Pace Layers

AI gives us the ability to prototype faster than ever before — which is great, as long as we remember that there's underlying work to be done.

Show notes:

• The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• Maintenance of Everything, Part One  by Stewart Brand
• Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The World as a Total System by Kenneth Boulding
• Living in Information by Jorge Arango
• Liquid Glass

Transcript

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Jorge 0:00

We might be looking at the current environment through the wrong layer in this stack. We may be examining it for the kind of near-term, fast-changing, shiny, exciting, sellable results as opposed to the underlying layers where the real power lies.

Narrator 0:31

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:42

Hey Harry, it’s good to see you.

Harry 0:44

Hey, Jorge, what's happening?

Jorge 0:45

Not much. Not much. Well, actually there’s a lot happening, but nothing that is relevant to our conversation here. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. We shall see. I have a reading.

Harry 0:56

Bring it on, baby

Jorge 0:59

This is actually a follow-on from a conversation that we had in a previous episode, a couple of episodes ago. So maybe you’ll be able to spot who the author of this one is as well.

Harry 1:12

Okay

Jorge 1:13

Okay, here we go. “In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle, these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.”

Harry 2:52

Oh man. It is either "Antifragile" or it is "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

Jorge 3:02

Those are really good guesses, but no, it’s neither of those.

Harry 3:07

Oh, come on, man. Seriously?

Jorge 3:10

Yeah, seriously. This is from a book called "The Clock of the Long Now" by...

Harry 3:17

Oh.

Jorge 3:17

Stewart Brand.

Harry 3:19

Boy, it's been a long time. Yeah, that's a great book.

Jorge 3:23

Yeah, and you mentioned Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” in one of our previous conversations, and you specifically brought up the idea of pace layers.

Harry 3:33

Yeah.

Jorge 3:34

And “How Buildings Learn” is a book about architecture, about buildings, and this idea of pace layers, that buildings are composed of elements that change at different rates, is something that he introduced in that book. But “The Clock of the Long Now” is a later work where he takes that model and he says, “Hey, it’s not just buildings that change like that. Other complex systems change like that too.” In fact, in this paragraph I read, he says, “All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure.” And I think that is a key statement, the idea that systems that prove resilient over time have ways of accommodating fast changes so that they can adapt to real-world conditions, but also they have components that constrain change so that the system can continue serving its purposes. And I think that that’s what he means by fast learns, slow remembers.

Harry 4:52

You know, I don’t remember reading “The Clock of the Long Now,” but I am such a huge fan of Stewart Brand’s work. A long time ago in a land far, far away, I probably mentioned this earlier, I invited Stewart Brand to speak at a course that was being guest lectured by, oh my gosh, my brain just stalled. It’s on my shelf behind me. Ah, can I get to it? No. All right, I’ll come back to it later. “The World as a Total System” is the name of the book, and the author’s name just escapes me at this particular moment. And literally just yesterday, I got Stewart Brand’s new book, “Maintenance of Everything, Part One: Maintenance of Everything, book one,” which I’m very excited to take a look at. But the thing that it reminded me of was, like in the design world, most people don’t realize that so much of the brilliance of the iOS interface is actually in how it handles fast and slow transients and changes between states. And if you grab your iPhone and you do something that you would normally do quickly, like swiping, but you slow it way down, you’ll see the attention to detail in the transmogrification of how they alter the interface going from one state to another. And if you want to see how it’s done poorly, look at an Android phone, where it’s very choppy. And one of them feels organic, and like it’s part of the real world, one of them doesn’t. One of them feels timeless, one of them doesn’t. And when you were talking about all of these durable resilient systems having both of these, I couldn’t help but think about the iPhone and how carefully the designers went through making sure that the fast and slow transition states were handled in the user interface in a way that could be done very, very well, but it really needed a lot of deep thought.

Jorge 7:13

I’m bringing this model up... and we’ll circle back to the iPhone example, because I think it’s a useful illustration. But I’m bringing this up in a somewhat self-serving way because I use this model in my book, “Living in Information,” to talk about the design of resilient information systems. And so much of the focus of what the business world thinks of as design — and I’m including the iOS example that you just mentioned — so much of what the business world thinks of as design is... you can think of it as like screen level. It’s like, what’s the touch point where users interact with this thing? And let’s make sure that is really polished and beautiful and useful and usable and all that stuff, right? In the model that I wrote about in “Living in Information,” I had five layers that change at different rates, and the user interface layer is what I called form, and it is the fastest-changing layer. Just last year, Apple introduced a major redesign of their operating systems, right? And they introduced this Liquid Glass thing that looks very different, right? It has these transparency... I’m not a big fan.

Harry 8:33

Yeah, me neither.

