Doing Without Dictates
By Karl Zinsmeister
address delivered at the
United States Military Academy, West Point
May 2012
Out of my time in national politics and public affairs, I sometimes get asked what makes for a successful leader. My experience-based response is that it is often smarter for people in government not to lead at all, but rather to follow. Or sometimes just to stay out of the way and let people rule themselves.
Some years ago, I read a book called Ants at Work, written by a Stanford entomologist who spent 17 years studying a large colony of harvester ants. (And you thought your professional expertise was narrow.)
The author’s goal was to discover how these tens of thousands of tiny creatures coordinate the specialized tasks essential to colony health—food harvest and storage, care of offspring, tunnel making, garbage toting, war fighting, etc. Who’s directing the show to make sure the right work gets done at the right time?
The answer, she discovered, is that nobody is in charge. No insect issues commands to another. The colony operates without any central or hierarchical control. These complex societies are instead built, she reports, on thousands of simple decisions made by individual creatures, with those many micro-decisions melding together to yield an efficient macro-result.
I suggest the right term for this is self organization. There is no central intelligence that controls the process. Localized entities act on their own to solve their own needs, and their actions blend to create an efficient wider result. That’s not just something we see in ant colonies, it’s how much of nature works. Indeed, throughout the natural world, self organization is something of an iron rule.
This can be seen not only among bugs, but also at the very top of nature’s pyramid—in human society. The obvious political question, it seems to me, is this: If ants have little need for hierarchy, and caste, and central direction, then how much external control and guidance and regulation do people need?
***
My conclusion, sharpened by years in Washington, is that people need a lot less guidance and control than the typical politician thinks. And our requirements appear to be shrinking every day. Contrary to George Orwell, we are depending less rather than more on centralized authority as modern society becomes increasingly technological.
Not many years ago, the largest supercomputers were extraordinarily complex centralized devices, where all the wires led to one extremely expensive custom-made processing chip. Today, there is no king processor in a supercomputer. The latest versions are made with more than 16,000 plebeian, everyday chips just like the one in your Dell, all working in democratic parallel. And this so-called “distributed intelligence” has turned out to be vastly more powerful than the elegant genius of the old centralized Cray supercomputers that worked from the top down.
Forms of distributed computing are being applied to many of today’s most difficult problems. For instance, the vast amounts of astronomical data that need to be sifted through in order to discover a possible planet transiting a distant sun, or a possible radio signal from another civilization, are being processed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers on their home computers.
Or take the Linux computer operating system—the computer code which has become the backbone of the digital business world. There is no master control over what goes into Linux. Software drafts are passed around over the Internet, where thousands of informal contributors just add and subtract and tinker with the code, and then put the result out there in the marketplace. This, along with many other so-called open-source software projects, has turned out to be a much more orderly, powerful, and unchaotic process than you might think, and the result is that Linux quickly turned into the most flexible and powerful and error-free computer language available.
The pattern of complex problems being solved by small actors working locally and independently without heavy central direction is not just the story of the Internet, it is a phenomenon common to much of technology, and biology, and human history.
Last summer I read some of the naval history of the War of 1812, and discovered fascinating examples showing that even warfare can be decentralized in some cases. Any rational person must wonder how the Americans managed to fight the British navy to a standstill in that war. The British navy was then at a peak, with more than 600 cruisers in commission. The American navy, by contrast, numbered just 23 ships when hostilities broke out. And not one of them was a ship-of-the-line with two gun decks, the British specialty. So how did we avoid crushing failure?
The answer: Most of our fighting was done by privateers--quickly built, manned, provisioned, and deployed against the enemy by independent captains or consortia acting without central direction. Almost overnight, there were 517 privateers defending the U.S. in this war, alongside the 23 ships of our public fleet. The privateers were enormously effective, and provided the lion’s share of the necessary military services. And they fought the world’s greatest navy to a draw.
Or take a different example. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki re-tells the story of an English statistician who, while visiting a country fair in the early 1900s, stumbled across a competition which asked passersby to guess what a particular ox would weigh once butchered and dressed. Participants wrote their estimate on a ticket and dropped it in a box. The statistician studied these tickets after the contest, and found that the 787 estimates by fairgoers averaged out to…exactly one pound less than the ox actually weighed.
