of the CASTe, as well as be influenced by the CASTe. So when we talk about changing a CASTe, or evolving a CASTe and its culture, you can see why these initiatives are always so painful, perilous, and fraught with failure…you are fighting biology!

I’m going to go out on a limb and posit that as we walk through this book and we talk about all the time and effort that will be required in order to make this new culture a reality, there will be multiple points where you stop and say “hmm, I think firing 40% of my managers WILL be easier!” So if we’re not going to fire a whole slew of people…what’s the “hard” way?

“As long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be. They will resist.” - Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War

No matter what your company is looking to do, or change, or accomplish, that “thing” came out of an idea someone had. Maybe a consultant generated it as part of a working session, or maybe a leader read a book or an article and it jarred something in their brain…regardless of where, the genesis of the idea has created an opportunity bell that can’t be unrung.

Almost every company that is around long enough goes through some type of change initiative. Some companies are hungry and looking for ways to differentiate themselves, to create space between them and their competition. Others are in an entrenched industry segment and are chasing profitability or market share. Sadly, there are also many CASTes that are chasing the current industry “fad”. If one looks back even over the last twenty years, you’ll see things like “Agile Transformation”, “Digital Transformation”, “DevOps”, etc. Whether these changes are good or bad, right for the CASTe or not, is inconsequential: the fact remains that at a certain juncture the CASTe decided “we are going to do thing X here”, with the people and the culture having to weather the journey no matter the outcome.

But let’s be honest with ourselves…we’re not talking about ‘’change.” we’re not talking about ‘’transformation” or a new “operating model”...what we’re really talking about is “intentional evolution.” CASTes are trying to evolve themselves towards a new/better/different something. That something is different from what they are today, and if achieved it will result in a new thing; the CASTe will have evolved. So let’s start by not referring to change, or transformation, but call it what it really is: intentional evolution.

Typically when leaders are looking at creating this evolution in the CASTe, there is a large amount of emphasis on skills and tools…how do we give our people the skills to do this new thing/work this new way? What new tools will we use to not only re-emphasize the commitment to evolution, but also make the evolution stick? These are absolutely the right questions to ask, and things that will need to be tackled in due time. There is a third side to this triangle, however, and that side is the most difficult to nail and the most impactful to your odds of success….what new culture do we need to fully adopt this evolution?

The sad truth is that on average only 1 in 3 attempts at CASTe evolution succeed…which is really depressing if you think about the amount of time, energy, effort, and PowerPoint slides that go into an ultimately fruitless and wasteful evolution initiative. The reasons for these failures are myriad: disconnect of motivators, poor planning, lack of stomach to persevere, turnover in leadership, or even just the world changing out from under you. If we are going to try and increase our odds of success, and be one of the “successful ones”, we need to start out with our culture FIRST. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that this is not what most leaders want to hear…I’m sure there’s some of you reading this and thinking “Can’t we just buy a tool?” or “Can’t we hire a consultant to design and guide this?” Well, actually…no. No you can’t. The tool eventually reaches its end-of-life, and the consultant contract ends and they have to go home. If we are really serious about enacting an evolution that will last and prevail, we need to start with the ugly part, the creation of the new culture.

The first step in this new culture is changing how we even LOOK at the thing we call culture. For this, we’re going to introduce a new term entirely that’s more commensurate with our objective: the “egregore.”

The Egregore

In his book Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny, author Mark Stavish provides a few different definitions of egregores, some leaning into more esoterica and metaphysics than others. The definition of his that we will utilize going forward is an “autonomous entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people.” Doesn’t that sound like “culture” to you, if culture could be boiled down into something whole? The idea of a “thing” that not only encompasses all the beliefs, behaviours, and norms of a particular population but also seemingly influences action, decision-making, longevity, and the evolution of the thing itself? When I first came across this concept I was blown away, as it explains so much.

As someone who’s been in multiple corporate environments, I’ve noticed that corporate cultures appear to have a mind of their own. Decisions are made, presentations are given, and actions are taken that at the time seemed counter to the present reality, but in hindsight they made sense as they were serving the culture NOT the goal. Anyone who’s ever had a decision countermanded, or been asked to do something that they feel is either inefficient or counterproductive can feel this pain….why are we doing X this way? If you take a step back and realize that it comes more from “the right thing to serve the culture” than “the right thing to serve the goal,” it sadly makes much more sense. I’ve seen projects that were dead on arrival continue along to some false semblance of completion, I’ve seen decisions made regarding team structure or staffing models that are mind boggling, I’ve seen leaders afraid of making a tough decision due to fears of how they’ll be treated or how their talent will be perceived afterwards. Many times, when these decisions are made, people don’t even realize that they are unable to look at the circumstances from any angle other than the egregore’s point of view!

Another aspect to consider about the egregore is: it’s bigger than any one person/department/team in an CASTe. Many times disgruntled employees will say things like “If only we got rid of X person, things would evolve!” Sadly that’s not the case, and if we hired a cultural anthropologist to examine this person in particular we would likely learn that they are a slave to the culture themselves. This could be the result of general agreement with the egregore, it could be a result of that person’s agreeableness as a personality trait, or it could even be a result of them being in the environment for a long enough duration that they have adopted the egregore’s way of thinking as their own (some may argue that this person has been “corrupted” by the egregore, but that’s a different conversation for a different book).

Taking this back to the start of this chapter: all egregores started with an idea. An idea that becomes bigger than one person, one team, one division. And the thing with ideas is: it’s hard to kill them. Financial trader and Renaissance man Jim O’Shaughnassey frequently remarks “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people ‘’...has that ever been more clear than in the sense of an egregore? This idea has become its own thing, and it will grow and develop on its own. If we apply the egregore concept to other “ideas” outside CASTe culture…think about political movements. Communism was disastrous for the countries that implemented it in the mid 20th century and yet it’s still viewed as a potentially viable solution to some of the discomfort and conflict we see in the world…why? Religion is something that has been with humankind since the beginning, and there are many examples of religion being used as a rationale for humans to do terrible things to each other…and yet these religions persevere…why? It is because these things are not movements, or frameworks, they’re ideas that have grown into an egregore.

In summary: in our corporate environments there is a culture that is “alive.” It has outgrown its creator(s) and taken on a mind of its own, and it now influences the behaviours, mindset, and decision-making of all those who come into contact with it. And now we wish to evolve that culture…which is against the wishes of the egregore that’s currently residing in the CASTe. What odds of success do we have, knowing that the culture will defend itself against any perceived intruder or interloper as it sees this as a challenge to its further survival?

The way I see it, there are two ways we can approach this evolution: the easy way and the hard way.

The easy way: start with where this idea for evolution is originating from in the CASTe’s hierarchy; is it being driven by a senior leader? Is it a technology evolution driven by your CIO? Or maybe it’s a true existential evolution being driven by your CEO? Regardless, the easy way to evolve this culture is to reduce managerial headcount by 40% starting with the level below the evolution champion. This means if your CIO is driving the evolution, they need to start with the layer directly below them, all the way through to the lowest level of manager (“manager” being defined as “person who is directly accountable for a subordinate’s performance in the corporate hierarchy”) and remove no less than FORTY percent of those people.

At this point you’re probably blinking and saying “Is he nuts? FORTY PERCENT reduction? How is THAT the easy way??!?!?!” Culture evolution is notoriously difficult, and these types of initiatives typically die in the “frozen middle” of managerial structures. Due to the breadth of CASTes it’s nearly impossible to guarantee that if you’re trying to evolve your culture from, for example, “red=bad” to “red=good”, everyone will successfully make the evolution and it will stick. Managers who are not in agreement with this evolution (or even worse, silent detractors) will stifle any chance of evolution before it even begins to grow. By reducing this headcount by a not insignificant amount you remove inevitable barriers to progress and you create the space necessary for the culture to take hold, as well as create the space to fill those newly-vacated positions with external candidates who understand and embrace the evolution idea you are looking to entrench in the culture. This isn’t to say that you can’t successfully evolve a culture with all these people; it’s just that changing a culture is exponentially (and also, cripplingly) more difficult. Why? It’s because of something called “morphic resonance.”

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

This quote is repeated to me quite often by a good friend of mine, Ben. Ben says this whenever we start discussing trends and ideas in the corporate world; we have both seen trends in the management and enterprise space come and go, and it’s hard to not be at least a little jaded (if not wary, from a survivability perspective) when new ideas seem to be rising to the top of the general discourse. Ben’s point is that “all these things we think are new, they’re just old ideas repackaged in the current vernacular”...and he’s not wrong! I open this book with this quote as a spoiler to what you’re about to read, i.e.:

There is nothing new in this book.

Renaissance man Jim O’Shaughnassey often states, when it comes to content creation and writing, “Tell the story only you can tell.” Well, my story isn’t necessarily one of a breakthrough in science but it is definitely one that you haven’t heard before. In service to the story that only I can tell, I will share that I LOVE to consume content. I read books voraciously, I have an RSS reader (this reference won’t age well) that is full of news sites, and I peruse the internet non-stop ...in search of what, you might ask? Ideas.

Our world is one of consistent change (so much so that many struggle to keep up); with this consistent change comes a complexity that our minds have yet to evolve to adapt to handling efficiently. In this world of ours, this complex adaptive system, we as people, our cultures, and our organizations are always changing and moving, and those parts of our world that are trying to grow, build, and survive can often struggle. Ask any professional who’s part of a larger organization (“larger” defined as “not on a first-name basis with all colleagues”) and they will tell you that there are often “change initiatives” currently in operation, which usually have the high-minded goal of changing a specific function or facet of the organization, be it people, processes, or tools in use. While none of these three are necessarily easy to change, it’s that first one that’s really a doozy. Bookstore shelves are filled with books that discuss the newest “transformation” fad that seems to be overtaking the corporate world…in my lifetime I’ve seen Lean Six Sigma, Agile, DevOps, Blockchain, Cloud, AI. I’m sure there have been more, this is just off the top of my head.

What all these types of change initiatives have in common is that it’s not just mechanics, it’s not just process and procedure. In order to truly be successful you need to change the underlying culture that supports those mechanics, processes, and procedures, and that is where things get amazingly difficult and fraught with failure. And when we take a step back and look at these things that we consider ‘’changes”...their scope, scale, and magnitude implies that they’re more than just change, they’re evolution. Ergo…this book is about evolution; specifically it’s about how an organization evolves itself with intention. The preceding paragraph makes mention of change initiatives within organizations…but aren’t they little more than an attempt to evolve the organization to something new, daresay better? What if we change our mindset to view these things as an attempt to evolve not change…?

Back to the ideas: I love to collect and cultivate ideas from all different fields, topics, and areas. And while I’m reading or listening to things I often in my head make a connection to something else that might not even be remotely related to the topic of what I’m consuming; these novel connections, in my mind, just make sense…frequently I’ll come across a concept and realize that it could serve as a metaphor to something else in an entirely different, if not foreign field.. So when I say “there’s nothing new in this book”, I’m not saying that I’m regurgitating what others have said, I’m saying that the concepts, metaphors, theory, and protocols contained within are available already in various forms. What I am saying is that “while there is nothing new in this book conceptually, what IS new is how all these concepts and metaphors are connected”. The word I’m utilizing to describe this approach is ‘’syncretism.” Syncretism is defined as “the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.” This book is amalgamation; I have collected various ideas from various fields that I think can aid organizations on their evolutionary journey.

To that end: what I’m trying to do (quite loftily I might add) is to create recombinant innovation; in introducing all these different concepts I hope to create a new way to look at our organizations, and then with this new point-of-view create the ability to change them more successfully. My hope is that after reading this book, you will realize that these metaphors and protocols(more on this word shortly) when combined can form a more advanced scaffolding about how to approach evolutionary change in organizations. Maybe you reach the end and it just makes sense, or maybe you reach the end and while it doesn’t entirely fit in your frame, you found some new ideas worth exploring, some new concepts that warrant further exploration. Maybe you even pick and choose the parts that are most resonant and build your own “recipe” for success in your organization. Any of those scenarios are a win as far as I’m concerned!

With all that being said, let’s start diving into the substrate around how we’re going to approach widening our apertures…I hope you enjoy the ride!

***

In the beginning…there was a triangle.

In the year 1978 a polymath by the name of Daniel Spreng conceived a concept that is now referred to as Spreng’s Triangle; this triangle is meant to represent the relationship between various attributes when it comes to performing a task (Spreng was a physicist, engineer, and economist so most of his references are around economics).

Each point on the triangle represents one of three key attributes: Information, Energy, and Time. The vertex of the Energy attribute represents that you will expend maximum energy expenditure in service to completing the task. The flip side to this maximal investment in energy is that you are relying on a fairly low amount of information, and you are tacitly acknowledging that you are unconcerned with the amount of time to be spent on this task (think of maximum investment in energy as “brute forcing” a solution). The same concept applies for choosing to maximize investment in either Time (the “long game”) or Information (“learn your way to success”).

