0.0 Context Setting

Friday, 31 July 2026 in Portland Oregon, after I just finished today’s show with Russell. Of which, well, that’s the thing that caught my attention.

0.1 Events: How People Work, Live!

All show all the time, I guess? Next one’s with Dylan Wilbanks -- register, check out the schedule, and watch previous shows on the show page. That’s a lot of the word show all at once.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Organizational Entropy, Activation Energy, and Catalysts

I had Russell Davies on the How People Work, Live! show today, it was wonderful. This is not to say that the previous guests have also not been wonderful.

One of the reasons why I love doing the show (which is helpful, because doing the show is terrifying) is that I get to talk with lovely smart people and I invariably end up with things stuck in my head. Things that catch my attention, I suppose.

For me, Russell’s thing is about how all the work that goes into writing is actually in the thinking and the decision-making. Writing -- emails, memos, presentations and so on -- is unclear when there isn’t clarity in the first place. And it’s hard to get the time and commitment to create that clarity in the first place.

Here’s what caught my attention from our chat:

Think about organizational physics, or use the metaphor of physics. We talk about organizations having inertia, but one other metaphor is the idea of entropy and the movement from order to disorder/chaos over time. That order takes energy, which you can think of as attention, focus, and direction and so on. Energy is what you need to make a decision. We talk about spending political capital or burning it. Left to their own devices, people will mill around. It also makes me think about that word I don’t like, alignment but again the metaphor works: alignment is creating order. Crystalizing. Annealing. In that way, what would it mean to friction-stir-weld an organization? Jony Ive could probably make a compelling video about it. Can you make an organization out of aircraft grade aluminum?

Say you’ve got an objective. Russell talked about one company acquiring another, so you’ve got to figure out what to do about your customer databases. One approach, if you prioritize data quality is to take while to do it and make sure you get it just right before you do any migration. Another approach might be your typical agile/iterative approach, where you improve your migration/data quality over time. Neither approach is wrong -- but you choose an approach based upon your objective, whether that’s explicit or not. Like Russell said, it’s also difficult when you’ve got a bunch of different options and, well, there’s much of a muchness.

In this case, you’ve got one organization that’s little and afraid of being regulated, so needs to do things Properly. Another one might be very, uh, cosy with regulators and let’s just say that their risk profile is different. Risk profiles -- whether you’re worried about getting a regulator raiding you, say, -- inform priorities.

You can think about whose job it is to deal with a certain level or kind of risk profile. I don’t think “what’s this organization’s attitude to risk” is a particularly useful question to ask, because risk is entirely context dependent. And like I said, the risk profile you have in one situation differs depending on the exact thing, and the consequences. Which is why being able to understand risk profiles, understanding what’s important, and then making a decision is what good leaders do. I get to say a lot that making no decision is also a decision. But a lot of the time when I work with people I see leaders or execs who understand that their job is to make their decisions. It’s literally their responsibility. They might not be happy about the circumstances, but the best ones appreciate the information and, well, the breaks are that they make the big decisions that set direction. Those decisions generate clarity.

But you can’t get to those decisions sometimes without answering what might feel like incredibly basic questions. Or making explicit implicit assumptions. Or asking questions that you’re not supposed to ask, or saying things out loud that you’re not supposed to say out loud. That avoidance leads to equivocation leads to presentations that nobody really wants to read because they don’t get to what’s important. What are we supposed to do here? Is our goal to buy up all the other companies and become the biggest? Just say it, if that’s the goal. Sure, you might not want to say it out loud to the public. But people in an organization can’t do their best work unless that’s understood. Of course in many cases what organizations might want to do might be illegal, but that’s a whole different can of management textbooks and pardons.

You think about organizational entropy then and Russell described what previous guests I’ve had on as injecting energy. I mean, you could call this being a Change Agent or being a Catalyst and you’d not be wrong? It’s just a shame how the language around those metaphors and ways of explaining what’s happening has been poisoned by a bunch of 26 year old management consultant idiots (sorry if you are 26 year old management consultant idiot).

This part -- the injecting energy part, the catalyst part -- really caught my attention because I’m thinking about what I want to be doing right now, and what I’m good at. I have this sense that what I’m good at is starting things. That’s an important job! And it’s a different job than continuing and sustaining things. It does take a certain energy to get a reaction going. I’m drawing on my GCSE physics and chemistry here: you can think about an organization in terms of its activation energy -- what will it take, how much do you need to heat it up to jiggle the atoms and molecules around to do something different? I suppose another way of thinking about this in a Nolan way is how you get a nuclear explosion going. You have a bunch of material sitting around and it’s not quite ready to do something but if you hit it just the right way into criticality then you get a runaway reaction. Hopefully that’s the good kind that’s sustainable and in the direction or change that you’ve decided that you want. Which isn’t to say that any of that is easy. In this way, Russell talked about how one of our mutual friends described as the kind of person you want for the first 10% of something.

There’s a personal fear here -- because you can be good at starting things but not finishing them. Anyone reading this who’s familiar with ADHD or neurodiverse in other similar ways might know about the difficult shame that comes with knowing about so many potential things to start and starting so many things, and for some reason feeling bad about how they don’t end up finished. But sometimes, starting is the most important thing. I talk about this in my work -- it’s easy as an outsider to be The Person Who Goes First, because like I said above, in some ways my risk profile is different. Every single time, once someone goes first, it’s easier for the next person to go. Energy has been injected into the system, you’re closer to that activation point.

We talked about the metaphor a bit more in the show. What happens when the catalyst leaves? How do things keep going? I mean hopefully you haven’t literally set off a fission chain reaction. There’s an analogy here in how I talk about breaking silos. Sometimes people just need to talk to each other when they’re not allowed to. You increase the energy, you warm it up a bit, you get the atoms to start wandering over. You’ve got a phase change, a different state of matter.

(Ugh, how wanky? How airport business book? And yet?)

In thinking about what I want to do next -- I’ve been consulting for a while now and it’s always worth stopping to, uh, think -- the chat with Russell today also opened something up that I’ve been becoming more comfortable with. It’s okay to want to change things up. It’s okay to want to make big changes. I mean sure don’t do it just to see the world burn, we’ve got enough of that. Bonus points if you’re good at changing things and injecting that energy, right?

(Sigh. Change agents. Yuck. I’m reminded about how I was described as a thought leader once and how I took it as an insult. It was pointed out to me that the term was being used sincerely and genuinely descriptively, and that it’s kind of on me and my problem that I see it negatively because of all the seeming-to-me charlatan thought leaders).

Enzymes, catalysts, kindling, accelerants. Injecting energy. All of that: caught my attention, and sticking somewhere in there.

Anyway, if you want, you can watch today’s show with Russell. You can speed it up and everything. Whatever you want.

That’s it for today. How are you? I love getting notes from people, even when or especially if those notes are just “hi!”

Best,

Dan