It’s been a few years since I’ve seen an interview with Jack Dorsey that didn’t read like he’d just smoked an entire copy of Atlas Shrugged, so when he announced that he was willing to fund “up to five” people to wash his hands a lot of people were a little suspicious, including me:
Twitter doesn’t exactly have a history of doing the reading before coming to class, so it wasn’t a surprise that there wasn’t so much as a nod to existingwork in the space. I also wasn’t surprised to see so much criticism emerge from a fundamental mistrust of both Twitter’s intent and execution; ambulance-chaser to the world’s worst ideas is definitely in-character for that company. That said, it’s definitely a testament to the fundamental optimism of the open source world that so many people offered to help at all.
It’s Twitter, so there’s plenty of healthy pessimism around – as one example, Diaspora developer Sean Tilley said that “the pessimistic interpretation is that Twitter wants this, but also wants to control the standard” – but even seeing that and a lot like it the “real why” question still nagged at me. Ok, you don’t want to control the client anymore. Great. You don’t necessarily want to control the infrastructure, also great, so… what’s left? We know who you are, we know what you are: what do you want to control here and to what end?
To me this smells like a cryptocurrency play. A clever one, admittedly, but still.
The general shape of that corner of the law is very strange to me; it’s illegal to create your own currency, for example, entirely legal to issue non-voting shares of stock in your company, we’re apparently undecided about cryptocoinage, and it’s not clear to me what makes any of those things different. That aside, my concern is this: if some financial services company manages to finagle enough control over, say, the wheat futures market and the bread futures market then the people who own and operate the bread-making plant in the middle wind up having very little agency over their fates beyond the decision of whether or not to operate the machinery at all.
With that model in mind, if this is a cryptocurrency play and Twitter manages to turn themselves in to the First National Bank of the Fediverse – by which I mean, if they can open up the application or storage layer while maintaining control over a separate value-exchange layer – then they can effectively meet the letter of the law as far as “open” is concerned (Readable code! Data migration!) while completely subverting open source’s ideological goals of user agency, safety and real, informed choice. If my suspicions are correct, the end play for this Twitter thing is not more agency or meaningful freedom for the participants, but simply dumping of the costs of operating the machinery of openness on an unsuspecting and ideologically-blinded audience. Or in the classic phrasing: socializing the costs and privatizing the profits. The only new twist here is the audience.
For my own part, beyond updating my sarcastic comments about the blockchain to sarcastic comments about “up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers” I’m going to ignore it. We’ve got a better future to build here, and if Twitter wants to be a part of that they can clean their own house first before wiring themselves up to everyone else’s.
Civility: A genuine plea for common understanding, or just another tool to oppress?
I mean, why not both?
Which is to say that one can genuinely wish for “civility” — a sort of courtly and dignified mode of discourse — without understanding all the ways that “civility” generally favors the more powerful parties in said discourse and/or can be used to mask or minimize within the discourse wholly awful ideas, events and opinions. Even the less formal versions of a desire for “civility,” the plaintive cries of “be nice” or “can’t we all get along?” have within them this same dichotomy. And this is why, almost inevitably, “calls for civility” are usually issued by those who have power (or belong to a powerful group): because it’s a rhetorical system of control, whether the person issuing the call consciously realizes it or not.
But let’s back up a bit. When is “Civility” just, you know, civility? Which is to say, two (or more) people engaging each other in a polite and courteous fashion? It can happen, right?
Sure! For example civility is easy when the parties engaged are at or near the same social/power level with each other. If you belong to a country club, chances are you can be perfectly civil to every other member of your country club, because you all are of more or less the same stratum: Probably professional, probably white-collar, probably of a certain level of wealth (those country club fees are a thing), probably possessing a particular world view, and so on. I pick “country club” here because it’s an easy thing to pick — and to pick on. But other organizations or fellowships work just as well. I recently joined a private library, which is a place that holds book events and author tours and so on; just the sort of place where I could meet other like-minded bibliophiles, who also have enough means to subscribe to a private library. I have no doubt the membership is generally perfectly civil with each other.
Likewise, civility is easy when it’s forced on you from above. There’s a near example of this: This very blog, which both has a comment policy and a moderator (waves) who isn’t shy about shaping the conversation, or deleting comments when people go out of bounds. As a result, on average, people here tend to be polite(r) to each other when they comment here than at many other places online. They are, in a word, civil. Because they know if they’re not, they lose the ability to participate in the discourse entirely. I am very clear I am practicing a system of control here — this is my house online. If you don’t want to behave when you’re in my house, you can get the hell off my lawn. Most people get that and play by the rules. Which are, again to be clear, my rules.