The “lattice” inside the triangle represents a different combination of said attributes; maybe you want to choose Time and Information, or maybe Energy and Time are most important to you. If you choose to invest evenly across all 3, you will complete the task and find success…eventually. No one approach is more correct than the others, they just represent different trade off decisions you will have to make, in service to accomplishing a goal.

Spreng’s Triangle can be applied to multiple facets of our lives…our careers, our hobbies, our relationships. In the context of this book, we are going to apply the triangle to organizational culture change. If you are reading this, you have most likely either been involved in or subjected to some type of change program, be it a transformation, a “reboot”, or some other type of program meant to shift how your company is organized or how the work gets done. And I don’t think it’s too much to assume that the program itself is struggling, mainly due to cultural friction and imbalances. So what do we do? Keep throwing money at it? Wait till the leaders change, and with them priorities?

What I’m proposing is a different option altogether: I’m proposing that we maximize the Information attribute of this triangle. By understanding the concepts and ties contained in this book you will over-invest in information which when combined with your unique organizational context can be leveraged to reach the success that you’re grasping for. Will all of these ideas work for you? Maybe, maybe not….I’m not trying to propose a “Grand Unified Theory” on organizational evolution. But maybe, just maybe, there are bits and bobs, parts and pieces that if you take them and apply them to your context you will start to see some of the goals that you are working towards come to fruition.

***

If we visit a town called Falun, Sweden, we would see that there exists a mine. This mine began operation before 1000 A.D. and the technology developed during its operation has influenced mining operations on a global scale. This mine was owned by a company named Stora Kopparberg; said corporation was chartered in 1347 which is over a hundred years before Columbus discovered the Americas (and 73 years after the Magna Carta was signed.) This corporation and its mine at one point supplied Europe with almost all its copper needs (two-thirds to be exact). In the modern world, Stora has evolved into Stora Enso Oyj, a combination of mining, forestry, and power generation sciences in both Sweden and Finland. Stora is considered the oldest existing corporation in the world at 676 years old (as of this writing.)

Let’s now travel southeast, to Australia. In Shark Bay on the Western coast of Australia there exists in the ecosystem a living species called a stromatolite. Stromatolites are an organism composed of microorganisms (bacteria mostly) that adhere to each other in layers of microbiological “mats”, that over time gradually add more layers and “grow.”

While living stromatolites are no longer found except for Shark Bay (and Hamelin Pool in the Bahamas), there have been many discoveries of stromatolite fossils around the globe; these fossils contain what is considered the earliest forms of life on our planet, dating to 3.7 billion years ago.

***

Most if not all of modern management theory arose out of Scientific Management; Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote the book on this topic in 1906 while he was a management consultant working with Bethlehem Steel. This was post-Industrial Revolution but pre-Knowledge Work Revolution, and obviously some of the behaviours and patterns suggested inside the book don’t have nearly the same level of applicability with software that they do when working with items in the physical, tactile space. Nevertheless, most consulting firms and leadership teams use the same old metaphors when referring to the modern world of work that were used in the 1900’s.

One thing that all these old metaphors have in common is they have a basis in mechanical engineering; the primary metaphor is always something that is constructed, like a house, a car, etc. These engineering metaphors come with the burden of an assumption that has often led to sub-optimal long-term results in the modern world: the assumption of infinite maintenance and survival. We quite often look at our organizations like we would a car, in that “if we just do the required maintenance, if we replace the parts that break over time, we can make this car last forever.”

I’m not saying that treating our organizations and enterprises like a Ship of Theseus is a bad thing; what I am saying is that it’s highly unrealistic given the pace of technological advancement and change in our modern world. This modern world needs a new lens to be viewed through, ideally a lens that is inclusive of the multi-faceted living system that we inhabit. What shared lens could we use, that has a long history of presence in human thinking and creativity, that we could share amongst various cultures and geographic locations that has near-universal understanding?

Enter: biology.

Back to my two previous examples…the oldest corporation on Earth is 676 years old. Life has been on planet Earth for 3.7 BILLION YEARS. Which one do you think has more staying power?

What this book is attempting to do (quite loftily, I might add) is to shift our language (and by extension, our narrative) to one of biological metaphors to describe how we work, how we structure our organizations, how we introduce, cultivate, and develop change, and most importantly how we deal with the people in this biological organization. To simplify even further, I would like us to move from viewing these enterprises as organizations to viewing them as organisms.

Organisms have life cycles; they’re born, they grow, they thrive, and eventually their energy is returned to the universe to be repurposed somewhere else. If we take the same view of our companies, our teams, even our people, we will be more successful at accommodating the laws of nature and build better, more resilient organisms that can thrive in a fast-changing environment. If we start viewing our organizations through this same lens, that will change how we think and feel about their current state, and more importantly their future.

While the organism descriptor technically works as far as advancing the concepts in this book, unfortunately that word is too semantically loaded to be of full use. Referring to our company as an organism will inevitably create some cognitive dissonance for some readers, which I think is unfair as I’m already creating enough conceptual detritus throughout the book. To that end, I’m proposing we utilize a new term: CASTeS.

This term is an acronym for ‘’Complex Adaptive Socio-Technical System”; it breaks down as follows:

• Complex - complexity science is defined as the study of systems whose collective behaviour cannot be easily predicted by the behaviour of the parts that compose said system. This is different from something that can be considered complicated…for example: a jet airliner is complicated, but mayonnaise is complex. Thinking about the organizations we work in, especially those enterprise-size…how could they be anything but complex?

• Adaptive - when something is adaptive, it evolves in response to challenges and/or changes in its environment. These organizations are always evolving and adapting to market pressure, shareholder pressure, industry trends, you name it.

• Socio-technical - this word is a combinatory term derived from the latin “socius” meaning “companion or ally” and “techne” which means “art or skill”. Coined in the 1950’s, this term is used to encapsulate the social dynamics and relationships inside a process of delivering value. Every organization has equal parts of agents/people and relationships inside said organization, along with processes and components of how they work together to create value.

• System - A system is a set of things working together as part of an interconnecting network. We are using this definition but expanding it to encompass not only the agents inside a thing, and how the thing works, but also the relationships between the agents, the thing, and the thing’s output.

The word “caste” itself means a specialized form; the most common usage is differentiating different hereditary classes in a society, and honestly that definition does not apply. However, when we consider each organization to be a highly-specialized form, it makes more sense…each one of the enterprises we work in and are part of are specialized, as no two companies are exactly alike in every detail. They’re complex, they’re adaptive, and their systems range in size…so while your gut may have told you this is a mis-use of the term, now it probably makes more sense.

In regards to helping these CASTeS evolve, we are going to utilize a syncretic approach. Being as I started with comparing CASTeS to organisms one would think we’re primarily going to center in biology, but we’re not going to stop with just biology…we will also cover concepts from physics, evolution, metaphysics, social sciences, behavioral psychology, sociology, and philosophy. The concepts from these areas will be introduced in service to that greater goal: that of successfully evolving the culture inside our CASTeS.

***

Sitting next to my desk is a giant rolling whiteboard, and on said whiteboard I have numerous sticky notes with words, phrases, and ideas on them. This collection of ideas comprise all the concepts that went into this book, but I have to be honest with you…I don’t like the term ‘’concepts.” In this book you will find scientific laws, theories, patterns from various disciplines, ideas, the whole gamut. That being said, I don’t think the term concept is a fair descriptor for the depth and breadth of idea variance you’re going to encounter. And then I found what I feel is the perfect term to describe all these ideas: protocols.

I have been following the author/thinker Venkatesh Rao for many years, and as a result of following him I encountered his work with the Summer of Protocols group; this group, backed by the Ethereum Foundation, is a volunteer “think tank” that concentrates on the concept of protocols and their application in the modern world…where they appear, how they are used, and most importantly what comprises a protocol and what makes protocols different from things like standards. In the piece The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols, Rao and his co-authors not only define a protocol but they also identify what makes a protocol a protocol.

Rao, et. al. define a protocol as “...a stratum of codified behaviour that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviours at adjacent loci.” Translated simply, protocols are sets of behaviours and/or rules that help create complex coordinated actions between systems or agents. Protocols help to ensure coordination across a large surface area without demanding conformance, but instead centering on coherence. Not every agent in a system must perform an action identically, but by utilizing a protocol as an enabling constraint the agents should arrive at the same result regardless of how they execute their tasks.

On the back of this definition the authors created a list of ten attributes that define a ‘’good’’ protocol. While not every protocol is required to meet the entire list, the protocols in this book will share the following definitive attributes:

• Sufficiently Evolvable - the expectation of a protocol is that it will mutate over time, and evolve in the face of entropy and external pressures being extended onto it. In terms of communication, humans went from the telegraph to internet chat; there existed a communication protocol that over time evolved with its environment and technical capability. The protocols in this book are intended to evolve with your CASTeS.

• Sufficiently Constrained - in this book we will discuss protocols that originate from various fields, and the one thing that they all will have in common is they’re constrained; what this means is these protocols are engineered to change and evolve but within a frame, and that frame is defined by trade-offs and cost/benefit comparisons. Each protocol will be made up of ideas that encourage their utilization to solve problems but also keep the door open to update and or modification, within the boundaries of the constraints the protocol operates within.

• Sufficiently Ludic - from the latin word ludus which means “play/game/sport”, good protocols help with creating meaning in a system, and they can be game-like in their creation and execution. There should be a general blurring of the seriousness of the protocol with the playfulness in how it’s utilized, and to the above it creates a space that is simultaneously constrained but evolvable.

• Sufficiently Generative - a good protocol should create value that is self-sustaining; the value created by said protocol creates what amounts to a ‘’virtuous cycle” of value that makes the protocol continue on. A good protocol, even when imposing on an agent’s behaviours or actions, provides enough value to make it worthwhile.

• Sufficiently Mortal - protocols should live only as long as they are necessary; given that they are both generative and evolvable, said protocols could technically live on for eternity as the expectation is that they are continually changing. However, it should be explicitly stated that there should be no consternation when it comes to removing and/or stopping usage of a protocol when it has outlived its usefulness.

Probably the biggest concept to keep in mind when designing and utilizing protocols is the idea of a Whitehead Advance. This is stolen from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about.” Good protocols create balanced power between the protocol and the participant (i.e.-the actor utilizing the protocol.) If correctly structured, said protocols will have a net benign influence, and create a positive pattern of control. The best example I can think of? Washing your hands. The idea of washing your hands before eating, after using the bathroom, after a task where they’re potentially exposed to germs, etc. is an example of a Whitehead Advance in public health. We are looking for the same effect when it comes to protocols we utilize in our CASTeS: they should create engagement via positive results, not punitive fears.

In order for these protocols to be successful, we need to understand humans and the HumanOS. We need to realize that there are many different types of agents in CASTeS, some higher-functioning than others, and we need to design for maximum exposure and adoption. And to do this, we need to delve a little deeper into what makes us what we are, and more importantly how we think.

***

Human beings love to talk about how they’re “rational”, and there is literally a deluge of content around how rational human beings are…but are we really? Are we really as rational as we like to tell ourselves we are? Do we often make decisions from a place of cold analysis? In times of stress do we typically stop and make decisions in a rational way? No! And here is one of the first lies that we’re going to unpack in this book: the lie that we tell ourselves that we are rational beings. The truth is we are emotional creatures and those emotions drive our decision-making; yes, there are outliers, there are people that are coldly rational and calculating, but for the majority of humanity that’s not the case. This isn’t to say we’re never rational…what this does say is that more often than not, we’re telling ourselves we’re being rational but in actuality we’re being rational in service to our emotions.

Simple question: how many brains do humans have? “One!” you exclaim! And biologically that may be true: yes, we have one “brain” which is where our thoughts and sense of being originate from. But if we change the definition of “brain” to “the place that we make decisions from”, we go from one to…THREE!

We’re all aware of the brain we have in our heads; that is our cephalic or cognitive brain. This is the brain of logic and reason, the place where we typically make decisions from. This brain processes information, input from our senses, and helps us “make sense” of the stimulus we receive. We tell ourselves that this is where we make all our decisions from, and while that technically may be true, there are times where that “logical” decision making is overridden by one of our other brains.

The second brain that we have is our gut, which is our enteric or intuitive brain. This is where “gut feelings” come from; this brain and its 100 million plus neurons produce copious amounts of neurotransmitters and almost half of the dopamine in our body. This is where the term “gut instinct” comes from, which is a way that we put into words feelings or intuitions that we may not understand where they originate from, but that they are present and we as humans take their presence as a sign to pay attention to them.

