From individualists to communities: Overachiever edition

[jacob]

My current focus is on the problem introduced here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MGQgQZHx1Q

In particular, how to avoid moving exclusively along individualist respectively community oriented approaches as both demonstrate a failure to build an effective community (an ineffective one is no problem).

This book was interesting in terms of training a crew for space shuttle missions.
https://www.amazon.com/Before-Lift-off- ... 801835240/

In particular, the problem of "overfactoring", that is, one crew-member knowing all the answers before anyone else. This leads to (co)dependence and consequentially the rest of the crew learns less "because they can just ask". This should be a familiar situation to overachievers

The solution is for the overachiever to deliberate play a different game: Rather than always presenting the correct answer, hold back and let someone else find it. Even take it as far as creating problems so that others may learn more. Proceed at your own risk. Of course this requires some upfront sacrifice as answers now proceed at the rate of the second-fastest person as opposed to the fastest, but the idea is that this will be rewarded later on by having more competent people in the community.

[mountainFrugal]

Is it possible that there are a "connector" category of folks working alone some of the time and working in groups some of the time that could be a possible solution to your problem? They have an individually motivated carrot vector, but also spend time floating in different communities influencing them through example and if they are savvy, various soft power moves. Not that it would have to be a large soft power scheme or something like popular culture and mass media (these have been suggested in the past as a solution). The problem being these things take large amounts of capital to deploy. The slower, cheaper, and ultimately sustainable route could be connectors that through individual action gain respect within various communities (in a genuine way!) and then "try" to align individuals within groups towards a slightly different outlook by showing that they can hold most of the views, but also these others. Or to put it another way, by leading by example as holding multiple views. This may still be too individualist though.

Applying this idea to your example. The connector could spend enough time within each group to lay the seeds of ideas to show what ideas are compatible in both groups, but not enough time to be a "leader" within that community. Often times Permies and ERE are used as parallel community examples that are missing one or other key ideas about the other group for the average user. Permies money, ERE systems thinking. So... IF there is hope to link communities, why not try to outline an effort for these two as a practical thing where both groups could benefit (forgive my ignorance is this was tried in the past). My intuition on this is that if you cannot get two parallel groups to see they are on the same team, it might be hopeless. On the positive outcomes side of things, if successful, this same model could be applied to an ever increasing sphere of adjacent communities. This could form the continuum that you seek sliding down the consumption curve from left to right. You want to create a low consumption black hole with connections and examples from all communities all having an event horizon to continue pulling new people in.

[edit] In thinking about this more. My current boss is a good example of a connector. She loves connecting communities that would not otherwise be connected, but have shared goals. Mainly she effortlessly flows between groups and if she finds the need for a more formal connection she comes up with some event that both groups would likely attend. She is unlikely to start a new group from skratch however, just leveraging what communities have already popped up. She reaches out to leaders within each community and builds relationships that way. She is wired for this type of stuff and I have tremendous respect for this ability. This is operating mainly in the software/data/modeling/design sphere, so may not as easily work for more physical things (permaculture gardens) because the iteration times are generally longer.

[Ego]

In an increasingly complex, rapidly changing world, competence diminishes rapidly. The competent must constantly practice to maintain their competence. Delegate with care or the community as a whole could suffer when the overachiever loses or fails to learn necessary skills.

[mountainFrugal]

The competent must constantly practice to maintain their competence.

If I understand you, there could be a huge cost (remaining competent) that would ultimately lead the group astray if leaders did not keep skills sharp and adapt by spending the time instead on group activities? Not sure there would be an easy fix for that and this may be your point.

[daylen]

Would seem that connectors and overachievers would tend to have quite polarized personalities. As the connector would have wide-reaching, shallow knowledge about many domains, and the overachievers would have deep knowledge in a narrow domain. Perhaps then another framing could be: how can achievers and connectors get along in the long run without flattening or homogenizing knowledge based upon the lowest common denominator? Overachievers will tend to silo knowledge and be uncompromising when clashing with someone of a different background and community; and connectors will tend to erode the particulars and gotchas so as to simplify inter-community translations (and to save time themselves). An overachiever can compromise by using the rule of thumb Jacob mentioned, sacrificing silo-building speed for adaptability to problems that blur their specialized boundaries; and a connector can compromise by referencing more nuanced achievers in their respective areas of competence while often being upfront about their incomplete knowledge. In short, overachievers are prone to overfitting into intra-communal rigidity and connectors are prone to underfitting into inter-communal rigidity, so less may be more and more may be less.