Jorge 8:35

But that’s kinda like the top-most, fastest-changing layer. And I’ll just walk you through what the other layers are, and I think we’ll see why I’ve brought this subject to the table here. So, the other layers in my model are structure. So even though iOS was redesigned, the idea that you have apps and information lives in apps, like the iPhone doesn’t really have a document model in the same way that a traditional computer does. Like, you think in terms of apps, and everything happens inside a particular app, right? So that structure has been pretty stable since 2007, when the iPhone launched, and even though it’s gone through many cosmetic redesigns, the structure is invariant. Now, it’s evolved and it is much richer than it used to be when the iPhone first launched. But that structural layer changes much slower than the formal layer. Underneath that is what I call the governance layer, which is the systems in the organization that are responsible for managing those structures, right? And I don’t have insights into how Apple is organized internally, but I know that they have teams that deal with the operating system and teams that now deal with services, which is something that has evolved since the iPhone was first released. Immediately below that layer is what I call the strategy layer. And the strategy layer changes even more slowly than governance, right? Like, whatever groups within Apple are managing the interface of the iPhone now are in response to a particular strategic direction that the company has. And the big strategic change since the iPhone launched has been Apple’s growing focus and emphasis on services, right? So, Apple used to make the bulk of its money from selling hardware devices, and I think they still do, but now a significant part of their bottom line are services, which includes things like revenue from the App Store and iCloud storage and stuff like that. And then the slowest layer is what I called in the book purpose. And purpose is like, why does this organization even exist in the world, right? And I would argue that Apple’s purpose has been fairly stable for a long time, perhaps even since the company started fifty years ago. They’ve always had at their core, this idea that they’re going to make technology accessible and useful to the masses, right? I would say that’s underlying all of this. That’s kind of their purpose in the world. And the reason why I’m bringing this model to the table is that we are living through a time where there is this hugely disruptive new set of technologies and it feels like a lot of people aren’t entirely clear on which layer they should be focusing on. Maybe this is a big enough disruptor that we really need to rethink our strategy, in which case, that changes our governance systems, and that seems to be what we’re observing with organizations laying off all these people, right? But I suspect that’s not being thought through as carefully as I’m suggesting with this model, right? I wonder if people are clearly articulating things like the purpose, strategy, governance models, and how those things influence structure and then form, as they make these decisions.

Harry 12:27

Yeah, I certainly don’t think so. It feels to me like they’re working from the outside in, not the inside out. They’re working very optics-in and what can they get away with and how is it gonna look versus what are they really trying to accomplish and how are they gonna accomplish that and what are they gonna do to make sure that what they’re trying to accomplish and how they’re going to accomplish it are being well-orchestrated. This seems like symptom of capitalism to some extent, because the metrics tend to be bold and numerical and monetary and placed on a fairly tight timeline versus looking at it from the inside out and looking at what are we really trying to accomplish and what kind of world do we actually want and what is the quality of life going to be and how are we going to put structures of utility in place to make certain things easier and certain things harder that are gonna help us all get to a better place. Because it isn’t about helping us all. It’s about creating a separation and figuring out structurally, economically how to have the vast majority of people pay for the small, for the minority, to be able to live in a much higher standard of living.

Jorge 13:48

I’ll say this right off the bat, because you brought up the word capitalism. I am an advocate of free markets with constraints, right? Free markets plus regulations I believe produce good results. I don’t think that there are, in real life, unfettered free-market situations. That said, one of the downsides of our current system is related to this notion of pace layers, and it’s that organizations — particularly publicly listed organizations — are strongly incentivized to focus on near-term results at the expense of the long term, right? You’re measured on a three-month basis as opposed to on a five-year basis or a 10-year basis or a 100-year basis, right? And you make different choices if you think that you’re going to be accountable to results that are going to be measured in the long term as opposed to the near term. And I think that might be what is causing the emphasis on the faster-changing layers of this stack. But I feel like we’re venturing into a very abstract theoretical domain here, and I wanna bring it back to gaining traction because there are implications for day-to-day decisions.

Harry 15:27

Mm-hmm.

Jorge 15:27

And I think that the primary implication or what I’ve learned from understanding this model that has affected how I make decisions is whenever I’m faced with a project, a challenge, or anything that implies building something or intervening in a system that is going to produce some kind of result, I’m asking myself what layer am I acting on and what layer should I be acting on, right? And we’ve talked in past conversations about gaining clarity. Gaining clarity about our context. What is going on? Am I seeing clearly? Am I biasing what I’m parsing here? But another condition that might affect our clarity is we might be looking at the current environment through the wrong layer in this stack. We may be examining it for the kind of near-term, fast-changing, shiny, exciting, sellable results as opposed to the underlying layers where the real power lies, where there’s real kind of inertia or conversely where there’s real momentum.

Harry 16:51

Yeah. There’s something that feels very intuitively correct about that. When I think about operating from the layer of purpose, it just feels like that’s implicit for most people. It’s certainly implicit for me. I think I just perhaps inappropriately attribute my positive underlying intent to what other people are doing and assume that I’m coming out of a place of operating from purpose and that everybody else is too. But the fact that it’s implicit, the fact that I’m presuming that I’m doing that and not being explicit with myself may mean that I’m operating at a different level and not even aware of it, number one. Number two is this notion of figuring out what level I’m operating at from a decision-making point of view also helps with the conversations, right? It’s not just about the decision-making, but if we can calibrate where we are, at what layer we’re at, then we can have a more sensible conversation. It reminds me of, from a leadership perspective, one of the most potent things that I discovered as an... in my early days of executive coaching was that when you take somebody who... this came up at DreamWorks. I was sitting in a room with a bunch of people, and the chief architect was a software developer, he was an architect, he was a filmmaker, he was a former startup person. He had a lot of different roles, and one of the things that he really struggled with was people didn’t understand where he was coming from. And I said to him, “You need to be more explicit about the role you’re in. Like, change your hat. Like, figure out how to state like, ‘As somebody who has had a startup, I’m coming from this point of view.’” And be more on the nose about what layer you’re operating at may be an analogous place to get the kind of leverage to have more potent conversations and to be in a place where the decisions are actually happening, at a layer that people can agree with, rather than one person operating at the more surface layer and another person more subconsciously or unconsciously or implicitly operating at a deeper level. It just seems like this is a very rich space of a lot of slippage right now.