The third and final brain we have is our heart; this is our cardiac or emotional brain. The heart is where we feel, and this helps us interpret and express our feelings and emotions. It is what drives us to create connections with others, it leads us to experience empathy, and also leads us into courage or confidence. What most people don’t realize is that there are a large number of neurons in this brain (40,000+) and this brain can actually sense, learn, and remember independent of the cognitive brain. “Affairs of the heart” are things that pull on our emotions and we use this brain to make sense of those scenarios, and whether we like it or not, this brain can occasionally override the logical reasoning brain.

These three brains, each taken by themselves, are amazingly powerful. However the true power is when they are all combined into our human experience. What good is a thinking brain without intuition? What good is intuition without some emotional attachment? These three brains define us, and whether we like it or not we are a slave to them…so it would reason that in order for us to be successful we should lean into these brains, and use this combined power to achieve our goals!

How does this tie to intentional evolution in CASTeS? Well, if our CASTeS are actually organisms, we need to service these three brains equally in order to be successful. We need to look at our CASTeS holistically, and we need to approach all 3 aspects, understand what their wants and needs are, and use that knowledge to our advantage (again, over-indexing on that point in Spreng’s Triangle). I posit that it is only by addressing all three brains, in equal measure, that we can truly intentionally evolve a CASTeS.

At this point you’re probably asking…Why three? Don’t most consultants and books swear by the “four box” construct? Four is a number that repeats often in our physical world…points on a compass, valves of the human heart, seasons, base elements. But what we’re trying to do is change more than our physical world, and for that reason I’m using three which is a number that repeats in the metaphysical world…the mind, the body, and the soul, the subconscious/conscious/physical, birth/life/death. This is more in line with what we’re trying to do…we are trying to change our physical world by starting with a change in our metaphysical one, meaning the culture in which we exist.

In this book we are going to introduce 3 primary metaphors; these metaphors will act as “conceptual wrapperS” around the ideas contained therein. Each one of these metaphors will align to one of our brains, and as we delve deeper into these brains and their related metaphors you will begin to not only appreciate each aspect but begin to formulate how you could apply these metaphors in your own context.

The first metaphor we are going to explore is the Egregore; this metaphor is tied to our emotional brain. An egregore is a manifestation of thoughts, norms, and feelings; in our context it represents the culture of the organism that we are attempting to change. In this section we will talk about how to go about creating a new egregore that will compete with, and eventually consume, the current CASTeS’ egregore. We will discuss the difference between stories and narratives, and how to create a narrative behind the egregore that will lead to its healthy development. We will discuss the importance of strong and weak connections, and how to utilize common knowledge and rituals to create, foster, and nourish our new egregore.

The second metaphor is the Holobiont. Stemming from evolutionary biology, this concept (tied to our intuitive brain) represents how we will evolve our new culture. In this section we will explore intentional evolution of our egregore via symbiogenesis, how to build assemblies that trigger assemblages, what types of people we will need to be part of our egregore, and recruiting missionaries to be part of our new culture. As to why this is tied to the intuitive brain: an example of holobiont theory is how our gut biome has evolved with us over time, even though it is a biologically unique organism and not considered when one thinks of homo sapiens. This theory states that we (humans) have co-evolved with our gut bacteria to form a “holobiont”; a new organism created not by evolutionary branching but by FUSION. In this section we will explore at a base level how to select the correct organisms that will co-evolve with us to create our new culture…much like those gut biomes.

The third and final metaphor we will utilize is Entropy. This is Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it describes how all systems over time will tend towards disorder. We acknowledge this as a scientific certainty, and with that being said we need to think about how we can utilize this trend to generate positive results for our culture. Over time every CASTeS experiences “cultural drift”, which is unintended and unplanned change inside the culture. Acknowledging this cultural drift (which, again, is really just entropy), in this section we’ll cover how to control the continued growth and evolution of our culture, even knowing that it will naturally trend towards disorder. We will discuss how to view this new CASTeS’ organizational construct, how to utilize West’s Scaling Postulates to build in resiliency, and most importantly, how to navigate the inevitable complexity that will arise when this culture grows and scales past the size that anyone could hope to successfully “manage.” Entropy is tied to the cognitive brain, as we need to be consciously aware that entropy will continuously be trying to enter our culture, and we need to utilize that knowledge to allow for positive growth.

***

Which leads us to the title of this book: Widening the Aperture: Syncretic Protocols Evolutionary Organizations. We are going to widen our frame of how we look at the CASTeS, and move from a mechanical metaphor to a biological one. We are going to combine and utilize concepts from various sciences to help add context to what we’re trying to do, which is more than changing the culture of the CASTeS but really creating evolution inside an organism. Think about it like this:

We are going to develop a new culture (egregore) that will inevitably replace the current culture (egregore) in the CASTeS (organism). This egregore represents an idea that will generate coherence. We will do this by utilizing a pattern of evolution (holobiont) that allows us to intentionally develop the culture we want by integrating people, skills, and attitudes via growth and recruitment into a new egregore which creates a stronger, healthier, more positive culture. As our egregore grows we will utilize our knowledge and awareness of the potential for cultural drift (entropy) as an enabling constraint that will help provide us with a fertile environment for growth, scale, and change; this scale will allow us to create progress internally (our egregore) and externally(in the market that we operate in).

***

At this point I have to admit…when I read books of the type you’re currently reading, I find they fall into two different buckets…

The first bucket is the ‘’theory’’ bucket; these are the books that overload you with the why, and give all the background information about the ideas being presented, their history, and why they are important.

The second bucket is the “praxis” bucket; these are the books that tell you how to apply the theory they’re describing. These books are typically told in a narrative and/or parable format, the most famous of which being the work that is done in the Theory of Constraints space, as well as probably the most well-known author of this type, Patrick Lencioni.

I’m not saying one is right and the other is wrong, but quite often when you only present one side of the theory-praxis relationship you can leave an audience wanting…at least that’s how I often feel. Which is why in this book my admittedly-lofty goal (that’s twice for those keeping count) is to present BOTH sides of the equation; each section of the book will present the theory behind the protocols, and then there will be a narrative section where these protocols are applied in a fictional setting. If you’re a reader who gets more out of the narrative side, feel free to skip the theory sections and go straight to the praxis. If the idea of a fake story bores you, and you are more interested in the underlying logic, ignore the narrative parts and take in only the theory. And if you’re truly interested in both sides of the coin, read both. I won’t say that one will be more fulfilling than the other, I’m writing for both potential sides, feel free to pick and choose the part that you find resonates with you most.

***

My final thought before we begin our journey: running through the human body there exists something called the vagus nerve; this nerve is a cranial nerve that connects the brain to both the heart and the digestive tract, along with multiple other organs and biological systems along the way. This nerve could be considered the “primary connector” of our 3 brains that allow us to function as we do. If the vagus nerve connects the 3 brains, and the concepts we are using for culture change are each tied to a brain, what is the metaphorical equivalent of the vagus nerve?

You.

Armed with the knowledge and concepts in this book, you can become the vagus nerve of your CASTeS, leading it into a better, healthier future. You will in effect create a living organism that is set up to adapt, survive, and grow in the complex world we live in. And the more people you expose to these concepts, and the more they understand how these pieces all interact, the stronger and more resilient you make this nerve.

Now let’s begin.

I’m 2/3 of the way done with writing, so this will provide me with two things: early feedback but also motivation to finish the final third. My ultimate goal is to get this thing into print by Q1 2027, and while lofty I do think it’s possible.

A note on the chapters: the book is split in thirds, with a major idea spanning each third. For each major idea, there will be a section on theory (already written) and then a business parable-esque story to show praxis of said theory. Again, lofty but achievable.

I hope you enjoy this journey with me, it’s been a fun challenge and I look forward to discussing these concepts with others. Cheers!

(please excuse the gratuitous and unnecessary Total Recall reference in the title)

I was recently at an off-site working session with my team (shout-out to Kansas City, especially the Conor the bartender, and the cocktail waitress at the P.S. speakeasy) and over dinner conversation it came out that none of the six members of my team save one (who still isn’t even sure) have seen the movie Seven. This blows my mind as the average age of my team is hovering near 50 and they were all obviously alive in 1995 when it came out.

This tidbit is apropos to this post, as a few weeks later I was presenting a book report I wrote (yes, I still write them when I read a good book) on Everyday Habits for Transforming Systems: The Catalytic Power of Radical Engagement by Adam Kahane. During the discussion we covered Adam’s perspective that the three universal human drivers of motivation (and by extension, collaboration) are love, power, and justice. At this point one of the people in the session made a snarky remark along the lines of “I thought it was one of the seven sins that motivates people…” Without even thinking, I remarked that I have a theory about how the seven deadly sins are all tied to each other and inter-relate, and I went off on some tangent/rant explaining it. When I got done and came up for breath, said attendee (shoutout to Pete!) said “I’d like to see this explained further, as I think I understand and agree but I’m not entirely sure”….so here we are. (Now do you get the Total Recall reference?)

What I am now going to attempt to do is explain my vision of how the seven deadly sins are inter-related and how one or two begat another, and how it ALWAYS ends with wrath (John Doe was not wrong on this point!) And to help bring this concept home, I’m going to tie it to why and how organizations act when they try to adopt a new management fad….think “lean”, “agile”, ‘‘devops”, or even…”AI”. The rationale that traditionally drives these adoptions can be based in sin, and the way that most ‘‘transformations” end, follows a pattern that I have personally seen played out in at least 3 different organizations (and anecdotally am aware of exponentially more) to the point that it has become stereotypical. Let’s explore my theory on how we start with the best of intentions…and end up with Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box (no SPOILER ALERT, the movie is 30 years old).

IN THE BEGINNING…

Think about these types of fad or change initiatives; they always start out with opportunity. “Hey, here’s a chance to do something different/improve our lot/etc.” Some executive reads a blog, attends a conference, or has a highly-paid consultant whisper something in their ear about “THE THING”. Some execs are immediately drawn to the the idea of the thing, whereas others it has to marinate for a bit. Sometimes said executive even needs to attend another conference, or read a different blog post, or maybe even hears a different story from a different highly-paid consultant…but eventually they ALL come around to the idea of “We NEED this THING, no matter what the cost!” This executive will then bring THE THING to their orgainzation; maybe they begin with meeting with their superiors, maybe they start seeding the idea with their subordinates, or maybe they even hire the highly-paid consultant to help them sell the idea…but in the end their goal is to start the organization down the path of adoption. And what’s driving this from-the-outside over-aggressive motivation, you ask?

• Envy - If said executive hears that one of their competitors are doing THE THING and they’re not…how do you think they’ll feel? They will definitely be envious of that competitor, as their competitor now has a story to tell about THE THING and they don’t….once could even say their

• Pride is damaged. “I want my company to be considered one of the best, and how can we be considered one of the best if we’re not up to par with our competition?” This wounded pride, coupled with a sense of envy, will lead said executive to want to jump all-in and accelerate their company’s adoption of THE THING. And with this motivator, however well-intentioned, we end up in the next phase of sin in enterprise transformation:

THE SIN CYCLE WASHING MACHINE!

Now this is where things really get interesting…at this juncture the executive has rallied the organization to start doing/adopting THE THING. The organization will now start bouncing back and forth and around 3 different deadly sins; there is no set order in which the organization will experience these sins, and the organization will whipsaw between them for what appears to be no rhyme or reason. Sadly, these three sins will feed each other/feed off each other, creating the washing machine effect. In no particular order:

• Greed: this comes into play because the organization has convinced themselves that they desperately WANT/NEED/MUST HAVE this THING that has been brought to them. No matter what signs emanate from the system, no matter what the executives are hearing, they are convinced that THE THING is what will make them better, more competitive, more profitable, more of everything. Greed can also create the feeling of exploitation for those further down the food chain, who feel like they’re pawns in a game where winning does nothing for them.

• Lust: some may seem like we’re splitting hairs when compared to Greed, but there’s a key difference. The sin of Greed is all about accumulation; the never-ending quest for more, more, more, as a sign of status and accomplishment. Lust, however, ties to a more carnal driver, and that is gratification. Whereas Greed will show up in “I want more of THE THING to show that I have arrived or am accomplished”, Lust is “I want the presence of THE THING in my organization so I can selfishly say to myself “I have arrived.” Greed is about externally-facing validation whereas Lust is about internally-facing. Two sides of the same coin, yes, and one can easily see how these two sins fuel each other.

• Gluttony: in this sense gluttony can be thought of as over-consumption. Along with Greed (I need this for external validation) and Lust (I need this for internal validation), Gluttony rears it’s head with the logic of “if a little is good, more is better, and a LOT more is a LOT better.” For example: the organization has introduced THE THING into itself, and it’s now looking to apply said thing everywhere…regardless of whether it makes sense to or not. This is the gross application of a concept all over an organization regardless of fit, and is exacerbated again by the preceding sins. No matter how much of THE THING we have, it’s never enough, we need more.

