The original tagline for this site and newsletter was ‘continuous improvement in a world that’s one damn thing after another.’ Today let’s revisit that last bit. What does it mean for a world to be one damn thing after another? And what does this have to do with the potential for continuous improvement, or the possibility of provision?

Something fishy

In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly (by this time 20 years into his career and already a prolific author) wrote a one-pager published on the back page of an obscure biology journal.

This was the location of one of the biggest, gloomiest ideas going. Pauly described a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ affecting his profession:

This syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.

Pauly viewed this as a generational ‘shift’ to be countered with careful data collection and analysis. These countermeasures would occupy much of his time and publication schedule for the rest of his career.

The blissfully boiling frog

When I first read this article some years ago, it really stuck with me. It seemed to explain a lot. But I wondered:

• Might it explain more, and more broadly? Doesn’t everybody do this?
• And at a faster pace than the gradual, generational cycles under discussion? I believed then, and believe now, that people can get used to just about anything. The evidence is all around us.
• I also worried that expanding the idea of ‘shifting baselines’ beyond Pauly’s original scope would lead to nostalgia. There are many important ways in which the present is better than the past, even as we rush to forget what has passed away.

Eventually I poked around the archive. No surprise that Pauly continued to think and write about this big, gloomy idea.

In 2011—sixteen years after ‘shifting baselines’—he wrote:

Without firm rooting in scientific, quantified knowledge of what we now have, or had, we will inevitably experience the ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’ As I have described, successive generations of naturalists, ecologists, or even Nature lovers use the state of the environment at the beginning of their conscious interactions with it as the reference point, which then shifts as successive generations degrade that same environment. The story of the frog kept in water that is heated very slowly comes to mind here, and if we are not careful, we are going to get boiled as the frog does: a runaway greenhouse effect would do the job nicely.

I found here in the 2011 writing the broadened scope, the boiling frog, and the slow-but-fast progression of human-caused climate change that is the defining feature of our century.

The decade-scale example is excess deaths caused by COVID-19. We never did a great job tracking mortality due to COVID. Instead, we mostly stopped counting 3 years ago, and mostly stopped estimating one year ago, as the body count neared 30 million. There is a huge impulse to forget and to move along, although insurance companies remember. (Thanks to Susannah for these links.) Is this another aspect of shifting baselines? Despite, alongside, and during this unsurpassed tragedy, we continue to care for the people in our lives and provide and labor in community. What the hell else would we do? Emerson wrote that “we learn geology the morning after the earthquake.” This is true; also true is that only a few days or years pass before the “cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea” become as unremarkable as any other feature of our surroundings. A disaster as invisible as any other.

Pauly made an additional point—also revealed to me by my friend Summer:

For baselines to shift is not always bad. There are many stupid things that must be forgotten even if they have been the rule for thousands of years. Getting rid of these notions will free our minds and enable us to concentrate on things that matter, including some important things that we should remember.

Forgetting, remembering—and in Pauly’s discussion, forgetting some things in order to remember others. All baselines can shift. It seems that most will. But a few must not, lest we lose our footing during the ongoing scramble toward liberation. This is the idea. It is big, and it is gloomy.

Shifting baselines in the workplace

This is not mere theory. I see it in my daily efforts as a consultant supporting people in their work and in their workplaces.

1. The conditions of shifting baseline syndrome—of vast, continual retrenchment of natural and built and social environments—are those under which people work. Even if undiscussable, it’s ever-present.
2. As someone who lives and works in the US, this has only accelerated in our current bad times. The Christian fascists in power have an agenda that depends on baselines shifting quickly and broadly. Whether people resist and ignore this—or, as a minority do, accept it—the effort keeps everyone distracted and uncomfortable.
3. Finally, certain ultra-Amazonified workplaces intentionally leverage the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ to get staff to accept bad policy, missing strategy, poorly leveled workloads, and so forth.
   1. If employees are to perform inside these settings, they must develop a context-free, history-less pragmatism.
   2. Some people will shift to accommodate.
   3. Other people will wash out.
   4. Either way, the corporation gets what it wants.

I don’t have answers to any of this. But I find it helpful to remember that these are the conditions people are in.

Pauly’s closing advice

Let’s give Pauly the last word. He ended his 2019 book Vanishing Fish with an offer of advice, which—after all of the above—I was eager to accept. His advice is honest and true. I suppose time will tell whether it is sufficient. Pauly wrote:

If I have any advice to give, it is that one should have friends and work hard.

When you’re learning your way through a new organization, look for peers or collaborators working at cross-purposes—people who are working together, but towards different ends.

For example:

• A will tell you the purpose of her work is to solve a social problem.
• B will tell you the purpose of his work is to make sure resources are shared fairly.

Another example:

• C wants to make something customers have never seen before—but that they’ll love the moment they see it.
• D needs people to pay a little bit more, or costs to come down, or both.

Why this happens

People work at cross-purposes when they value different things:

• A & B don’t agree on the purpose of their work. They disagree on underlying principles, not in the particulars.
• C & D are trying to produce different results with their work. Each has a perspective that is necessary for the organization, but you can imagine how they’d clash.

Three responses

These conflicts—propped up by different individual understandings of goodness—store a lot of potential energy. What does one do with all that?

Three responses I consider:

1. The dismal response. Working at cross-purposes makes people unhappy; it generates needless suffering, worry, and conflict. Decreasing any of that opportunistically is important.
2. The pragmatic response. As a consultant, I look for the hand-offs. That’s where things break, where errors get produced and passed along. When people are working at cross-purposes, their hand-offs tend to be bad. Fixing these is one of the first, and best, local improvements I can make.
3. The optimistic response. Maybe there is a chance to gather everyone together and figure out what “good” means.