What that experience illustrated was that the collective wisdom of a group is often quite powerful and accurate. Ordinary citizens possess stores of experience and forms of knowledge, intuition, and moral sense that will often make them better arbiters of important questions, as a group, than any few elite experts.
This is a mode of decision-making that Americans in particular incline toward. During the Battle of King’s Mountain in the Revolutionary War, American Colonel Isaac Shelby instructed his men, “When we encounter the enemy, don’t wait for the word of command. Let each one of you be your own officer.” And by relying on that self-direction, those scattered backwoods marksmen defeated a larger force of soldiers regimented by officers.
As another example of the general superiority of decentralized problem solving, consider a simple football stadium. Even a boozy crowd can drain itself from a packed oval in a matter of minutes. Yet emptying that stadium by commanding each person from some master perch is, as those of you with some background in mathematics or statistics will know, an almost insoluble problem. You could cover the field from goalpost to goalpost with computers and programmers, and you’d end up frustrated. There are just too many variables: 80,000 people; 25 exits; scores of stairways; thousands of stairs, pillars that block certain routes; backups in specific aisles; it’s just too much to orchestrate.
Yet leave each Joe to himself and he’ll be opening the door to his Chevy before the scoreboard lights are cool. He may not realize that he’s exhibiting what scientists call “large-scale adaptive intelligence in the absence of central direction.” But he is.
***
So what are some of the implications of this law of nature?
First there are lessons for personal leadership. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said this:
A leader is best
when people barely know that he exists,
not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
worst when they despise him....
Of a good leader, who talks little,
when his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
they will say, “We did this ourselves.”
Much of today’s best teaching on leading and managing emphasizes the importance of setting good goals, and providing strong motivation and inspiration, but then getting out of the way and letting people come up with their own nitty-gritty solutions. Controlling people and dictating to them will produce mediocre results. Good leaders set appropriate strategies, then leave tactics to those closest to the problem. When the rank and file “buy in” and feel the solution is their own, that generally produces the best work.
In their detailed guide to what they call their “Freedom and Responsibility Culture,” the top managers of Netflix include a quotation from the book The Little Prince: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
The Netflix ideal for interactions between various team members and groups is that they should be “highly aligned, yet loosely coupled.” The vision needs to be shared. The execution should be decentralized.
The remarkable power of dispersed authority also has political implications.
I suggest it should strongly incline any wise leader toward decentralism, toward resolving issues at the lowest possible level of governance. We need to be powerfully protective of individual sovereignty, local control, and self-determination. Not out of ideology, but out of simple practicality and surrender to the facts about the ways in which humans behave most effectively.
Everyday citizens tend to have better information on the optimal ways to solve their problems than remote authorities do. Everyday citizens are also likelier to create varied solutions, and to tailor actions to regional peculiarities. That’s crucial in governance, because what works in Missouri is sometimes different from what works in New York. The realities of human society suggest strongly that policy makers should avoid one-size-fits-all rules, and instead encourage experimentation and local variation wherever possible.
The power of decentralized decision-making also ought to incline us, I believe, toward a principle of equality. Equality not merely in the political sense, but in the moral sense. In America, every man, woman, and child is presumed to have not only equal rights, but also equal dignity.
There’s an old American aphorism I try to live by which says: “Never be haughty to the humble, nor humble to the haughty.” Both halves are important.
“Never be haughty to the humble” is a Christian concept which lies at the very heart of Western democracy. The other part—“Never be humble to the haughty”—is an especially American formulation. Our pioneer population insisted that every man is as good as the next, that every woman is as worthy as another.
One historical root of this is that many of our immigrants came to these shores in open rebellion against aristocratic pretensions. Another root is that most Americans owned their own land or trade, and thus enjoyed an economic independence. And then there was the reality that most households were armed. You don’t bully people with firearms strapped to their hips, or hung over their mantels.
There has always been an understanding in American society that you need to uphold your equality through responsible actions. But if you act respectably in this country, you are owed respect in return. And that egalitarianism has paid many concrete benefits.
