Fun read, but it feels vaguely dystopian to me. The TVA is very, y'know, bad? And using it as your example of how to control org culture because "It can get problematic if the employees start to question the TVA" feels like the kind of thing you only do when critiquing or satirizing corporate consultancies.
Similarly, I am by no means educated on workplace whatnot in general or the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model specifically, but, at least to me, the diagram under "Evaluating Congruence" would be good parody of a meaningless powerpoint slide if it wasn't real. I think it's the word "Strategy" added in small text to a random arrow that really takes it to the level where my brain needs to start evaluating whether I'm looking at a parody.
Exactly. There is an underlying narrative that goes almost unquestioned that Some Evil is necessary to prevent a Greater Evil. That's how we get things like the fucking Patriot Act and this new "TikTok Ban".
> There is an underlying narrative that goes almost unquestioned that Some Evil is necessary to prevent a Greater Evil. That's how we get things like the fucking Patriot Act ….
There was an awful lot of questioning about the Patriot Act; it just got shouted down. I'm sure there is as much questioning today, it's just that the people who prefer you not question things have got better at shouting you down (or, well, more than shouting).
Is their life really "ended" if there is still an infinite number of them in other timelines? I'm kind-of joking, but once you start contemplating the multiverse things stop making much sense.
It's not made super clear but it seems the TVA does not destroy every branching timeline. By extension we can arguably infer that infinite copies of "everybody" still exist, just in a smaller set of timelines (the ones the TVA allows to exist). So, if they've erased an infinite amount of life, but also an infinite amount of life still exists, then what actually happened?
That weird chart, with the "Environment/Resources/History" inputs and the "Transformational Process" of "Culture/Work/People/Structure", is called the "Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model" and it has, like, actual papers written about it for places like the "Journal of Organisational Transformation & Social Change": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nadler-tushman+congruen...
I lack the awareness of the field to judge whether it expresses something profound or is absolute bullshit.
Paranoid police states also need to understand system design. And they may be clearer about the conflicts between human nature and organizational mission than public comms allow.
Consider that the NSA built their spooky-STASI data warehouse of all communications anywhere/anytime/forever in Utah. Perhaps someone believes it will be easier to recruit for a culture of secret archives in Utah than in Maryland.
Hrm, engineering via applying Conway's Law: figure out the right architecture for your program, and then shape the organization to resemble that architecture. The result will organically and inevitably take that shape.
For large scale organizations, a reorg is an architecture change to accomplish a change in outcome. It's pretty obvious after you've been at a large org (>1000 people as an arbitrary cutoff) for a few years and you start to see how changes in organizational structure change your own ability to work across teams.
I program with a computer. The C-suite programs via org changes.
Maybe the C suite should use software. I am serious - i see software as a form of literacy and at some point the workers for the worlds largest companies stopped being human and became CPUs and GPUs. Coders became managers. I mean Twitter is trying to become a company of workers (CPUs) and their managers only.
You do need a unifying story so that the managers co-ordinate at a high "mission" level.
And most of the rest of the co-ordination is done via integration testing.
Frankly "managers" as we know them, supervisory over a few people are done for.
What will succeed is what google now seems to optimise for - being nice and safe for coders so they can co-operate.
Frankly therapists on tap might make for better org design - iron out most of the directional problems with "the story", keep people from infighting by sharing the cash and occasional therapy sessions and you pretty much describe Google till last year.
A formal management calculus is an intriguing idea. It could allow something like specifying invariants that must hold for any reorganization or deriving the necessary precondition for some desired organizational property to be achieved.
I think you can go an awful long way with three things
- a single programmatic API wrapping all parts of a company "datastore"
import accounts, people, ...
print sales.emea.range(2023,2,1)
- a simple forward based test suite - so tests that are specified now but should pass at certain dates in future, or after certain release milestones
test.endfebruary.totalemeasales> 5M
test.startfebruary.totalmarketingemea.increase = 15%
This basically is trying to link budgets to actions in a traceable way.
it effectively takes project management and wipes it out as it should.
you don't need managers to tell people what is to be done, you just measure if it has been done.
(admittedly Inthink things also need to measure like "all posters in shops need to be chnaged by date x"
So is Severance. Dystopian views of corporations are my favorite watch these days. Kind of like mixing the 90's Office/corporate culture (like Office Space, etc) satire with science-fiction. Though, the Matrix did both originally..
I object to the idea that marvel puts subtle themes into anything. Marvel movie and TV writing is so slap you in the face obvious that pretending they have deeper subtle meanings is just us seeing patterns where they don't exist.
I think they try to have deeper themes sometimes, but the strict formula ruins it.
Winter Soldier is about questioning loyalty, Wandavision is about burying trauma. The problem is that these themes are always undone or diminished in the end, because there must always be a bad guy with strictly evil motives, and the good guys must punch him and shoot lasers at him until the audience gets tired.
... and then they pull back as soon as they might be about to say anything interesting, or take anything but a very-boring stance on any position.