After reading the above details, it becomes apparent how these 3 sins specifically create this widening gyre of recursion, an almost perpetual motion machine of misery for those downstream, caught up in the current (I might be projecting here…) These 3 sins, working with and off each other, create that cyclical motion of suck that creates the feeling of inescapability, which is the beginning of our final descent.

NOW APPROACHING: THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL. STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS.

With the previous three sins approaching terminal velocity, there has been so much inertia generated, so much back-and-forth and strife, that we have reached what could be considered an impasse: Sloth.

Sloth sets in when the organization has so much going on, so much change, so many unclear/questionable priorities (or lack thereof) that the easiest way for most if not all of the organization to successfully navigate these waters is to just…do nothing.

Sloth is Eeyore; it’s “it won’t get any better, so I might as well enjoy doing nothing.” The initiative, however strong/powerful and equally misguided will end up stalling out, and to the executive who brought it forward in the first place, they will see the system for what it now resembles: a morass of half-hearted attempts at adoption, feeble well-intentioned but misguided messaging, and a cohort of employees that only want to do the ‘‘right’’ thing, and really want to be successful, but they feel stuck in their inability to make forward progress, at least progress that’s perceptible. As a result…we are stagnant. As far as the agents in this system are concerned, the best move for them is to not do anything, and just keep doing what they’re currently doing as to choose sides puts them in the Kobayashi Maru.

and this brings us to the final stop in our journey….

JOHN DOE HAS THE UPPER HAND!

And now, we have arrived at Wrath. The initiating executive (if they’re still with the organization) is angry because the thing they wanted to do didn’t…do. The agents in the system are angry because they had change inflicted on them, and are now hardened against any future infliction of change. And the organization as a whole now has a luke-warm, half-assed adoption of an emerging trend or fad. So now what happens?

…we do the same thing again with the NEXT management fad.

To start, let’s join in welcoming back anthropologist Mr. Robin Dunbar!  Dunbar’s seminal work in group size and coordination is well-known across many industries, specifically the number “150” and how it relates to the number of meaningful connections that a typical person can maintain with others.  What many people do not realize is there is an entire sequence of numbers that precede 150!

The Dunbar sequence is a theory he developed to explain the different types of connections we maintain with other humans; the lower the number, the higher the connection.  Let’s break it down:

You will often see this pattern applied to modern organizational design:

Many organizations use this upper-boundary number as a guideline when it comes to establishing value streams, but they typically ignore the lower numbers in the sequence.  When managers and leaders start asking “Why do we struggle to get things done?” or “Why do we have such problems with collaboration?” they would be wise to start with looking at the underlying team structure and size along with the team’s mission, as well as keep in mind the limits of meaningful cognitive connection that people can maintain.

Recall how we discussed evolving the egregore in the last piece; we talked of cohorts splitting off and being created when they got over 150 people; the exact same concept can be applied to organizational structure.  When your value stream reaches 200 people, it makes sense to split it up: dig into the value that this structure delivers, find a natural fracture plane (h/t Team Topologies) and then create 2 value streams in place of 1. 

Keep in mind that the 150 number is not absolute; it is not mandatory to cut along that line, you can cut earlier if natural rifts appear that from the outside would seem beneficial to divide along.  Also, you can let the group grow larger than 150 if you explicitly acknowledge that you are creating potential coordination and collaboration issues; however there are some instances where letting the cohort expand past 150 will actually create more optionality for optimal division decisions…instead of cutting at 150 for 150’s sake.

Dr. Sarah Eaton, professor at the University of Calgary, published a paper titled Understanding Academic Integrity from a Teaching and Learning Perspective: Engaging with the 4M Framework.  In this paper she introduces the 4Ms as a framework to help understand complex issues such as academic integrity while avoiding oversimplification or reductionism. Her 4Ms are Micro, Meso, Macro, and Mega, and while not a 1 to 1 analog this categorization resembles from the outside the same concept as the Dunbar Sequence!  From the paper:

• Micro: this is the level of the individual 

• Meso: this is the level of the department

• Macro: this is the level of the institution

• Mega: this is the level of the community

These descriptors of the various levels make sense when you consider the crux of the paper is academic instruction, and they don’t quite perfectly align with the Dunbar Sequence as a level is missing.  Here is where I suggest we add the strata of “nano.”  I posit that this level becomes the individual (as it is the smallest particle available to us), and we can align the concepts.  Additionally, we need to be cognizant of the world that we are operating in outside our organization: the Spanish word “Mundo” translates to “world”, which I think fits perfectly!

With the introduction of these two terms, we now have a simple heuristic that can guide us when it comes to breaking down our organization into smaller components.  This heuristic can also function as an early-warning indicator for potential collaboration problems for groups that are bigger than they may need to be (anybody ever been on a team of 20+?  How’d that go?).  This sequence also helps us when it comes to descaling our organization…many organizations have “teams of 1” nestled amongst their org chart; this is a hint that maybe we were too granular in how we split our teams (to say nothing about a flawed view of responsibilities for this team of 1).  And lastly, with the addition of Mundo should serve as a reminder that we are in an environment bigger than our team or team of teams, and we should be cognizant of our place, our dependencies, and how we interact with other cohorts.

***

At this point we need to discuss the idea of vertical scale; the 150 more/less concept works to delineate different value streams, teams, teams of teams, et cetera, but what it doesn’t explicitly address is the coordination that is needed when your organization reaches a point where there are so many cohorts that there’s no way we can rely on cognitive association to unify towards a common goal.  We acknowledge the greater world (Mundo) that we are operating in, but what about the hierarchy that is so inherent to the HumanOS?  What should we think about this?

I bet that every organization greater than 3 people has some sort of org chart.  And on this org chart, there are lines connecting people to diagram “who reports to whom”, or managerial structure…said structure typically resembles a pyramid, with the CEO/President/et cetera at the top, and then cascading connections through multiple layers to the lowest rung of employee classification.  While this is a necessary construct inside an organization of sufficient size, it inadvertently reinforces a mental model that we would like to shy away from.

Historically these charts would be used as a representation of “who gets to decide?”.  It implies that those at the top of the pyramid have the most “power”, the most say in how things go…”because I’m the boss and I said so.”  While this type of behaviour may have been beneficial in the past we have learned quite a few reasons why it fails in the modern world:

• Doesn’t scale: if you’re always having to go upwards to get decisions made, you slow down, your team slows down, and there’s latency introduced into the system.  More latency = greater chances for entropy.  Also, you create a choke point for decision making which leads to delays and, again, entropy.

• Enables a cult of personality/hero culture:  If you’re always having to go to the same few people “up the flagpole” you create a culture of heroes, where everyone wants to climb the ladder to achieve the cachet that comes with the ability to make decisions

• Doer/decider distance:  When the people making decisions are abstracted away from the results of said decisions, you typically get poorer decisions.  This is best represented by Nassim Taleb’s concept of “skin in the game”:  the people who have to live with the decisions and have something to lose should be the ones making said decisions.

What I'm not saying is hierarchy is bad; what I am saying is that our current conception of the function of that hierarchy is outmoded and not conducive to successfully navigating our modern world.  This conception is slow to notice and react to change(either exogenous or endogenous) and appears unresponsive.  Our current ideas around hierarchy are also quite brittle in the face of entropy; look at a standard org chart and tell me what happens when a node in one of the higher strata is removed….have you ever worked in a company where this happens?  A whole bunch of shuffling, moving people around, “finding a home” for teams…not only are these changes highly disruptive they can often be counter-productive.

In the 1800’s in the United States the primary mode of transporting goods was the railroad.  The General Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad in 1855 was Daniel McCallum; this was one of the busiest rail systems in the United States, servicing the Northeast with 500+ miles of track, which at the time was the biggest rail system.  As part of his role McCallum realized that he needed a way to manage people and operations across a workforce that numbered in the thousands in a fairly large geographic area, and while the telegraph would allow for faster communication that did not solve the quandary of “who is doing what in this expansive and complex organization?”  To try and reduce cognitive load and make sense of the enterprise, McCallum created this:

What stands out about this org chart?  Besides the fact that most modern org charts dont resemble this even slightly….

• Leaders are at the bottom; they’re viewed as supporting the organization, not necessarily leading it

• The branches are very to easy to understand; you get a sense of the body of work that each part is responsible for

• It expresses more than “who reports to whom”

• Most importantly, and germane to this series of articles: it emphasizes the organic nature of organizations, not the mechanical representation of hierarchy

Fast-forward to modern times: one of the more recent trends in leadership and management circles is the concept of servant leadership.  This concept centers the role of the leader on the growth, development, and empowerment of others in lieu of themselves.  This translates into leaders that are most concerned with their colleagues and subordinate’s successes: they actively work to enable their people by helping to change the system they are working in to enable success.  This could be activities like clearing impediments to team or program success, changing the organization’s structure or operating model when sufficient, among other options (for a wonderful explanation and example of this concept see David Marquet’s Turn This Ship Around.)  The gestalt of this mental model is an organization that is successful because all parts of it are orientated towards success.

This concept is not necessarily contradictory to the idea of a corporate hierarchy, but if the organization is truly invested in effective coordination that increases collaboration they will invert their concept of the hierarchy.  

Where have we seen this concept before?  Maybe an org chart from the 19th century?

This doesn’t take away from the responsibilities of the CEO, the C-level executives, but what it does do is re-emphasize and change the way leadership thinks about themselves and their role within the organization.  You are still arguably “in charge”, and any fiduciary or corporate responsibilities you had before this change remain, however this visualization helps to re-emphasize the mental model of “serving and supporting” over “deciding and driving”.

When we combine these two concepts (the M’s + the inverted hierarchy) we end up with an organization that resembles a gravity well; the horizontal scale represents the bigger and bigger circles of relationship and structure in the organization, while the vertical aspect comes to represent the hierarchy and the supporting structure of servant leadership.

As organizations typically grow, their hierarchy grows with them in a type of allometric scaling; the hierarchy typically grows at the same rate as the overall organization.  In the early stages this is out of necessity (coordination across a rapidly-growing organism), best demonstrated by observing how technology start-ups grow their hierarchy as their funding and product grows.  If the organization truly adopts this mental model, something interesting can be observed: the number of layers in the organization become inconsequential.  If all the layers are working towards collaboration and coordination and the betterment of their colleagues and environment, the raw number of levels is less important.   However, keep in mind that with more levels of hierarchy you breed the opportunity for entropy to invade the construct and to throw those best-laid plans into unplanned situations or scenarios that become harder to navigate.

***

While the number of layers in the hierarchy is inconsequential with a shared servant leadership mindset, we do need to keep HumanOS in mind.  In an ideal world the hierarchy and requisite bureaucracy growth would be a function of what’s called negative allometry; the hierarchy would grow at a slower rate than the overall organism.  As organizations grow and expand this can be observed, however history tells us that this negative allometry sometimes continues regardless of need for growth.

Famed naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson was quoted as observing that bureaucracy inside organizations grows at 5-7% per year regardless of changes in demand, work to be done, organizational profitability, or organic growth necessity.  This phenomenon (commonly referred to as Parkinson’s Law) has been observed in governments, private organizations, and other areas where large-scale coordination is required.  While some of this growth is needed, over time you may end up where many organizations find themselves, in that their bureaucracy and “value non-contributory roles” grows to consume a large part of the organization and not only slows development but becomes a drag on the organization.  Common examples include the massive amounts of “middle managers” in large financial institutions, or the over-abundance of non-teaching bureaucrat roles in universities, when compared to instructor volume.

We understand the need for growth, we understand the need for hierarchy, but we also want to be cognizant of what potential problems could be introduced with creating the opportunities for entropy.  The first heuristic I find useful is the Rule of 3 and 10.

Hiroshi Mikitani is the CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese eCommerce retailer.  He was quoted as observing “Everything changes at roughly every third and tenth step”.  What he means by that is when you go from 1 person to 3 people, your current operating paradigm changes; basically “what got you here won’t get you there.”  That same paradigm change occurs AGAIN at 10 people…and again at 30 people…and so on and so on.  Taken on its surface this theory implies that disruption happens at growth points that are predictable.  The underlying point in his statement is that we cannot expect the same organizational structure, or processes, or ways of communicating to work as well with 30 people as it did with 3 (or even 10).  If true, this means that the organization could utilize this theory as a quasi- “leading indicator” of when they will be encountering inflection points that require a redesign of the current operating model. We can apply this concept in our Dunbar Sequence (every 3rd and 10th step of growth of the cohort) but also across the organization (every 3rd and 10th cohort). 

Another potential heuristic that explicitly deals with supra-large scale organizations is Michael Küsters’ Rule of 3.  This is very much in the same vein as the Rule of 3 and 10, but Michael expands and gives examples of what occurs when organizations reach enterprise-scale, such as international organizations and even governments:

While this nor the Rule of 3 and 10 is a scientific law, they provide potential inflection points in our organization’s growth that we can then schedule opportunities to pause, retrospect, and develop new ideas and potential avenues for change ahead of time, before entropy seeps in to the point that unplanned changes start not only occurring but accelerating outside the bounds of potentially controllable scenarios.

