Month: January 2020

The most common hard question I get around consulting work is: how do I find clients to get bootstrapped as an indie consultant? It is at once the most distastefully grubby practical question you can ask, and the most sublimely philosophical one.

In this issue, I want to offer an answer based partly on my recent ribbonfarm post, The Internet of Beefs, which went viral a couple of weeks ago. It’s a genuinely dangerous answer that can screw up your indie consulting career if implemented poorly, so I want to present it with some care. Read the whole article through and think carefully before adopting this approach, since running with it half-assed really can blow up in your face and make you not just unretainable as a consultant, but too toxic to even employ in a regular job. This is not theoretical. I know people who’ve blown themselves up this way.

Clayton Christensen, 1952-2020 photo by Remy Steinegger CC BY-SA 2.0

This is also my tribute issue for Clayton Christensen, developer of the disruptive idea of “disruption”, who passed away last week. You could say that the answer I’m offering in this issue is a way to approach indie consulting bootstrapping as a non-classical disruption problem. Non-classical because you are the disruptive product, not something you design.

Again, not being theatrical about the risks here. They are real. I offer some safety tips at the end. Primum non nocere and caveat emptor etc.

Bootstrapping ≠ First Client

The question of getting clients is distastefully grubby because there are so many soul-destroying bad answers out there that will kinda-sorta “work” in the sense of generating income, but will dehumanize you and practically make you want to kill yourself. Which explains why so many of the people who seem able to make them work either clearly have no soul, or are in deep denial about their ongoing destruction of it.

On the other hand, it is sublimely philosophical because if you squint a bit, it is almost the same as why do I exist and what is the meaning of MY life?

Many aspiring indie consultants manage to land a first client via a mix of mighty struggling, selling themselves short, and luck. Then they fervently hope that that first gig will magically turn into a steady stream of gigs via referrals.

Then they are shocked when that doesn’t happen. Landing the second client turns out to be just as hard or harder. And the third, and the fourth. Eventually beginner’s luck dries up and they face gambler’s ruin. Because that’s what this approach is. Gambling. You aren’t bootstrapping at all. You’re just failing painfully slowly. Your best outcome is actually to fail fast enough that you can go back to the paycheck economy without your psyche destroyed by the experience.

Bootstrapping is not about getting your first client, but discovering your first non-brute-force mechanism for driving demand that actually works.

Of the 3 layers of the free-agent world, which I covered last week, indie consultant, contractor, and platformer, the question is only meaningful and hard at the indie consultant level. The mechanism is simpler at lower levels of the gig economy. Contractors just have to do a slightly different version of a job hunt, and platformers simply have to sign up on some website. They face what Peter Thiel called a 1-to-n problem. You are solving for becoming the nth Photoshop jockey or the nth Uber driver.

Indie consultants are faced with a 0-1 challenge: true bootstrapping. They have to become the first version of themselves that there is a demand for. They have to sort of “IPO” as a unique stock in a public conversation, not labor anonymously backstage.

I don’t have a general answer — this is very much a 1:1 coaching type problem — but I do have a general approach to an answer, which relies on beefs. Let me illustrate with my own case.

Case Study: Me

The top 3 articles of the hundreds I’ve written, in terms of how much they drove cold inbound leads for consulting gigs, are the following. What feature you think they have in common?

1. The Gervais Principle (2009): A dark/satirical take on office politics and corporate sociopathy that went hugely viral back in the day.

2. Entrepreneurs are the New Labor (2012): A cynical take on heroic valorization of founders, arguing that VCs are to founders as management to labor.

3. Fat thinking and Economies of Variety (2016): A post arguing for fat startups and messy, wasteful, play-like innovation over “lean” thinking.

It’s not that they are dark and satirical or contrarian. I’ve written other dark/satirical or contrarian things that led to no gigs.

It’s not that they showcase deep expertise in a subject. They don’t. In fact they largely showcase my shallow, self-taught amateurishness on the underlying topics.

It’s not that they offer step-by-step playbooks to solving the problems they frame. They don’t.

The correct answer is that they each pick a beef worth picking, but not too strongly.

• The Gervais Principle picks a beef against feel-good “nice” management thinking that dominated the pop-business literature at the time (I helped drive the surge of interest in darker understandings of business circa 2009-12 I think).

• Entrepreneurs are the New Labor picks a beef against people in the tech sector shilling what has come to be known as “hustle porn” and flattering founders with a Hero self-image that blinds them to industry dynamics and debilitating behaviors.

• Fat Thinking picked a beef with the lean six-sigma crowd in big corporations, and the lean startup crowd in the startup scene.

But importantly, none of these is what you might call “pure beef” where the fight and criticism of an opposed perspective are the main focus or content.