Looking at you, Falcon & Winter Soldier. And Wandavision, for that matter. And several of the movies—friggin' Spiderman: Far From Home, ugh. Even Black Panther ends up feeling like a missed opportunity that almost went somewhere interesting, had all the pieces in place to, then... just didn't, I suspect in part because it would likely have required a less-well-proven-in-superhero-movies story structure, so would have been riskier. The second one revisits that a little and tries to recover some of the potential the first one just left lying on the floor, but damn, that first one could have been great, period, not just "decent for a Marvel movie".
It's almost better when they don't even hint that they might be trying to convey a message or have interesting themes, because then it's frustrating when they inevitably fail to follow through. It's so bad that when one of the films manages to have even fairly-safe themes and actually treats them half-decently and takes well-worn, safe positions on them (the Guardians films) it puts them at the very top of the Marvel pile, so far as that aspect is concerned, at least.
They tease messages and interesting themes more often than they really commit to them, unfortunately.
While not technically in the MCU, a Marvel movie that did go a bit deeper, and off-formula, was Logan.
Yes,there were some familiar beats,but I think also did a good job of exploring what it means to grow old, to look back on a life of battles won, but war lost, to envisage a different future for the next generation over a simple repeat of the mistakes of this one,in spite of the futility of that desire.
It was a very different look at familiar characters,and a very sober alternative to the "hero always wins in the end" narrative.
Yep, that's true, good call, Logan's got some heft. I wasn't even thinking about the X-Men movies (which are, to be fair, and as you note, only MCU-adjacent)
Onthe inverse-meta of this comment ; there is a definite purpose to Marvel (and all other means of mass media consumption), but first some context. (This one will rile some feathers, TBS)
-
Secret societies (Masons, Essenes, Rosi, Mayan, Jesuits (not the ones youre familiar with) - have divided minds into two classes for centuries...
"Those that think, and those that think they think"
--
One of the most prolific manipulations is to get people to embed themselves into the latter, whilst thinking they are in the former.
So when you provide a single layer of depth into the pattern, for people to think they are imbued with the higher (deeper) concepts - alows their conscious to align with your intent, without understanding the principles behind it, and thus, keeping (rather than detoriating) the momentum of intent... (this is how politics works. Its where the idea of 'just scratching the surface' comes from but from much more ancient times..)
So for example, if you held the cast of a paint job on a Ford Mustang, and held it up - a viewer would exlaim "That is a ford Mustang!" feeling confident in their exclamation.
Yet you can clearly tell that it is the image of a mustang, but beyond that...
So they carry the idea of the mustang, without any clue what is true behind the reality of a mustang (its body, parts, etc...)
These media pieces are rudders in the flow of thought (you may also not know that the symbol for thought in all these groups is water - as thought flows as water. For many reasons, water is used to represent thought (as its state can change from fluid, solid, gas - but with controlling elements as well -- Wont go into that here...)
--
When you say "seeing patterns where they don't exist" is partially true -- as there are layers to this.
Many patterns are presented by those who are not aware of the patterns they present. Either by subconscious suppression/suggestion, or other unrecognized (by them) familiarity, or by soul-desire (not for HN) connections...
But symbolism is literally in every single thing you do, see, hear, read and SAY.
Etymology is amazing - especially when you have historical context to the origin of certain incantations of speech.
The submitted title was "Marvel's Loki is secretly about org design". We've reverted it now. Discussion tends to get skewed in a shallow/baity direction with title edits like that, which is one reason we have this rule:
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
If you want a fictional organizational system, see L. Ron Hubbard's "How to live though an executive". The original edition describes a JIRA-like work control system in great detail. It's all manual. There are forms, wallboards of clamps holding tickets, markers for status changes, followup, and "communicators" running the process. This was a fantasy when first proposed, because the process was too labor-intensive. Now it's automated and common.
(Such boards were not original with Hubbard. Here's such a setup for locomotive overhaul on a once famous UK railway.[1] Hubbard was applying a control scheme intended for a huge operation to rather banal tasks.)
52 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread> Needless to say, there will be spoilers from the show.
Similarly, I am by no means educated on workplace whatnot in general or the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model specifically, but, at least to me, the diagram under "Evaluating Congruence" would be good parody of a meaningless powerpoint slide if it wasn't real. I think it's the word "Strategy" added in small text to a random arrow that really takes it to the level where my brain needs to start evaluating whether I'm looking at a parody.
And so are corporations.
Also let’s not forget kidnapping, gaslighting, and erasing people’s memories!
There was an awful lot of questioning about the Patriot Act; it just got shouted down. I'm sure there is as much questioning today, it's just that the people who prefer you not question things have got better at shouting you down (or, well, more than shouting).
It's not made super clear but it seems the TVA does not destroy every branching timeline. By extension we can arguably infer that infinite copies of "everybody" still exist, just in a smaller set of timelines (the ones the TVA allows to exist). So, if they've erased an infinite amount of life, but also an infinite amount of life still exists, then what actually happened?
What does this mean?
I lack the awareness of the field to judge whether it expresses something profound or is absolute bullshit.