***

In closing, I think the most important attribute that organizations need to be successful when it comes to evolving their structure is:  courage.  The courage to try something new, the courage to experiment, the courage to not mindlessly follow what everyone else is doing.  Millions of dollars change hands every year between enterprises and expensive consulting firms, and said firms turn around and sell the enterprise the same patterns and mental models that they’ve sold everyone else regardless if they work or not.  If the enterprise is truly interested in success and longevity, they should try to mirror more biology and less mechanical engineering…because only one has been around for millions of years!

References:

• Neocortex size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates, Robin Dunbar  

• Friendship: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, Robin Dunbar

• Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Palais

• Understanding Academic Integrity using the 4M Framework, Sarah Eaton

• Rule of 3 and 10, Sequoia Capital.

• The Rule of 3, Michael Kusters

• Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb

• Turn The Ship Around, David Marquet

• The First Organisational Chart, Psychological Safety

• Parkinson's Law, 1955, The Economist

• Allometry: The Study of Biological Scaling, Nature 

***

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar is famously known for his identification of what is now known as “Dunbar’s Number.”  This principle represents what he theorized to be the maximum number of connections that a human can maintain with stability.  Dunbar was studying primates and how they form bonds and maintain connections with others in their species, and he developed a theory that this number is direct function of the size of the neocortex in the brain; he observed how these groups collaborated, functioned, and coordinated with each other and then extrapolated his findings to match the size of the human neocortex.  His theory is that the maximum number of interpersonal connections we can maintain stably is around one-hundred fifty (150).  Historically this is the maximum size of a Stone Age farming village, and also the size of a unit in the Roman army.  

This number also has ties to modern human constructs as well; Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point references the company W.L.Gore’s behaviour of creating a new building facility once a current one reaches 150 people; their internal observation and research had shown that over that point (150 people) coherence and collaboration degrade.  Facebook’s purported defining feature was its ability to “connect the world” and yet observation has shown that people will struggle to maintain more than 150 interpersonal connections…for me personally, my connections were a combination of friends from grammar school, high school, college, past colleagues, friends with shared interests, and when the Facebook popularity was blooming I quickly blew past 500+ connections…how many of those were reliable, stable, and what I would define as “quality” interpersonal connections?  My unscientific observation?  Very few if any.  (The continued slow decline of Facebook’s ability to generate positive interactions could be a book in and of itself.)

This “cutoff point” can be highly useful for us as a heuristic while our egregore evolves.  As more people enter our culture and become part of our egregore, we can use this number as a lagging indicator as to when we need to split into cohorts; these cohorts are rooted in the same common knowledge and rituals as the genesis cohort, and they will share these attributes as they divide up in a process that resembles cellular mitosis.  These cohorts will resemble each other, and share the same common knowledge, but they can then grow and develop inside the established memeplex (the collection of memes that help the egregore propagate, see my previous piece).  

The overarching goal in not only allowing for but creating the environment for this division is coherence NOT conformance…we want these new cohorts to have coherence with the genesis cohort’s memes, common knowledge, and rituals, but not constrain these cohorts to conform exactly to it; ideally each cohort will align with what we’re trying to accomplish without being explicitly forced to do so.  This coherence will create the opportunity for entropy to enter the egregore in the form of mutation i.e.- cohorts will have enough “breathing room” that they can experiment and try new things within the confines of their cohort.  This coherence not conformance approach will also create the loose coupling necessary for modularity vis a vis: there’s enough common ties that there is stability but not ties so strong that they could cripple the overall organization.  This concept will aid in creating a “design for redesign” pattern, which should increase the odds of successful growth and propagation of our organization while allowing for occasional mis-steps or evolutionary dead ends.  

We should plan to accommodate this successful or positive mutation as that is how this egregore will develop its anti-fragility(ability to utilize entropy to strengthen itself): it will experience internal disruption to itself as it changes which will create a stronger egregore. Some cohorts may develop ideas or updates to the memeplex that prove beneficial and help increase the odds of not only survival but more effective propagation, which will then feed back into the common knowledge of the egregore, which may be the secret to successful scaling.  But the Dunbar Number should not be the only heuristic we use to try and increase our odds of success.

***

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West wrote a book where he investigates how our world “scales”, in both biology and in human constructs such as cities and organizations.  He observed that natural organisms engage in what’s called allometric scaling; this term is a generalization of how different parts of an organism grow (or “scale”) at different paces/in different dimensions than others.  Do you ever look back on pictures of yourself as a teenager and think “Wow, I look so gangly and gawky.  My legs are long and skinny, my torso seems short, and my feet look huge!”  This is an example of allometric scaling…your body is growing and different parts of your body are growing at different rates.  

This will also inevitably happen in human constructs, and also in our egregore; there will be facets of our memeplex that replicate and grow faster than others.  This is not necessarily bad, but we need to plan for this; part of planning for this inevitability is creating inside the egregore a system that will scale elegantly.  In the book (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies) West identifies patterns that he has observed in relation to how biological entities demonstrate allometric scaling; he presents these to us as  “West’s Postulates”. These three postulates can act as a heuristic when it comes to purposefully evolving our egregore.

The first of West’s Postulates is space filling.  This is the concept whereby the extensions of a network need to extend (and as a result, service) the entire system.  The biological example is the human circulatory system: regardless of where you go in our bodies there will be arteries, veins, capillaries, all servicing the body with blood flow.  An example of this in human constructs would be: electricity.  You have electrical wiring in your house, which is connected to your grid, which is connected to your power company, and so on and so on until you reach the generating station…yet another metaphor could be your home's plumbing, water or waste or both.

When we think of applying the idea of space filling to our growing egregore, we should consider how memes, information, conversations propagate through our construct.  Put another way, how does information flow throughout the various pieces and parts of this new culture?  We should carefully consider how ideas, communication, and the like move around…have we created any blind spots or areas of this growing culture that are not as informed as others?  Information distribution in as close to real-time as possible is one of the biggest ways you can mitigate entropy…should we investigate our rituals?  Do we need to expand or change their audience and purpose? All things to consider in this aspect.

***

The second postulate is called terminal unit invariance.  What this means is that in the terminal units of a system or network, these units have the same relative size and characteristics.  Back to the circulatory system example:  those blood vessels have the same relative size and characteristics of the vessels that feed them, and the vessels that feed THOSE vessels, so on and so on.  The same symmetry applies to electricity transmission: those giant power lines you see up on those metal towers, while larger in diameter and made of slightly different materials, have the exact same function as the fourteen gauge wiring behind your outlets.  Conceptually this is nearly the same as the idea of a fractal: the overarching system is self-similar no matter what level of magnification or abstraction you sink or rise to…this is terminal unit invariance.

When we think about our egregore, and its distribution across multiple similarly-sized cohorts, we need to try and ensure that these cohorts resemble each other as best as possible, at their lowest levels of behaviour.  The reasons for this self-similarity should be obvious:

• It allows for new cohorts to arise with minimal effort as they have ersatz guiding principles to cohere to

• It allows for people to transfer into and out of cohorts fairly effortlessly due to their similarity

• Any potential mutation that could result in the “death” of the cohort will be easier to identify.

We are expecting mutation and differentiation amongst cohorts, a result of constant evolution, as this will help our egregore grow; the goal of terminal unit invariance is to make sure that the overall coherence of the construct maintains even in the face of this entropic change.  

The biggest impact this postulate will have is on our organization as we scale upwards.  As this egregore grows in cohorts the need will arise for hierarchy; this is a natural part of the HumanOS and goes back to the beginning of our species.  We are a species that has conquered the planet through coordination, and as our egregore grows there will need to be coordination from above; we will need to rely on others who have a vantage point across the entire ecosystem that can then help the spread of knowledge and aid in communication.  When these hierarchies arise it will create less cognitive load if they resemble the more granular parts of the ecosystem, as best as possible.  It is understood that needs and behaviour will change across these hierarchies, but if we work to ensure they’re self-similar it will reduce complexity but also aid those who have to traverse these hierarchies.

At this point we probably should address the idea of a “flat” organization.  This idea is popular in some circles but the examples of it being successfully implemented in a large-scale organization are almost non-existent.  The reason for this may be that the concept of hierarchy is, again, part of our HumanOS.  Trying to remove something that we have evolved to utilize to collaborate is not a simple task and will take a longer timeline than most of us will experience.

***

The third and final postulate is optimization. The common scientific hypothesis regarding energy is that it is neither created nor consumed but transferred; one can see this in action in physics, chemistry and in mechanical engineering.  With energy comes the principle of least action: this principle underlies Netwonian laws of motion, Einstein's theory of relativity, as well as Langrange and Hamilton’s equation of motion.  This principle states that when there are multiple permutations or evolutions of a system available, the one that minimizes the action required will be the one that is successful and survives over time.

We could boil down the idea behind optimization to a well-known acronym: K.I.S.S.  While we humans love to create big, giant, complex systems and things, the smartest thing we could do is keep it simple.  In terms of our egregore and it’s constant cohort growth we can maximize our odds of success by making the mechanism by which these cohorts split off and evolve on their own as easy as possible i.e. requiring the least amount of energy.  While it may be tempting to rely on the shared genetic code that we came from (our rituals and common knowledge), this  is a lazy approach and assumes that the evolution of the various cohorts will maintain along the lines that were loosely-intended.  

If we minimize the effort (and by extension, energy) needed to stand up new cohorts we serve to accelerate this process; this will allow for more frequent fracturing, which over time results in more frequent evolution and experimentation inside the cohorts themselves, which serves the needs of the greater egregore.  This can be accomplished by active curation of our common knowledge (and by extension, our memeplex) to ensure that the “root” of the common knowledge does not drift away from the intent that led to its establishment; different people use different words to describe concepts, some people and words being more successful than others.  For the best chances of successful evolutionary change we need to be cognizant of this fact and actively engaged in how the common knowledge grows and is propagated.  Simple mechanisms that require minimal energy and display minimal variance with little to no empty space therein will be the recipe for our success.

Both the Dunbar Numbers (see a future piece on the full sequence of numbers)  and West’s Postulates can be utilized to not only scale our egregore but also the organization in which it resides; as this new idea propagates through the system and more and more adherents arise, we can use these concepts to help us try and guide our growth towards positive outcomes, while we create the mechanism to allow the egregore to notice when a negative scenario is brewing, which allows us to get in front of it and prevent downstream pollution.  So far the emphasis has been on successfully evolving our egregore, but how do we evolve our organization along with it?  More on that soon!

Reference:

• Scale, Geoffrey West

• Neocortex size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates, Robin Dunbar  

• Primates on Facebook

• Friendship: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, Robin Dunbar

• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Physics teaches us of the concept of entropy; entropy can be defined as a degree of randomness or disorder in any system. Every system, regardless of how/when/who was involved in its construction will inevitably move towards disorder. We use terms like “ghost in the machine” to explain why things happen that were unplanned or unexpected; this is a euphemism that represents entropy. Any construct, over time, will change; the only variable is “are we observing the construct long enough to see the change?” Think about our continents, our mountains, our climate: for humans (average lifespan — 80 years +/-) these things look as constant as the rising and setting of the sun. But if we were to take a longer-term evolutionary view we would notice that they’re constantly shifting and changing. Mountains grow due to tectonic plate movement or shrink due to weathering, but in our relatively small window of observation they appear constant.

Entropy in our lives and constructs will become apparent to us as time progresses. Quite often we view this entropy as complexity, defined as a system containing many components that interact with each other, sometimes outside of our aperture of observation. Complex systems are systems where there are many moving parts of such size and magnitude that we cannot mentally conceptualize all the parts and pieces and interactions without gross oversimplification which introduces blind spots and bias. Think of the internal combustion engine…this system is complex with many parts and different interactions that unless one is formally trained and spends a lifetime working in and with it, the intricacies and possible permutations of interaction inside of it might easily be equated to “magic.” As a knock-on effect of being unable to conceptualize the entirety it becomes difficult if not impossible to even remotely predict future behavior and or performance.

In the service of treating entropy as complexity we recognize that the advanced constructs that humanity operates in (our culture, our organizations, our countries) have so much complexity that we typically define these constructs as “complex adaptive systems.” This mental model allows us to attempt to summarize all the entropy in a sufficiently large enough construct as a “CAS”, and developments in the field of complexity science are creating knowledge and best practices around dealing with this entropy. Unfortunately we may prove to be our own worst enemies when it comes to successfully preparing our constructs for this entropy.

