Such approaches to strategy are feasible now because our products and processes are so often mediated by digital networks. Their digital nature means that they can be altered just by typing. Not only are fingers far more agile than tired soldiers crossing faltering bridges, but code is pestered by mere bugs, not artillery shells. The networking of digital creation means that the boundaries drawn between users and cocreators are artificial; enabling those boundaries to be overstepped can be a strategic move toward radically increasing the value of one’s products by reducing one’s control over them. And now that machine learning is guiding everyday aspects of our lives, it is provoking inevitable but impossible questions about the ways in which the world surpasses our understanding. We may not be able to answer these questions finally, but strategies that act as if we have as much control as we used to imagine we did increasingly may look like they are in denial.
Possibilities in our new world are of a different sort than we’re used to. In a clockwork universe, a thing will either happen or it won’t; the possibilities that don’t happen have thereby proved that they weren’t really possible after all. But interoperability mints real possibilities that can be actualized, and can be actualized by people unknown to those who created the interoperable tools and resources: we can plug our thing into their thing, these services can be used with our data, we can mash our content up with that content and that data. We couldn’t before, but now that these systems are interoperable, we can. That’s what it means to say that interoperability creates real possibilities: possibilities that can be actualized without waiting for further technical changes, for permission, or for someone else to come up with the idea and choose to build it.
Of course, organizations will continue to pursue strategies that narrow the possibilities and will concentrate their resources on the achievement of the ones they’ve chosen. But over the past twenty years we have moved from assuming that the natural state of a business is to be a fort with a thick wall that firmly separates the inside from the outside. It is now quite common—the norm, even—for a business to think of itself as embedded in a messy network of suppliers, customers, partners, and even competitors.35 Businesses have gone out of their way to open up their processes, welcoming customer input and engaging far more broadly with their ecosystems. It turns out that Fort Business was a social construction, not a formation decreed by nature.
Functionally, this shift toward a networked, or permeable, view of business can be characterized as an increase in interoperability. Systems that were once kept apart by narrow and formal channels have now been enabled to affect one another: product cocreation with customers; multiway marketing conversations rather than one-way broadcasting of messages; standards alliances with competitors. The knocking down of the old walls that were definitional of a business is better understood as a strategic and purposive commitment to increasing a business’s interoperability with the rest of its environment. A business does this in order to make more possibilities real, knowing that this entails that those possibilities will be more unpredictable, for they may be actualized far outside the business’s old, crumbling walls.
This is a far cry from our old anticipate-and-prepare strategy of strategies that relied on narrowing the possible possibilities and betting on the one that will actualize. In an interoperable world in which everything affects everything else, the strategic path forward may be to open as many paths as possible and enable everyone to charge down them all at once, together and apart.
Coda: Strategic Obscurity
Accumulate thickly, arise thinly.
That’s a literal translation of the four Chinese characters that Ren Zhengfei, founder and chairman of Huawei, sent out to his 170,000 employees in 2016.36 The four characters are a chengyu, a saying that often refers to a classic story in Chinese literature. This one traces back to Su Shi, an eleventh-century writer of the Northern Song dynasty.
Ren periodically sends out such poems. Because they are strategic communications from the chairman of the world’s largest telecommunications equipment and services company, he works on finding exactly the right ones. But the right poem is not the one that explicitly and perfectly captures the corporate strategy. Rather, Ren chooses poems that are obscure. Every employee, at every level, is invited to join a study group to try to make sense of the four characters, each of which is rich with meaning.37
One can only imagine the online ridicule an American CEO who distributed poems would risk for trying to sound wise and superior. At Huawei it’s different. The employees do not assume the poem has one clear and correct meaning that Ren could have instead just written out in a memo. It’s not a secret message from the boss that they have to decipher. Rather, the practice requires employees to bring their experience, values, and feelings to the group discussions where shared ideas and values are developed. There they may discover new purposes for the group and the company, new directions, new ways of understanding what they are doing together.
If your strategy requires “putting all your wood behind the arrow,” it is of the essence that the leader be clear at the very least about which way the arrow is to be pointed. But if the corporate goal includes more than hitting a small bull’s-eye a manageable distance away, there’s virtue in obscurity.
First the disclaimer: Of course, clarity is vital in many situations. If you’re writing an airplane repair manual, you can’t tell readers, “Go pull out that thingy on the left, under that other thing, and shake it until it sounds better.” The CFO can’t write in the annual report, “We lost a bunch of money,” and leave it there. Clarity is often required.
But obscurity has some advantages that clarity just can’t match.
Obscurity creates empowerment that clarity can take away. For example, if your boss lays out careful and clear instructions for launching a product, those instructions have power over you. If you decide to add a webinar series, or give an exclusive preview to an important outlet, you risk getting reprimanded for not following those clear, crisp directions. If, on the other hand, your boss tells you to launch a product but does not provide clear instructions about how to do it, she has empowered you to imagine, to decide, to create. Obscurity frees you.