They are what you might call “20% beef.” Where the starting point is rejecting some core sacred-cow axiom of a prevailing orthodoxy, and then building something new and interesting, based on additional ideas and novel elements, on that foundation of principled dissent. It is something like rejecting Euclid’s parallel line postulate and going out on a limb to see if you can build a non-Euclidean geometry.

For example, the assumptions I rejected in my 3 articles above are:

1. Executives are nice and managers know what they’re doing (Gervais Principle)

2. Entrepreneurs/founders are heroes (New Labor)

3. Efficiency and optimization are good things (Fat Thinking)

So one good answer to how to bootstrap from 0 to 1 is: indie consultants bootstrap with beefs. It’s not the only way, and it’s certainly not the safest way, but it’s a fun way that is very intellectually satisfying and validating when it works, and is the opposite of soul-destroying and dehumanizing.

But implementing that answer is a remarkably hard challenge, because it involves a delicate bit of threading the needle, and sending a hard-to-fake disruption signal out in the world.

Too Much Beef, Too Little Beef

Bootstrapping with beefs can fail in 2 ways: via too much beef, or too little.

On the one hand, you can adopt too beefy a posture and end up crashing into the Internet of Beefs. This is pure downside.

I’ve done that. For example, an early book review I wrote, of Blue Ocean Strategy, (2007) was pure beef. Another, a review of Seth Godin’s Tribes (2008) had the same problem. In both cases, I stand by my criticism, and believe they are bad books. But the point is, the reviews were 100% beef. I didn’t reject selected premises and build something else better on the alternative foundation. In both cases, it would have been possible; I just didn’t bother to do it. I did the equivalent of criticizing Euclid’s Elements with a “geometry is bad and geometers are evil” line of attack rather than building a non-Euclidean geometry.

On the other hand, you can put in a lot of work into posts that solidly cover a topic in an entirely non-beefy way, and get a lot of gratitude and praise, but generate no leads. This is a “safe” way to fail in the short term, but in the long term is death by slow starvation.

I’ve done that too. Three examples of my own are The Seven Dimensions of Positioning (2010), Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope (2012), and Product-Driven vs. Customer-Driven (2014). I had high hopes of all 3 as consulting lead-gen essays. But though I got a lot of praise and gratitude for them, as lead generation essays they were utter flops. Why? Because they weren’t alternatives to existing ways of doing things. They weren’t non-Euclidean geometries. They weren’t beefy disruptions of prevailing orthodoxies.

Bootstrapping with beefs doesn’t have to be done with writing. You could do a book, or a talk, or a show-over-tell artifact that falsifies a commonly held belief via counterexample. Or even just a twitter rant. If you’re not a creator type, you could develop a sales pitch for use in 1:1 conversational selling that’s based on a beefy take. There’s many ways to “go non-Euclidean”.

Many ways, but no easy ways. Discovering and developing a genuine beef into an artful calling card that lands you gigs is hard work. That’s why it’s a costly signal. You can’t fake it by simple bullshitting.

You have to put in the work of:

1. Spotting a widespread pattern of disillusionment in the margins

2. Identifying the prevailing orthodoxy driving the disillusionment

3. Analyzing its foundations

4. Rejecting one or more flawed premises driving the disillusionment

5. Adding imaginative alternative premises

6. Running with it to see where the whole thing can take you

7. Becoming conscious of what and who you’re for and against

8. Articulating it out there in public and standing behind it.

Yes, this is just Clayton Christensen’s ideas applied to you, personally, as an idea economy product, finding and serving an underserved marginal market before attacking the core.

The work is hard not because it takes effort or time. None of those articles took me more than a couple of days to write. The work is hard because it takes a certain amount of courage and a good deal of taste. If you don’t feel a bit of an adrenalin rush, a sense of a fight-or-flight, a sense of burning bridges, while working on them, you’re not doing it right.

Without this work, you’ll end up with either too much beef or too little beef, and be left with either a pointless fight or deathly silence.

Differentiation = Right Amount of Beef

Why does 20% beef work as a bootstrapping solution?

Last week, I noted that indie consultants pursue a differentiation strategy in terms of Michael Porter’s 3 generic strategies (differentiation is indie consultants, focus is contractors, low-cost leadership is platformers). But most beginning indie consultants don’t understand what differentiation means in our line of work.

Even ones who’ve figured out a differentiation that works often are unsure about how/why it is working. They just pray it doesn’t suddenly stop. Hell I was that way as late as 2014, three years into my indie career, as evidenced by the date of my last “failed lead-gen” blog post cited above.

So what is differentiation for an indie consultant?