Cultures, organizations, enterprises etc. all try to actively prevent change: in this instance, we are defining change as “unplanned occurrences in a construct”. They create methods and procedures, policies and playbooks, and all sorts of processes to try and create a stable system that (ideally) if followed correctly will prevent any deviation in the construct. Yet as any experienced working professional can attest, these attempts at controlling change (which, again is really just entropy) are always defeated. This concept of organizational entropy is as constant as entropy in nature itself, and we need to accept it. This now begs the question: if we know entropy is going to occur, why can’t we design our constructs with that specific entropy in mind. Many organizations will argue they DO design their processes to be “future proof”, but that is rarely the case…and an Austrian logician can tell us why.

Kurt Gödel was arguably one of the most brilliant logicians in all of human history. Along with logic he was also a mathematician and a philosopher, which led him to question the thinking behind how our world works and investigate the foundations of modern mathematics itself. The idea he is most well known for is his incompleteness theorems. Published in 1931, Godel’s incompleteness theorems deal with how a system can assess and judge its own “completeness”; in mathematics this could be understood as no equation can prove its own completeness. These theorems also state that a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency i.e. — it is always complete and TRUE.

In Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal work Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid he explains the application of Godel’s incompleteness theorems to our world; to summarize, he reiterates that we can never see everything happening in a system all at once because we are IN said system, and the only cure for this would be to “pop out” of the system to observe from afar. For example, this is why many large enterprises bring in consultants to help them assess their processes and operations…they are under the assumption that the right consultant will be “in the world but not of it.”, and can provide a level of analysis that those in the system cannot provide. Philosophically one could argue that by inviting the consultants into the system and their incentive being financial remuneration from the system they become OF the system and their observations mirror those of participants in the current system…but that’s another argument for another day :).

If we take the concept of the incompleteness theorem and apply it to our own corporate processes, what does that look like? It looks like that no matter what we think we know or we think we can control, we can never completely design a system that proves itself complete and true. And in these spaces of ignorance due to our inability to pop out, these spaces of what we don’t know…THAT is where we’ll find entropy, which often takes the form of evolution.

We were all taught evolution in school; this is the concept of how organisms change and adapt to their environments over time. Evolution could be via branching (Darwin) or fusion (Margulis), but regardless of how, there is a change made in a resulting organism that is then tested in the environment…a mutation, if you will. Sometimes these mutations are evolutionary dead-ends and over time they end up putting the organism in a metaphorical “corner” of which it cannot escape. Other times, these mutations are so aberrant that they result in the death of the organism in short order…an evolutionary mulligan.

If we apply this biological concept to our human constructs, we can see plenty of similarities. Evolutionary dead-ends are corporate mergers gone bad (AOL Time Warner) or a dedication to a particular product at the expense of changing trends or technology (Kodak, Blockbuster). An example of an aberrant mutation could be the Facebook and Amazon phones, or Google glass…while these products did not kill their parent company, they killed the organization they originated from, never to be tried again.

The explicit acknowledgement that change will happen no matter how we define our processes or policies is something that many organizations struggle with. There is a common thread through most C-suites that “If we plan better, we can identify what will change” or “If we take all the time we need to develop the PERFECT solution, we’ll be all set”….this has been proven to be a complete fallacy time and time again.

What we need to do in our constructs is create the space for “good” mutation while simultaneously making “bad” mutations obvious and evident; we want to allow entropy that will help to strengthen our organization and minimize the effects of entropy that could potentially not weaken it. Muscles develop when the tissue constantly tears and repairs itself, and we should be looking to apply that same type of thinking to our constructs…stress on a system is inevitable, but optimally that stress will result in a stronger construct, not destroy it beyond repair (we will discuss how to calculate exactly how much stress a construct can absorb in a future piece.) Author Nassim Taleb talks of a concept of “antifragility”; this is neither resilience nor robustness but the ability for something to utilize shocks to itself in order to grow and strengthen itself against this type of disruption in the future. Basically the thought is to use the constant presence of entropy as a stone to sharpen your iron against..and THAT is what we are striving for.

To restate in different terms: we are trying to engineer our constructs to maximize the opportunity for good mutation, and the presence of bad mutation is quickly identified and then analyzed to see if it can then be repurposed to help build robustness and create resilience. Easier said than done, right? Well…maybe not!

***

If we are going to design our constructs to be antifragile the first concept we need to keep in mind is Gall’s Law. John Gall was an American pediatrician and author who researched what makes systems work, and what makes them fail. He then turned this research into multiple books on what he called the systemantics, which resulted in his famous rule of thumb:

In other words: any complex system that works is a result of the evolution of a simple system that worked when it was created. Conversely, a system that is designed to be complex from scratch not only never works but cannot be made to work due to its inherent complexity.

Now let’s consider how we design processes in our constructs: we typically start with a goal in mind and design the steps that will be needed to reach that goal. Along the way we add validation steps (to make sure the process is being followed), verification steps (to make sure the process is proceeding as planned) and, if we’re really forward thinking, feedback loops (to feed learning back into the process). When it’s all said and done we have this wonderfully complete and beautiful process…that will NEVER work. People will skip steps due to perceived hassle or inconvenience (which negate the validation and feedback steps) or they will skip the process completely and find other means to accomplish their goal (negating the verification and feedback steps); this is typically not a result of malice but of incentive as we are incentivized to accomplish goals NOT follow a process.

In order to countermand this flaw in the HumanOS we need to start by creating the simplest yet sufficient process we can identify. This process should serve to accomplish the output of the process but not be encumbered by ANYTHING that does not aid in the successful completion of the process. Now, those of you that are highly risk-averse are probably saying “But what about the risks?! What about compliance!” I am not suggesting we ignore these valid concerns; what I am suggesting is that to start the process should be as light as possible, and after it’s designed a small batch of deliverables should be run through the process from start to finish. This minimizes risk (by not allowing the process to run unchecked), minimizes delay (by only creating the bare minimum steps) but also creates the opportunity to observe in a controlled environment not only what the process delivers but also what opportunities have been presented for the process itself. Typically observers will find that there are steps that should be “tweaked” in order to fine-tune the process to maximize delivery efficiency. Another intended consequence of this small-batch process testing is that observers who are knowledgeable in your construct’s governance expectations (Audit/Risk/Compliance) then have the opportunity to add these necessary steps to the process itself, AGAIN while processing small batches that allows observers to intimately observe progress.

There is another thing we should consider as we build these necessarily simple but sufficient processes, and this lesson comes from nature itself. It deals with how nature views time and gives us another insight into how to ensure we’re purposeful with the amount of complexity we introduce…this concept is called assembly theory.

We started this piece with a reference to time, and how we as humans view it as immutable. However, physicists from Newton to Einstein have stated that the human experience of time i.e. past, present, and future is a function of human observation (Einstein went as far to call it an “illusion”). In all of the fundamental laws of physics there is no commonly-accepted theory that time is moving and directional. Things like Newton’s laws of motion, or laws of thermodynamics…time is fixed and passes but never CHANGES.

Assembly theory, first proposed in 2017, argues that time IS in fact moving and directional, and is actually necessary for creation of life in our world. Sara Walker in her piece Time is an Object for Aeon Magazine posits that the complex biological objects in our life do not (and could not) exist outside of time. She argues that there are numerous objects that are too complex to just instantaneously arise; there needs to be a passage of time and a building of the underlying materials in unique combinations to create these necessarily complex objects. She gives examples of proteins and complex molecules that could only have arisen out of a combination of evolution AND time…that these things could only come to be by a succession of evolutionary experiments that (almost) miraculously result in a stable organism. NOTE: if you’re really interested in the concept of spontaneous complex organisms arising instantaneously, look up the explanation of a Boltzmann Brain. Apologies in advance.

As a result of Walker’s experiments she observed that molecules that are a result of random processes cannot get beyond 13 steps; only living systems with a concept of time (and evolution) advance past 15 steps. This means that biological objects that potentially came together at random are NEVER a result of more than 13 discrete steps. Attempts to create complex biological organisms with more than 13 steps result in a stew that most closely resembles tar; a messy biological slop with limited coherence (Are the LaBrea tar pits where life was first trying to evolve in North America? One wonders…)

Why did we take this excursion into physics and fairly recent theory? A running theme in these articles is the usage of biology as a metaphor in lieu of the mechanical engineering metaphors common to organizations, enterprises, and our modern world. If biology itself needs an evolutionary hand to create organisms of more than 13 steps, why would WE purposefully design complex systems that need the equivalent of an evolutionary hand to be successful?

In summary, assembly theory provides us with a highly useful and simple heuristic: limit processes to no more than 13 steps.

***

Another contributor to the complexity in our process design is what sometimes feels like EVERYONE has to be involved in the design. In most organizations doing things by both committee and consensus seems to be the rule; the psychological motivations for this range from the goal to make everyone feel included (and by extension create an inclusive organization) to the goal of minimizing risk and or exposure to potential downstream negative effects by including anyone who could potentially be involved in the process.

There is an old adage about the platypus as an example of “God designing by committee”; a mammal with webbed feet, a duck bill, and thick fur? That also lays eggs and is poisonous? No wonder it gave biologists and scientists fits when it first arrived in England in 1799…how do we classify this thing? And is there any animal that from the outside appears MORE complex than the platypus?

In order to mitigate the inherent complexity that results from “design by committee” we need to limit who exactly is involved in the creation of the process (again, think simple yet sufficient.) When we’re speaking about large organizations this seems easier said than done…how small is small enough, how large is too large?

Remember our friend Robin Dunbar from an earlier section? He and scientist Mark Burgess (remember that name, he’ll be coming up again later) published a study on the relationship phenomena of how Wikipedia edits happen. They studied the interactions between people when it comes to making updates, edits, and deletions to articles on Wikipedia; their frequency, their validity, their contentiousness. It appears from outside observation that edits happen in spurts and swarms, and the authors were curious to see “how many people, editing an article, create conflict around both their edits and the article in question?”

After accounting for automatic updates and studying over 800+ topics that were edited by over 260,000 unique users they realized that the size of a group that results in maximum contention is eight. That is, when there is a group of eight unique users updating a particular article there is the highest likelihood of conflict amongst users. Their research also showed that contention appeared most frequently when articles had the minimum of four unique users making changes.

Would it be overly bold to say that process design in most organizations is like editing a wikipedia article? Think about it:

• There are pre-existing constraints: Wikipedia has the article format, processes have the system they function as a component of

• Multiple authors with either complementary or conflicting motivations and interest in the article/process

• Varying degrees of interest in the subject at hand (some people are more involved in the topic than others, some have varying levels of knowledge and/or exposure)

If we approach process design knowing that “more contributors =/= better” as well as “more contributors = higher chances of conflict” we can hedge how we create our simple yet sufficient processes by limiting the amount of initial contributors to less than 4. If this is not possible for any multitude of reasons we can then go in with an expectation that there is a likelihood of collision due to conflicting opinions. However, if at all possible we should limit the total number of contributors to less than 8. This approach will provide us the best opportunity for success with minimal friction or resistance.

***

Up until this point we’ve specifically been speaking about processes when it comes to entropy, and designing for antifragility…but what about other aspects of our construct? What about our architecture, in either software or systems design? What about something like organizational structure? When it comes to structure and architecture we need to keep a few concepts at the forefront of our minds, the first of which is loose coupling.

After World War II the US and the Soviet Union entered into an arms race, seeing who could make better/more efficient/more effective weapons; while we frequently jump to nuclear arms, there was also a race in conventional weaponry, and the first place that the initial results of this race were observed was in America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict. The North Vietnamese Army was supplied by the Soviets, while the South Vietnamese Army was supplied by the U.S.; the North Vietnamese utilized the AK-47, whereas the South Vietnamese were armed with the latest in Western conventional arms, the Armalite M-16. The South Vietnamese army was very quick to complain about their new arms and it’s performance versus the AK, the results of which is a perfect example of tight coupling.

The M16 components were tightly coupled in an effort to create reliable performance; however the complexity of the components coupled with the wet climate of Southeast Asia resulted in a rifle that frequently jammed and needed an abnormal amount of maintenance (taking it apart, cleaning the barrel, cleaning the bolt, etc.) in order to maintain its reliability. The AK-47, however, had stamped components that were loosely coupled. It was often remarked that you could pick one up and if you shook it, it would rattle. This loose coupling allowed for the parts to distort due to weather and climate and it would still function reliably (accuracy, however, is a different story). This loose coupling was combined with a stronger round than the M16, which means that if the gun had debris in the mechanicals or barrel they could maintain the gun by FIRING A ROUND, which cleared the action and prepared the weapon for use. In the middle of combat in a sweltering jungle, which solution is preferable?

We should apply this concept in the same way in regards to the systems we architect and the organizations we design. We need to create a culture of “design for redesign” which will allow our construct to absorb stress and flex accordingly without breaking, which contributes to antifragility. In our organizations this means we purposefully mention how the current state (or “reality”) should not be considered the END REALITY, and that we will change and grow as opportunities and challenges present themselves. The best way to demonstrate this concept is to design our systems with a high degree of modularity; this implies that the pieces of our organization or architecture can be moved around or repositioned when circumstances change. Again, it is best to be explicit when it comes to fungibility: we acknowledge that we cannot hot-swap people or components (typically), but we need to keep the ability for movement in mind when we design for current reality.

