Societies are adaptive systems. What a policy does is less important than how people adapt to it.
Our body is an adaptive system. We lift weights not to move them, but for how our muscles adapt to it (they grow).
(thread, 1/N)
Teams are adaptive systems. In the short-term, a manager's decision matters for what it does. In the long-term, it matters for how the team adapts to it. What behaviors does it make more likely?
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Markets are adaptive systems. Many strategies only work until the market adapts to them.
Marketing, sales, and strategy are about adaptive systems. In the long-term, what matters is how customers, competitors, and suppliers adapt to a new product.
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Adaptive systems are all around us, and are adapting faster than ever. Understanding them is more important than ever.
Hence, I launched a live Zoom course on adaptive systems and their practical applications.
The course contains practical examples and applications for Finance, Management, Personal Health, Healthcare, Marketing, Behavioral Change, and Policy Design.
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Sessions start on the 23rd of February.
For a limited time, you can get in at an early-bird price (33% off). Places are limited to 15 per cohort.
A peek inside my adaptive systems course starting on the 23rd of February.
In this thread, a list of what participants will learn.
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MODULE #1: HARNESSING ANTIFRAGILITY
The organic is both antifragile (we lift weights → our muscles grow) and fragile (we lift too much → we injure ourselves).
What determines antifragility?
What's the relationship between it and fragility?
What to do about it? 2/N
3/ Antifragility can make us stronger (exercise → stronger muscles) or weaker (no exercise → muscles atrophy).
It can make us adapt (famine → we adapt by storing more nutrients) or maladapt (lack of famine → we take risks & store less nutrients, making us more fragile).
A Nobel prize can tell us two things: how good is the recipient or how bad is the committee.
“Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.” – @nntaleb
2/ I used to express Wittgenstein’s ruler as follows: the more the free parameters, the less you know what is being measured.
For example, last spring COVID mortality could have been informing us about how aggressive is the virus or how good is a country’s testing
3/ In addition, and this is the point of this new thread, it just dawned to me that Wittgenstein’s ruler is not just about the precision of the ruler but also about its choice.
Those who put too much ego in their car do things that are good for their car (eg spending Saturdays afternoon washing it) rather than things which are good for them (eg hanging out with their friends and family).
We do what is good for what we invested our ego in.
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2/ Those who put too much ego in their job stop doing things that are good for them and instead do things that are good for their job.
Those who put too much ego in their political party stop doing things that are good for them and instead do things that are good for their party
3/ Those who put too much ego into racial discrimination stop doing things that are good for them and instead do things that are good for racial discrimination.
When Twitter banned Trump, I wrote that even though I don't like Trump and thought that the world would be better off without him, I was also against its censorship for fear of a slippery slope.
3 weeks later, did it happen?
Yes. Examples & implications 👇
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2/ After Twitter, FB banned him. Then, Google suspended Parler from its store, Apple did it too, and finally Amazon banned it from its infrastructure.
3/ Two comments:
– What looks inconsequential if one small company does it is very consequential if all major players do it.
– It started with banning a few bad apples, it ended up with banning full categories of users.
(the latter should give the chills; also see tweet #5)
A common scenario at the office:
– The manager sets an unclear task
– The employee does it, but not well enough
– Because of the lack of clarity, the employee thinks he did it well enough
– Now the manager faces two options, both bad:
(Thread 1/7)
2/ Either the manager accepts how the employee did the task (sending the message that subpar performance is okay and lowering standards across the team),
Or he tells the employee he didn't deliver on an unclear objective, pissing him off and/or demotivating him.
3/ Lack of clarity is a problem that:
– Always comes to bite you back
– And you will have to address it at some point, willingly or unwillingly