Differentiation is the right amount of beef in your positioning; notionally about 20%.

Most mistakenly assume differentiation is about a nice website with pithy, superlative-laden positioning statements, glowing testimonials from nobodies, and professional headshots. All pulled together with a headline declaring something like “I help executives deliver value by blah blah blah zzzzzz 😴😴😴”

No, that’s not a differentiated offering. That’s a commodity offering putting on a nice suit.

See the thing is, as an indie consultant, you’re not selling a product that can have different “features” relative to the competition. Nor are you claiming skills others lack, or 5-star ratings putting you in a top performance category. That’s contractors and platformers. People who sell maker skills or just plain labor.

You are modeling a clear, generative way to break away from something that a lot of people are disillusioned with.

You’re offering an irreversible path of political action.

You’re making your support for that action mean something by association.

You are meaning.

Some of you will recognize the element of Hannah Arendt philosophy in here: we’re talking about “action” in a spotlight over “making” or “laboring” backstage. I highly recommend The Human Condition as philosophical background here.

Beefy Positioning

All indie consultant positioning that works amounts to: it doesn’t have to be this prevailing orthodox way that you’ve been disillusioned by, there is another, better way, and here’s how you go down that road.

Even if there is a product-like element to what you’re offering, like say a workshop or training package, it’s not the quality or effectiveness that matters, but the fact that it embodies a true, bridges-burned alternative to something that isn’t working.

And when you’re offering services to senior executives in particular, VP and up at mid-to-large companies, the “alternative way” is the sum total of what they’re buying.

They don’t need your expertise. They are the experts in their business.

They don’t need your hands-on doer skills. That’s what contractors and employees are for, not consultants.

They don’t need raw labor. That’s Uber-for-X, whatever their X is.

They don’t need you for rah-rah motivation driving them from mediocre to superlative performance (or pretending to). That’s for middle managers and rank-and-file.

Executives typically got where they are not by being exceptional performers, but by being bold and opinionated decision-makers who took interesting risks with a broad but mediocre set of abilities. They’re generally in the market for opinions worth betting on, not knowledge or skills per se.

They need you as an ideological partner-in-arms to drive an “alternative way” agenda through. You are their ideological optionality. Betting on you should represent a meaningful risk.

And you can’t just create ideological optionality by painting a cloud of superlatives around your headshot, and expect that halo of meaningless blather to do the work. You have to offer something like a weaponized schism that they can use to force a decision, and drive the action down one road rather than another. That’s what the 8-step recipe I outlined earlier aims to craft.

It’s a tall order, and fraught with all sorts of risks if you actually try it. So here are some safety rules for running this 20% beef bootstrapping playbook, whatever medium you choose.

Safety Rules!

Here’s a set of 12 rules that can help to keep you safe and generative when you try to bootstrap with beefs (or level up your game). They aren’t guaranteed to keep you perfectly safe. Conflict is by definition risky. You might misjudge a tone. You might push too hard or not hard enough. You might provoke someone who goes all psychopath on you. You might get hijacked by your own emotions and get sucked deeper into a fight than you intended to. You could get distracted from trying to solve a problem to trying to make an adversary suffer.

But still, following these rules should load things in your favor, and mitigate the risks.

1. Add 3-4 novel elements for every 1 rejected orthodoxy element

2. Warren Buffett rule: praise by name, criticize by category

3. Offer an exit to a better way, rather than a voice in a fight

4. Bring out the funny side, which is not the same as being haha funny

5. Reject what you reject with force and clarity, don’t pull your punches

6. Embrace what you embrace with doubt and qualifications

7. Follow your truth where it leads you, not your adversaries where they draw you

8. Openly acknowledge any motivating resentments and set them aside

9. You don’t have to pick every battle, but you do have to pick a few

10. Disengage from the rejected way, do not seek to destroy it

11. Firmly reject resentment-driven mooks who want to fight for you

12. Be kind. If you forget every other rule, don’t forget this one.

So that’s it.

RIP Clayton Christensen.

Go forth and disrupt, with 20% beef.

Over the short history of this newsletter, I’ve been rather sloppily referring to distinctions among 3 kinds of gig economy workers: indie consultants, indie contractors, and under-the-API gigworkers, who I’m now relabeling platformers (people who find work via things like Uber or Upwork and who I can’t, with a straight face, attach the adjective indie to). I’m overdue for cleaning up my definitions of these 3 important categories and their structural relationships to each other, so here we go. First, here is the basic structure:

You’re an indie consultant if you don’t have to deal with purchasing departments (or sometimes, HR departments) as gatekeepers.