[mountainFrugal]

I think that distinction makes sense in general. I would say that in the example of my boss, she has a T shaped development with deep sub-domain expertise (world expert), but also wider ranging interests and makes connections on a regular basis to other domain experts within adjacent communities. So it could be possible for this to exist in a single individual. It is hard for me to tell if the other people that she is reaching out to are also T shaped, or are doing some compromising like you are suggesting (maybe both?).

[jacob]

The way I interpret the extremes of the two axes is that there are people/process-oriented people and results/task-oriented people. These correspond to Green and Orange. There are also rule-oriented Blue ... but the dichotomy is usually between results-oriented individualists and people-oriented collectivists.

Key here is that task-oriented people see everything as a task including relationships.
Similarly people-oriented people see everything as a relationship including tasks, specifically, "fixing the printer" becomes "a relationship with the printer guy".

The stereotyping here seems to be reinforced by the two approaches. People become worse than their natural balance once they start down the road. The more competent an individual gets, the less they need people, so relationships atrophy. The bigger the community, the bigger the bystander-effect at the less personal initiative... why bother learning anything when somebody else already knows.

At some point, however, it is realized that there are limits to both the people-only approach and the task-only approaches. However, at this point people have sunk so far into the mud that it's difficult to get up. It feels easier to "work smarter and harder" on the current approach.. which only makes it worse in the long run.

What has worked and been believed in previously must be crimped. For example, rather than "just doing it yourself" you should ask someone else to do it even if they do it worse. Rather than asking someone else who does it better, you should try to do it yourself.

Another way to see this is that these are two extremes in the insource/outsource debate. (insofar outsource was restricted to communitarian approaches ... obviously not market-based or tit-for-tat relationships.)

[Ego]

If I understand you, there could be a huge cost (remaining competent) that would ultimately lead the group astray if leaders did not keep skills sharp and adapt by spending the time instead on group activities? Not sure there would be an easy fix for that and this may be your point.

Doers are doers because they do. Non-doers are non-doers because they don't. Both have a default. There are some situations where a non-doer will crossover and become a doer if the doer refrains from doing. The more consequential the situation, the more costly is inaction but inaction is the non-doers default. Crossing over is scary for the non-doer because consequential situations produce costly mistakes.

If you have a spaceship with six capable crew then cross-training everyone for as many jobs as possible is smart. If you have a spaceship with two crew, a fight attendant and three paying passengers, maybe not.

[mountainFrugal]

As a potential quick summary for my own understanding. I may be trying to combine two different analogies in the wrong way.

By focusing on training/feeding the doers they continue to become ever more competent. The non-doers are not given a chance to rise up to the occasion and fill into some mission critical role because it is easier to just defer to the doers to GTD. This potentially backfires in the spaceship example with non competent crew members need to suddenly fill a role they may not have been trained for, ever given the opportunity to lead, or potentially just over-relying on the community of experts to solve. I think this is also a common thing when car accidents occur as another example. Bystanders stand by assuming that someone else is going to take care of it, when in fact someone should ACTUALLY make sure that the scene is safe, someone else is calling 911 and returning, and then you can attend to the victims. So potentially the group of bystanders are relying too much on assuming someone else (jacob as an example in this community) to take the lead?

[theanimal]

The solution is for the overachiever to deliberate play a different game: Rather than always presenting the correct answer, hold back and let someone else find it. Even take it as far as creating problems so that others may learn more. Proceed at your own risk. Of course this requires some upfront sacrifice as answers now proceed at the rate of the second-fastest person as opposed to the fastest, but the idea is that this will be rewarded later on by having more competent people in the community.