***

We have now introduced heuristics for both process and architecture to design constructs that will accommodate entropy and also serve to minimize complexity, but there is yet another example in nature that we can use when designing either to aid in minimization of runaway entropy: the fractal.

First coined in 1975 by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the term fractal refers to a geometric shape that appears similar at various scales; whether the observer zooms in or out (“pushes down” or “pop out”, to steal from Hofstadter) the appearance of the shape is similar. Think of a coastline: when you view it from a satellite, a plane, a lighthouse, standing on it and zooming in with a microscope, the further up or down you go, the shape will be similar at all levels. Other examples in nature include snowflakes, algae, animal coloration patterns, and pulmonary vessels.

Speaking of pulmonary vessels: theoretical physicist Geoffrey West wrote the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. This book discusses his observations around scaling laws evident in nature As part of this book West creates what he calls “West’s Postulates”, the second of which is called Terminal Unit Invariance. What this means is that in the terminal units of a system or network, these units have the same relative size and characteristics. Think of the blood vessels that terminate in your fingers/toes…those blood vessels have the same relative size and characteristics of the vessels that feed them, and the vessels that feed THOSE vessels, so on and so on…this is terminal unit invariance.

This concept can be applied to our constructs that scale…think of our organizational hierarchy, or the processes by which your enterprise delivers value to its customers. I posit that without even knowing where you work, or your organization’s structure, there’s a fair amount of diversity when it comes to “how the sausage is made.” Sometimes this is by design, as it creates a bulwark against the perceived presence of people who are not competent enough to operate in the higher areas of an organization; more often than not, it’s a natural outcropping of unguided growth over time…there’s that “e” word again! In many technology-centric organizations there is the concept of portfolio management: what are we working on currently, what value are we delivering to the customer, how does the work progress from a strategic initiative down to a granular deliverable for a team? Many companies as of late have undertaken efforts to map this process or procedure to understand where there is a lack of flow, or waste in the system. Most companies, after completing a mapping exercise of this magnitude, wonder how they even get anything done at all!

And here is where the fractal comes into play: as we discussed earlier, processes should be simple yet sufficient with a limited number of steps…NOW we need to ensure that the process is self-similar at ALL levels. This will have numerous advantages:

• If a construct is self-similar at all levels of abstraction, any entropy (a.k.a. Deviance from norms) will appear obvious

• A self-similar construct minimizes cognitive load of those that participate in the construct

• Also, a self-similar construct provides outside observers the ability to view and assess said construct without requiring minute levels of detail (“if it works at 50,000 feet it’ll work at 500 feet”)

If over time entropy causes the construct to drift, or start to become needlessly complex, those at any level of the construct will be able to recognize it easily and at the minimum question why this complexity is arising. There is a distinct possibility that yes, this entropy is welcome and will create a more antifragile construct, but odds are it’s not welcome and this observation could be interpreted as a leading indicator that the construct needs to be re-evaluated.

(NOTE: we will discuss the concept of scaling in more detail in a future piece.)

***

Processes and systems design are tricky things; it’s part of the HumanOS to design complex systems with complex interactions, but more often than not this unnecessary complexity sows the seeds of our own destruction. It’s also part of the HumanOS to develop a false sense of confidence and risk avoidance in the face of entropy, which remains undefeated. And if we cannot prevent or defeat entropy, we should make every effort we can to build constructs that can adapt to it with minimal discomfort. We can do this by utilizing the heuristics above to “cheat” our constructs towards entropy and evolution for the positive!

REFERENCES:

Time is an object — Sara Walker, Aeon

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas Hofstadter

Symbiotic Planet — Lynn Margulis

Assembly Theory

Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail — John Gall

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder — Nassim Taleb

The Gun — CJ Chivers

Scale — Geoffrey West

Cultural change is a deceptively-large part of organizational change and is also broadly acknowledged to be the most difficult endeavor of said effort. Changing a culture is HARD. The inherent complexity of addressing cultural change is that it cannot be tackled directly via a “frontal assault”; change in this arena can only truly be enacted by approaching from an oblique angle, so that the cultural defenses do not realize what is happening until it is hopefully too late. The further along an organization is in its lifecycle, the longer it has been in existence, the stronger and more cemented its culture becomes, making itself seemingly impervious to change.

Let’s back up for a moment, and ask the question: why do companies want to change their culture? There’s a limitless list of reasons for attempting to do so: maybe your competition has lapped you and you’re concerned about being left behind. Maybe your leadership has changed and they’re looking to introduce some change. Or quite possibly, maybe there is a general sense that “what got us here won’t get us there”, and employees are left wanting.

“Changing behaviour without changing beliefs results in change that does not stick.” — Todd Goodwin, Infinite Loops

In the scenarios above, the leaders or employees are becoming aware of the situation and are realizing that a change may be needed for the continued success of the company or even themselves. Which begs the question: if everyone sees that a change is necessary, why is that change so hard? Enter: the egregore.

In esoterica and metaphysics an egregore is defined as a non-physical entity (a “thoughtform”) that arises from a group of individuals and their collective thoughts. Egregores can be created intentionally, but often they are created unintentionally and can have a powerful and lasting influence on the thoughts, emotions, and actions of people who are in said group. Egregores can even become so big that they seemingly take on a life of their own even AFTER the group that created it has moved on to something else.

How does this relate to cultural change, you say? Let’s look at what we’re discussing…we’re discussing the idea of cultural change inside an organization that has been around for a while, which in effect created its OWN egregore! That egregore has grown, matured, and become so ingrained it is basically a non-physical manifestation of the culture itself. Picture a giant cloud looming over an organization; regardless of whether benevolent or malevolent this cloud is an encapsulation of the distilled culture of an enterprise. From what we discussed regarding cultural change we know we cannot attack this egregore head on but must attempt to change it from the sides. So how do we do this without the egregore noticing and rising to defend itself?

First, let’s look at a man by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck was a French biologist and naturalist in the late 1700s/early 1800s. Lamarck was a supporter of evolutionary theory (he was a contemporary of Darwin) and out of this came the ideas known now as Lamarckism. Lamarckism centers on the idea of biological inheritance; it supposes that an organism inherits characteristics from its parents, and typically these inherited characteristics are ones that the parent acquired through use. For example, a blacksmith who developed a strong upper-body from swinging a hammer against an anvil all day passed on this strength to his offspring (this idea was considered controversial for its time and it is only recently that research in both genetics and epigenetics has this theory been given some potential supporting proof.)

If we shift the blacksmith metaphor to one of a large organization and apply Lamarckism, we realize that organizational cultures pass down through generations of new hires the characteristics that are most prevalent in the organization’s culture…the characteristics that are most “used.” The continued heritance of these attributes in newer and future generations creates an almost unbreakable bond between these characteristics and the organization itself. How does one combat this? Maybe we should see how biology works…let’s look at the mechanism that is typically used to introduce new attributes into an organization.

Presenting: Lynn Margulis. Lynn was an American evolutionary biologist whose biggest contribution to science was the concept of symbiogenesis: the idea that new organisms can arise by the combination of two distinct organisms into a new, unified organic creation. This theory has been successfully demonstrated in the evolution of mitochondria and, like Lamarckism, was originally considered heterodox thinking…until it wasn’t.

Whether these organizations believe it or not, they follow this biological behaviour every time they hire a new employee; the addition of a new person to the enterprise creates a new organism that is a combination of the pre-existing organism with the new attributes contained in the recent entrant. However (and this is where the egregore shows its head), the recent entrant over time typically has their attributes that are NOT part of the culture blunted and or “dis-used”. As a result, these attributes (which have the ability to start shifting a culture) wither and die from neglect and any hopes of making lasting change are gone. What hope do we have?

The secret in “slaying” the egregore is to create a COMPETING egregore; we are not going to “shift mindsets” or change the current culture…we’re going to create a NEW one. This new egregore is composed of the behaviours, mindset, and actions that you would like the new culture to resemble. The best way to create this competing egregore is to identify and unify the members of your organization that are operating in the “new” way while simultaneously hiring and/or recruiting others who are open and amenable to adopting the cultural profile you seek to attain. These like-minded individuals will begin the work of creating the competing egregore and sow the cultural seeds that will be required to change. As this new egregore grows and develops others will feel the “need” to join this new egregore for a variety of reasons that may or may not be known to them consciously.

***

As we try to create this new egregore, the first challenge we need to tackle is the challenge of getting others to collaborate and contribute to this new idea. Michael Suk-Young Chwe, author of Rational Ritual, calls this a coordination problem…how do we get others to participate in this group? Knowing what we do about the “HumanOS”, we know that people are typically likely to join in and participate in a group if they know others who share their mental model(s) are as well.

The last scenario I described (knowing another’s mental models) is defined by Chwe as common knowledge. Common knowledge is knowledge that both parties know but also they know that the other party “knows”. It is in this scenario:

• I know something (say, X=2)

• You know the same thing (x=2)

• I know that you know (I know you know ‘x=2’)

• You know that I know that you know (you know that I know that you know ‘x=2’)

• I know that you know that I know that you know

That might be confusing, so take a moment to think about it and it makes better sense. The shortcut is that both parties have knowledge that is shared, and they have confidence that the knowledge that’s shared is THE SAME.

When all parties involved share the same knowledge (not just information, but KNOWLEDGE) this can be defined as common; that knowledge is then used as a baseline to establish this new egregore.

Common knowledge can be created in a few ways. The first way that common knowledge is created is through history; information and concepts that are passed down throughout the history of an organization or culture become common knowledge (remember our buddy Lamarck?). Unfortunately we are trying to create a new culture that doesn’t have the history of common knowledge to build upon, so that leaves us with another option: the ritual.

In this context rituals are defined as “social practices that generate common knowledge.” A simple example of this in the corporate setting would be the all-colleage town hall. Everyone convenes at a pre-determined date and time and everyone hears the same message simultaneously; this creates the “I know you know I know etc.” loop and quickly grounds the population in that common knowledge. When we think about the presentations that are given during these types of events (or speeches, or demonstrations), consider the language being used…the language, words, verbiage are specifically chose to try and limit how many meanings are being conveyed i.e. the speaker is attempting to prevent mis-interpretation.

With our egregore we will need to create rituals that create common knowledge, directly in the face of currently-existing rituals that support the current egregore …a challenge! To do this we need to find individuals with some unique attributes to cause.

***

There are a few attributes that are vital to the creation of this egregore, one of which is the requirement of networked, influential presence. Niels Pflaegling talks about the concept of “organizational physics”: in every organization there are 3 types of networks:

• Formal: your official hierarchy, the “org chart”

• Informal: the people who while not necessarily reporting to or working with each other have strong connections and share information and knowledge

• Value Creation: this is the network of people who “get things done.” These are the “go talk to Mary, she knows how to get this sorted” type

All 3 of these networks are important in a company as they represent different connections and nodes of how customer value is created. The egregore we are looking to create will need to pull from all of these networks to be successful, as these networks can be represented by a Venn diagram and most organizations have a healthy overlap amongst regions.

Right now you’re probably thinking “how the heck do I find these people? And don’t I need more than a handful of people from each?” There’s a secret here: you really only need three people.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s first book The Tipping Point he discusses how ideas reach a “tipping point”. Ideas are said to have reached their tipping point when they become mainstream and “tip over” into a socially-acceptable idea/practice/methodology (*cough* common knowledge *cough*). Gladwell states “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” Gladwell also references the Pareto Principle (80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the causes) to help drive this point home; a vital few people can greatly influence the odds of success. But who are these people, and where can we find them? Per Gladwell these vital few fit into 3 archetypes:

• Connectors
  -People who are in the habit of making introductions
  -Social equivalent of a network hub

• Mavens
  -“information specialists”
  -They accumulate knowledge and know how to share it with others
  -“pathologically helpful”

• Salesmen
  -Charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills
  -“Persuaders”
  -They have a trait which makes others want to agree with them

If we view the 3 different types of networks as a Venn diagram, you notice there are overlaps between the shapes, and in these overlaps are where we find the “vital few”.

• Connectors:
  -Sit between the Formal and Informal networks
  -Have positional authority and a myriad of informal connections
  -This helps them connect those in “authority” with a large population inside the organization

• Salesmen:
  -Sit between the Formal and Value-creation networks
  -Have both the positional authority and reputational cachet
  -This helps their message be heard because they are typically respected

• Mavens:
  -Sit between the Informal and Value-creation networks
  -Have a myriad of informal connections and reputational cachet
  -This helps them introduce new ideas in a “bottom-up”, informal way

When you successfully gather these people your egregore will now be able to share it’s common knowledge memes to a wide array of people inside your organization, and that meme will be viewed as originating from the inside (not a “planned, organization-wide change initiative”), and it will be attached to the reputational cachet of those who are respected. This will greatly deepen the attractiveness of this egregore and will help accelerate it’s acceptance.

