This distinction between outcome- and process-oriented accountability strikes me a similar to System 1 vs System 2, or Plato’s “Monster” vs “Man”, or near- vs far-thinking, lizard- vs animal-brain, id vs ego, etc.: looks like nature had to solve similar problem when designing humans, so that they do not obsess to much on eating the cake now, but also not too much on figuring out the best way to get the cake in future, and it settled on having both systems in adversarial setting and gave them a meta-goal of figure out the balance between the two (that it is “we” feel bad when the two are in unresolved conflict). If this analogy makes sense, then perhaps it’s worth looking more closely at the “solution”—according to Plato, there is one more ingredient, “The Lion”=the social animal=super ego=trying to fit in/please/satisfy commitments to the other people, right? What would be the analog of that if we were to map it back to management world? Some form of mutual contracts between teams/workers as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_organisation ?
And another analogy which comes to my mind is Reinforced Learning, which I don’t know much about, but IIUC it’s about figuring out algorithms which try to achieve long term goal by guessing the right short-term goals to pursue which align well with the long term goal. Supposedly the Evolution as a whole pursues the long term goal of “having as many grand-children as possible” to which end it imbues creatures with short-term goals like “get food, and seek sex”, but importantly the way it figured out the mapping between long-term and short-term goal was by trial and error=generate and test=babble and filter=GAN=artist and critique=”virtual engines”… and I don’t know how AlphaStar did it, but I guess, by playing StarCraft2 for subjective millenia between myriads of mutants and letting the fittest survive. What would this mean if translated back to the world of management? Perhaps dividing the company into competing or at least diverse branches and set up their incentives in outcome-oriented way, but with the outcome being measured over very long periods, and leaving the definition of short-term goals and policies to the teams themselves (same way AlphaStar learns that it has lost a battle only after 2h of playing, but had to figure out how to mine minerals and steer soldiers to succeed)?
This distinction between outcome- and process-oriented accountability strikes me a similar to System 1 vs System 2, or Plato’s “Monster” vs “Man”, or near- vs far-thinking, lizard- vs animal-brain, id vs ego, etc.: looks like nature had to solve similar problem when designing humans, so that they do not obsess to much on eating the cake now, but also not too much on figuring out the best way to get the cake in future, and it settled on having both systems in adversarial setting and gave them a meta-goal of figure out the balance between the two (that it is “we” feel bad when the two are in unresolved conflict).
If this analogy makes sense, then perhaps it’s worth looking more closely at the “solution”—according to Plato, there is one more ingredient, “The Lion”=the social animal=super ego=trying to fit in/please/satisfy commitments to the other people, right? What would be the analog of that if we were to map it back to management world? Some form of mutual contracts between teams/workers as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal_organisation ?
And another analogy which comes to my mind is Reinforced Learning, which I don’t know much about, but IIUC it’s about figuring out algorithms which try to achieve long term goal by guessing the right short-term goals to pursue which align well with the long term goal. Supposedly the Evolution as a whole pursues the long term goal of “having as many grand-children as possible” to which end it imbues creatures with short-term goals like “get food, and seek sex”, but importantly the way it figured out the mapping between long-term and short-term goal was by trial and error=generate and test=babble and filter=GAN=artist and critique=”virtual engines”… and I don’t know how AlphaStar did it, but I guess, by playing StarCraft2 for subjective millenia between myriads of mutants and letting the fittest survive. What would this mean if translated back to the world of management? Perhaps dividing the company into competing or at least diverse branches and set up their incentives in outcome-oriented way, but with the outcome being measured over very long periods, and leaving the definition of short-term goals and policies to the teams themselves (same way AlphaStar learns that it has lost a battle only after 2h of playing, but had to figure out how to mine minerals and steer soldiers to succeed)?