Paranoid police states also need to understand system design. And they may be clearer about the conflicts between human nature and organizational mission than public comms allow.
Consider that the NSA built their spooky-STASI data warehouse of all communications anywhere/anytime/forever in Utah. Perhaps someone believes it will be easier to recruit for a culture of secret archives in Utah than in Maryland.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
I program with a computer. The C-suite programs via org changes.
You do need a unifying story so that the managers co-ordinate at a high "mission" level.
And most of the rest of the co-ordination is done via integration testing.
Frankly "managers" as we know them, supervisory over a few people are done for.
What will succeed is what google now seems to optimise for - being nice and safe for coders so they can co-operate.
Frankly therapists on tap might make for better org design - iron out most of the directional problems with "the story", keep people from infighting by sharing the cash and occasional therapy sessions and you pretty much describe Google till last year.
- a single programmatic API wrapping all parts of a company "datastore" import accounts, people, ... print sales.emea.range(2023,2,1)
- a simple forward based test suite - so tests that are specified now but should pass at certain dates in future, or after certain release milestones test.endfebruary.totalemeasales> 5M test.startfebruary.totalmarketingemea.increase = 15%
This basically is trying to link budgets to actions in a traceable way. it effectively takes project management and wipes it out as it should. you don't need managers to tell people what is to be done, you just measure if it has been done.
(admittedly Inthink things also need to measure like "all posters in shops need to be chnaged by date x"
- lots and lots of talking to people
https://xkcd.com/556/
(For anyone that just wants a link.)
Myself, I find looking out my window boring.
Winter Soldier is about questioning loyalty, Wandavision is about burying trauma. The problem is that these themes are always undone or diminished in the end, because there must always be a bad guy with strictly evil motives, and the good guys must punch him and shoot lasers at him until the audience gets tired.
Looking at you, Falcon & Winter Soldier. And Wandavision, for that matter. And several of the movies—friggin' Spiderman: Far From Home, ugh. Even Black Panther ends up feeling like a missed opportunity that almost went somewhere interesting, had all the pieces in place to, then... just didn't, I suspect in part because it would likely have required a less-well-proven-in-superhero-movies story structure, so would have been riskier. The second one revisits that a little and tries to recover some of the potential the first one just left lying on the floor, but damn, that first one could have been great, period, not just "decent for a Marvel movie".
It's almost better when they don't even hint that they might be trying to convey a message or have interesting themes, because then it's frustrating when they inevitably fail to follow through. It's so bad that when one of the films manages to have even fairly-safe themes and actually treats them half-decently and takes well-worn, safe positions on them (the Guardians films) it puts them at the very top of the Marvel pile, so far as that aspect is concerned, at least.
They tease messages and interesting themes more often than they really commit to them, unfortunately.
Yes,there were some familiar beats,but I think also did a good job of exploring what it means to grow old, to look back on a life of battles won, but war lost, to envisage a different future for the next generation over a simple repeat of the mistakes of this one,in spite of the futility of that desire.
It was a very different look at familiar characters,and a very sober alternative to the "hero always wins in the end" narrative.
-
Secret societies (Masons, Essenes, Rosi, Mayan, Jesuits (not the ones youre familiar with) - have divided minds into two classes for centuries...
"Those that think, and those that think they think"
--
One of the most prolific manipulations is to get people to embed themselves into the latter, whilst thinking they are in the former.
So when you provide a single layer of depth into the pattern, for people to think they are imbued with the higher (deeper) concepts - alows their conscious to align with your intent, without understanding the principles behind it, and thus, keeping (rather than detoriating) the momentum of intent... (this is how politics works. Its where the idea of 'just scratching the surface' comes from but from much more ancient times..)
So for example, if you held the cast of a paint job on a Ford Mustang, and held it up - a viewer would exlaim "That is a ford Mustang!" feeling confident in their exclamation.
Yet you can clearly tell that it is the image of a mustang, but beyond that...
So they carry the idea of the mustang, without any clue what is true behind the reality of a mustang (its body, parts, etc...)
These media pieces are rudders in the flow of thought (you may also not know that the symbol for thought in all these groups is water - as thought flows as water. For many reasons, water is used to represent thought (as its state can change from fluid, solid, gas - but with controlling elements as well -- Wont go into that here...)
--
When you say "seeing patterns where they don't exist" is partially true -- as there are layers to this. Many patterns are presented by those who are not aware of the patterns they present. Either by subconscious suppression/suggestion, or other unrecognized (by them) familiarity, or by soul-desire (not for HN) connections...
But symbolism is literally in every single thing you do, see, hear, read and SAY.
Etymology is amazing - especially when you have historical context to the origin of certain incantations of speech.
The Angry Birds Movie was secretly about CG birds protecting themselves from an attack by invading green pigs.
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Such boards were not original with Hubbard. Here's such a setup for locomotive overhaul on a once famous UK railway.[1] Hubbard was applying a control scheme intended for a huge operation to rather banal tasks.)
[1] https://youtu.be/nZ3AN-kd66g?t=138
I'll add "inventing JIRA" onto the list of L. Ron Hubbard's crimes.