Product #77
The Crux, Man Computer Symbiosis and More.
The Crux · Richard Rumelt · 2022
Strategy is a mix of policy and action designed to overcome a significant high stakes challenge. It’s about focusing attention and resources narrowly on the critical issue. Focus is the cornerstone of strategy, the concentration of resources is where the power comes from. BUT focus on the wrong thing and not much will happen.
The crux of the problem is the place where commitment to actions will have the best chance of surmounting the most critical obstacles. The art of strategy is defining a crux that can be mastered and to see a way through it.
Don’t start with goals. An unsupported goal is set arbitrarily, without an analysis or understanding of a critical challenge or opportunity. Instead start by understanding the challenge and finding its crux (the sub-problem that’s most important but still addressable).
Strategy a judgment about what to do. It cannot serve all of our desires at once. Strategy should be based on judgments gained by examining changes, problems, skills, resources, and opportunities. Strategy decides a way forward → once you have a strategy → you can then fashion the specific goals that will guide its implementation. A good objective defines a problem that is simpler to solve than the original overall challenge
The process of strategy creation is diagnosing the challenge and creating a response (a challenge can be a big opportunity). You can’t deduce a strategy from a set of always relevant principles. Generic strategy frameworks might draw your attention to what’s important but they can’t guide you to specific actions.
Compile a comprehensive list of all related problems, issues, and opportunities. Next, organise these them into groups, identifying relationships between them while allowing for some flexibility in categorisation. Then, prioritise based on immediacy, setting aside issues that can be addressed later. Finally, evaluate the remaining items based on their importance and addressability.
Often critical challenges don’t seem addressable without careful consideration. Can you break into sub-problems, find similar problems, consult experts, identify changing factors, determine key constraints, subdivide if necessary?
A strategy shouldn’t be a long-range sketch of a desired destination. Think of it as a journey through, over, and around a sequence of challenges. The hard part is distilling broad intent into actions that can be taken now.
The key to strategy is playing games you can win. Choose the crux that strikes at critical issues and that can be surmounted.
The ASC (Addressable Strategic Challenge) must pass the joint filters of critical importance and addressability. The number of ASCs that can be worked on at once depends on resources - but its likely fewer than you think.
Sometimes your personal strategy has to include a path toward gaining enough executive power to actually enact the strategy you need to.
Your actions and policies need to be coherent (not contradicting each other). Ideally they complement each other and create additional power. The cost of coherence is saying no to many interests with reasonable values and arguments.
Seek an edge: In competition, we seek advantage, and it can come only from some asymmetry. Look for an important asymmetry, that can be turned to an advantage (source of power/leverage) to help you tackle the crux.
Quick Links
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Man Computer Symbiosis · J.C.R Licklider · 1960
Not long after the first computers were invented - we got incredibly excited about the arrival of Artificial Intelligence. It wasn’t clear how long it would take to develop AI general enough to do our thinking and doing. Even bullish estimates at the time proposed that it would take 20 years.
Licklider therefore articulated the need for a phase of computing between ‘Mechanically extended man’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’.
Mechanically Extended Man: Computers are capable of automatic some basic tasks but the humans doing the programming had to think through the problem in great detail in advance. They were doing the hard part
The age of Artificial Intelligence: where a mechanical or organic brain would be produced that could operate far beyond the level of human intelligence - and be capable of doing everything
He saw the opportunity in Man-Computer Symbiosis. Where humans and computers could work together and solve intellectual operations more effectively than humans alone.
In this paper he defined what that could look like and what problems we’d have to solve before we could get there.
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Quotes & Tweets
90% of success is not getting distracted.
Shane Parrish
THIS IS NOT IN PRAISE OF POISON
Jean-Michel Basquiat