We humans think we’re great.
We also think that what humans are good at must be most important, and overestimate how good we are.
When evolution arrived as a theory, it had a tough job convincing everybody, as is well known. Scepticism runs deep about it even now, partly because it’s deeply unintuitive.
Looking at the world, we see that it’s full of amazingly functional things working together. Considering that we, as humans, spend a lot of our time trying to create functional things, it’s very difficult not to imagine that what we see is deliberately designed to do what it does.
Even when we know about evolution, and accept that it’s how things work and came about, we persist in seeing it as a sort of design, somehow, as though it was blindly aiming at what we now have. We also have a sort of soft bigotry about it, marvelling at the way (as we think) an unintelligent process creates something that is “as good as if it had been designed”.
This is completely backwards, and shows a bias that blinds us to a lot of important things.
Evolution is better than design.
Apparently nearly half of American men surveyed think they could land an airliner in an emergency. In spite of knowing how complex a task that is, they don’t grasp the difference between the true complexity and their actual knowledge of it.
In the same way, we look at, say, an insect, and think, sure, designing that would be really hard, but not unimaginably hard. We couldn’t do it ourselves, but somebody like us, just very very capable, could. This is because we find it so difficult to grasp what’s involved, at an intuitive level. Most of us with any education know differently intellectually, of course, but this is still how it feels.
And it’s wrong. Again, it’s completely backwards.
Evolution accomplishes things that design simply can’t. Nobody could design an insect from scratch.
Rather than admiring evolution for matching a design process, we should be in awe at what it can do far in excess of the best design. It isn’t a blunt and brainless imitation, it’s the key to all the successful complexity there is, anywhere.
And that includes things that we assume we designed ourselves, a lot of the time.
Most successful design IS evolution, anyway.
This is where I’d expect some people to get quite cross with me and say I’m moving the goalposts. But it’s important, and true.
This bias, where we see and value the intelligent and purposeful decisions of design, and overlook things that happen because of the slow results of trial and error, means we’re misled even about our own successes.
Let’s jump to the most basic and isolated design work: say, a single person coming up with a logo. It’s pure, one person doing it all, and deciding it all, few external requirements of what it has to be.
… and even then, if we’re honest about how the design process happens, a huge amount is doing something, seeing if it works, doing something else, seeing if it’s better, an accidental change that sparks a new approach, reacting to feedback. It isn’t an intellectual line from zero to final product, using nothing but talent, inspiration and skill.
I expect some will dismiss that assertion as sleight of hand, on the basis that if I’m saying there is no such thing as design anyway then even the argument is pointless. Stay with me, though, and assume that I do think design is a distinct and valuable thing.
If we do hold both ideas at once, design comes to seem more like the controlled use of evolution than anything. In the same way that an honest look at creativity finds that it sort of evaporates from wherever you try to find it, leaving only influences and prior building blocks behind, design comes to look as though it’s skill at guiding trial and error, mixed with experience and intuition. That doesn’t mean that creativity or design don’t exist, only that they’re not mystical qualities.
And that isn’t even the only way we elevate intent and expertise about the trial and error of finding what works.
When a new phone comes out, we look and see if they’ve “got it right this time”. We subconsciously assume the new object is a distinct entity, rather than a continuation of a process. Generally, the new one couldn’t exist without the previous one, and things are iterative.
By now, there is nobody alive who knows how to design an airliner. Not a single one who could sit down with only their knowledge and come up with a working design. Yet airliners are “designed”, in that new versions arrive, but they build on existing knowledge diffused through a lot of people and experience, and, yes, trial and error of what worked and what didn’t. A complex new product is, if we’re honest, as much the result of evolution as naked intelligence and capability.
So what? Isn’t all this semantics?
This is all very interesting (for a given value of interesting), but so far seems pedantic without affecting much.
Where the crunch comes is when we talk about change, especially re-design.
This bias is very dangerous when we come to look at complex things of all sorts and are dissatisfied with them. Which, let’s face it, describes a lot of life.
We tend to assume both that there’s intention behind why things are as they are, more than is in fact the case, which adds to our dissatisfaction and leads to scapegoating, and that they are more fixable than they are. This is the root of some very real problems.
You can’t design it, and you shouldn’t try.
Take political systems.
Laws, customs, institutions, culture, in whole and in detail.
If we’re biased towards thinking nature is designed, it’s even more difficult to avoid when it comes to things we’ve clearly created between us. We assume that because we did it, it was our intent and intelligence that mattered, and we don’t see the degree to which it “just happened” and we’re left with what worked.
Idealists are, understandably, always outraged at the shortfalls of whatever political system they live in. They’re very susceptible to thinking that it’s been designed badly, and even more susceptible to thinking that they could design it better and are being prevented from implementing such a thing. They want revolution and a new constitution, maybe, or at least some deeply-thought-through change.
A different sort of idealist sees the shortfalls abroad, and is keen to lecture and impose better. That leads to deposing dictators, sometimes, and importing ways of doing things from other more successful countries.
Both are under the delusion that any successful mass human system can be designed at all, even by the wisest of us and with the best intentions. The precise extent to which they’re convinced their design is right is the extent to which we can be sure it will fail. Because what makes a human society work is always evolution. Just as there are forever unexpected subtleties to natural organisms that are crucial to their function, however much we learn, so unnoticed trivial details always turn out to be vital to functioning society.