Jorge 19:17

Yeah, and you mentioned the question, what level am I operating at? I would say that there’s a follow-up question, which is, once you understand what level you’re operating at, you should ask yourself, “What level should I be operating at?” And I’ll give you a story to illustrate that. So I’m working right now on a project where I’m helping design a system that is like deeply AI-powered, let’s call it like that. It’s not like a retrofit of an existing system to add AI features. This is a kind of natively designed AI system that does things that by nature could only be done because things like large language models exist. And because we have tools now that allow pretty much anyone to very richly envision their ideas, like you can get Claude Code to prototype something very quickly. You can very quickly spin up the form layer. And the challenge with that is that the form layer needs to be informed by... or there are going to be underlying structures, whether they are what led to the prototype in the way that it currently exists or not. There are structural constructs that are implicit in that interface. And if you are going to go beyond a proof of concept to a system that truly scales and can be put into production, you have to take a step back and consider how the system is actually structured. And more than that, you have to consider how the system is gonna be run and the degree to which the system serves the strategic goals of the organization that is building it, right?

Harry 21:23

This is really cool.

Jorge 21:25

I wanted to bring this to the conversation here because I feel like my role is increasingly saying, “Let’s build the underlying structures that are going to allow this to become a real system that creates value in a repeatable and scalable and controllable manner.”

Harry 21:47

I love what you’ve done here because you’ve provided a set of intellectual tools for asking a set of questions about how to move from proof of concept to a scalable, for lack of a better term, enterprise-class solution or application, right? And whether that’s appropriate or not, that’s not the point. The point is that the optic, like you said, the sort of the shiny optics associated with the proof of concept make it very easy to forget there’s all of this depth that you... We used to talk about in terms of architecture, whether it was the information architecture, whether it was the software architecture or the implementation in sort of systems architecture. But I think the term architecture inadvertently hides these layers you’re talking about, because that term pastes over the fact that, okay, that there’s still an architecture at the form layer, there’s still an architecture at the structure layer, there’s still an architecture at the governance layer. You can have architecture at all of these layers, right? But speaking about them in terms of these five layers, I think creates a much more cogent conversation about what you’re really trying to accomplish and what would be necessary to close a gap between wherever that proof of concept is and whatever you would ultimately want it to be able to deliver on.

Jorge 23:08

And if the ultimate purpose is to gain traction, eventually you’re going to have to move on from the form layer to actually build systems that can scale and that can accommodate a wide variety of issues. And I have to say, I can imagine someone hearing this thinking, “Oh my gosh, this sounds like going back to the bad old days where everything was so slow.” It’s like, not necessarily. I’m super excited to have people spinning up prototypes with systems like Claude because it allows folks to describe what they envision in a much richer way than they would by writing something like a project brief or having an interview or something like that. So it’s really good to have that as a starting point. And these tools can also help us design that architecture. Like, we don’t have to... it’s not like we’re only going to use AI to help with the prototyping. It’s like, no, we can use it to also help design the underlying architecture and help us tweak it so that it’s closely aligned to our strategy and the way that the company’s going to manage these systems, right? It might even make it possible for us to have these conversations explicitly, which is something that we maybe weren’t doing before AI existed. So I’m really excited about working in this new way. And I think it’s going to be much faster than doing something like this was in the past just because of the very nature of the tools.

Harry 24:45

And I think what’s so important about what you’re saying too is that what it does is it shifts the conversation from the overgeneralization of what would it take to commercialize this proof of concept to what would we need to do at these five different layers in order to get to a place where this could be commercialized? And I feel like there’s probably a set of diagnostic questions associated with each one of these layers that would be super helpful to put out there in the show notes potentially for somebody that’s sitting there with a POC and wants to show their boss, but could also then show up with, “And we’re starting to ask ourselves the following questions,” right? This feels very powerful to me. I would love to exercise it and wrestle with it a little bit more.

Jorge 25:38

We obviously don’t have time to brainstorm what those questions might be right now, but I would be very excited to do something like co-author a post with you or something like that where we share these. Because, like, just thinking through them would be useful, I think.

Harry 25:54

Count me in, man. That sounds like it would be hugely valuable. To me personally, and I think getting that out there into the world would help people see through this point of view that you have. Yeah, I think there’s something here.

Jorge 26:09

Like we’ve said before, let’s put a pin on that. Thank you, Harry.

Narrator 26:17

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.