(Mind you, I am not enjoined to play by the same rules as everyone else here. Which is also in line with the general facts of a system of control.)
Lateral Civility — the civility of peers — is easy to have because no one person is at a particular disadvantage to any other in terms of power or status (or if they are, it’s because of other factors, and that disadvantage is often temporary). Top-Down Civility can be less congenial because even if it’s “evenly” applied, it favors those people who attitudes, status and world view are similar to the person(s) enforcing that civility, and who better implicitly understand the rules of the civility road, as it were. Civility almost always favors the “in group” whose status is not in question, and whose status is unlikely to be threatened.
So, for example, take me: Hi, I’m white, male, straight, well-off and in the cohort of age whose hands are currently on a lot of the wheels of industry, government and the creative arts. Also for the last decade or so I’ve been at or near the top of my chosen profession. I’m not an outsider in any meaningful sense. It’s super-easy for me to practice, engage with and benefit from the rhetoric of civility, because I have nothing to lose from it. And I like civility! It’s nice when people are polite to each other and we can get through whatever we’re getting through with a minimum of social friction and anxiety. Moreover, as the social primate I am, I don’t like it when people are uncivil, and attempt to make me feel uncomfortable —
— which is, to be very clear, the magic of the rhetoric of civility: It creates the conditions by which being uncivil — not playing by the rules of the “civility” game, however they were created and imposed — becomes the emotional and dialectical equivalent of any possible actual wrong that an aggrieved party brings to an issue.
So: Yes, the water system of Flint, Michigan is literally unsafe and has been made so by bad governance, but you were a dick about it to me in an online discussion, so that’s just as bad. Yes, this oil spill ruined miles and miles of coastline, but then someone had to go and splatter an executive of the company that caused the spill with the blood of a dead, oiled seabird, and that’s just uncalled for. Sure, that smooth-talking alt-right dude would happily murder the Jews if he thought he could get away with it, but then someone punched him and made him cry, so really, both sides are bad, aren’t they?
Which is why people who are not on the inside are wary of “calls for civility”: They are being told that to be heard, they have to engage in a rhetorical system in which the value of their actual injury is held to be the equivalent to the value of the other side’s emotional investment in the rules of discussion. “Yes, you are suffering, but you were also rude to me about it, so my suffering is the same.” Which is, you know, bullshit. And the injured know it, even if the person calling for “civility” is not.
Additionally, when one “calls for civility” one is very often asking people who are genuinely aggrieved to engage in a rhetorical system in which their actual injury is not seen as a problem to be addressed, but an item to be debated — which means a lot of dudes out there with no skin in the game, or who are actively malicious, laying out their “Debate: The Gathering” cards, with the sole object being to “win” the discussion, and to string it out into irrelevance. When “civility” is a stalking horse for crap like this, there is no value for those with actual injury to engage with it; it literally does them no good to do so.
You can’t demand “civility” without understanding what it costs those you demand it from. You can’t demand “civility” without understanding how it advantages you. You can’t demand “civility” without the knowledge that what you are actually saying is “this is a game to me, and you have to play it by my rules.” Or, actually, you can, in each of these cases. But then you can’t really be surprised when other people choose not to play along.
If you want people to engage in civility then the answer is simple: Help to create a world in which “civility” does not inherently and explicitly disadvantage the most injured party — where such rhetoric of discourse isn’t a system of control. It can be done! But, well. It will take a lot of work. And the real question is whether the sort of person who always calls for civility wants that world at all, or is in fact satisfied with the world we have now, because “civility” is just an excuse to treat people in an uncivil manner when they call out the game for what it is.
Engineering and data science work don’t benefit from SMART goals, OKRs, or similar management favorites.
The goal of making baskets isn’t what makes you good at making baskets.
I don’t believe in goal-setting. Over the course of my career, I’ve occasionally been pressured into setting goals, always as an initiative from an executive or manager who was hoping to inject new life into an old process. I’ve done SMART goals. I’ve done OKRs. I’ve done KPIs. I dislike them all.
I don’t like goal-setting in the workplace — particularly in creative jobs like data science and engineering — because I’ve consistently found it to be ineffective, I’ve often found it to be harmful, I’ve always found it to more trouble than it’s worth, and I’ve never seen it provide me with information I actually needed to achieve results. As far as I’m concerned, goal-setting is pretty much a failure all around. And there’s a better way (I’ll talk about that at the end of the post).