You may still need to do paperwork with them, but they have little control over whether to hire you because sufficiently senior managers or executives are making that call. In particular, if hiring freezes/cost control measures are in place, they are senior enough to authorize exceptions, OR are irreplaceable enough to get such exceptions made on their behalf via their chain of command (often this is mission-critical technical people).

You’re a contractor if a purchasing department has significant power to say no based on a variety of considerations, and the client principal can’t override that decision.

You’re an under-the-API platformer if you get work mostly on autopilot from a demand aggregator platform, with little to no human gatekeeping (you might get some procedural human attention while signing up, and during exceptional situations, but that’s it).

How are these 3 layers different? The overall difference is that you take on more risk, for more return, in the higher layers, and gain more independence if you succeed. Much of the changing risk/return profile comes from having to sell yourself to generate your own demand. The increased independence manifests as increasing control over contract terms.

This basic difference leads to all the other differences. Here are 10 important dimensions of the differences, illustrated. I’ve tried to be pretty black-and-white for clarity, but of course, there’s blurred edges along all 10 dimensions.

The ten dimensions (detailed for the 3 layers above) are:

1. Competition mode

2. Social perception

3. Contracting structure

4. Rate-setting

5. Haggling/bidding dynamics

6. Demand structure

7. Selling model

8. Positioning

9. Generic strategy type

10. Branding

For most of you, the ambiguity in who you are is likely to be between contracting and consulting. The easiest way to tell the two apart is whether or not you haggle (dimension 5). I discussed that in detail in my Aug 15, 2019 newsletter: When is a Gig an Engagement? Important point: as I noted in that article, contractors can often make more money per hour than comparable consultants. Haggling does NOT mean being paid less.

But platformers generally are paid less (far less) than either contractors or consultants, because they’re generally participating in a relatively lower skill sector. Uber-for-X generally involves low-$/hour kinds of X.

The simplest way to understand the logic of these distinctions is via Michael Porter’s famous generic strategies model (dimension 9).

• Indie consultants use a strategy of differentiation,

• Indie contractors use a strategy of focus,

• Platformers use a strategy of low-cost leadership.

These things are hard to mix effectively, which is why “hybrid” strategies are dangerous unless you’re absolutely forced into them. They require incompatible operating practices and models, so if you hybridize, you’ll often find yourself making zero-sum tradeoffs. Moves that strengthen you as a contractor will weaken you as a consultant, and vice-versa. This is also why upward mobility is rare in the gig economy. You’re likely to stay at the level you’re at unless you pull a high-effort stunt to move up (for the contractor to consultant move, a good stunt is to write a book).

I imagine very few of you are in the platform layer, or if you are, it’s a temporary way to backstop cashflow shortfalls while you get the game going at either the contracting or consulting levels. But the reason I pay a lot of attention to the platform layer is that it is the strongest manifestation of “software eating the world” in the gig economy. The biggest trends in the gig economy are unfolding at the platform layer.

So you need to be paying attention to it, and open to participating in it if it opens up the right possibilities for you.

Another 101 type reference post, which I hope is also useful for seasoned indie consultants, on basic consulting diagrams. The kind that you should be able to instinctively judge as appropriate to a discussion, and rapidly whiteboard without thinking too hard. I’ve picked 16 of my favorites to get you started, but you should develop your own vocabulary.

Recent chats with some friends have made me realize that my approach to consulting is based on what academics call ethnomethodology, and this particularly applies to how I use diagrams in conversations.

Loosely, ethnomethodology means taking the modes of thought and problem solving of “lay” people seriously, and in my case, actually making them my own.

A great deal of business thinking runs on diagrams drawn on whiteboards, or inserted into presentations/briefings. There is a reason actual working people doing serious work rely on these diagrams to frame and structure conversations.

You’re not a good consultant until you understand the logic and appeal of every major popular diagram type, and learn to use each tastefully, with good “form”.

A word on the relationship between diagramming approaches and indie consulting brands.

Many beginning consultants have a weird kind of insecurity that leads them to invent and rely on over-complicated, bespoke constructs that they can name after themselves. While these can sometimes be useful, especially ones that are developed and refined over many years, across hundreds of applications, such as Wardley maps, in general, they are fragile visual bullshit. You’re much better off learning to use the basic commodity diagrams well than trying to make up and sell your own in most cases.

Many consultants also seem to take a weird kind of pride in avoiding the basic tools of the consulting trade like 2×2 diagrams, almost as though they are afraid they won’t be taken seriously if they use such familiar constructs. To me, this is a clear tell that you don’t have confidence in your basic thinking, and so are wary of commodity packaging.

That or you’re exhibiting a kind of snobbery towards vernacular visual business language that will lead to people distrusting you and refusing to think with you.