This seems to be common advice in many of the leadership (a la Jocko Willink) and parenting books I've read. Someone is going to be much more enthusiastic about and take much more control/responsibility for their own solution rather than the one you present to them. Yours may be 100% efficient and seem like the smartest way to do it, but if their's is a little more roundabout it's best to follow their example. Nobody wants to follow a leader who barks orders all the time and doesn't factor in the ideas of others. You are also enabling other people to see themselves as part of the process and a sense of agency, thereby providing an incentive to come up with their ideas. They get on the path to becoming doers and have a stake in the vision.

Speaking to the lack of skills, it's the same thing. I'm better off in the long run if my (hypothetical) 4 year old kid makes the pancake batter even if the first time it results in a giant mess and a tremendous amount of patience. It's awful, agonizingly slow and I have to provide instructions, corrections and encouragement step by step. But with each iteration it's going to improve, there is less instruction and the process is becoming more efficient. Sure enough by say 5 or 6 my kid is making pancakes for the whole family, while other kids down the street aren't allowed in the kitchen. ​Sure I could make the batter in 2 minutes, but that just enables dependency and fosters a "non-doer" mentality in the long run.


@Ego and @MF-In almost all fields teaching is seen as a way to further your knowledge and increase your competency. I don't think trying to get others to level up by allowing them to do certain actions should be seen as a regression. Letting others do one task doesn't mean that all growth has to stop, learning and continual skill acquisitions can continue outside of the teachings. I think the astronauts vs flight attendant vs passengers speaks more to people being taught and engaged at different levels depending on where they are coming from. Not necessarily a one size all fits approach.

People don't know what they don't know. Provided reasoning and an opportunity to execute, many people rise to the challenge. Though how to find reasoning that resonates in this regard remains a mystery.

[jacob]

Is it possible that there are a "connector" category of folks working alone some of the time and working in groups some of the time that could be a possible solution to your problem? They have an individually motivated carrot vector, but also spend time floating in different communities influencing them through example and if they are savvy, various soft power moves. Not that it would have to be a large soft power scheme or something like popular culture and mass media (these have been suggested in the past as a solution). The problem being these things take large amounts of capital to deploy. The slower, cheaper, and ultimately sustainable route could be connectors that through individual action gain respect within various communities (in a genuine way!) and then "try" to align individuals within groups towards a slightly different outlook by showing that they can hold most of the views, but also these others. Or to put it another way, by leading by example as holding multiple views. This may still be too individualist though.

I think this is what I had in mind with WL9 in the EREWLv2.0 table. And I do think this is starting from a rather [too?] individualist position. I consider WL8 to be the peak of the individualist approach. The antithesis at WL8 is that there's only so much one can do without involving others.

[mountainFrugal]

I think this is what I had in mind with WL9 in the EREWLv2.0 table. And I do think this is starting from a rather [too?] individualist position. I consider WL8 to be the peak of the individualist approach. The antithesis at WL8 is that there's only so much one can do without involving others.

That makes sense. This is where venturing out to other communities and trying to make connections would become the way to move higher because the person realized the/their limitations of solo work. Apologies if I am being dense, but is the idea to get as many individualists to level 8/9 so they can branch out, or is it to get people to realize the limitations of only a {individual/community] approach and embrace that earlier so as to not be siloed vertically or dispersed communally? Or is the goal both? Am I confusing things? I am happy to go back and do more reading if I am confusing things and sit the remainder of this thread as an observer.

Another stab at understanding the problem in my own words. If the goal is getting larger numbers of individualists to level 8/9 then focus on a conveyor belt with examples from all walks of life similar to the journals to get people beyond 4/5. What would a community of individualist first WL9s look like? They were individualists coming in but realized the limitations to get to level 9 and beyond. What would their community look like? Could having a community to join that is already formed be the model to then bring along various community first minded people? Or would it be a disaster because part of an attractive community is defined by community first minded people creating the community in the first place because "they get it"? So any attempt to not include this other way of thinking at the outset is doomed to fail. On the flip side there are also limitations to communities first approaches because they eventually run into the we are too large and there are no doers around to take us to the next level. Where along this continuum would be the best intervention? It could be earlier on for one side than the other. Like if you could intervene earlier in the individualists track earlier they might take just as long to get to 8, but would jump to 9 much easier because they at least knew conceptually about limits and how community could help.