Sure, we can point to successful and unsuccessful starting points, including declarations and constitutions that are the base of distinct political systems. But those things are not themselves the working result that springs from them, as we can see by the fact that they’re not transferrable.
When we fall into thinking that the design is the important part of a working complex thing, we think otherwise, and are tempted to correct or replace it, not realising that we truly don’t know what we’re doing.
The same applies, usually with less widely disastrous impact, to organisations of various types, as anyone who has experienced an attempted culture change at a big company, or even a “digital transformation” can verify.
So can’t we hope for anything? Change anything?
Humans, we know, dreamed of flying for a long time, probably thousands of years at least. For almost all that time, we imagined flying like birds, with wings somehow part of our bodies using our natural strength as they do.
Bio-mechanically, this was a hopeless dream. But humans do now fly, because we finally switched to maximising the strengths we do have, and external help. Airliners, as previously discussed, are the result.
For many things, though not modern commercial products like phones and airliners, we still dream, and haven’t moved on. Our brains aren’t enough to design things beyond a certain complexity any more than our bodies are built for flight. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, as we clearly see.
What it does mean is that we need to acknowledge the limitation, and work with it, as happens when designing an airliner. Expertise is prized, but not as much as direct knowledge of something that works is prized, and not as much as proof via repeated testing under every imaginable condition and adjusting according to the results.
Design of complex things isn’t design in the simplistic way we assume, and we need to be humble enough to overcome our instinct otherwise.
What we can design: frameworks, drafts, platforms, systems for the desired results.
What we can’t design: complex end results in themselves.
What does this sort of design look like, then?
Software development has been wrestling with this for some time, since to an unusual extent the production of software is design, not a separate thing. That means extremely clever people have thought more deeply about this problem in that area than most, and has given rise to “agile”, among other ideas, in which responsiveness is prioritised over planning.
Even aside from named methodologies, big open-source projects like the Linux kernel have some clues.
When something is extremely complex, the design effort doesn’t go into the thing itself, but the processes around it, and the base it starts from. We assume at the start that we have close to no idea, and can have no idea, what the result will look like. So instead we identify the most promising starting points, and concentrate on how we can tell whether what’s emerging is right so far.
Design of an effective feedback loop is far more consequential than the design of any component of the thing itself.
This, essentially, is evolution in action. We provide, in a sense, both the evolutionary pressure, and the generative trial and error, and it’s a scalable process.
Interestingly, this is also a reasonable description of “common law”, which forms the basis of many legal systems. Laws are drafted, debated, scrutinised and enacted, but there is always the understanding that the results will depend on evolving case law as they are applied and tested against real life. To an unacknowledged extent, this is also what happens with most law and regulation everywhere in some form.
So we know this already?
We do, in some fields, but we seem to be not always aware of it, and we don’t apply it everywhere it’s needed.
Companies are fond of streamlining processes, and it’s often a puzzle why it’s so hard to do, and why the results are terrible, or the attempt abandoned.
The reason, largely, is that they’re replacing something that’s evolved with something that’s designed, in the assumption that the latter is better. Business transformation, instead, needs to be on the understanding that the new thing is going to be worse in some important respects, at least initially, simply because evolution hasn’t had a chance to work on it, and therefore efforts are best directed towards the best possible starting point and the means by which it can evolve effectively, not treated as a one-off idealistic project.
That doesn’t make it pointless, because when an existing process has evolved as far as it can, a new start can be very necessary. But changing to something that can grow into an improvement is a lot more realistic than hoping for utopia in one hit.
In this sense, we can see the same in politics and government.
The arguments are often framed badly from all directions. Those who want radical change are not necessarily mistaken, but what they ought to hope for is a better base for a future society, not that ideal immediately. It is more honest to wish to rip out the existing system, just mistaken to believe that a better version can be imposed because they wish it.
Effective change, in society as well as business, tends to be about how things are to happen, and harnessing processes and feedback loops, not about grand plans.
OK, so what do we take from this?
There are a few general principles I’d like to suggest.
1 – It’s important to actively prevent focus on the end result. Instead, ask how we know how well something fits what we want to achieve when we see it. Specify that.
2 – Relatedly, keep the requirements loose and simple. The definition of what constitutes success should be tight and clear, but there should be as little as possible about the means.
3 – Put the design effort and talent into designing feedback loops in the process, not the thing itself. Think about what happens when something could be improved, how we know that’s the case and why, and how the improvement happens.
4 – Create space for things to go wrong. In trial and error, “error” is real and expected. Not only allow for it, but encourage it to the extent that unknowns are clarified. Build that into the feedback loops.
5 – Where there are options, prioritise the ones that allow for further change. Either undoing things if they don’t work, or leading to new possibilities if they do. This is, actually, true design skill and experience, because this can be a subtle and non-obvious thing.
Sometimes I like to dream of companies and countries run this way.
I imagine not arguments about ideals and proposals that would definitely fix a problem, but discussions about ways in which improvements might be tested to see if they’re improvements, built on if they are, and undone if they’re not.
The ridiculous thing is that to a large extent, this is how the systems we have work, simply because it’s the only way that does work. Our blindness to that fact makes it all precarious because we constantly pretend otherwise and look for that perfect solution, risking wrecking all the delicate balances we’ve painstakingly arrived at without realising.
Presumably evolution has made us humans that way for some reason, but I have no idea what it is.