Of course, a few people genuinely have objections to one or other diagramming approach as representing dangerously sloppy thinking (Simon Wardley and I have a long-running good-natured beef about 2x2s for example, but he’s also the creator of one of the best 2x2s I’ve seen: openness versus level of strategic play).

Basic diagrams are basic for a reason. They’re like free weights in the consulting gym. Sure they can be used in cringe-inducing ways that are vulnerable to parody, but used with good form, they blow complicated name-brand machine weights and fancy equipment out of the water. So whatever the kind of consulting you do, it pays to master basic consulting diagrams.

What is common to all of these is that you do not need external data or measurements, or generally, even a brainstorm. These are ways to capture your existing situation awareness of what’s going on, and structure the conversation in a way that participants can pool their beliefs, with the right dominant mood (conflict, cooperation, analysis, synthesis).

All 16 of these diagrams also have a very special and useful feature: they can usually be described with 5-9 chunks of information. This fits Miller’s famous Magic Number argument that we can hold 7±2 in short-term memory. This means good discussions tend to stay in that range and avoid the meeting getting stupid.

So without further ado, let’s take a quick tour of the 16 basic diagrams.

1. The 2×2

The 2×2 is the barbell squat in the business gym. Basic, dull, but a full-brain workout that forces you to think, pay attention, and practice good form to avoid injury. It can be used to break out of a zero-sum situation by adding a dimension, relate archetypal cases, etc.  One of its most interesting and unexpected uses is as a conflict de-escalation tool. When 2 people are arguing about mutually exclusive options, or a single spectrum, moving the conversation to a non-conflict mode (if that’s what you want to do) can be as simple as adding an axis that makes the unspoken conflict variable explicit. The 2×2 is also a natural sweet spot, so resist the temptation to go 3×3 or 2x2x2. It almost never works. Get good at the 2×2.

Miller Complexity: 11 (2 axis labels, 4 limit labels, 4 quadrant labels, 1 title)

Examples: The BCG Growth Share matrix, Johari window.

2. The Ranked Cut

If the 2×2 is the squat, the ranked cut is the deadlift. A simple list is just a data capture structure, but what makes the ranked cut a proper diagram is the addition of a single line, to model a cut-off or threshold. Usually you get to a ranked cut by brainstorming a list, ranking it in some priority order, and then having a discussion about where to draw the line and why (which can lead to revision in the prioritization logic). The line usually marks a proposal dividing different regimes of action (in the simplest case, do versus don’t).

Miller Complexity: 4 (above the line, below the line, meaning of the line, ranking criterion)

Examples: Feature prioritization, candidates shortlisting.

3. The Pyramid

The pyramid is used to illustrate a leverage hierarchy of some sort. It is perhaps the most familiar diagraming technique and is synonymous with organizations themselves. The basic use of the pyramid is to create a hierarchical structural scaffolding to identify levels of abstraction in analysis, description, and prescription. It’s a blank map template for anything. I of course, love pyramids. My entire consulting career is based on an essay about one: Hugh MacLeod’s sociopaths/clueless/losers cartoon.

Miller Complexity: 3-7

Examples: Capability Maturity Model, Maslow’s pyramid, MacLeod hierarchy.

4. The Pick-2-of-3 Triangle

The pick-2-of-3 is probably my own favorite after the 2×2, but is not very commonly used, and this is primarily because it is among the most difficult to use. It requires thinking about interacting real-world constraints that model real tradeoffs. It is an excellent tool to use when people seem to be forgetting constraints that matter and are going wild with too-sloppy brainstorming. As with 2x2s, there seems to be a natural limit, and a sweet-spot value to the 2-of-3 case, and attempts to create n-of-m discussions generally don’t work, so don’t go nuts trying. The combinatorics just get too out of hand and exit the Miller 7 +/- 2 zone fast.

Miller Complexity: 3-6. Three basic constraint variables, three pairwise-active regimes.

Examples: The original pizza triangle, the Mundell-Fleming trilemma, the CAP theorem.

5. The 3-Circle Venn Diagram

The Venn diagram is a way to create an interference pattern, and add resolution to a basic structure by creating a set of fill-in-the-blank complexities. The 3-circle Venn diagram is the most common one for a good reason: all possible intersections create zones. When you get up to 4, you can’t intersect opposite pairs pairwise visually. It is particularly useful for archetype analysis, where traits intersect in interesting ways that create evocative role descriptions, like the famous nerds/geeks/dweebs/dorks Venn diagram.

Miller Complexity: 10 (7 mutually exhaustive regions, plus 3 basic circle labels)

Examples: Nerds/geeks diagram, data scientists, Drew Conway data science diagram.