What good means—and who decides

I used to believe the received wisdom from lean, as mired in bog-standard management—that it is the task of leadership to define what’s good and then to require everyone else adhere to that standard. From this comes various goofs, gags and sacraments: True Norths, Mission Statements, Visions & Values. Things most people in an organization don’t remember, don’t care about, and can’t relate to their own work.

Barring that, there are elaborate structures organizations can construct and service over time to give an answer to what good means and show how everything connects. This is the realm of OKRs, KPIs, PuMP, and so forth. These can be useful, but take effort to keep active. They are leaky buckets.

These days, I think it’s best that everyone decides what good means, together. You gotta sit down and do it.

Many executives, and many organizations, don’t have the appetite for that.

• No appetite: I happily dodge the question entirely, and seek local improvements (see the pragmatic consultant’s response above).
• For the bold, methods are available: the strategy-culture bicycle, ecocycle planning, open space, and the like.

I can’t close this section without a link to Dan’s essay on the topic. And yes, Dan is the person I swiped the “what good means” question from:

What Good Means

I’m obsessed with the question of what “good” means, and blame the genius loci of West Michigan for this affliction.

MediumDan Klyn

Three questions

The rubric I use to help a group get through it is three simple questions, asked and answered one a time, with as much care as needed:

1. What do we make?
2. Who do we make it for?
3. How do we know if it's any good?

As you work through these, draw a diagram or write a few sentences. Disagreements will arise. Sometimes they touch on various forbidden or undiscussable topics. But in the end you’ll find something the group created together that sets the standard for what good means, here, today.

1. Do the very first thing someone suggests. Commit as many resources to it as possible: we’re all in on the new approach, no matter what.
2. Do the very first thing someone suggests. Do not commit anything at all to the solution: we’re doing more with less.
3. Don’t waste valuable time identifying or understanding the problem. As people wheel and mill around and solve for slightly different things, it’ll boost creativity or some damned thing.
4. Fix something upstream without looking downstream.
5. Fix something downstream without looking upstream.
6. Have you considered a reorg?
7. Don’t talk to customers. Of course you know who they are and what they want. This goes without saying.
8. Whatever else you do, put a thing on the timeline called “evaluate & adjust” or similar. Schedule it to be held in 6 months’ time. By then, everyone will have forgotten.

It is 1976. Neil Diamond saunters onstage at The Last Waltz and introduces his performance of ‘Dry Your Eyes’ by saying:

I’m going to do one song for you, but I’m going to do it good.

Isn’t that what we all want? We want to do something once, and to do it good. And easy enough: the first step is to be Neil Diamond.

The rest of us should probably acknowledge that—whatever the work is—we’ll have to do it more than once, because it almost certainly won’t be done good the first time.

My friend Dan gave me the notion of a “now that I see it” moment. This occurs when a work-in-progress becomes real enough that people can say a sentence beginning with “Now that I see it…” and ending with things like:

• “…it’s completely wrong” or
• “…we forgot this important detail” or
• “…this will never work for this particular reason.”

Methods for building quality at the source, shifting left, set-based design, and so forth all help elicit “now that I see it” moments as early as possible.

By arriving earlier to “now that I see it,” we also arrive earlier to the wrong place, to the just-revealed insight, or to the key constraint. It is hopefully early enough that there is wiggle room to learn and iterate and retry.

Airbrushing the side of a van is delightful. It is a job that takes as much time as you care to give. But you need only outline those first few flames and/or wolves to wedge open space for the objection that what we really need is a bicycle, or for the idea that we might be able to take the train.

I leave you with this dismal little project management couplet:

“Now that I see it” is certainly true;
That’s why to use tape first & then glue.

(This advice does not apply to Neil Diamond or to his beaded shirts.)

I’ve been visiting these particular trees for years. Each time, I wonder: is this a view of perfect stability, or of a system building up potential until it changes—collapses, in this case—into something new?

There’s tension, and strength.

When I visit these trees I also see Stewart Brand’s pace layers:

Some things move faster than those trees: animals, water, me, you. Other things move slower. If you sit with this, it might become beautiful.

And then we go to work, where projects are atomized and boxed and shuffled around in tidy intervals, even though “whenever it starts is the right time.”

New beginnings are sudden

Transformation happens when it’s going to happen… and when it’s time, it happens fast, noisily, and irreversibly, like a tree falling.

• As a sandy bank erodes and trees slip into the saltwater, we tend to see that as a loss. The tides and the weather and the climate got to ‘em.
• When a group of people get to a moment of shared insight and identity and possibility, we tend to think that’s good. The choreography and structure and careful engagement got to ‘em.

Either way, what happens is a sudden shift from one state to another. The visible shift is a result of accumulated actions over time.

Not everything starts at the same time

Seven years ago I tossed out the “house of Lean”—with its ossified, layered columns and foundations, it was a powerful vision poorly communicated.

Instead, I taught for a while from this doodle:

(These are shearing layers, after Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.)

What I liked about this figure is that it helped people sort out their approach to continuous improvement as a collection of things that start and stop and change over time and at different rates.

These days, I get people to the same point using ecocycle planning:

I’d prefer to work from a picture of trees growing than from a schematic of a little house.

For me, creative destruction is not “plowing” or the little controlled burn in the image above, but rather a huge tree slipping off and down into the tide, where it will drift and—at its own pace—break down and provide shelter, enrich the food web, become the beginning of many things. Whenever it starts is the right time.

Open space technology series:

• “Whoever comes is the right people.”
• “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”
• “Whenever it starts is the right time.” → now reading
• “When it is over, it is over.” (forthcoming)