Future Guardian,
17 years ago, I wrote a heady, overly intellectual dissertation contemplating the nature of intelligence and what it means to be a person by observing the intersection between AI and Art.
*Whew* … even that short description was a bit much.
I'm sharing this because even though that work was ... a bit of a stretch (as you do in college) ... there's one lesson I've seen repeated over and over and over again.
What matters more than what comes out of a system is what you put into it to begin with.
Here's the essence of that work I did.
So, at the time (this was 2005ish) I was simultaneously geeking out about AI and about the ways in which people react to images.
(Iconoclasm is ... fascinating ... that someone can have such an emotional response to an image as to physically attack it)
As I approached my undergrad dissertation, I was tasked with creating a physical artwork and a written piece to go with it.
I decided I wanted to explore the nature of how we perceive an intelligent entity.
Because I'd seen people react and behave towards inanimate objects the way they do towards people.
Stay with me, I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds.
The culmination of that work was an interactive video installation.
It was an abstract representation of the room people stood in, and it changed based off how people reacted to it ...
Basically it was intended to "pay attention" to the most active group in the room.
I remember standing in the back of the room,
Watching people get really frustrated because they couldn't get the thing to pay attention to them.
I held that observation in the back of my mind for years.
And then AI came along.
And I watched the whole thing unfold over again.
The ultimate lesson for me is this.
Whether we are intelligent beings, or computers, or the environment made of up seemingly inanimate objects ...
We are all systems.
We ARE systems, and we are a part of them.
And invariably, every result that we see is the perfect result for the system that the result came from.
More important than trying to sort out the result of the system, is figuring out everything that goes into the system to get that result.
It's no surprise then that when I ran into this quote, I could only nod to the truth:
"Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does." - W. Edwards Demming
Since fully accepting that premise and looking through the lens of "system" into not just my business but my entire life, I've found a significant level of what I can only describe as empowerment.
Want to not act like an a-hole? (DALA)
Recognize the systems of your life. Recognize that the results of what you are doing, of what is happening around you, of what is happening to you, are all the exact correct result for the system you are in.
Let's explore …
The magic comes in stepping backwards through this idea.
Accepting the premise of the idea that every result of a system is the perfect result because that's what the system was designed to do, is to accept that systems are "set" things.
Which they are.
It's also to acknowledge that everything which produces an result can be seen as "a system."
You are unhappy with your weight (for sake of argument).
Well, the result of your current weight, your current fitness and health, that is a "result," of the system of your life. Figuring out all the pieces of your life might help you better gain clarity on that which is most responsible for the result you don't desire.
You might skim through your days, your habits, your practices ... you might see that you eat pretty well, and you work out 2-3 times a week, so why is it that you are gaining weight, or losing weight?
"Something is wrong," you might think, with the way you are doing things. Your diet isn't right. Your workouts aren't right. Well, if every system "is perfectly designed to get the result that it does", then you actually have a perfect system for having the weight that you currently have.
It's a great system! It's just not giving you the result you want.
Nothing is wrong, you just have a disconnect between your expectation and reality. That means it's time to consider DALA, and look very closely at your behaviors.
You might then discover that, while most of the time you eat pretty well and are active, you haven't noticed that you're actually eating a lot more than you think you are at several meals, because you have kids who are super picky about their food, and so you end up eating off their plate. Then you might also realize that even though you feel like you are active, the times you aren't active you are sitting on your butt for hours.
Now we see the truth of the system. You "eat well" and "work out," but the result across the board is you are consuming more calories than you expend.
In this case, your humanness is part of the system and that introduces a ton of variability / unreliability.
How do you change the system? DALA. In this case it's your behavior.
We don't need to continue down that path, the point is that once you start recognizing the result you experience is CORRECT for the system that result originates from, it's easier to make adjustments.
A quick side jaunt into system reliability.
Let's talk about the likelihood that every morning you turn on the light, the light actually comes on.
Seems like something that would happen 100% of the time, right?
Well, let's explore.
Is the light bulb always 100% of the time going to be working? No, eventually it will fail. Let's say 99% of the time the bulb will be working when you flip on the switch.
(Using whole numbers for ease of the example)
Ok what about the switch itself?
Will the switch also 100% of the time work? It's unlikely to fail, but stuff breaks down and stops working over time. I don't think you can say it will completely 100% always work.
Again, for the sake of the argument, let's say 99%.
What about the electricity? What if there's an outage? What if you screw up your bill? Again, not a 100% certainty that there will always be electricity. Let's say 99%.
What about the human? What if you're really tired in the morning one morning and start flicking the wrong light switch? Sounds silly? Yet, again, if you can imagine having a morning where you fumble around and flip on the wrong switch, you don't have a 100% certainty of turning on the light. Let's say 99%.
