Leverage Weekly #72 - Keeping track of history
tl;dr - An organization’s history can inform decisions about its future
When designing a machine or piece of software, one makes many choices. These choices, which can be called “design choices,” are made for many reasons. In some cases, choices may somewhat arbitrary. In other cases, the reason for a given choice is obvious. Sometimes, however, the reason for a given choice or set of choices is actually rather deep. A person looking at the design would not understand why one knob or gear was placed here rather than there, even though there is, in fact, an important reason.
The same is true in organizational design. Organizations, as I have argued, are machines made from people. Alternatively, they may be thought of as pieces of software that connect people to the deeper software of society and civilization as a whole. Either way, the creation of an organization involves the implementation of a design which, consciously or not, involves a large number of design choices. Does a non-profit have a President or CEO or Executive Director? Is compensation given at the start or end of a pay period? What are the organization’s bylaws and what, precisely, is its mission?
With machines and software, good design frequently ideally comes with thorough documentation. That way, if anyone wants to change out any part or edit a line of code, they know why things were set up the way they were. Without documentation, errors can occur in both directions. Design choices that were arbitrary or meant as a temporary stopgap can be canonized as unalterable; other choices, based on a deep understanding of tradeoffs in the design space, can be undone for the sake of a minor and short term gain.
The analogy carries over to organizations as well. Choices that were temporary compromises can become lasting features of an organization, while important but subtle design choices can be misunderstood and mistakenly undone. Part of the solution, of course, is conscious meditation on design choices as they are made and keeping records of rationales at the time. Sometimes, however, life happens too fast to document decisions as they happen. There is, thus, a role for historians and archivists in tracking and understanding organizations — at least ones that are intended to last.
There are three main challenges in tracking an organization’s history. The first is simply recognizing that history matters and setting aside time to write things down. The importance of history from the perspective of organizational design has been described above, but more generally, organizations make choices for different reasons. Understanding why a company or group is doing what it is doing is important so that people can make assess whether those rationales make sense and can change or maintain course for good reasons. The value of this is hard to overstate.
The second challenge to recording an organization’s history is that frequently that history is embarrassing. The people who actually know what happened may not want to tell the people who are trying to write it down and the people who want to write it down may not be ready for the chaos and jumbliness they encounter. What if John became president only because no one else wanted the job? What if an entire division was given a task everyone else knew would fail just to keep them busy? These sort of circumstances are common in organizations’ histories. Keeping track of the history means figuring out how to navigate such things.
Third, there is the actual challenge of history, which is that the true causes of things are not always apparent and frequently only become so with hindsight and substantial reflection. It may seem like the arrival or departure of an employee was a small event, in the grand scheme of things. Yet in some cases, the arrival or departure of an employee can be one of the most important events in an organization’s history. The truth of such things is hard to determine and also hard to talk about.
Keeping good records is, perhaps surprisingly, a partial solution to all of these problems. One may not know exactly what is happening or why, but if enough records are kept, it becomes possible to comb through the data and figure it out later. It may be hard to write down certain highly contentious facts, even if everyone knows them. Keeping track of enough surrounding facts, however, can help to make the missing pieces clear, at least to those who look for them. It is then that an organization can understand its own history, know what it is aiming to do and how, and make informed decisions about its future.
An organization’s history can inform decisions about its future.
Last week, the Leverage team gave its last presentation of the quarter to the Quantum Biology Institute. For the most part, other presentations have been prompted by QBI’s immediate needs or interests; for this presentation, Leverage chose something near and dear to its heart: institutional memory. With important roles at QBI changing — Geoff stepping down as acting CEO, Mike moving from President to CTO, and Anna coming on as Executive Director — making sure relevant information is passed on seemed paramount.
Apart from the presentation, Geoff, Melinda, and Oliver spent time compiling a record (or “big pile,” as it was called) of the different things Leverage has done as part of helping get QBI off the ground and break the bottleneck in quantum biology. This information will be useful for many parties in the future, including the general public, the Bottlenecks network, QBI, and Leverage itself. Writing it all up will take time, but will certainly be worth it.
Work with Cliff Sandlin on the mechanisms of magnetic field effects continued, with a deeper dive into the radical pair mechanism. Radical pairs, spin superpositions, hyperfine coupling, external magnetic fields, Larmor procession, Zeeman splitting... the posited causal mechanism is almost clear. Just a little bit more the spin zero triplet state and maybe it will all make sense. Cliff’s work continues to be superb and Leverage has extended his contract again.
The rest of the week was devoted to preparation for the Q3 retreat in Boston. The team finished the Q2 board update and finalized plans for a two-day workshop on nucleonics with the LENR team at MIT. Since much of the retreat will be occupied with the workshop, there was also some discussion of broader topics, in case there doesn’t end up being time for everything at the retreat itself. The quarter was pretty great. Boston awaits!