One of the U.S. senators I enjoyed working with—Johnny Isakson from Georgia—is the son of a Greyhound bus driver. The fact that there is no wall separating drivers from senators in this country is a wonderful thing, not just morally but practically. It makes us both a freer and a stronger society than the brittle European oligarchies we descended from.
Equal treatment isn’t just some favor we offer. And it’s more than just a moral imperative. It’s also the best way to get good outcomes.
I was present in Iraq when what I consider the most impressive small-arms engagement of the entire war took place. If any of you are interested in the details I can tell you more at another time, but the interesting bottom line is that the soldiers involved were not Special Forces troops. They weren’t Rangers, or Airborne. They weren’t even full-time Army. They were citizen-soldiers from the Kentucky National Guard.
Their leader was a soft-spoken salesman of paper products who has a sterling character and tremendous courage, for which he earned the Distinguished Service Cross. The medic who picked up a SAW and an anti-tank weapon to prevent their position from being overrun after all his comrades had been shot down was a fullback fresh from the Jacksonville University football team. The most unlikely of these three recipients of the Silver Star was a 5’3” woman who had been selling footwear at Nashville’s Shoe Carnival store when she was called up. This small band killed 27 terrorists, and captured seven more, as they were right in the midst of executing a mass kidnapping and beheading on the second anniversary of the war. After spending a good deal of time with them at the battle site I can assure you these MPs and part-time soldiers deserve to be treated as the equals of any of our most elite soldiers.
I suggest America’s tradition of genuine equality should lead you to several important places if you are an officer of government. First, it ought to propel you to a powerful respect for everyday choices.
It’s important we resist the impulse to “improve” the lives of ordinary people without their consent. For American history suggests that everyday citizens, not “experts,” are generally the best arbiters of law and policy.
William F. Buckley once declared that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. That’s not just rabble-rousing. Our Founding Fathers made the very same choice. Though it was a radical idea at the time, they concluded that the large body of ordinary Americans—intently focused on their private affairs and the facts on the ground in their home communities—would be less likely to drift into misunderstandings of human nature, social reality, and economic truth than persons who manipulate theory for a living.
In this, we are dramatically different from other nations. Even today in advanced countries like Japan and most European nations, society is much more traditionally commanded from above. A small elect—anointed at places like the Sorbonne, Tokyo University, and in tight networks of gatekeeping institutions and clans—exerts disproportionate control.
In France, nearly all forms of societal power are tightly centralized in Paris. In Britain, if you want to be at the heart of things, you have to be in London. In many countries there is one locale which dominates as the finance center, educational center, seat of government, and creative hub. That is not true in the United States. Here, power, talent, financial resources, and cultural authority are much more democratically scattered across the country.
Silicon Valley and Seattle lead in technology. Popular culture is centered in Nashville and Los Angeles. For educational leadership look to places like Boston. Charlotte is ground zero for retail banking. Houston is the energy center. And our highly decentralized, bottom-up economy has outperformed all counterparts managed from above by mandarins.
This is not a question of hinterlands vs. coast, or good ordinary citizens vs. wicked intellectuals. Everyday Americans are not saints or savants with magical powers of discernment. But there are structural reasons why individual households will often make better decisions than experts.
For one thing, they usually have richer information. Trying to separate good schools from mediocre ones, or excellent doctors from poor ones, for example, is very hard when attempted from a government bureau or academic office. Yet individual Americans make those kinds of judgments routinely. Rule by the millions works because the millions are close to daily realities. And when they do make errors in judgment, their errors usually cancel each other out.
Political leaders need to be reminded that in our country, government is just a sideline. It is not the heart of our society. America’s most important accomplishments are private, personal, and communal. The government is there, in essence, to preserve peace so you can raise children, raise questions about the meaning of life, raise tomatoes in your backyard, raise Cain against injustice, or otherwise exercise your human freedom in whatever wholesome way you find meaningful.
Political leaders must avoid sucking power and resources into government in ways that will constrict other opportunities open to citizens. When evaluating any policy, they should ask themselves: Will this help individuals and families and localities create richer lives for themselves? The key phrase there is “…for themselves.”
The central vision of American politics is that government should serve, not rule.
That’s also a good vision for effective leadership in general.