"Ok ok, so, 99% of the time, it works every time, great." - you interject
Hold on there Fantana. That's not how systems work.
In a system, you multiply the individual reliability of components to discover the reliability of the system.
In this case, it's not a 99% chance that the light will turn on in the morning.
It's a .99*.99*.99*.99 = 96.05% chance
Look, obviously turning on a light is not a super critical system. You've probably never worried about getting the light on 100% of the time.
But this perspective becomes useful whenever you are trying to figure out why the result of a system doesn't match your expectations.
Take the weight loss example above.
Let's say you have 100% consistency on how active you are, but it turns out you only have an 80% consistency on eating within your parameters. And that other 20% of the time counteracts your efforts.
You can start to imagine how the results of that system could end up completely different than you expect ... especially if the counteracting force is more than enough to overcome the 80% of the time you do things as you expect.
And this is just a 2 part example.
Weight loss is nothing if not a wildly complicated system, because most of that system is your biological self and everything that happens with regard to your behavior influences components of that system.
(This is probably why the most common and effective general advice for weight loss is to just eat less calories than you expend)
This is also why, again, when it comes to systems of life where YOU the human are a component, the answer is DALA. It's going to come down to what you say vs what you do, and changing your behaviors, expectations, or (likely) both.
Components of a system are things which are set.
A gear turning is a component of a system. It is set. It's always a gear that always turns in a specific way and interacts and influences the other components of that system in a specific way. Until it doesn't (until it breaks).
This is why systems that involve humans are so tricky.
And why aiming for a consistently specific result is a mistake (in my opinion).
Let's explore further. An odd analogy for you here, but stick with me.
My wife and I cook very different styles of scrambled and fried eggs.
She prefers the eggs that I cook. I tend to make scrambled eggs that are on the softer side, and I've got pretty solid technique for nailing just the right preference on fried egg (personally I like gooey center with crispy edges).
Anyway.
She has tried to replicate my scrambled eggs, has heard how I do it, seen how to do it, but she just can't repeat the process.
Same tools, same ingredients, same space ... looks like the same system, but two different results.
Obviously, the human involved is different.
And even though I can explain and demonstrate my approach to heat management when it comes to cooking eggs ...
There are nuances to the way I cook which I am not even aware of.
The point at which I put eggs in is pretty consistent, but I couldn't explain when that is other to say than ... when the pan gets to be just "so" (and then I vaguely wave my hand over it).
How I "fold" the eggs when they cook is pretty consistent. But again. All I could do is show while doing, but that probably wouldn't communicate how to replicate what I do. (I even said "fold" the eggs, which should be an indicator that I'm doing something vaguely gourmet-like which I do not understand)
The point I take the eggs off the heat is another component ...
Etc.
These all impact the result. And even though I make pretty consistently good eggs, the end result is also not really all that consistent.
It's a system which produces a result within a range of a particular style.
And I find that's how many human involved systems work.
Input into them is nearly impossible to consistently maintain, so aiming for a range of acceptable results becomes a wise choice for getting you what you want.
That is, you focus first on the components of the system which can be set. For example, I'm pretty sure we'd both make consistently "better" eggs if we stored them at room temp rather than in the fridge. That's a component that could be "improved" without the input of human interaction (the only interaction being the choice to set them out, which can be a part of the system that fails).
Let's talk business.
A business system "is perfectly designed to get the result that it does."
If you run advertising to a sale or an offer, and you make sales on those offers, but then your business can't grow, what is going on?
Most people make the fatal mistake of assuming that there are problems with the ads, with the offers, with the calls to actions, with the copy, etc. If a funnel initially produces results during the first month - and lets say that means you spend $10 to make an average of $30 sale - and then in the subsequent months that diminishes, most will argue that you need to refresh your ads, and test your CTAs and your creative ...
But every system "is perfectly designed to get the result that it does."
In that case the system of their business may be producing a long term result of disinterest in their prospects and customers. That means diminishing sales. That means a struggle for growth and forever being in the position of having to wrestle to bring in new customers.
Ironically, there are people who have success with these systems, and they tend to be the loudest and most prolific because they get money and have success in the short term. But they are the minority.
There are also other aspects to their systems which you don't see which make their whole system work (example: Guru launches a product, sells $100k in 30 days, and then the numbers dwindle from there, but they then sell a program on how they made $100k in 30 days, etc)
How do you take this understanding of systems and apply it so that the result of growth for the business is inevitable?
The answer, again, lies in DALA. In my experience it's always a disconnect between what the business owner says they want and the actions they take.