Goal-setting is ineffective
It’s not hard to find mountains of research claiming to show that goal-setting is effective in achieving results. I’m not aware of any study from that body of research that was conducted in a way that justifies those claims. Any variant of “goal-setting achieves results” is a causal claim. Causal claims require (at least) two things: support for the claim, and lack of support for any plausible alternative explanations.
James Clear voiced a very plausible alternative explanation. I’ll use one of his examples: say you’re a sports team and you want to win a championship. Say you set a goal of winning the championship by a certain date. Now, let’s say you make a lot of changes in order to progress towards your goal: you recruit new players, hire and manage assistant coaches, schedule and conduct practices, and even get old recordings of competitor’s games and study them.
All these things are systems: specific behaviors you commit to do on a regular schedule. If you set up these systems, and you stick with them, you improve your chances of winning the championship. If you also set the goal of winning the championship, your chances of actually winning don’t change. The systems are necessary to the accomplishment of the goal. Actually setting the goal, and even measuring progress towards the goal, is not.
Plausible alternative explanation. The goal research doesn’t address it. Therefore, the goal research doesn’t support the claim that goal-setting achieves results.
Goal-setting carries hidden costs
A few years ago, researchers at several major business schools published a working paper on the dangers of goal setting. Their paper doesn’t prove goal-setting doesn’t work — I refer to it because it tells a few illustrative stories (all of which I quote here):
“In the early 1990s…Sears imposed a sales quota on its auto repair staff of $147/hour. This specific, challenging goal prompted staff to overcharge for work and to complete unnecessary repairs on a companywide basis... Ultimately, Sears’ Chairman Edward Brennan acknowledged that goal setting had motivated Sears’ employees to deceive customers.”
“In the late 1990s, specific, challenging goals fueled energy-trading company Enron’s rapid financial success… Enron’s incentive system [involved] ‘paying a salesman a commission based on the volume of sales and letting him set the price of goods sold.’ Even during Enron’s final days, Enron executives were rewarded with large bonuses for meeting specific revenue goals… By focusing on revenue rather than profit, Enron executives drove the company into the ground.”
“In the late 1960s, the Ford Motor Company was losing market share to foreign competitors that were selling small, fuel-efficient cars. CEO Lee Iacocca announced the specific, challenging goal of producing a new car that would be ‘under 2000 pounds and under $2,000’ and would be available for purchase in 1970. This goal, coupled with a tight deadline, meant that many levels of management signed off on unperformed safety checks to expedite the development of the car — the Ford Pinto. Investigations revealed that after Ford finally discovered [a safety] hazard, executives remained committed to their goal and instead of repairing the faulty design, calculated that the costs of lawsuits associated with Pinto fires (which involved 53 deaths and many injuries) would be less than the cost of fixing the design. In this case, the specific, challenging goals were met (speed to market, fuel efficiency, and cost) at the expense of other important features that were not specified (safety, ethical behavior, and company reputation).”
I really like the author’s summary argument:
The beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored… Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers…need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.
In other words, goal-setting is a fragile way of trying to achieve results. Not only are goal unnecessary to achieve desired results (because they don’t do anything systems don’t already do), but they also create incentives that make it easy to achieve undesired results.
Goal-setting is more trouble than it’s worth
When I make arguments like those I’ve laid out above, I often get a response of “Well, yeah, if you’re stupid about how you set goals then of coarse you get into trouble. Goals work when you do them right.”
It’s so very easy to say that.
Take a look at one example of what it takes to do OKRs “right”:
Objectives need to be the right balance between general and specific, but there are no clear ways of telling where that balance lies.
Metrics measuring progress towards goals need to have a clear definition and people need to have access to those metrics and those metrics need to be frequently updated. All of this assumes the existence of measurement systems (a good assumption for sales teams, but a bad assumption for almost everyone else).
You have to clearly define the relationships between goals across different teams, but there are no clear ways of telling how to get those definitions.
You have to be able to recognize when a goal will increase productivity at the cost of stifling innovation so you can avoid overly-prescriptive OKRs in those cases. Again, there’s no clear way to recognize those situations.
When it’s that easy to misuse a tool, it may be time to consider that the problem is the tool itself, not the users. The amount of time it takes to set goals in a way that are both meaningful and not harmful is simply not worth it. Time I spend defining and implementing and measuring progress towards goals is time I don’t spend building things that actually add value.
I think this is especially true when you consider the amount of instrumentation necessary to meaningfully and explicitly measure progress towards an end state in an engineering project. If your goal is a certain sales figure, the instrumentation is already built. If your goal is anything more ambiguous, and it usually is, building a way to measure it effectively will usually take more time and resources than it will take to actually do the thing that will actually accomplish the goal.
