Fish Food: Episode 611

The seeking system, ideas as data, 'strawberry' AI, social media trends, Nassim Taleb on risk, founder mode, and the sustained two-shot.

Sep 13, 2024

We hear so much about the value of curiosity in a fast-changing, complex world (in fact I've also written about it my books) but Dan Cable gives us a powerful way of understanding just how essential the ability to explore, learn and experiment are to being engaged and motivated in the modern workplace.

In his book 'Alive at Work' (which I'm reading at the moment), he frames this through the lens of the 'seeking system'. This, says Dan, is our elemental desire to learn about and explore our environments in order to extract meaning from our circumstances. He uses a bunch of different academic studies to show how fundamental this is to our motivation, notably in the workplace. When an ability to explore new things and to find a sense of purpose in what we're doing is combined with the ability to make use of our unique skills as part of a team we become truly 'alive at work'.

There are echoes of Dan Pink's 'autonomy, mastery, and purpose' in this (another of my favourite ways of thinking about motivation), but Dan Cable makes a compelling case for how the modern working environment is entirely unsuited for activating our seeking systems. In fact it's doing the opposite. Modern 'scientific management', which originated in the industrial revolution, has long focused on suppressing employees' natural impulses to explore. It seeks to keep staff in predictable boxes and behaviours, to reduce variability and maintain 'control'. When work was all about repeatable patterns, efficiency and doing the same things in the same way at scale, a desire to experiment and learn simply gets in the way. But given the fact that pretty much every organisation is now operating in highly complex and adaptive environments this has never been so needed.

Think about your own experience. I'm sure we've all had situations where we've felt hemmed in, restricted from trying new things or exploring new ideas because it was not seen as a good use of time or was perceived to be beyond our direct area of responsibility. Conversely, perhaps we've also had times when we felt empowered and supported by our boss and the wider organisation to apply new thinking or challenge existing ways of doing things. I sometimes run a reflection in my leadership workshops that asks leaders to reflect on a time when they felt that they did the best work of their career and were most motivated. I ask them to think about what characterised that situation. Again and again words like 'autonomy', 'trust', 'supported' and 'learning' come up. It's always a challenging situation of some kind (a launch, a new role, a big target, a turnaround) where they felt that they had a good sense of purpose and the autonomy to make the key decisions, try new things, and see the difference that they were making. This is the seeking system in action.

Sadly though, we have the contemporary tragedy of disengaged, frustrated employees. According to Gallup’s huge annual survey, only 23% of employees worldwide say that they are engaged at work. The author quotes neuroscience pioneer Jack Panksepp: 'When the seeking systems are not active, human aspirations remain frozen in an endless winter of discontent.' The particular tragedy is that when our seeking systems ARE engaged it can generate a positive reinforcing loop of motivation. The release of dopamine pushes us to explore more. Cable quotes Steve Cole, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences in the UCLA School of Medicine:

'The seeking system doesn’t seem to reward us for innovation and creativity, but rather it drives and propels those behaviors. The distinction is mainly temporal—reward happens after a behavioral event, whereas seeking happens before it. We are motivated to do a lot of things based on hope and aspiration that are not described by backward-looking rewards.’

This distinction is key. Rewards for past behaviours may generate temporary hedonic well-being (the pleasant feelings we feel when we get the things that we want), but engaging the seeking system can generate eudemonic happiness (relating to the meaning and purpose that we feel in life). To quote Dan Cable:

'Maybe, for us humans, this is what the seeking system is urging us to do: to explore our environments in order to discover our personal potential in the world, and then express ourselves in that way. Following our seeking system’s urges make us feel good in a purposeful way, which makes us healthier and happier.'

The lasting point is that in an increasingly complex world the natural impulses of employees towards purpose and exploration can align perfectly with the need for organisations to experiment, innovate and to learn fast.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

If you do one thing this week…

Phil Adams is someone who’s thinking I’ve long respected and so it was wonderful to have him as a guest on the latest episode of Google Firestarters, just out. Phil chose as his provocation the thought that great strategy is about working backwards from ideas, but he brought this to life with some excellent thoughts on how ideas are effectively data, how they can give you a glimpse of the future, and how to have great ideas. I loved what he says about collaborative concepting (‘an agency is like a Large Hadron Collider for ideas’), and how strategy is about making choices and sensemaking, but he also has some wonderful reflections of what it’s been like to become an independent following a long career leading strategy teams and agencies. You can give it a watch over on YouTube, or a listen on Spotify and Apple (or wherever you get your podcasts).

Links of the week

OpenAI’s new model, o1 (code named ‘strawberry’ because of the difficulty that previous models had in recognising that the word had 3 ‘r’ s), is the first in a planned series of reasoning models. Reported to be able to answer more complex questions and more easily solve multistep problems faster than a human can, it’s another step towards AGI. It was tested against the qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad and scored 83% compared to GPT-4o’s score of 13%
Some useful points and thought-starters in this lengthy (but easy-to-read) presentation on social media trends and content from Matthew Stasoff (HT Pete Marcus)
Meta’s ad share is nearly 3 times the share of time spent on its platforms. Some big disparities in ad share vs time spent (and surely lots of room for growth from some platforms)
Don’t let the ‘I-spent-X-on-X-and-here’s-what-I-learned’ headline put you off - there’s some useful strategy concepts in this post featuring highlights from Nassim Taleb’s Real World Risk Institute Course.
Paul Graham wrote a challenging provocation about the difference between ‘founder mode’ and ‘manager mode’ in leadership. The former, and it’s differentiation from traditional leadership in a large organisation, is an interesting idea, but I can definitely see the potential downside of it too (not least the risk of micromanagement)
Before I went on holiday I wrote something for JP Castlin’s excellent strategy newsletter on the importance of contextual understanding in strategy, transformation and navigating change. It came out whilst I was away and it’s here if you’d like to read it.
Like Jason Kottke I used to like the Every Frame a Painting video channel on YouTube which featured a series of sub-10-minute video essays on film form and film craft. And they’ve just released the first episode in eight years focusing on ‘the sustained two-shot’. Excellent stuff.
‘The very first non-AI generative art model’. Give this artist a prompt to work from and he’ll send you back a visual sketch of it. Prompt Brush is a fun anti-AI-hype idea (HT Mike Scheiner)

And finally…

I loved this cartoon drawn and shared by (friend of ODF) Andy Whitlock, which is so true.

Weeknotes

Thanks for your patience whilst I’ve been on holiday in Italy (I had a wonderful time). Our normal weekly frequency is now resuming. This week post-holiday I came straight out to Dubai to work with leaders at the retailer Carrefour running a workshop around leading change and transformation. I always find the Burj Khalifa totally gobsmacking when I come here but what I hadn’t realised is that they’re now building the world’s second tallest tower as well. Nuts.

Next week I’ll be running the IPA course on the application of AI in advertising (last one or two places still available I believe) and kicking off some interviews for an exciting research/report project looking at the evolution of marketing operations.

Thanks for subscribing to and reading Only Dead Fish. It means a lot. If you’d like more from me my blog is over here and my personal site is here. If you liked this episode do share and pass it on, and do get in touch if you’d like me to give a talk to your team or talk about working together.

My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.