Integration of vision and practical in every decision

Part III in “What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?” series.

Integration of vision and practical in every decision

I’m making the claim that one of the necessary but insufficient components of dancing with metaproblems is grounded vision informing every decision. This one is probably the most obvious to say, but hardest to do.

We’ve all seen so many visionaries with great ideas struggle to execute. Almost every community living situation I’ve ever seen falls into this category: “yes!” to living together, but who pays the property taxes and fixes the well? We’ve also seen tons of execution that lacks vision. My favorite example of this is Apple’s AirTags. One of the most innovative and well-funded companies in the world shocked us with its announcement that it finally solved the deep human need to… not lose stuff?

Constraints as design parameters

Vision operates in possibility space while execution operates in constraint space. Most people treat constraints as obstacles to overcome rather than design parameters that inform what wants to be created. This would be like a musician treating notes of a scale as a barrier to their songwriting, rather than building blocks.

Taylor Swift as an example of upstream integration

But I mean it when I say it’s hard. Visionary thinkers, writers and philosophers are often terrible CEOs. I think this is one reason why we’re all so enamored with Taylor Swift.¹ She’s an artist and an incredible business woman! I’m sure she has a world-class team, but she doesn't toggle between "artist mode" and "business mode.” The integration happens upstream. Her creative decisions and commercial calculations are one. Maybe her dating life is too?

Transcend and include: must win the old game

Truly (r)evolutionary ideas must win at the old game. This is Kuhn’s classic claim: new paradigms must be superior in the established and novel domains. Take burning wood/charcoal/dung indoors for cooking for example, which contributes 2-5% of CO2 emissions. The new way of cooking has to be actually better for everyday use in that person’s context. Maybe its solar cookstoves with USB ports to charge phones that allow users to take payments, and as a result justify being able to hire a technician to fix the inevitable breakdowns, and whose taxes maintain the roads that technician drives in on.

For social media, we’ve got to design something better at connecting people, discovering stuff we care about, and accessing information than current platforms, while simultaneously solving addiction and misinformation problems.

Current "solutions"—digital detoxes, time limits, fact-checking overlays—fail because they don’t address the needs that drive people to social media. Evolutionary platforms need to be either more engaging, more informative, and more socially satisfying than existing platforms while eliminating the psychological manipulation and epistemic pollution. This is why there’s a graveyard of alternative social media apps, and current well-meaning alternatives like Mastodon have tiny adoption. They aren’t transcending and including. Or it’s got to provide something new and non-threatening.

As a start: integrating vision/practical into culture and systems

Like Taylor Swift’s integration of music and business, a successful new platform must embed the vision-practical integration in decision making at every possible step. I don’t know the best way to do this, but I have some preliminary thoughts for a way that seems to work:

(1) Building an organizational culture around it: reaffirming it in every meeting and discussion of decisions, rewarding this awareness and commitment whenever anyone brings it up, curbing the alternative (just profit maximization, for example, or just vision commitment without pragmatics), hiring only people deeply mission-committed, and firing when there’s not alignment (or otherwise incentivizing leaving).

(2) Building it into the incentive structure of the platform. Attention optimization algorithms, for example, are practical but not visionary. Algorithmic choice and federated servers have visionary elements, but are impractical.

Eg: whole foods, chipotle, patagonia, alphaschool

I wish I could say more about some specific “do X, Y, Z” but I think that comes naturally from the awareness that the vision must be grounded. And I think it’s something everyone trying to tackle one of these problems needs to stay aware of as they go.

My favorite go-to examples of this are Whole Foods (versus a vegan food co-op or traditional supermarket, for example), Chipotle (versus Mr. Natural or McDonald’s, for example), and Patagonia. We’ve got to straddle what is with what wants to be, as where we come from when considering everything. It may be visionary to imagine bike infrastructure like Amsterdam in every American city so everyone can ride a bike to work to reduce emissions, but it’s impractical and doesn’t meet people’s mindsets, American culture or the geography of US cities where they’re at. Despite all their problems, the battery powered scooters in all the major US metropolises found this integration point—fun, freedom oriented, last mile. Self-driving taxis will likely be a part of the solution for similar reasons.

Structural barriers become incentive moats

One nice property of this balance being hard to do is that structural barriers can be transformed into incentive moats. When a company’s entire business model is focused on a different incentive structure, it’s pretty hard for them to eat you. This can be true for social systems as well. Alpha School in Austin, TX has been using AI to transform education, an area famously stuck in weird incentive loops (seat time, compliance, teaching to the middle, getting funding). Students spend only two hours daily on academics using AI tutors, giving time for the vision of education for autonomy and creativity over test-taking, but still rank in the top 1-2% nationally on standardized assessments, demonstrating the practicality. They aim to make it cheaper than public school—again grounding the vision (transforming education) into the practical (making it affordable).

Synthesis: “Orange-Green” Integration

We need an (Orange-green) integration of vision and pragmatics that evolves us: Vision without systems thinking produces beautiful failures. Systems thinking without vision produces efficient meaninglessness. Recognizing that both need each other—that the vision is implemented because of the constraints (not in spite of them), and the practical only matters because of the vision, will help us continuously combine long-term consequence modeling with immediate value delivery.

Part 3 in “What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?” series, which attempts to uncover some of the (un)common principles that might help us transform the most tricky global problems into something beautiful

Part 1: No villains
Part II: Self-organizing systems & incentive landscapes
Part III: Integration of vision and practical in every decision (this post)
Part IV: Addressing the whole developmental stack (what’s good for me, we, all of us)
Part V: Culture addressing the problem must embody rare integral values
Part VI: Multiple stakeholder integration

1. My three year old son calls her “Twaylor Sift.” It’s adorable. I’m so lucky.