Goal-setting doesn’t yield actionable information
Let’s go back to the analogy of a sports team. Let’s say you set the goal of winning the championship, and let’s ignore the fact that you’ve set up all sorts of systems that will move you towards the goal without you ever needing to set the goal in the first place. Now, let’s say you reach the date of the championship you’ve wanted to win. Let’s say you lose.
What should you now do because you failed to meet your goal? How should your behavior change? Let’s reverse the scenario and say you actually won — you met your goal. Same question: therefore, what?
Whether you accomplish the goal or not does nothing but tell you whether you accomplished the goal. If you’ve already put together systems to lead you toward a desired future state, you already know what you need to do. Clearly-defined goal with measurable progress markers don’t tell you next steps. They don’t contain any information that allows you to reach your desired future state any faster or more efficiently.
I found this post by a former Google Product Lead insightful. He references Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. Makers (engineers, data scientists) are people whose job performance is measured by what they build. Managers are people whose job performance is measured by the meetings they have. Both are necessary functions (as much as makers sometimes hate to admit it, meetings are the glue that coordinate and hold together the stuff that gets built).
Talking about his experience using OKRs at Google, the author of the post said:
We consider ourselves a company founded and driven by Makers (our engineers), but somehow we settled into a Manager planning rhythm, one which mimicked accounting cycles rather than how things actually get built. “Quarterly goals?” Why are three months the right duration for building features, why not two months or four months? And there was the amusing “last week of quarter” push to try and ship all the features you’d committed to ~90 days earlier.
In a business context, most goal-setting benefits managers more than makers. If a makers need to prove their value, they can point to things they’ve built. The nature of management is such that has a less explicit set of accomplishments, and goal accomplishment is a way to prove managerial value. It’s like assessing a teacher’s value based on student test scores — and just about as valid. But because the accomplishment (or not) or goals doesn’t tell us what to do next, that’s the best we can hope for: goals don’t tell us about anything but themselves.
In my experience, goal-setting is often the refuge of weak management. Goal-setting allows organizations to pretend that getting results less messy and more predictable than it really is. The cost of that make-believe is that both makers and managers spend an inordinate amount of time managing the illusion, and to add insult to injury, they don’t even get actionable information from doing so.
What to do instead
I’ve found the following process effective:
Define a desire future state, and go ahead and call it a goal if you want. Ask yourself: “What do I want to be true about this project (or product or company) by the end of next quarter (or week or year)?”
Define obstacles that prevent you from moving toward this future end state — not things that prevent you from accomplishing it, but rather things that prevent you from moving towards it. It’s a lot less work, and generally more effective, to measure direction than distance covered.
Define tasks that mitigate the obstacles. Prioritize those tasks in terms of what you think will have the most impact on the obstacle, as well as what tasks are necessary for other tasks to be accomplished.
Tackle the tasks in order of priority, as time and resources allow. If you’re accomplishing the tasks, you’re moving towards your goal, because you’ve already defined how the task mitigates an obstacle that prevents progress towards the goal.
Is this similar to setting goals, OKRs and things like that? Yeah, it is. But this focuses on “where do I want to be?” and “what’s going to move me toward that place?” instead of “what can I commit to accomplish?” and “what can I measure?” It requires us to set up systems regardless of goals, doesn’t incentivize counter-productive behavior, takes remarkably little time to do reasonably well, yields actionable information at every step. It’s a little shift in perspective that makes a big difference in both job satisfaction and results.
Time Travel!Annalee Newitz is playing with it in their new novel The Future of Another Timeline! Or, perhaps, has been playing with it already, or will have been playing with it at some unspecified point in what might have been the future! Maybe! They’re here now to sort all the timelines out for you.
ANNALEE NEWITZ:
I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to tropes. I love to see them done well, but mostly I love to see them turned inside out, mutated, genderswapped, racebent, unraveled, or forced to wear a silly shoes. When I set out to write a time travel novel, though, I knew the tropey situation might be dire. The list of time travel tropes at TV Tropes is instructive: there are roughly a hundred of them, ranging from the Grandfather Paradox to closed time loops, and that’s not counting all the other tropes related to alternate history.
The Future of Another Timeline (on sale today!) wasn’t even supposed to be a time travel story. It started as an alternate history that was kind of small and personal. I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if abortion had been illegal when I was growing up, and the spectre of getting pregnant was looming over my horny high school self like a kaiju ready to barf napalm. So I started taking notes, building up an alternate reality without abortion rights. Then I added some angry riot grrls going on a murder spree in high school, killing rapists. Because obviously extreme times call for extreme measures.