6. The Flywheel

The flywheel is a visualization of a system that creates compounding effects via a positive feedback loop or virtuous cycle. It is a diagram that is powerful in inverse proportion to the number of blocks in the positive-feedback circle. A 2-block flywheel is more powerful than a 3-block flywheel. Negative feedback flywheels are also useful to visualize draining momentum/vicious cycles.

Miller Complexity: 2-7 (one per block in the circle)

Examples: Customer acquisition loops, Amazon flywheel.

7. The Spectrum

The spectrum is probably the single most commonly used business diagram, but is easily my least favorite, because it tends to suck people into a no-exit, zero-sum frame. Often, people use sets of spectra to characterize a large decision space, or flesh out the feature space of a product category. This is a slightly better way to use spectra. Spectra can be binary or continuous, and the resulting “product spaces” of spectra sets can be mixed discrete/continuous.

The spectrum is probably more useful in discussions about design problems than analysis problems.

Miller complexity: 3 per spectrum (end points, pointer position)

Examples: feature set descriptions for disruption debates, persona models.

8. The Bounding Box

The bounding box is one of my favorites, and I rarely see non-engineers use it. It is a loose, qualitative generalization of the idea of a “design” space illustrating the zone where you have freedom of choice. Each edge — and I recommend drawing this as an irregular polygon — represents one boundary with an adjacent zone that can affect what you do, but is outside your control. These could be supply chain partners, etc. For example, in the semiconductor industry, if you are a chip design outfit, you might have a bounding box with foundry, device manufacturers, and IP partners as your edges.

Miller Complexity: 4—9 (3-8 labeled boundary edges, with an interior label for your in-scope design space.

Examples: Any sort of supply chain discussion, discussion of physics constraints.

9. The Stack

The stack is another diagram inherited from engineering, with the archetype being the stack diagram of a computer. It looks a bit like the pyramid, but has equal size layers. It is great to use for discussing actual stacks involved in engineering, design, and architecture discussions, as well as more abstract things like industry sector structure, and market structure.

Miller Complexity: 3-7 (I’ve rarely seen stack diagrams with more than 7 layers)

Examples: Industry structure diagrams, software architectures.

10. The Pillars

The pillars are, to me, one of the most interesting diagram types because I almost never use them. Their sweet spot is values-based reasoning. This does not necessarily mean ethics at a human level. It can be a dogma for highly opinionated engineering design. The vertical orientation suggests a cutting-through of a stack or pyramid, and each pillar suggests a “present at every level of abstraction” concept. So pillars necessarily have to be somewhat abstract, because they’ll be embodied differently at different levels. With 3-pillar diagrams, you can also discuss stability questions, since a 2-legged stool will fall over.

Miller Complexity: 3-6 (more than 6 pillars and you have a caterpillar)

Examples: “Core values” diagrams, equilibrium diagrams.

11. The Breakdown

The breakdown is a special kind of top-down tree, where a large ambiguous thing is progressively broken down into component parts that are bite-sized chunks ready for resource allocation, responsibility assignment, or functional coverage in a design. They can be used in formal, technical ways in some engineering disciplines, but are commonly used in much more informal ways.

Miller complexity: 9-15, but with some chunking by branch and level lowering the cognitive burden to single digits.

Example: project breakdown, root cause analysis, org charts.

12. The Directed Spokes

The directed spokes are a set of arrows arranged along the spokes of an imaginary wheel, with a labeled hub. In an inward pointing orientation, they usually represent environmental forces you must respond to. In the less common outward orientation, they represent some sort of impact analysis. Where a flow (see 14 and 15) is a controlled, directed pattern of unfolding action and consequences, the outward spokes are good for thinking about relatively uncontrolled impact patterns, such as thinking about the effects of a major press release.

Miller Complexity: 4-5 (1 per spoke, 1 central concept)

Examples: Descriptions of environmental factors affecting a company, convergence/divergence in trends, impact analysis, fallout patterns.

13. The Turnpike

The turnpike is an idealized pattern of growth where two evolving variables are in a healthy dynamic balance. In the simplest, somewhat degenerate case, the x-axis is simply time, while the y-axis is something like capability. The turnpike — the term is from economics — is the vector of optimal growth. Below the line and above the line you get some sort of suboptimal (and possible unstable) out-of-balance condition. On the turnpike, you get some sort of idealized pattern of evolution or growth.

Miller Complexity: 7-9 (1 per axis, turnpike label, above/below line region labels, 1 per “milestone” box)

Examples: Product development roadmaps, capability maturation path, business evolution stages.