***
By Karl Zinsmeister
address delivered at the
United States Military Academy, West Point
May 2012
Out of my time in national politics and public affairs, I sometimes get asked what makes for a successful leader. My experience-based response is that it is often smarter for people in government not to lead at all, but rather to follow. Or sometimes just to stay out of the way and let people rule themselves.
Some years ago, I read a book called Ants at Work, written by a Stanford entomologist who spent 17 years studying a large colony of harvester ants. (And you thought your professional expertise was narrow.)
The author’s goal was to discover how these tens of thousands of tiny creatures coordinate the specialized tasks essential to colony health—food harvest and storage, care of offspring, tunnel making, garbage toting, war fighting, etc. Who’s directing the show to make sure the right work gets done at the right time?
The answer, she discovered, is that nobody is in charge. No insect issues commands to another. The colony operates without any central or hierarchical control. These complex societies are instead built, she reports, on thousands of simple decisions made by individual creatures, with those many micro-decisions melding together to yield an efficient macro-result.
I suggest the right term for this is self organization. There is no central intelligence that controls the process. Localized entities act on their own to solve their own needs, and their actions blend to create an efficient wider result. That’s not just something we see in ant colonies, it’s how much of nature works. Indeed, throughout the natural world, self organization is something of an iron rule.
This can be seen not only among bugs, but also at the very top of nature’s pyramid—in human society. The obvious political question, it seems to me, is this: If ants have little need for hierarchy, and caste, and central direction, then how much external control and guidance and regulation do people need?
***
My conclusion, sharpened by years in Washington, is that people need a lot less guidance and control than the typical politician thinks. And our requirements appear to be shrinking every day. Contrary to George Orwell, we are depending less rather than more on centralized authority as modern society becomes increasingly technological.
Not many years ago, the largest supercomputers were extraordinarily complex centralized devices, where all the wires led to one extremely expensive custom-made processing chip. Today, there is no king processor in a supercomputer. The latest versions are made with more than 16,000 plebeian, everyday chips just like the one in your Dell, all working in democratic parallel. And this so-called “distributed intelligence” has turned out to be vastly more powerful than the elegant genius of the old centralized Cray supercomputers that worked from the top down.
Forms of distributed computing are being applied to many of today’s most difficult problems. For instance, the vast amounts of astronomical data that need to be sifted through in order to discover a possible planet transiting a distant sun, or a possible radio signal from another civilization, are being processed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers on their home computers.
Or take the Linux computer operating system—the computer code which has become the backbone of the digital business world. There is no master control over what goes into Linux. Software drafts are passed around over the Internet, where thousands of informal contributors just add and subtract and tinker with the code, and then put the result out there in the marketplace. This, along with many other so-called open-source software projects, has turned out to be a much more orderly, powerful, and unchaotic process than you might think, and the result is that Linux quickly turned into the most flexible and powerful and error-free computer language available.
The pattern of complex problems being solved by small actors working locally and independently without heavy central direction is not just the story of the Internet, it is a phenomenon common to much of technology, and biology, and human history.
Last summer I read some of the naval history of the War of 1812, and discovered fascinating examples showing that even warfare can be decentralized in some cases. Any rational person must wonder how the Americans managed to fight the British navy to a standstill in that war. The British navy was then at a peak, with more than 600 cruisers in commission. The American navy, by contrast, numbered just 23 ships when hostilities broke out. And not one of them was a ship-of-the-line with two gun decks, the British specialty. So how did we avoid crushing failure?
The answer: Most of our fighting was done by privateers--quickly built, manned, provisioned, and deployed against the enemy by independent captains or consortia acting without central direction. Almost overnight, there were 517 privateers defending the U.S. in this war, alongside the 23 ships of our public fleet. The privateers were enormously effective, and provided the lion’s share of the necessary military services. And they fought the world’s greatest navy to a draw.
Or take a different example. In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki re-tells the story of an English statistician who, while visiting a country fair in the early 1900s, stumbled across a competition which asked passersby to guess what a particular ox would weigh once butchered and dressed. Participants wrote their estimate on a ticket and dropped it in a box. The statistician studied these tickets after the contest, and found that the 787 estimates by fairgoers averaged out to…exactly one pound less than the ox actually weighed.
