THE LEAFLET
March 14 2024
communication as maintenance, the case against, magic wand before local context
COMMUNICATION AS MAINTENANCE
In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand is naming something real. Maintenance is a drag. He’s also right to point out, however, that it’s a sneaky lifeline. Good maintenance can keep a building beautifully sheltering the people that use It for decades, even centuries, beyond expectation.
A thought experiment I’ve been running for myself is imagining my relationships as buildings and certain kinds of communication as maintenance. What are the mundane things I can say to my people, things they may already know and I could worry they’ve heard enough of, that might be the equivalent of re-shingling a roof, replacing an air filter, flushing a sturdy but aging set of pipes?
My guess is that the words of maintenance fall into categories like:
Here’s what we’re here for
Here’s how to be great around here
I see you
When I see you, here’s what I see
Thank you
Read the rest here.
THE CASE FOR THE CASE AGAINST
A common move in effective altruist writing I’ve come to appreciate recently is making a thoroughgoing case for your idea, sometimes over many pages and even more footnotes, then, somewhere near the end, offering the very best case against your idea that you can think of.
For those who carry the scars of many internal political battles, this can seem counterintuitive, even crazy. If you want your idea to carry the day, you lobby, you build a coalition, you amass the evidence that makes the most robust case for your take on things. In low-trust, adversarial contexts, this is a reasonable and even wise approach.
If you’re on a team though, that has shared values and a clear mission, you might be surprised by how effective the case against is. It can lend legitimacy to your argument - and to you. You recognize that there’s a reasonable critique of your idea. And even in the face of that critique, you make your recommendation.
You’re not a salesperson grasping for commissions; you’re a sommelier, aware of the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the options, recommending the best you know of for the moment.
Read the rest here.
MAGIC WAND BEFORE LOCAL CONTEXT
A sharp move I’ve seen some good leaders make: they write out what a better world would like if they had few of the constraints that face them now. You can think of this as a first principles analysis; you can think of it as the magic wand version. You scrape off the frustrating, frictional, fickle requirements of the way things are and have been and open your thinking more purely to what could or should be.
Sometimes you can run with your magic wand version. The facts you face might not be that bad or that stubborn. You’re in an elastic environment. There aren’t that many personalities to accommodate. Transaction costs are low.
Probably more often, if you’re not in the earliest phase of your project or working with an especially flexible team, you’ll want to write a second version after the magic wand version. This is the version that speaks to your local context. A crystalline, balanced org chart acquires names, histories, asymmetrical exceptions.
The bet, the hope, is that having done the magic wand version will unlock possibilities in the version in context. You anchor your thinking on what’s possible and on a desired outcome instead of on what’s demanding and what.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Author Anthony DeMello on enlightenment:
Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.
Novelist Tom Wolfe on symbols:
Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
Novelist and essayist Kiese Laymon on what we owe each other:
We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric