In many cases (including the rationality community/LW), the point is to come together towards some joint objective. Raemon would call this building a product together. When you’re building a product, it’s not about my needs vs your needs, it’s about which actions will actually lead to a successful product.
I think it’s quite importantly about both. In her review of An Everyone Culture Sarah describes a deliberately developmental organizations as
creating a culture where everyone talks about mistakes and improvements, and where the personal/professional boundaries are broken down.
That second one may seem nuts, but as she points out in her review of moral mazes in the same post, there’s a really good reasons to bring our needs to work: If we don’t, we end up pretending to have conversations about Product that are actually about our needs. This should terrify us as people who actually care about the product, because it might mean that your fighting for website minimalism is actually about your need to be heard, and has nothing to do with creating a better reading experience as you’re eloquently arguing.
Once you accept that much work at traditional organizations is actually about expressing trauma and unmet needs, we can split up the conversation so that the part about expressing needs also has the CONTENT of addressing your needs, so the product doesn’t suffer from being an outlet for them.
At this point, you have to make sure that you’re taking into account the consequences to the product and organization as a whole as you work to address your needs, and balance them with your other co-workers, who are trying to get their needs met as well.
I think I understand this picture and could pass your ITT (maybe), but I think your proposed org will fail in all but exceptional circumstances for reasons I don’t have an immediate great articulation for.
I’ll attempt to offer something, but I might need to stew on it longer (plus it’s probably a rather long conversation we were to try to properly resolve it. I’d be up for chatting sometime or a public Double-Crux or the like. Feel free to reply to this one, but probably next round should happen elsewhere).
A thing I emphatically agree with is that people are usually covertly pursuing other goals when working on products together. I lean a bit “cynical” here and think it’s “expressing trauma and unmet needs” plus typical monkey status competition stuff. Much of the later stuff is a) subconscious and instinctive (for the reasons given in Elephant in the Brain/Trivers), and b) not stuff you can ever admit to and still succeed at due to its zero-sum, adversarial nature. I’ll collectively call these a person’s Other Goals because they’re “other” than the stated goal of building a product.
I think that people’s (sub)conscious pursuit of Other Goals does interfere with their ability to work on the product, but I think it’s a perilous for an organization’s solution to be to try ensure everyone’s satisfied on their Other Goals enough to work on the product without distraction/compromise. Individuals should attempt to do achieve integration/inner harmony, etc., but if an organizations tries to create this for them as its primary strategy for dealing with Other Goals, I foresee that opening being exploited ruthlessly by the Other Goals to detriment of the product. [elaboration/justification needed]
I favor solving the Other Goals problem by being a culture/system which rewards and punishes you for helping or hindering the product. Want to be more listened to? Have good ideas for the product! This requires an emotional maturity of sorts from members who need to be able to contribute to the actual goal even if it means neglecting their Other Goals pursuit. (“I concede you’re right about minimalism because I care about doing the correct thing for the product and not just winning.” Rationalist circles do well here because it rewards one socially for this behavior thereby aligning product-goals and Other goals.)
This isn’t to say feeling, emotions, needs, etc. should never be mentioned or dealt with. They should, but carefully, and only (as far as the organization is concerned) secondarily to the mission of creating the product. Definitely, I think people should explicitly deal with interpersonal issues that arise (“I feel disregarded because you never listen and always interrupt” or “I don’t feel like I’m getting enough feedback on whether my work is valued”). Definitely, definitely, people should take care not to harm their collaborators psychologically or covertly do zero-sum things. Also there are many times it’s good to share things that are going on for a person and receive support. But all of this only within the context of organizational values that say first and foremost comes the product, and that if something appears to be sucking attention way from the product in a way that is net harmful, that something will be cut.
As I understood it, your envisioned organization makes needs (“Other Goals” in my parlance) first-class concerns in way I expect the product to lose to. [elaboration needed]. Crucially, to me, it is the product which is far more fragile [elaboration needed].
Could part of this be paraphrased as “If you don’t address meeting people’s needs equally, they won’t be able to work on pure product without it secretly being about their needs”?
I think it’s quite importantly about both. In her review of An Everyone Culture Sarah describes a deliberately developmental organizations as
That second one may seem nuts, but as she points out in her review of moral mazes in the same post, there’s a really good reasons to bring our needs to work: If we don’t, we end up pretending to have conversations about Product that are actually about our needs. This should terrify us as people who actually care about the product, because it might mean that your fighting for website minimalism is actually about your need to be heard, and has nothing to do with creating a better reading experience as you’re eloquently arguing.
Once you accept that much work at traditional organizations is actually about expressing trauma and unmet needs, we can split up the conversation so that the part about expressing needs also has the CONTENT of addressing your needs, so the product doesn’t suffer from being an outlet for them.
At this point, you have to make sure that you’re taking into account the consequences to the product and organization as a whole as you work to address your needs, and balance them with your other co-workers, who are trying to get their needs met as well.
I think I understand this picture and could pass your ITT (maybe), but I think your proposed org will fail in all but exceptional circumstances for reasons I don’t have an immediate great articulation for.
I’ll attempt to offer something, but I might need to stew on it longer (plus it’s probably a rather long conversation we were to try to properly resolve it. I’d be up for chatting sometime or a public Double-Crux or the like. Feel free to reply to this one, but probably next round should happen elsewhere).
A thing I emphatically agree with is that people are usually covertly pursuing other goals when working on products together. I lean a bit “cynical” here and think it’s “expressing trauma and unmet needs” plus typical monkey status competition stuff. Much of the later stuff is a) subconscious and instinctive (for the reasons given in Elephant in the Brain/Trivers), and b) not stuff you can ever admit to and still succeed at due to its zero-sum, adversarial nature. I’ll collectively call these a person’s Other Goals because they’re “other” than the stated goal of building a product.
I think that people’s (sub)conscious pursuit of Other Goals does interfere with their ability to work on the product, but I think it’s a perilous for an organization’s solution to be to try ensure everyone’s satisfied on their Other Goals enough to work on the product without distraction/compromise. Individuals should attempt to do achieve integration/inner harmony, etc., but if an organizations tries to create this for them as its primary strategy for dealing with Other Goals, I foresee that opening being exploited ruthlessly by the Other Goals to detriment of the product. [elaboration/justification needed]
I favor solving the Other Goals problem by being a culture/system which rewards and punishes you for helping or hindering the product. Want to be more listened to? Have good ideas for the product! This requires an emotional maturity of sorts from members who need to be able to contribute to the actual goal even if it means neglecting their Other Goals pursuit. (“I concede you’re right about minimalism because I care about doing the correct thing for the product and not just winning.” Rationalist circles do well here because it rewards one socially for this behavior thereby aligning product-goals and Other goals.)
This isn’t to say feeling, emotions, needs, etc. should never be mentioned or dealt with. They should, but carefully, and only (as far as the organization is concerned) secondarily to the mission of creating the product. Definitely, I think people should explicitly deal with interpersonal issues that arise (“I feel disregarded because you never listen and always interrupt” or “I don’t feel like I’m getting enough feedback on whether my work is valued”). Definitely, definitely, people should take care not to harm their collaborators psychologically or covertly do zero-sum things. Also there are many times it’s good to share things that are going on for a person and receive support. But all of this only within the context of organizational values that say first and foremost comes the product, and that if something appears to be sucking attention way from the product in a way that is net harmful, that something will be cut.
As I understood it, your envisioned organization makes needs (“Other Goals” in my parlance) first-class concerns in way I expect the product to lose to. [elaboration needed]. Crucially, to me, it is the product which is far more fragile [elaboration needed].
Could part of this be paraphrased as “If you don’t address meeting people’s needs equally, they won’t be able to work on pure product without it secretly being about their needs”?
Yes that seems like a decent summary