What that experience illustrated was that the collective wisdom of a group is often quite powerful and accurate. Ordinary citizens possess stores of experience and forms of knowledge, intuition, and moral sense that will often make them better arbiters of important questions, as a group, than any few elite experts.
This is a mode of decision-making that Americans in particular incline toward. During the Battle of King’s Mountain in the Revolutionary War, American Colonel Isaac Shelby instructed his men, “When we encounter the enemy, don’t wait for the word of command. Let each one of you be your own officer.” And by relying on that self-direction, those scattered backwoods marksmen defeated a larger force of soldiers regimented by officers.
As another example of the general superiority of decentralized problem solving, consider a simple football stadium. Even a boozy crowd can drain itself from a packed oval in a matter of minutes. Yet emptying that stadium by commanding each person from some master perch is, as those of you with some background in mathematics or statistics will know, an almost insoluble problem. You could cover the field from goalpost to goalpost with computers and programmers, and you’d end up frustrated. There are just too many variables: 80,000 people; 25 exits; scores of stairways; thousands of stairs, pillars that block certain routes; backups in specific aisles; it’s just too much to orchestrate.
Yet leave each Joe to himself and he’ll be opening the door to his Chevy before the scoreboard lights are cool. He may not realize that he’s exhibiting what scientists call “large-scale adaptive intelligence in the absence of central direction.” But he is.
***
So what are some of the implications of this law of nature?
First there are lessons for personal leadership. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said this:
A leader is best
when people barely know that he exists,
not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
worst when they despise him....
Of a good leader, who talks little,
when his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
they will say, “We did this ourselves.”
Much of today’s best teaching on leading and managing emphasizes the importance of setting good goals, and providing strong motivation and inspiration, but then getting out of the way and letting people come up with their own nitty-gritty solutions. Controlling people and dictating to them will produce mediocre results. Good leaders set appropriate strategies, then leave tactics to those closest to the problem. When the rank and file “buy in” and feel the solution is their own, that generally produces the best work.
In their detailed guide to what they call their “Freedom and Responsibility Culture,” the top managers of Netflix include a quotation from the book The Little Prince: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
The Netflix ideal for interactions between various team members and groups is that they should be “highly aligned, yet loosely coupled.” The vision needs to be shared. The execution should be decentralized.
The remarkable power of dispersed authority also has political implications.
I suggest it should strongly incline any wise leader toward decentralism, toward resolving issues at the lowest possible level of governance. We need to be powerfully protective of individual sovereignty, local control, and self-determination. Not out of ideology, but out of simple practicality and surrender to the facts about the ways in which humans behave most effectively.
Everyday citizens tend to have better information on the optimal ways to solve their problems than remote authorities do. Everyday citizens are also likelier to create varied solutions, and to tailor actions to regional peculiarities. That’s crucial in governance, because what works in Missouri is sometimes different from what works in New York. The realities of human society suggest strongly that policy makers should avoid one-size-fits-all rules, and instead encourage experimentation and local variation wherever possible.
The power of decentralized decision-making also ought to incline us, I believe, toward a principle of equality. Equality not merely in the political sense, but in the moral sense. In America, every man, woman, and child is presumed to have not only equal rights, but also equal dignity.
There’s an old American aphorism I try to live by which says: “Never be haughty to the humble, nor humble to the haughty.” Both halves are important.
“Never be haughty to the humble” is a Christian concept which lies at the very heart of Western democracy. The other part—“Never be humble to the haughty”—is an especially American formulation. Our pioneer population insisted that every man is as good as the next, that every woman is as worthy as another.
One historical root of this is that many of our immigrants came to these shores in open rebellion against aristocratic pretensions. Another root is that most Americans owned their own land or trade, and thus enjoyed an economic independence. And then there was the reality that most households were armed. You don’t bully people with firearms strapped to their hips, or hung over their mantels.
There has always been an understanding in American society that you need to uphold your equality through responsible actions. But if you act respectably in this country, you are owed respect in return. And that egalitarianism has paid many concrete benefits.
