I’ve been working on an idea for several years, since 2016, in fact. Hence, today’s installment kicks off a new segment of this publication: “The Skive”.
What’s a skive? you might be wondering. Don’t worry about Googling it. The first thing that pops up is a third-rate rock band from Manchester, England. However, they seem to have met with some small modicum of success, and so I salute them and wish them the best of luck. But those gods of music, those unparalleled rock musicians of Manchester, are not the eponymous originators of today’s essay.
Rather, skive has two more relevant meanings.
The first is “to slack off”. It is, originally, a very British term. In America, we say Bueller played hooky. In England, they say Bueller skived off. The second is a reference to leather-working. A skive is a tool used to thin leather, to pare it down in order to reduce its thickness. In this sense, skive can also be used as a verb, as in “to skive leather”. In keeping with the luggage theme here at The Portmanteau, this new section (‘The Skive’) is actually my attempt to do both things.
On one hand, I have an idea that needs refining. It needs to be thinned, pared down so as to be useful. On the other hand, it’s an idea that I’m presenting to you, more than half-formed but still not the polished porcelain of perfection you might expect. In that sense, I’m slacking. Skiving off, if you will.
But enough, let’s get to it.
What’s a System?
The technology we use. The people we associate with. The way we get to work. The food in our pantries. The grocery stores near our houses. How we choose to entertain ourselves. The first thing we do when the alarm goes off. The kind of coffee we drink (or not). These are all things that comprise the systems that surround us.
You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” It’s a thought I can’t shake. It’s made me reconsider the incentive structure of a non-profit board I sit on. It’s made me take a different approach to understanding our electoral machinery. And it’s also made me think more systemically about my own life.
Systems are not new to me. They’re what I studied in college as an undergraduate in Control Systems Engineering. They’re what I built in the Marine Corps as a Combat Engineer officer. They’re what I worked on for my first two years in the software industry as a Product Operations Manager. And systems are what run both my life, and yours, on a daily basis.
What I think people miss in all of the frenzy at the beginning of the New Year, despite their best intentions and programmatic resets, is a lack of System. “You do not rise to the level of your goals,” writes James Clear in Atomic Habits, “You fall to the level of your systems.”
Clear’s approach is tactical—on building lots of little systems for altering behavior. It’s thoughtful, rooted in human psychology and biology. And, no doubt, it’s effective. When thinking about New Year’s resolutions this is where many of us begin—at the tactical level. But maybe it’s good to take a step back and look at the overall System we’ve constructed around ourselves. But what’s a System? If I want to understand my current systems or build new ones, where do I look? What questions can I ask?
Toward a Theory of Human Systems
When we take a systems approach to viewing our modern problems, then it quickly exposes the long term futility of addressing something narrowly, like “mental health”. Our health overall is a result of the system we have in place. Yes, what are our habits? But also who are our friends? Yes, what is our routine? But also what is our environment? Yes, what are our behaviors? But also what technology do we have in place directing and funneling our behaviors, automating our actions?
Human systems can be broken down into a 3-and-1 paradigm: People, Processes, and Programs. Every system is composed of these things, and for solving any problem we have to understand where the locus of effort is concentrated among the three.
The People part of a system is composed of me and my relationships.
The Process part of a system is things like my routine and schedule.
The Program part of a system is all the technology and automation that I use or implement.
In my professional life, when trying to solve a difficult problem, I revert to this paradigm because it helps me think through how to solve the problem. For example, sometimes the answer is a person. A specific problem calls for someone with unique skills—there may only be a handful of people who can fill the vacancy or complete the task. Think about leading a company, for example. CEOs are a great example of applying a person (CEO) to solve a problem (Vision) that needs a particular skill (Leadership).
A process is a combination of people and programs. It’s the middle-ground between the two. Think of process as a program with a human in the loop. There are all sorts of processes we put in place, like recurring meetings to review financial statements, or bedtime routines for children (and ourselves!) that ensure we get things done. The combination of the recurring meeting + the right people in the room leads to resolution. We layer process on people to direct behavior. But humans are fallible, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies, and systems break down. What else can we do to help keep the system functioning? We can automate.
In its purest form, a program is fully automated. It happens without the intervention of any human. In the software world, these are scripts set to run automatically on a recurring basis or as the result of some cue or action. In human systems, programs are technological solutions, but unlike in software, they’re rarely fully automated.
Finally, we can map these three components onto a spectrum. The further to the left, the more people are required. The further to the right, the more things are automated. A perfect process then, strictly speaking, is a 50/50 split of people and automation.
To make things clearer, let’s talk about shoes.
Three hundred years ago, if you wanted a new pair of shoes you went to a person. That person, a cobbler, constructed a pair of shoes for you. As we lurched into the Industrial Revolution, the shoemaking industry drifted on the spectrum toward process and away from people. We implemented factories that included assembly lines to incorporate a certain level of automation + people to make shoes. The specific skills of a particular person became less critical. With this in mind, we can understand that the more automation involved, the less skill required.
So, an update to our graph.
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