14. The Sequential Flow

The sequential flow is simply a single set of arrows going from left to right, representing the temporal gestalt. The more detailed (and in most cases, less useful and possibly harmful) version is the Gantt chart. The sequential flow serializes the necessarily complex detailed behavior into a set of phases or gears. Often separated by stage gates with go/no-go decision points, in which case this is the horizontal, temporal version of the ranked cut.

Miller complexity: 3-8 (a per arrow, and optionally, one between each pair of arrows, and a pair of bookends, along with a overall flow label)

Examples: Project phase structure, narrative structure, causal hypotheses.

15. The Parallel Flow

Parallel flow diagrams are useful when you need to talk about synchronized efforts. Unlike the vertically oriented cousin (Pillars) which represent timeless values, the parallel flow represents the most precisely timed artifact in business: the synchronization point. Things that have to line up at a single point in time.

Usually it is used to talk about an all-or-nothing outcome with several necessary  conditions (a large AND gate basically), but with some practice, you can also use it easily for talking about hedged option sets (an OR gate).

Miller complexity: 3-8 (a per arrow, synchronization point label, overall flow label)

Examples: Launch conditions modeling, go/no-go necessary/sufficient conditions.

16. The Concentric Circles

The last of my 16 basic diagrams is a focusing tool. Concentric circles are usually used to think about fuzzy structural boundaries, with a stepped transition from inside to outside. A common example is modeling an ecosystem, or a set of prioritized concerns with a coarse partial ordering. Interestingly, the concentric circles are closely related to the basic linear spectrum. The radial axis of a concentric circles diagram is a directed spectrum. The tangential direction represents a sort of unsorted residual direction of “everything else”.

Miller Complexity: 3-5 (one per ring)

Examples: Ecosystem models, partitioning of concerns along a focal to peripheral spectrum.

Using Visual Language

There are plenty more, but I’ll stop at 16. If you have any favorites that aren’t on my list, do comment. I might eventually make a flashcard deck of these.

Diagrams are like any other language. You get better with practice, and your vocabulary expands expands as you gain both experience and theoretical knowledge. So long as you never use diagrams simply for the sake of using them, and focus on improving your ability to pattern match contexts where a particular type of diagram is useful, your command of the language will improve, and you will become more eloquent and useful as a discussion partner.

Don’t turn your nose up at the basic stuff. Don’t invent or use unnecessary, bespoke, complex stuff. Use what works, pay attention when and how it works, and use it better next time. If people you’re talking to seem to have an aversion to particular bits of your vocabulary, don’t waste too much time trying to convince them. Just switch to mutually preferred vocabulary. The point is the discussion, not displaying your diagramming prowess. It’s not complicated unless you want to make it complicated.

We talk a lot about 4 types of economic entities in this newsletter: big organizations, startups, under-the-API gig workers (such as rideshare drivers), and finally our core class — independent consultants. The superficial structural differences are obvious, but what are the real, deep differences that account for their different economic roles and mutual relationships? I’m going to try and explain it with 2 pictures.

The first picture is a generic Venn diagram of organizational behavior modes that applies to all 4 (considering free agents to be 1-person organizations). All organizational behavior can be understood in terms of the intersections of problems, resources, and surprises, which intersect to create 7 behavioral zones like so.

I’ll let you think about my 7 behavioral zones on your own, but I want to make a couple of general comments before zooming in on the indie consulting version.

The first thing to recognize about this diagram is that problems and resources don’t have to match/overlap much, but do need to be approximately equal in magnitude, which allows for solving them via creative trade and commerce. Bullshit work usually indicates underutilized capacities that can be sold to others. Futile gestures and signaling generally indicates real problems that could be solved by third parties. If the scope of opportunities to spend/make money are well matched, there is the possibility of increasing the efficiency zone.

But if your problems sum to $1 billion and your resources sum to $100k, there’s a basic mismatch that cannot be solved without some true innovation and probably brute-force capitalization. More likely, you will simply try to shrink the scope of the problems you accept to match the resources you have, or die trying.

The second thing to recognize is the role surprises play in shaping organizational behavior. Good/bad doesn’t matter. Sometimes unexpected gifts turn out to be curses. Other times, making lemonade from lemons turns out to be a huge win. What matters is that something unexpected has entered your world from the vast unknown outside.

I’m something of an extremist on this point. I believe nothing truly significant ever changes in an organization without the injection of a surprise from the external world, followed by a creative and imaginative internal response to it. Surprises are necessary (but not sufficient) fuel for growth and change.

Without a stream of external surprises in the picture, the problems-resources relationship is generally in a zero-sum gridlock and doesn’t offer much opportunity to break out of bad situations. All you can hope for is slow, painstaking growth or decline driven by conscious discipline.

