Will Larson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. So there's a few directions I want to go and I'm just going to poke around and see where we go. The first is you're a big advocate of systems thinking. We were chatting about this before. I think a lot of people have heard this term systems thinking and there's books about it. It's sounds great. I want to be a systems thinker. What does that actually mean? How do you find you apply it in your work? How do people get better at this way of thinking? A lot of the least successful but smartest people I've worked with were really strong systems thinking advocates. And so I do want to say every kind of framework has a lot of downsides. There's no framework that people can apply consistently, universally, and get good results. And so briefly on this one, what I see is often people will find a spot where their system and reality are in conflict and they'll be like, "Reality is wrong." And so what's a concrete example? At Stripe, we worked on incident management. And so Stripe pretty important company where our API is available. If the API is down, you lose money and if you lose a lot of money, you leave Stripe because you're pretty upset about that. The number one thing businesses need to do is to collect money successfully for the service that they're selling, right? Stripe is super important. And so we did a lot of analysis on incidents trying to understand why things weren't working, what we could do better, but we got so caught up in the analysis that we lost track of whether we're actually improving things. And it took us a while to figure that out because we were so stuck in the systems thinking model and it's not like, "Oh, the team was wrong." It's like, "I was wrong." I was caught up in that model myself, to realize like, "Hey, we weren't actually prioritizing improvements, we were just prioritizing measurement." And you can't keep measuring. There's measure twice, cut once. Sure, but you don't measure infinite times and never get to cut. And you do have to cut at some point to actually make impact. But we just got caught a little bit there. I think a lot of people who get too far in systems thinking make the same mistake where they think reality is wrong and reality is never wrong. Reality is always right. Your model is always wrong if it's in conflict with reality. But that conflict, that gap is really interesting and that's where you can learn. And so I had this model. It's really clean. It represents your hiring pipeline that moving through different steps. It represents your incidents and how you remediate incidents. It can model almost anything pretty quickly when you get good at it. And then understanding how reality is in conflict with that, you start to understand where your mental model is wrong and then you can go educate yourself and improve the model and just keep doing that. At some point the model is close enough and you can stop doing that and go actually do the work. So that the biggest thing I tell people is this is a great way to learn, but you also have to do things. You can't just learn. That's not our entire job. To make it a little more concrete, how would you best describe this idea of systems thinking? What's a good way to just like, "Okay. I get what you're talking about?"…

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