What does it take to have an everlasting business that just seems to grow and thrive and continue no matter what you do? The answer is (in my view), a sea of people who are hungry for whatever it is you have and do.
To make it more granular, which would you rather have as a business, a customer who buys every single thing you ever offer, or a customer who buys one thing and then never buys again?
I'd wager the customer who buys everything. So if we acknowledge that "every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does" ...
Why wouldn't you design the system of your business to perfectly produce the result of customers who buy every single thing you ever make?
"What makes you think people aren't trying to do that?" you might be asking ...
DALA.
The actions of aggressively selling in the short term almost always have negative downline consequences.
See Peaks and Valleys and Power vs Force.
You can't cultivate a customer who greatly desires everything you have to sell if they have a terrible experience the first time they buy something from you (or any subsequent time really). There are infinite options for everything out there, and if your business makes someone feel bad, they have ZERO reason to want to do anything with you.
Now, HOW to do this, is a topic I'll get into another time.
Randomness and Time
There are two undefeated players in the history of existence.
Randomness and Time.
Time inexorably marches forward. As long as there is movement in the universe as we know it, there will be time. (Time may be an emergent property of another system, but let's leave that conversation for another time)
Randomness is the occurrence of things without predictability. It is 100% true that you will experience randomness. You just can't predict it. That's why it's random (should we keep going in that circle?).
Our perspective in TGA is that it is wise to "put time and randomness" on your side.
That is, instead of fighting time and randomness and losing (because you can't win against those two), create systems where you benefit from time and randomness.
Easier said than done perhaps?
For context, let's quickly talk Crypto, Base Case1, and Solvable Problem™2.
Our original conversations around Time and Randomness largely floated around crypto. It's easy to see the element of randomness in crypto, and it's also easy to see that over longer periods of time, crypto go up.
So.
Creating a system in crypto that puts time and randomness on your side is to position yourself in the very long term, and position yourself such that when random things happen your risk is weighted to the upside (meaning, if you do lose, it's minimized, while if you gain, it's maximized).
And that is where the original GUARD/BUSD farm pair came into play. We held a long term (10 year) view, and positioned our assets so that when randomness struck, if it was negative our "losses" would be minimized, and if it was positive we'd reap rewards.
Hopefully that makes sense.
How do you put Time and Randomness on your side in life systems?
It's the same perspective and approach. To put time on your side, let go of short term needs and extend your perspective to the long term.
Let's consider weight loss. I am not an expert. But I do know that extreme weight loss - where you might drop 10% of your body weight in a month - can do bad things to your metabolism and over time make it harder and harder to lose and maintain weight.
Trying to lose weight fast is fighting time.
As soon as you start losing weight beyond the threshold of your daily/weekly natural up and down, your body starts to notice and starts to fight you.
Nature will always seek equilibrium (and nature is very adept at using time to its advantage).
So how do you put time on your side? Extend your time expectation. Make the amount you lose on a weekly basis so small your body doesn't notice. If you want to lose 10 pounds, don't do it in a month, do it in 20 weeks.
(This does not constitute health advice, I am not an expert)
How do you put randomness on your side?
I think in this case, the best way is to EXPECT randomness to happen.
Know that at some point you'll get sick and it will throw you off. At some point there will be a party and you're obviously gonna have some of that cake. At some point you're gonna injure yourself and be less active. At some point you might lose a client and have to work many more hours to make up for it. At some point all of your kids and your wife and you might get sick and that may disrupt everything for a month.
Expect your plan to be disrupted, and either accept that this will extend your timeline, or have things in place to keep going smoothly in the obviously inevitable event of randomness.
How do you put time and randomness on your side in business and marketing?
I'm going to tease you and say that I'll cover this in a depth in a different set of articles (will be linked here in the future).
Let's bring this back to the beginning.
I could go on and on about different systems and using atypical engineering to consistently create the result you really want … Frankly I'm obsessed with these ideas, because you CAN have exactly what you want in life and in business.
You just have to realize what it is you actually have control over. Because that's different than most people think.
YOU DON'T HAVE CONTROL OVER THE RESULT - You only have control over SOME components of the system which produces the result.
This concept to me is important because the perspective helps solve and root out systemic and behavioral issues and clears the way for us to get what we really want.
If you don't like the way you feel, how your days unfold, the kind of things you end up having to do ...
All of those are results of a system in which you are a component.
Take your time to look at the whole system. Figure out where your expectations are mismatched. Figure out where what you say does not align with what you do.
These are the keys to manufacturing your own system to consistently produce the result you want.
That's really what we're doing here.
We are giving you an "operating system" to help you consistently produce the result of "what you want in life."
Who is the author of this piece? Masterful.