Pace Layers [Framework of the Day]

As some of you may know I’ve been collecting mental models and working on a book for a little while now (it’s been going pretty slow since my daughter was born in January). This is more notes than chapter, but I still thought it was worth sharing. If you like this I’m happy to do more in the future. Oh, and if you haven’t already, sign up to get my new blog posts by email, it’s the best way to keep up.

Pace Layers

This one comes from Stewart Brand and is a way to explain the different speed various layers of society moves. The outer layer, fashion, is the quickest, while the innermost layer, nature, moves most slowly. Each layer interacts with one another as inventions and ideas get digested. As Brand explains:

The job of fashion and art is to be froth—quick, irrelevant, engaging, self-preoccupied, and cruel.  Try this!  No, no, try this!  It is culture cut free to experiment as creatively and irresponsibly as the society can bear.  From all that variety comes driving energy for commerce (the annual model change in automobiles) and the occasional good idea or practice that sifts down to improve deeper levels, such as governance becoming responsive to opinion polls, or culture gradually accepting “multiculturalism” as structure instead of just entertainment.

Brand’s inspiration for the framework came from an architect named Frank Duffy who encouraged builders not to think of a building as a single entity, but as a set of layers operating at different timescales. Duffy included four timescales: Shell, services, scenery, and sets (represented below).

Brand picked up on Duffy’s work and adapted it to a kind of proto-pace layer framework in his 1994 book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, expanding it to six S’s and including this handy diagram:

Brand eventually adapted that into the pace layer framework at the top in his 2008 book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (the chapter on pace layers was edited and republished last year in MIT’s Journal of Design and Science). If you want more, here’s a great writeup from Eric Nehrlich on a conversation about pace layers between Brand and Paul Saffo. Nehrlich calls out this slide from the presentation, which is quite helpful for understanding how the layers work:

(The whole talk is posted at the Long Now Blog if you’re so inclined.)

The framework has been picked up and adapted by many, but one of the more notable versions for me comes from Gartner as a way to think about your enterprise software strategy. They break enterprise software into three “layers”:

– Systems of Record — Established packaged applications or legacy homegrown systems that support core transaction processing and manage the organization’s critical master data. The rate of change is low, because the processes are well-established and common to most organizations, and often are subject to regulatory requirements.
– Systems of Differentiation — Applications that enable unique company processes or industry-specific capabilities. They have a medium life cycle (one to three years), but need to be reconfigured frequently to accommodate changing business practices or customer requirements.
– Systems of Innovation — New applications that are built on an ad hoc basis to address new business requirements or opportunities. These are typically short life cycle projects (zero to 12 months) using departmental or outside resources and consumer-grade technologies.

Each layer has it’s own pace of change, lifetime, planning horizon, governance model, and many other unique differentiators:

All in all, the overarching shearing/pace layers framework (many layers which interact with each other and operate at different speeds) is something I’ve found useful in various spheres in addition to the society, architecture, and enterprise software examples above. Inside a company, for instance, you conduct various activities that exist in a similar set of layers ranging from long-term planning and brand building to quarterly goals or roadmaps to two week sprints to weekly exec meetings and then the daily work. It’s a useful way to spot where you’re overloaded with meetings (too many weekly check-ins, not enough monthly lookbacks) or understand where you’re falling down (not doing a good enough job translating the medium term to the long term).

August 21, 2018 // This post is about: enterprise software, Framework of the Day, frameworks, frank duffy, gartner, IT, mental models, pace layers, shearing layers, stewart brand

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, The New Yorker, and Pau Gasol

Yesterday I was reading an article about the first female assistant coach in the NBA in the latest issue of the New Yorker. The piece was moderately interesting and not particularly worth sharing here, except for one paragraph, and really just one sentence within it (emphasis mine):

Because of their success, the Spurs have not been eligible for the highest picks in the draft. Instead of relying on college superstars, they have built their team through some crafty trades and by pushing their young players to the limit. They scout top international players—like Parker, from France, and Manu Ginóbili, from Argentina—and sign N.B.A. veterans like Pau Gasol, from Spain, who is thirty-seven but can anchor a defense and move in a way that creates space on the floor; they also, as in the case of Leonard, hone the raw athletic talent of less experienced players. When the Spurs are at their best, the ball moves fluidly and freely. Duncan, who retired in 2016 and was perhaps the least flashy major star in the N.B.A., was emblematic of the team’s unselfish style. On a given night, almost anyone on the roster can be the leading scorer.

The whole thing seems relatively innocuous and is largely accurate: The Spurs success has been driven, at least in part, by incredibly successful drafting (Manu Ginóbili, a key player in their multi-championship run, was picked in the second round and is widely considered one of the best draft picks ever). With that said, though, Pau Gasol is most definitely not a defensive anchor. He’s a pretty good rebounder and he’s a giant, but he’s slow and famous almost entirely for his prowess on the offensive end of the court. In fact, earlier this season his coach, Gregg Popovich, said in a needling way that, “He likes offense better than defense.”¹

Now obviously this is one tiny point in a giant article. But it happens to be an article about a subject I’m kind of obsessed with (the NBA) and that’s pretty rare for a magazine that covers a huge diversity of topics.

Which brings me to the title of this post: The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Named after famous physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Amnesia Effect was coined by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton to describe the act of feeling skeptical as you read a magazine or newspaper article about an area in which you have expertise and then completely forgetting that skepticism as you turn the page and read about something you know less about. If they could get it so wrong for one, why don’t we assume they could get it so wrong for all?

Here’s Michael Crichton explaining it:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

The Gasol slip up put me in a funny state with my favorite magazine: What misportrayals, however small, do I take for granted when I read about topics like Catholicism or pharmaceuticals? What bothers me even more is that I feel some guilt even writing this. In this moment of conversations about fake news, questioning a publication that is unquestionably a beacon of extraordinary journalism (and fact-checking!) feels like adding fuel to a fire that’s trying to burn down my house.

But reading with skepticism is something we should all do, not because we don’t trust the publication, but because it’s our responsibility to be media literate and develop our own points of view. The biggest problem I have with the conversation around fake news is that it makes it more difficult to legitimately critique the media, something we should all be doing more often.

In the meantime, I’m going to hope the New Yorker stays away from basketball …

¹ Because I can’t go through this without making it clear: The Gasol thing is an opinion and not fact and some might argue that the act of being a center makes you a defensive anchor. I spoke to a friend who is a Spurs fanatic and reinforced my raised eyebrow reaction with a “Umm hell no” to the label applied to Gasol.

April 15, 2018 // This post is about: basketball, gell-mann amnesia effect, media, media literacy, mental models, New Yorker