Obscurity enables creativity. When all we see in the night sky is a black curtain randomly interrupted by dots of light, we start to imagine the lines that connect them into shapes that look like a ladle, a hunter, a crab. We become creative. In business the same thing can happen when a group brainstorms solutions to a difficult problem or finds itself in a new arena where their old assumptions may not hold.
Obscurity enables engagement. When everything is clear, the conversation tends to be pragmatic and operational. We hammer down the details and are guided by the gods of efficiency. But when the way forward is murky, and even more when we don’t yet know where we should be going—which way the arrow is pointed—we will turn it over in our minds. We will wonder aloud to the person next to us, and then we will expand the possibilities together. What’s clear is the same to everyone—that’s part of the meaning of being clear. What’s obscure looks different to each, and thus brings out what’s unique about each.
Obscurity has these powers because clarity is not a natural state for humans. Our lives are uncertain. Our way forward is hard to discern. Clarity is a helpful tool, but there’s often more truth in obscurity.
Chapter Six
Progress and Creativity
In 1954, Western Electric produced a five-minute video in which a perfectly coiffed redhead leads us step by step into the brave new world of rotary dials.1 First, look up a number in the phone directory, she tells us in a cheerful voice that makes it seem as if it’s all going to be OK. “It saves time to keep the number in front of you when you dial.” Great tip! Now, pick up the handset and listen for the dial tone.
Things continue to go well as she demonstrates on a dial the size of a small pizza. “When dialing, notice that I brought my finger around until it firmly touched the fin
ger stop. And now I remove my finger and let the dial go back by itself.”
But then comes a moment of unexpected sternness: “A failure to bring your finger fully to the finger stop with each pull of the dial may cause you to dial a wrong number. The same can happen if you pull the dial back.”
From this video we learn three things.
First, how to dial a phone.
Second, in warning us, with a steely conviction that her smile fails to mask, against pulling on the dial to speed its return, our host is anticipating that we humans will make the mistake of assuming that we are the agents of change. It’s a natural mistake, for we create tools to bend the future toward our desires. But that’s only half true about rotary telephone dials. Yes, we rotate the dial clockwise, but the actual dialing occurs on the counterclockwise return trip precisely because that trip is not under our control. The number we dialed is sent across the phone network as a series of timed electrical pulses. Monkeying with their tempo by pulling on the dial to hurry its return trip can throw the timing off. So inside the phone is a governor that makes pulling back on the dial feel like trying to drag your finger through wet corn starch (try it sometime). Our tutor has to warn us in a stern-friendly tone against even trying because the phone company has anticipated that we’ll fight against the governor installed to prevent our anticipated urge to hurry the dial up. Misuse anticipated and prepared for.
Third, having to produce a video to instruct your users in how to use the latest feature you’ve added to your product is a sign that you may be taking a step that will merit its own tick mark on your product’s time line. In this case, it’s the beginning of requiring people to make their own calls instead of asking an operator to do it for them. The tick mark goes on a line that is the shape of the future as we imagine it: drawn left to right, slowly inclining upward, with marks for every achievement.
The next tick on the telephone’s time line has its own lesson. The touch-tone keypad that replaced the rotary dial was introduced at the 1962 World’s Fair, where the future was on display; AT&T didn’t mention that its operators had been using buttons to dial since 1941. But between then and 1962, computers, with their push-button keyboards, had become the mark of modernity. At last the phone had joined the Computer Age, an achievement fully meriting a mark on the time line.
In truth, though, touch-tones were what we would today call a “hack.” They seemed as digital as a computer, but they were actually as analog as Alexander Graham Bell’s moustache. The telephone system from the start had been designed to convey the human voice. That anticipation meant that it was far easier to have the touch-tone keys send analog signals—audible tones within the range of the human voice—than to convert the underlying system to a digital network designed for the crisp on-offs of bits.
Still, touch-tone dialing was such a hit that even now our mobile devices default to a simulation of the old touch-tone keypad, right down to tones that are now meaningless to the system—a digital system simulating an analog system simulating a digital system.2 And we still talk about dialing a keypad. That persistence justifies treating the introduction of the rotary dial and touch-tones as worthy of tick marks on the time line.
We get to choose what we count as tick marks because progress is a story we tell ourselves. That story narrows complex histories of innovation to a single line. For example, here’s one reasonable time line of the telephone’s history:
1876: The phone is invented.
1877: Bell Telephone is founded.
1930s: The two-piece “candlestick” phone is replaced by a unit that combines the speaker and earpiece.
1950s: Rotary phones are introduced.
1960s: Touch-tone dialing is introduced.
