One of the biggest things I had to learn over the last five years was to scale myself without losing touch with the details of the business and the operations. Mental models have been a great tool in that. For me, they are like maps, or mathematical equations; they help me understand reality without having to spend the time to understand everything that happens in the real world. My biggest struggle was to use the right mental model for the right decision making and keeping the mental model updated as reality changed. The real world is very dynamic.
Last year, I stumbled upon an episode of the Endless loop podcast where the guest speaker was Tom Morgan, a knowledge curator in the financial services industry. He talked about a mental model of maximum engagement and maximum abstraction. I have been thinking more about it, and I wanted to expand a bit more on it.
Here's how he describes it in the podcast. "At maximum engagement, you're one with everything in this undifferentiated mass. And at maximum abstraction, you're completely isolated from the world with enormous power over it, but completely disconnected from it. And I think that a lot of people get into real trouble in life when they become maximally abstracted. So if you're living completely in the map and not in the territory, that's actually one of the descriptions of major depression. It's basically when your map doesn't get updated by new territory. And your network is completely closed to new information and there's no connectivity whatsoever. So, basically people in the executive suite, when no one wants to bring bad news to them, they're almost like completely disconnected."
When you're running things as a leader, the larger the organization, the harder it is to have a maximum engagement experience all the time. So, the ideal situation is to keep walking between two ends of that continuum between maximum engagement and maximum abstraction. Napoleon used to lead his army into battle, when most monarchs and prime ministers at the time stayed in their palaces and cabinet rooms. Duke of Wellington led his army into battle in India and Europe before becoming Prime Minister. Sir Winston Churchill resigned from the cabinet after the Gallipolli disaster and went to command an infantry battalion in France during the first world war. In the software world, Bill Gates coded - until he couldn't. However, the maximum abstraction behavior gave us the tragedies of Iraq and Afghanistan. It also gave us the 2008 financial crisis. The people running our largest banks had no idea what was really backing up the mortgage backed securities. The maximum abstraction behavior definitely helps leaders scale as long as the abstraction - or the model - is getting updated with reality. And the way leaders can update their abstraction is by having that maximum engagement experience to make sure that their abstractions match reality.
What should leaders do to be able to live on maximum engagement, sometimes? Some of the executives at AWS actually roll-up their sleeves and code against the APIs their teams are producing. Leaders go out and talk to customers and participate in customer call-listening sessions. Leaders of smaller or medium sized engineering teams participate in and contribute to code and design reviews. Many product leaders use their own products like a customer would: eating your own dogfood. The trick is not about staying in maximum engagement all the time, but it is about staying at the right level of engagement and using the lessons learned during that engagement to update the abstraction of reality. This also involves creating the right organization culture where anyone in the organization can bring bad news, and bring in suggestions to improve what's broken.