[edit] rephrased some of the problem definition questions to hopefully be more clear

[Ego]

I don't think trying to get others to level up by allowing them to do certain actions should be seen as a regression. Letting others do one task doesn't mean that all growth has to stop, learning and continual skill acquisitions can continue outside of the teachings.

When I typed that I was thinking of a friend who has been a manufacturer of bike helmets for almost fifty years. He started out making helmets in a SoCal factory and expanded to several factories. The molds for the foam injection molding they used were created at specialty shops in SoCal. Then after NAFTA they built a factory in Mexico and eventually shifted all production to Mexico but continued to make the molds here. A decade later they shifted production to Vietnam and China. They began testing a variety of shops to make the injection molds in China. The price was good but the quality was low. Eventually one-stop Chinese suppliers began making good quality molds in-house and the independent mold shops in SoCal disappeared. Today they are in a position where they cannot shift production back to the US or anywhere else because they cannot find people who know how to make the molds. It is a basic skill that has been lost.

[theanimal]

Fair enough. I have heard similar stories regarding clothing and footwear production. I still think the teaching plays a part though otherwise you still end up losing all of that knowledge when the overachieving individual dies. In the case of the factory, the knowledge was lost because they stopped doing it and the people that used to do it died, forgot or are no longer employable/able to be found. It's not because while they were doing it they took time to teach another person how to do it. In highly specialized cases like an astronaut not teaching to the masses probably makes sense, but in terms of something like lifestyle and getting people in line with ERE maybe not?

[mountainFrugal]

I still think the teaching plays a part though otherwise you still end up losing all of that knowledge when the overachieving individual dies.

This made me think of the power of story and narrative based traditions that existed long before writing was invented to pass along knowledge. Although having a story or a written text is not as good as having someone who can give you feedback while you are learning and given the present contexts.

I also agree that teaching is good way to learn something, I was just trying to understand what Ego was saying. His further example makes more sense to me now about knowledge loss. As another example, this happens all the time when a key person leaves an org that designed the system initially, but did not train any people to understand or problem solve through information hoarding or generally not given room to breath. That person eventually burns out and the system slowly and then quickly implodes on itself without that key person to firefight. Similar outcomes.

[mountainFrugal]

I think that there may be some lesser known gems within stoicism itself that start to get at these things other than the popular rugged individualism that is often amplified in our modern times. This is not necessarily actionable, but there are some important ideas here if starting from a more popular version of stoicism today.

Hierocles himself from Stobaeus, Ioannis Stobaei Florilegium 4 line 671-673:
Each one of us is as it were entirely encompassed by many circles, some smaller, others larger, the latter enclosing the former on the basis of their different and unequal dispositions relative to each other. The first and closest circle is the one which a person has drawn as though around a center, his own mind. This circle encloses the body and anything taken for the sake of the body. For it is virtually the smallest circle, and almost touches the center itself. Next, the second one further removed from the center but enclosing the first circle; this contains parents, siblings, wife, and children. The third one has in it uncles and aunts, grandparents, nephews, nieces, and cousins. The next circle includes the other relatives, and this is followed by the circle of local residents, then the circle of fellow tribesmen, next that of fellow citizens, and then in the same way the circle of people from neighboring towns, and then the circle of fellow-countrymen. The outermost and largest circle, which encompasses all the rest, is that of the whole human race. Once these have all been surveyed, it is the task of a well-tempered man, in his proper treatment of each group, to draw the circles together somehow towards the center, and to keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones. It is incumbent on us to respect people from the third circle as if they were those from the second, and again to respect our other relatives as if they were those from the third circle. …

Source: https://practicalstoic.com/on-hierocles ... c-circles/

[white belt]

I agree with what @theanimal said. In my experience in the military, it is quite common to challenge someone with tasks outside their comfort zone, with the expectation that failure is likely. This short term failure is essential for learning and ultimately long term growth. The senior members of a team can almost always complete a task faster/better than junior members, but it is recognized that junior members need to learn the same skills for the team to succeed over the long term. Issues arise in organizations when short term failure is not seen as an option, so the less competent personnel never get the chance to be challenged and "level up." I think this is probably more common in organizations that are hyper-focused on "efficiency" at the expense of everything else.

