Perceiving Like a Polity 👁
How multi-scale organisations deal with the complexities of the world
Summary
There are a few ideas that have been rattling around my head which I wanted to bring together: Complexity profiles, multi-scale requisite variety, affordances and what a non-pathological large-scale organisation of people could look like. These pieces turned into this week's essay.
It’s a bit longer than usual so I don't have a book review this week. However, I read an excellent paper by Douglas Hoftstader on Analogy as the Core of Cognition. I would highly recommend it.
Perceiving Like a Polity
For any system - including ourselves - there is a constant question of whether we can meet the demands of the world around us, or be overwhelmed. We can be washed away by a tidal wave that destroys our village, or murdered by a jealous lover who puts poison in our drink. The variety and scale of forces that a system has to contend with are myriad. You can get a picture of this with a complexity profile.
In the diagram above, the y-axis is complexity, or the potential variation of the system. The x-axis is scale, in terms of time and space. A point in the bottom left might correspond to breathing in some dust, and the top left could be responding to a virus. The bottom right could be getting fired from a job. On the top right, you could have the intricacies of modern geopolitics.
In this space every system has a 'complexity profile' that maps the situations it can respond to. In the case of a person, you can develop an immune system to fend off the virus, or interview skills to get a new job. Combining these capabilities gives you a curve that captures the area that the system is able to operate over. In the example of the human above: You can deal with an infection from a virus, or get by in the low complexity event of losing your current job. But if the tide of geopolitics turns, you will have to go wherever it takes you.
One aspect of this picture is that over time the area under the curve can be increased as a system develops new capabilities. If a person gets regular sleep and eats healthy, they can strengthen their immune system to respond to more kinds of virus. Likewise, if one picks up a new skill like programming one can better rebound if ever fired from a job.
A complexity profile is not, however, just about the negative view of responding to environmental pressures. When a system encounters a situation at a scale and complexity that it can meet, not only will it not be overwhelmed, but it has a chance to create something new out of the event. As the curve moves out, a system is able to take advantage of new opportunities and develops a richer set of affordances1.
The idea of affordances comes from James J. Gibson. He reframes the world we perceive as a collection of possible interactions that we could have, rather than as a collection of facts and objects. From this posture, an affordance is still a 'thing' that you perceive. But it is a relational idea, formed as much by what you are and what you can do as by the thing itself.
One of the consequences of this view is that what one can do, one can perceive. In the context of a system's complexity profile, this means that as a system is able to respond to more situations, it also sees more of the world.
At the human level, our perceptual systems are bandwidth-constrained to particular scales2 . The experience of added perception can be quite subtle. Still, you can get an idea of how this process operates it when you learn a new skill, like driving a car. Once you get behind the wheel, you start to see dangers that were never previously salient, like cars backing into the road from their driveways. For systems co-ordinating multiple people, the effect can be more dramatic.
Any polity3 engages with the world in similar ways to a human system, expanding its complexity profile as it goes. It does this through bringing additional people into the polity, developing new organisational philosophies and process, and adding more resources like land or machinery. “People, ideas, machines — in that order!”4
As a polity grows its complexity profile, it perceives things that were invisible before. Amazon, currently one of the world's most functional polities, offers some examples of how this happens.
At a macro scale this happened with the creation of AWS: First, the company learned how to serve their retail website at scale. Eventually they became skilled enough at doing this themselves that they saw an opportunity to provide that same capability to other companies. This led to the creation of AWS as a business for providing cloud-hosting services - a venture that was completely invisible before they had set up the capabilities themselves.
At a smaller scale, Amazon prides itself on providing internal teams with significant autonomy. When confronted with a new problem, they can rapidly set up self-organising business units that respond directly to the issue. To aid these teams the company has developed cult-like cultural practices around principles like "disagree and commit", or "dive deep". They defer responsibility and decision-making authority to the unit that is familiar with the lowest level of detail.
At the same time, Amazon contains examples of how a polity can fail to develop its complexity profile. When the company has tried in the past to understand what was going on in their warehouses, they have used quotas and metrics to track things like how many packages a worker can move in an hour. This led to a higher prevalence of burnout and workplace injury, serious negative press, and increasingly, calls for their workers to unionise in a way that could fundamentally harm their business.
Understanding what was happening on the warehouse floor was not a perception that Amazon had earned, but one that they tried to impose. Rather than developing the ability to deal with higher complexity at the scale of the factory, they used a coarse-grained approach. As a result they were blindsided by the reality of what was going on.
If a polity wishes to truly perceive something, it cannot do so via a procrustean bed of formal legibility. Instead, perception comes from real affordances earned through the development of new capabilities. When we create and participate in polities that seek to authentically enhance their complexity profiles, we will be able to see clearly. In this way we can meet the world, in all its variety and scale, head on.
Thanks to Casey Li for reading a draft of this newsletter.
I wrote a bit about this alongside the idea of context cascades.
I found the Wikipedia definition for a polity helpful: "any group of people who have a collective identity, who are organised by some form of institutionalised social relations, and have a capacity to mobilise resources."