But then I started asking myself what would have led to this dire scenario. The answer I kept returning to was time travel. A secret group of feminist time travelers was in an edit war over the timeline with a group of men’s rights activists from the future. The bad guys had deleted abortion rights from U.S. history, but my heroes would go on a mission to revert that edit, trying to create a world where riot grrls could just enjoy punk rock instead of murdering people.
I already had a pretty unusual premise, so I decided to make my time travel as mundane as possible. I chucked out the “secret time travel” tropes, and the “omg one thing in history has changed we have to change it back” storylines.
Instead, I created a world where time travel has always existed, everybody knows about it, and we all take for granted that the timeline has been heavily edited by travelers for millennia. Time machines are embedded in ancient shield rock formations on the Earth’s surface that have endured virtually unchanged since the Cambrian period half a billion years ago. Nobody knows how these devices got there, or who built them, but if you tap on the rock with a specific rhythm it opens a wormhole to the past. Humans discovered them in pre-history, and have been mucking around with the timeline ever since. In the modern era, geologists are the people who study time travel.
The idea of a heavily-edited timeline felt real to me. Plus, who doesn’t want to push the “go” button on an incomprehensible technology that’s barely distinguishable from nature?
As you might guess, this setup raises even more questions. Why isn’t everybody changing everything all the time? Are there any limits? Who is in charge of running these Machines when we discover them? What I found was that the more I set limits, the more the standard tropes could be helpful. After all, a trope is basically a narrative limit we’ve all seen before, so it doesn’t sound so damn strange when I say that of course there’s an organization called the Chronology Academy that controls access to the Machines. There’s only one timeline (and you know what that means, Back to the Future fans), and we can only go to the past. If you meet yourself in the past, as you know from Tropey McTroperson, BAD THINGS HAPPEN. If a traveler changes the timeline, or is present for a change, only they remember the old timeline.
Then I came up with more weird rules that I haven’t seen in any trope list yet. For reasons that scientists don’t understand, the wormhole won’t open for travelers unless they’ve lived in close proximity to a time machine for roughly four years. So you have to be pretty damn serious about time travel, and willing to devote a lot of time (heh) to it, before you can jump into the past.
Most of my characters are women and people of color, so I also played with a trope that’s become quite common recently in our slightly-more-woke-but-not really times. That’s the “scary to time travel if you’re not a cis white man” trope. You’ve seen it on TV in shows like Timeless and Legends of Tomorrow, and much further back in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. The idea is that everything was much worse for women and people of color in the past–and, implicitly, that things are better for us in the present.
In Future of Another Timeline, I wanted to question that idea. First of all, the present is no piece of cake, and in many post-colonial places it’s hard to say things are definitely better than past eras. Yes, there were different hardships in the past, but throughout history there have always been spaces of resistance where women and people of color and other marginalized groups could organize. When my character Tess goes back in time, she’s able to ally herself with 19th century feminists and anarchists; when she travels back to the 1st century BCE, she finds safe haven among priestesses of the goddess al-Lat. I wanted to recognize that there have always been powerful women and people of color in history; it’s just that historians have deleted our contributions.
One of the major differences between our timeline and the alternate one in my novel is that women and freed slaves achieved universal suffrage in 1870 in the U.S. As a result, Harriet Tubman became a senator in 1880. I wanted to center an event that’s rarely glimpsed in time travel stories, instead of the usual (tropey) Civil War and World War II. And the Big Bad my novel, Anthony Comstock, is trying to crush women’s reproductive rights. Only the Daughters of Harriet, a secret organization of intersectional feminist time travelers, can stop him. YES IT’S A TROPE. But it’s swerving in a new direction.
Navigating the trope obstacle course to write about time travel has been delightful and hard as hell. Still, I love that it allowed me to visit a 1992 Grape Ape concert, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the ancient city of Petra in 13 BCE, and the Ordovician period about half a billion years ago on a megacontinent that no longer exists.
I think of stories as map overlays on a skeletal field of tropes. One story might be like the traffic layer in Google maps, which draws angry red lines down the freeway during rush hour. But another is like the terrain layer, which converts the cartoony perfection of an abstract map into an overhead view of mismatched houses and blobs of unexpected trees. Each new layer, like a new story, offers a fresh perspective on the same old piece of land. I hope The Future of Another Timeline gives you a new way of navigating the histories you thought you knew.
