In “The Coherence Premium” @joanwestenberg defines coherence:
When I say coherence, I mean something specific: the degree to which every part of an operation derives from the same understanding, the same model of reality and set of priorities and tradeoffs.
and points out what is lost as working groups grow to the point that a single vision no longer closely controls their operation:
When you work alone, you have a problem and you understand the context because you lived it and touched it and experienced it first-hand. You make a decision based on that understanding, execute the decision, see the results, and update your understanding. The entire loop happens inside one mind.
What happens in a large organization facing the same problem? [Multiple examples of increasing effort spent on communication between group members.]
This is the basic challenge of coordination across minds. Every handoff loses information, every translation introduces drift, and every layer of abstraction moves further from ground truth.
I once made a friend mad by claiming that no movie could ever be as good as even a mid-tier book, exactly because of this — one writer, one mind, is in complete control of realizing the book, whereas a movie generally involves the work of hundreds or even thousands of participants, all requiring coordination.
I’m not sure I believe the claim anymore — books and movies are different sorts of creatures, for one — but I’ve spent a lot of time over the years learning about how movies and TV shows are made, and what strikes me is that the best of them somehow manage to realize a coherent vision. Just not in the way an author would do it.
My deepest dive was into the Vince Gilligan universe, hours and hours of podcasts and interviews and articles about the making of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and Pluribus. Gilligan is far from a micro-manager. Instead, he seems to assemble teams that are themselves coherent groups, the best he can find, and works extensively with the leaders of each to coordinate their efforts. But he doesn’t involve himself in the details.
In some areas, say music, he is not especially knowledgable (and admits it), but he has a notion of what result he wants, and asks those responsible to develop an understanding of what he wants, to educate him about the details when helpful and shield him from the rest, to take initiative and risks when proposing solutions to him, to take enough ownership to push back when they actually know a better way but still focused on giving him what he wants.
In other areas (and there are many) he is deeply knowledgable about the details. But rather than using that to micro-manage, he finds team leaders he respects and gives them wide latitude to operate, with them knowing that he is not their peer but still competent to judge their work in the details. Listening to him talk about, say, the distinctive visual style of Breaking Bad, you’ll hear nothing but praise and admiration for the look that director of photography Michael Slovis created. But you can hear even in his talk that he is quite knowedgable and competent about cinemaphotography, and you can see in the pilot episode (before Slovis had joined his team) that much of that distinctive look was there, at least in embryo.
There is a saying in the Gilligan universe that the universe seems to be dead set against something as complex as a movie or TV series getting made — and yet from time to time good ones do get made. Having spent so much time working in the bowels of large complex organizations where good things definitely did not get made, due to the largeness and complexity and resulting lack of coherence, I marvel when I see a good movie or TV series and want to know how they did it.
I don’t understand how Gilligan does it, at least not at a level where I could study his operation and extract a template for how to build something so complex. It’s not something unique to Gilligan, there are lots of well-crafted movies and TV series made by other people. Gilligan is just one of them, but fortunately for those of us who are fascinated he has been shockingly open and reflective about his working process.
There are lots of possible answers, but one that comes to mind is that Gilligan assembles teams that are led so well, that have such competent and creative leaders, that he can deal with an entire team solely by dealing with the leader, able to trust that the leader takes full responsibility for his team operating as a single coherent unit. When I hear him talk, he will constantly talk about those leaders, in awe of the results they are able to produce — that he trusts them to produce. That means that even though his projects aren’t under the detailed control of a single mind, the group he needs to coordinate, develop into a hive mind (!) is relatively small, eight or ten people.
And when the members of the hive mind are the best of the best in their respective fields, I have to imagine that creative tension arises, in a productive way. Gilligan repeatedly gives all credit to one of his team leaders for some major aspect of the work, who often pushes back saying that it was mostly his idea in the first place — but not always, sometimes the team leader comes up with something surprising that Gilligan is glad to acknowledge is a better idea and adopt.
All this to say: I see the power of complete coherence, as in the case of a writer, or a programmer wielding powerful tools. And I see that incoherence grows along with the size of the group. But I also see (some) creative groups able to realize a coherent vision despite the need to involve hundreds or thousands of participants. Is something other than coherence as Joan defines it operating here? Is forging a hive mind from team leaders a path to coherence?