The difficult part? How to identify these people! The one proven and realistically the best way to find these types of “nodes” in an organization is to observe the interactions amongst people over time. What leaders seem to always be involved with interesting ideas? What people’s names always seem to come up when discussing the organization’s current initiatives? Who consistently gets called out as “go talk to X, they know what’s up”…these are the types of signals you need to watch out for as they will help clue you into who are the vital few you need to engage in your egregore.

There is also another possibility; there is the possibility that you GROW these people INSIDE the egregore. Think back to the common-knowledge rituals. The authority are the ones who create the rituals and ceremonies that create common knowledge (which power the egregore); as the egregore’s memes attract more people there may be some leaders or influential thinkers in the organization that gravitate towards this memeplex. They now become your Connectors or your Salesmen without explicitly seeking them out!

One other (potentially controversial) idea when it comes to building your egregore…in addition to the vital few above you will also need to enlist “counter-elites” from the current egregore to bolster the odds of success. But, what is a “counter-elite”?

Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist who specializes in a field he calls cliodynamics, which is mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. His work involves modeling history to find similarities in societies that rise and fall, and one of his theories is that revolutionaries occur when there is an overproduction of “elites” in a culture; basically, there are more people who have ambitions to move into the higher levels of a society than open spaces. These people historically are the ones who not only have expressed their displeasure with the current state of the culture/society but also have the exposure and recognition to push back against it: the “counter-elites.” A quick perusal of the French Revolution, the rise of Communism in many countries to see this in action…who are the ones carrying the flag the highest, extorting the virtues of the “new culture” the loudest? They’re the elites who feel left behind.

Building on this concept: this egregore will surreptitiously be revolutionary to the current culture while appearing evolutionary. And when the current egregore realizes that a revolution is at hand the organizational antibodies (“The Powers That Be” i.e.- the current “elites”) will mobilize to defeat it and or to blunt it. This is why a cohort of counter-elites will be vital; they should have both achieved much in the current egregore but are wanting for more/better/different enough that they will embrace this new cultural construct and push back against the organizational inertia that will try to countermand this creation.

Back to our rituals: the rituals we described earlier contribute to the culture of this new egregore, and these are created by what is seen as the “authority” of the culture. Consider the town hall example: the “authority” behind these rituals is typically the leadership and/or executives of an organization who utilize this ritual to create common knowledge…they’re the stewards of this knowledge creation. In our new egregore these counter-elites and vital few should be leveraged to assist in creating the rituals that this new egregore will need to survive, and their reputational cachet will increase the odds of this not only survival but success!

NOTE: As we begin to plant the seeds of our egregore we should look to enlist these counter-elites to our cause, but ONLY IF they share our mindset and worldview. If a counter-elite only wants to attain power and they see this competing culture as a way to do so they should be avoided. However, if there is someone who’s at the fringes of the current leadership culture and they have a growth mindset, they could be your best ally!

***

Once we have our rituals to create our common knowledge, and we have identified the people that will help us carry the message, we now need to get our message out to others, but how do we do that? We need to create memes to carry our message!

The concept of a meme was first established by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. He describes a meme as an “idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.” Howard Bloom builds on this concept in stating that memes are “idea replicators” with the power to pull together a superorganism; memes represent a locus for our collective consciousness. They knit those in the group together and are a demonstration to those not in the superorganism of what the group is about. But most importantly….memes can be used to recruit others to join the cause.

There exists a concept of “mimetic contagion” where a meme that is desired by others begins to be adopted and spread, allowing the meme (and the underlying culture or concept) to grow exponentially and with great speed. Rene Girard the French polymath introduced this concept to explain the almost runaway popularity of ideas and desires. Think about fads throughout history…music trends, clothing, hairstyles…the reason why some of these ideas take root in our culture and then explode outwards at unprecedented velocity is a result of these fads creating a meme, which then becomes contagious.

Along with the idea of memes and mimetic contagion, Girard introduced the idea of “mimetic desire.” Mimetic desire is when we want things because others want them; while some social scientists could consider this a “bug” in our HumanOS, this can be used positively to recruit others and help expand the superorganism. When this desire grows and starts consuming more and more organisms, it can be considered contagious, and if we’re trying to create an egregore to compete with our established cultural egregore this is a simple way to grow our cohort of like-minded individuals without having to hold recruiting drives, or the requisite “dog-and-pony show” that is part of most change initiatives.

The only way to truly create mimetic desire is to start with empathy. This egregore’s memes need to touch on something that others may find uncomfortable or undesirable; it doesn’t have to be explicit, but it should poke at something that someone doesn’t like. This empathy will allow others the opportunity to not only open their minds but potentially transcend their current thinking and allow them to join this competing egregore without any fear of guilt or ostracization.

Another play on this concept of mimetic desire is the idea of “basins of attraction.” In his essay on Game B the author Jim Rutt speaks of how each one of us resides in a conceptual basin, be it culturally, socially, or organizationally. In order for us to move (Jim uses the term “dislodge”), a network attractor needs to be created to make us WANT to move…forcing us to move will just make us yearn for the previous basin and we will retreat there at the first opportunity; however if we intrinsically desire to change our basin we will move and stay there. Memes arising from common knowledge that we are exposed to via rituals will help our egregore thrive!

***

As all these concepts collide and the egregore begins to grow, the question will then become: how many people do we need? Regardless of the size of the organization, the size of the cohort will indicate how successful this attempt at creating a new egregore will be. While smaller companies can get by with fewer overall people supporting this new culture, research has shown that regardless of the size of the organization it really comes down to a matter of percentage of the overall population.

Everett M. Rogers was an American sociologist and communication theorist. His biggest contribution to the field is his seminal work, Diffusion of Innovation, which describes how and at what rate new ideas spread. His theory is that when five (5) percent of a population accepts a new idea, said idea becomes embedded within a culture. This would mean that in a company of 1,000 people you would only need FIFTY PEOPLE to have this new mindset; while this may sound like a lot it’s about the same number of people you would invite to an extended family barbecue party!

Depending on your organization’s size, 5% may be a not insignificant number. In a company of 20,000 that equates to 1,000 people…but remember! That 5% number means that this new culture is EMBEDDED and is harder to dislodge; think about the basins of attraction that we discussed earlier. If we create memes that best embody our new egregore, and we use the levers of the vital few to reach into the organization, you will never not be surprised by the amount of people that come into your orbit trying to learn more about this new “thing.” Using the concepts we’ve already discussed, that number may be closer than you may think!

But before we get to that 5%, let’s take a moment to talk about a much smaller, some would say stronger target: 150. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed a sequence of numbers that upon observation correlates to the amount of meaningful connections humans can have in social groups. The number “50” in the sequence correlates to “close friends and family”; using this construct we can see that a small, close construct of like-minded individuals can unify and not only weather the storms of opposition but also seek to carve out and create a space of their own. Dunbar’s research states that the maximum number of connections that a person can keep in their minds is 150; this is much bigger but less cohesive than a family barbecue; this is more along the lines of a wedding or a funeral. There are connections amongst all the people, but they’re weaker. If you can create a 150-person cohort with a shared mental model, this group becomes the kernel that contains the genetic material necessary for this egregore to exist and begin thriving. As the egregore grows, it would behoove the cohort to continuously split along these 150-member lines (in a process resembling cellular mitosis) to create new cohorts that share the same DNA, so to speak. This constantly-growing egregore can have multiple 150-person cohort(s) inside of it to maximize connectivity amongst the members but also to prevent growth to a scale that becomes unmanageable (we will tackle the concept of scaling the egregore in a subsequent article.)

A note on connections: in Chwe’s research he discusses the difference between strong and weak link networks. Strong link networks are defined as when “friends of friends tend to be friends.” For example, I may know you, you introduce me to Bob, and then Bob and I become friends. That is a strong link as we are friends regardless of your presence in our interactions. Conversely, weak link networks are where “friends of friends are not that person’s friend.” I know you, and you know Bob, but Bob and I are NOT friends. Both of these types of links serve a purpose: strong link networks are better for generating common knowledge and coordination, as there are tighter connections amongst people (or nodes.). Weak link networks function as “diffusion channels” and are better for spreading information as the “gossip network” moves quickly (“hey, did you hear….I heard it from …”.) When it comes to building our cohorts we can use this to our advantage; a fairly even distribution of strong and weak links will lead to higher chances to create network effects to draw others into our egregore.

A different metaphor to view this Dunbar-sized group of people would be to consider this cohort a “superorganism” . Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle describes superorganisms as a combination of multiple independent organisms that share a common definition of what they are a part of. An example of a super-organism in nature would be that of a sponge, or of an ant colony; there are countless independent entities that when combined make up a superorganism that is vested in its success (and, as an extension, its own survival.) Each person in this network, while contributing unique skills and or abilities, feels the inherent connection to the superorganism and will work to serve in the interests of the collective, even in situations where it may be counter to what they may want to do (we will discuss collective behaviour in a future post.) In our scenario we’ve created common knowledge which is represented by memes, which we then utilize to share what we believe which in turn creates a network attraction to influence others who would be open to being part of this new egregore.

***

At this point we’ve created an egregore, it’s building a superorganism with memes, generating common knowledge through rituals, and we’re levying the vital few to help create a basin of attraction to draw others to our cause. At this point the “old” egregore has taken notice of the “new” egregore. Where do we go from here?

Back to The Lucifer Principle: in this book Bloom talks extensively about the “pecking order.” Based on studies by Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, a Norwegian zoologist, and his observations of chickens this theory has come to be known as dominance hierarchies. This scenario is where a ranking order is established amongst members of an animal group; he observed in chickens that when a new hen was introduced to the flock there was a jostling for power and position amongst the other hens, and the hen with the lowest position was typically eliminated, thereby establishing the newcomer’s place in the hierarchy at the expense of another. This behaviour has been observed in various species, ranging from different types of primates and as far down as insects such as ants and paper wasps.

In our organization we have now introduced a second organism which is challenging the current dominating culture i.e. the old egregore. These two egregores will be at odds with one another until one transcends the pecking order and becomes the primary; one way to do this is over time through mimetic desire and continuous propagation but that could be risky to the new egregore as it is fighting an entrenched egregore (this is where the Lindy Effect comes into play.) The new egregore needs to establish itself in a relatively short amount of time; to do this it first needs to find a scapegoat.

Rene Girard (through Luke Burgis and Wanting) observed that when there are times of mimetic crisis, the way that a challenged group defends itself is by creating a scapegoat. This scapegoat is typically a proxy for the thing that the group is fighting against; creating this archetype unifies the superorganism (by creating a scapegoat meme) and provides an outlet for the superorganism to expel or eliminate, thereby relieving the conflict as an ersatz “blowoff valve.” And how should the egregore expel this scapegoat…with a ritual sacrifice.

As we established earlier, rituals are an efficient way to create common knowledge, and sacrificial rituals have historically been used by cultures in times of mimetic crisis to give members of the superorganism the peace of mind that comes from the message “it’s going to be ok.” The historical equivalent of this would be when primitive Mesoamerican cultures would sacrifice someone to the gods to get rid of a blight plaguing their crops…logically we know that there is absolutely zero correlation between that act and the blight subsiding, but to the superorganism the sacrifice of the scapegoat meme gave them an outlet to restore order and it helped to quell the tension. In our context, the cohort(s) that are creating the new egregore should sacrifice something that is part of the old egregore as a show of their commitment to the new egregore. In an organization this could be as simple as publicly proclaiming “NO MORE STATUS REPORTS!”, or by canceling a long-running meeting series that has traditionally been used to reinforce the previous culture’s egregore. Ideally the scapegoat that is sacrificed is so large that it horribly weakens the old egregore, but this requires true devotion and commitment on behalf of the organization’s leaders to the new egregore, examples of which in the wild are sadly few and far between.

This brings us to the end of the beginning; we have discussed many different concepts and ideas that could be used as levers to introduce a pivot to an organization’s culture, but with all these answers come many more questions: what other behaviours do we need to utilize to build our egregore? How do we grow/scale this egregore to guarantee survival? I plan on covering these topics and many more in upcoming pieces, so hopefully you stick around for the ride. Cheers!

REFERENCE:

• In Search of the Fifth Attractor, Jim Rutt

• Rational Ritual, Michael Suk-Young Chwe

• Diffusion of Innovations, Everett M. Rogers

• OpenSpace Beta, Niels Pflaeging

• Friendship: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, Robin Dunbar

• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

• The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom

• End Times, Peter Turchin

• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

• Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis

• Wanting, Luke Burgis

• Todd Goodwin, Infinite Loops Podcast ep 175