But external surprises can break the gridlock. Whether in positive or negative ways is partly, but not entirely, up to you. Organizations differ in their “surprisal surface area”, both in terms of the scope of generally salient surprises, and the degree of direct overlap between the stream of surprises and the resource/problem gridlock picture.

Varieties of Surprisability

The trick to understanding different types of organizations is recognizing that these circles and intersection zones are sized differently for our 4 basic types. And of course we can plot them on a 2×2 😎. What I’ve plotted here are typical representatives of each class.

See what’s going on here?

Big organizations and under-the-API gig workers are both process constrained. This means relatively low scope of relevant surprises (small green circle), and weak ability to respond to them (small overlap zone).

Startups and under-the-API gig workers are both resource limited, which means there is a significant mismatch between the scale of problems they have to take on and the resources they have available to address them (red circle bigger than blue circle). This means the situation is unsustainable long term without some differential growth or shrinkage to balance the two. Startups and gig workers are both in grow-or-die mode, and the growth is required as much to right-shape their economic roles as to make them profitable.

But indie consultants are unique among the four types in having a much bigger surprisal surface area, and overlap zones, than the other three. Because we are neither process constrained like under-the-API gig workers, nor faced with a severe mismatch between resources and problems like startups. So we have a very significant openness to surprisal, and a much higher ability to solve problems in ways besides arguing over resources with others.

The Art of Being Surprisable

A trivial example: if you’re reasonably smart and broadly curious and interested in stuff, almost any item in the news can be fodder for something like a blog post, or quick-turnaround expertise acquisition if you want to invest more time.

These can then be turned into money fairly easily, with mechanisms ranging from subscription newsletters to online classes, to corporate workshops, and spec work for appropriately targeted clients. This means you can respond to a LOT more of what’s going on in the world than the other 3 types of organizations. This is the reason the main product a lot of indie consultants sell is surprises transformed into customized/personalized action optionality for clients. Because we have surplus capacity to respond to surprises ourselves, we sell that capacity to others who have a deficit, due to reasons of either process limitation, or resource limitation, or both.

Startups are equally process-unconstrained, but their capacity for surprisal is limited by the fact that they are trying to build out one very specific ambitious thing with very scarce resources, so their green circle of relevant surprises is smaller. Otoh, big companies have a lot of resources, but too constrained by their processes to ingest significant surprisal. Under-the-API gig workers of course, are the most constrained of all.

You need 5 things going on to turn surprisability into economic leverage:

1. Openness to experience: You have to be paying attention outside your focal zones, and ideally, actively provoking parts of the environment to generate surprise-fuel for yourself.

2. Depth of curiosity: A surprise by itself is like rain. Without adequate forest cover or porous soil, it just rolls off like a flash flood. To “trap” surprise in the form of an asset, you need a rich and broad awareness of the world, so you can integrate surprising things to things you already know/do in interesting ways.

3. Lack of missionary lock: Your life should NOT be built around a single overarching mission to the degree that you can’t opportunistically in ways unrelated to other things you are doing. If you have that kind of lock, you need to turn yourself into a startup.

4. Imagination: Ability to see the possibilities latent in a surprise that are within your zone of actionability. Nobody else can do this for you. This is a kind of connecting of dots that relies on your private knowledge.

5. Boldness: The ability to overcome doubts and just act to be the agent of whatever the environment has enabled to happen. The ability to say: this connection is just waiting to be made, somebody has to make it, why not me?

That’s ODLIB if you like mnemonics: Openness to experience, Depth of curiosity, Lack of missionary lock, Imagination, Boldness.

If you think your surprisability is weak, you might want to start a “surprise log” in a notebook, or even as an evolving thread of tweets. Sensitizing yourself to surprise is not hard. Be careful not to turn it into an “idea log” though. It’s important to learn to see the surprise itself, and the potential it opens up, and not jump too quickly to a way to do something with it (and most of the time you won’t be able to). That’s the only way you’ll train your surprisability.

Pro-tip: a surprise doesn’t have to be a new development or seem obviously surprising at first glance. It just has to be newly surprising to you, via an insight. It can even be something that didn’t happen (“the dog that didn’t bark”). A surprise stream is not a news feed.

Apologies for taking two weeks off on the newsletter instead of a planned one week. A bad cold rendered me incapable of doing anything more complex than shitposting on Twitter for the last 10 days. I meant to do an end-of-year roundup, but now I’m deferring that to the one-year anniversary of this newsletter in April, since I’m not actually at a good retrospective point. In the meantime, the archives page is reasonably browsable if you’re a recent subscriber.

Back next week with a real newsletter issue. In the meantime, do send in any thoughts on what you’d like to see me cover in the coming year, and what you’d like to see more or less of.

Happy new decade, gig on!

🤧