One of the U.S. senators I enjoyed working with—Johnny Isakson from Georgia—is the son of a Greyhound bus driver. The fact that there is no wall separating drivers from senators in this country is a wonderful thing, not just morally but practically. It makes us both a freer and a stronger society than the brittle European oligarchies we descended from.
Equal treatment isn’t just some favor we offer. And it’s more than just a moral imperative. It’s also the best way to get good outcomes.
I was present in Iraq when what I consider the most impressive small-arms engagement of the entire war took place. If any of you are interested in the details I can tell you more at another time, but the interesting bottom line is that the soldiers involved were not Special Forces troops. They weren’t Rangers, or Airborne. They weren’t even full-time Army. They were citizen-soldiers from the Kentucky National Guard.
Their leader was a soft-spoken salesman of paper products who has a sterling character and tremendous courage, for which he earned the Distinguished Service Cross. The medic who picked up a SAW and an anti-tank weapon to prevent their position from being overrun after all his comrades had been shot down was a fullback fresh from the Jacksonville University football team. The most unlikely of these three recipients of the Silver Star was a 5’3” woman who had been selling footwear at Nashville’s Shoe Carnival store when she was called up. This small band killed 27 terrorists, and captured seven more, as they were right in the midst of executing a mass kidnapping and beheading on the second anniversary of the war. After spending a good deal of time with them at the battle site I can assure you these MPs and part-time soldiers deserve to be treated as the equals of any of our most elite soldiers.
I suggest America’s tradition of genuine equality should lead you to several important places if you are an officer of government. First, it ought to propel you to a powerful respect for everyday choices.
It’s important we resist the impulse to “improve” the lives of ordinary people without their consent. For American history suggests that everyday citizens, not “experts,” are generally the best arbiters of law and policy.
William F. Buckley once declared that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. That’s not just rabble-rousing. Our Founding Fathers made the very same choice. Though it was a radical idea at the time, they concluded that the large body of ordinary Americans—intently focused on their private affairs and the facts on the ground in their home communities—would be less likely to drift into misunderstandings of human nature, social reality, and economic truth than persons who manipulate theory for a living.
In this, we are dramatically different from other nations. Even today in advanced countries like Japan and most European nations, society is much more traditionally commanded from above. A small elect—anointed at places like the Sorbonne, Tokyo University, and in tight networks of gatekeeping institutions and clans—exerts disproportionate control.
In France, nearly all forms of societal power are tightly centralized in Paris. In Britain, if you want to be at the heart of things, you have to be in London. In many countries there is one locale which dominates as the finance center, educational center, seat of government, and creative hub. That is not true in the United States. Here, power, talent, financial resources, and cultural authority are much more democratically scattered across the country.
Silicon Valley and Seattle lead in technology. Popular culture is centered in Nashville and Los Angeles. For educational leadership look to places like Boston. Charlotte is ground zero for retail banking. Houston is the energy center. And our highly decentralized, bottom-up economy has outperformed all counterparts managed from above by mandarins.
This is not a question of hinterlands vs. coast, or good ordinary citizens vs. wicked intellectuals. Everyday Americans are not saints or savants with magical powers of discernment. But there are structural reasons why individual households will often make better decisions than experts.
For one thing, they usually have richer information. Trying to separate good schools from mediocre ones, or excellent doctors from poor ones, for example, is very hard when attempted from a government bureau or academic office. Yet individual Americans make those kinds of judgments routinely. Rule by the millions works because the millions are close to daily realities. And when they do make errors in judgment, their errors usually cancel each other out.
Political leaders need to be reminded that in our country, government is just a sideline. It is not the heart of our society. America’s most important accomplishments are private, personal, and communal. The government is there, in essence, to preserve peace so you can raise children, raise questions about the meaning of life, raise tomatoes in your backyard, raise Cain against injustice, or otherwise exercise your human freedom in whatever wholesome way you find meaningful.
Political leaders must avoid sucking power and resources into government in ways that will constrict other opportunities open to citizens. When evaluating any policy, they should ask themselves: Will this help individuals and families and localities create richer lives for themselves? The key phrase there is “…for themselves.”
The central vision of American politics is that government should serve, not rule.
That’s also a good vision for effective leadership in general.
***
