Example: 94% of 80+yo in my region booked the vaccine but only 50% of 70-79yo. Why? The former can do it through their doctor; the latter must use a website.
Website scale fast, but arteries must become capillaries to reach everyone
2/ Similarly, many company initiatives fail because the center (top management) uses arteries (company-wide emails) to communicate a change to the the peripheries (employees).
Instead, they should focus on a capillar approach. Only supervisors are close enough to drive change.
3/ The focus of every company initiative should be to *actively* recruit & engage supervisors so that they'll communicate the change & demonstrate the need for change *effectively*.
Some things can only be done with personal touch.
Company initiatives must account for it or fail
4/ If an employee reads an email from the CEO saying to do X and then sees his supervisor not doing X, he won't do X.
Not all communication is equal.
Communication from those nearby us has stronger effect.
Hence the need for initiatives to plan what happens at the capillaries.
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Gumroad is the platform on which I sell my eBooks. It's their 10th birthday. To celebrate, they decided to cancel all transaction fees for the day, and I decided to match & pass the savings to readers
(discount links in the thread👇)
First, my most-sold book: "Ergodicity, as simple as possible."
It's the best book to get an intuitive understanding of one of the most important concepts to take good decisions regarding your career, relationships, and life in general.
Principle: organizations are not influenced by incentives weighting on it; instead, their behavior is determined by the incentives weighting on the decision makers inside them.
This is because organizations have no agency; no hive mind.
Thread, 1/N
2/ Let me explain with a metaphor.
When we talk about a colony of bees, we often believe it has a collective will (the "hive mind").
However, it never takes decisions itself.
Instead, its bees take INDIVIDUAL decisions, whose result converges on a group behavior.
3/ The same applies to companies. How often do we read headlines such as "Apple decided to design a car"?
However, Apple doesn't have agency.
Its managers do.
The decision was the result of individual managers taking decisions based on their individual information & incentives.