[jacob]

That makes sense. This is where venturing out to other communities and trying to make connections would become the way to move higher because the person realized the/their limitations of solo work. Apologies if I am being dense, but is the idea to get as many individualists to level 8/9 so they can branch out, or is it to get people to realize the limitations of only a {individual/community] approach and embrace that earlier so as to not be siloed vertically or dispersed communally? Or is the goal both? Am I confusing things? I am happy to go back and do more reading if I am confusing things and sit the remainder of this thread as an observer.

Another stab at understanding the problem in my own words. If the goal is getting larger numbers of individualists to level 8/9 then focus on a conveyor belt with examples from all walks of life similar to the journals to get people beyond 4/5. What would a community of individualist first WL9s look like? They were individualists coming in but realized the limitations to get to level 9 and beyond. What would their community look like? Could having a community to join that is already formed be the model to then bring along various community first minded people? Or would it be a disaster because part of an attractive community is defined by community first minded people creating the community in the first place because "they get it"? So any attempt to not include this other way of thinking at the outset is doomed to fail. On the flip side there are also limitations to communities first approaches because they eventually run into the we are too large and there are no doers around to take us to the next level. Where along this continuum would be the best intervention? It could be earlier on for one side than the other. Like if you could intervene earlier in the individualists track earlier they might take just as long to get to 8, but would jump to 9 much easier because they at least knew conceptually about limits and how community could help.

[edit] rephrased some of the problem definition questions to hopefully be more clear

We're thinking along the same lines here.

Creating a community that's attractive to community-first people tend to turn off people using other modes of thinking. Not really different than creating a plan that's attractive to rules-first people turns off people who are more interested in the purpose of following the rules and not satisfied with a "because rules are beautiful" answer.

There are two "cases" which sit on a continuum.

The first one is what everybody is doing, namely, "silo up vertically" respectively "include communally" until it is realized that one is trapped in one's own skillset---basically being at a local maximum. E.g. the individualist can't do everything but at least they can do at lot and doing less is too high of a price.. OR .. the community can't do much of anything but at least they can have meetings to plan another plan and get the feeling of doing something.

The second one is doing both. Here we start at WL(1,1) instead of WL(8,1) or WL(1,8). This would require going up the diagonal. This is roughly what the Danish school system tries to do albeit not very well and obviously not on adults.

Somewhere in between the two is trying to connect WL(8,1) and WL(1,8) by "bringing someone over". This would likely require having some special rules for the person who doesn't fit in rather than "crimping" their contribution with a leveling mechanism---this is what usually happens. Highly skilled doers are not allowed to talk more than anyone else in communities. Highly inclusively includers are not allowed to talk or ignored by skill-oriented people unless they know what they're talking about.

[jacob]

This is roughly what the Danish school system tries to do albeit not very well and obviously not on adults.

The community is forced (school is mandatory). Unlike in the US(?) a class is 15-25 people who stay together for 9-10 years all through the school system. The teachers then force the rules (e.g. homework, showing up on time, etc.) and later (6th grade and onwards) force the results (grades).

I'm pondering whether some of these goals (people, rules, results) are mutually incompatible. For example, when grades became important, people became more picky about who they wanted to work with.

People tend to become good at what they prioritize. (A variation of Macnamara's law). The mistake may simply be in prioritizing one method-value set above the others.

[7Wannabe5]

Maybe I am a (4,4), because I think this whole problem is based on false premise. Obviously, all sorts of people get together and DO stuff all the time. For instance, I taught my DD30 how to bake many years ago, she independently developed her own skill set, and then yesterday we got together to bake holiday treats co-operatively. We also both know some science, so co-operatively in discussion came up with several possible explanations for why the glass bowl filled with sugar syrup exploded n the microwave. MUCH more pleasant than being in the kitchen with somebody who thinks that he knows the one right way to fry an egg and is compelled to Iron Chef over the interaction.