1980s: Cordless phones and fax machines become available.3
This is definitely progress. But even if we throw in the 1959 introduction of the Princess phone, a time line as spread out over time as this one is unthinkable—intolerable!—for the device in our pockets today. If there aren’t new apps to look at every day, and a new model of our chosen phone every year, we feel bewildered, if not outraged.
But the most important change we’re experiencing in the nature of progress is not in its pace but in its shape: a one-dimensional line that tells a one-dimensional story is now unwinding into its natural complexity. The new shape of progress reflects a change at the macro level—the top-down view from far away—not only in how we think things happen but also in what drives our story forward.
The Invention of Progress
In 1967, the famous teacher and scholar Charles Van Doren carefully articulated the essence of progress in four assertions: (1) A “definite pattern of change exists in the history of mankind.” (2) That pattern is known to us. (3) It is, “in the long run, irreversible.” (4) “The direction of the irreversible pattern of change in history is toward the better.”4
There’s a fifth assertion not on that list because Van Doren discusses it at length throughout his nearly five-hundred-page book: something causes that pattern to occur and persevere. If we thought it were all just an accident, a series of dice throws, we would call it luck, not progress. Van Doren notes eleven different forces behind progress, which he divides into two major categories: progress caused by something about the nature of the universe (God, natural principles) and progress caused by something about humans.5
As an example, the abolitionist Unitarian minister who originated the phrase “The arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice,”6 famously invoked by Martin Luther King Jr., believed in a combination of the two drivers. In 1853 Theodore Parker thought that moral progress occurred because the divine principle in humans tends to win out. But why, he wondered, is that arc so long? Parker explained that while natural laws—Newton’s laws—are reliable and predictable, the moral law only has an effect if we humans listen to our conscience. Too often we fail to hear and heed that quiet voice. The driver of moral progress is our paying attention (Van Doren’s second sort of driver) to the divine law (the first driver).
So what do we think drives technological progress? Until relatively late in our history, the clear answer would have been, “Absolutely nothing,” for the concept of progress didn’t seem to apply to technology any more than we currently think it applies to fashion or to the movement of tectonic plates, albeit for different reasons. To see why it took so long to think of technology as subject to progress, we first have to take a quick look at the history of progress itself.
* * *
“All that the hand of man can make, is either overturned by the hand of man, or at length by standing and continuing consumed.”7 Thus wrote Sir Walter Raleigh in the preface to his incomplete million-word history of the world published in 1614.8 Such pessimism ruffled no feathers because it was obvious to everyone—as obvious as the march of progress is to us—that the older a civilization grows, the weaker and more corrupt it becomes.9 After all, a civilization is like a human body, isn’t it? That’s where we got the idea that it needs a head to run it and that there are organs of government. So it was assumed that, like a human body, once a civilization reaches adulthood, it begins to decline.10 (This line of thought was part of a more encompassing strategy for understanding the universe by looking for analogies among its parts at every level.) Even the Greeks, who ever after were held up as the pinnacle of learning and art, had assumed that their own civilization was yet another step in the decline from the original Golden Age before Zeus took over.11 Christian beliefs about the Fall of man and the upcoming Apocalypse added a decisive ending to this story. Even in the early nineteenth century, the Romantics lamented the lost innocence of childhood and praised the “noble savages” who resisted the corrupting influence of “civilization.”
Sir Walter Raleigh’s history wasn’t an argument against progress, for there was no conception of progress to argue against. To be learned meant to be a scholar of the Greek and Roman sources of all wisdom and beauty: Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, an
d their ilk. Even the geniuses of the Renaissance did not think they were making progress beyond the classics, but rather believed they were renewing them; renaissance means “rebirth.” For example, when a 1509 book, illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, described the glories of the golden ratio—a rectangle of particular proportions revered by Renaissance artists—it was presented as founded in Plato’s theory of shapes and interpreted through a Christian understanding of God.12 If it was true or beautiful, or preferably both, then the Greeks or Romans had discovered it.
So it was shocking when, in 1687, a poem by Charles Perrault—the creator of the genre we call fairy tales—was read out at a meeting of the Académie française, for it contained these audacious lines, among others:
Learned Antiquity, throughout all its stay,
Was never as enlightened as we are today.13
The arrogance! The horror! Outraged shouts from the audience demanded that the reading be stopped mid couplet.
That session was only the opening shot in what was called in France “the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.”14 Those advocating for the idea of progress maintained that the ancient world was based on superstitions, while the modern world was advancing our knowledge by means of the new scientific method pioneered by Sir Francis Bacon.
Five years later, the dispute had hopped across the English Channel. Sir William Temple, a statesman and hugely popular writer, wrote an essay in which he argued against progress in no uncertain terms.15 Temple was what we might today call a science denier, questioning that the Earth revolves around the sun and that the heart pumps blood through our veins and arteries.16 Embarrassingly for Temple, some of the examples of great ancient works he used to make his point turned out to be far more modern than he supposed, and one was an outright forgery.17
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