I was bumping a couple of ideas and concepts against each other this morning. I’m still formulating my thoughts on what problems these parallels and lenses could be useful for, but let’s just look at them right now.
Concretely, we’ll talk about Microsoft, Walmart, and Barnes and Nobles.
Abstractly, we’ll talk about ‘pattern languages’, differentiations, decentralisation, ownership, orbits and centers, and building unique places from the same simple generative process / “patterns”
TLDR:
- patterns can’t be plugged and played
- there needs to be as little gap as possible between users and builders
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designers and builders need to speak the same language (of the users)
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decentralising ownership is necessary sometimes
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sometimes we need to acknowledge that the nature of centralisation in tech can be a bug.
By the way, these will make more sense if you’re somewhat familiar with the work of Christopher Alexander. But if you’re not, you’re in for some treat. Hang on tight because we’re going to go on some tangents.
It started when I listened to this episode of stratechery. Ben linked two observations together:
- Microsoft’s journey in reorganising the constellation of their product in the face of Windows’ decline, and its eventual comeback in a configuration that is more in touch with current reality. From all I’ve learned about Satya Nadella, he seems to have done all the difficult yet necessary things to get Microsoft where they need to be to thrive again.
- Walmart’s journey in working through the fact that their expertise in retail logistics failed to translate to e-commerce success because different strategies and priorities are essential for online business models, and how their current form of working strategy for e-commerce look like.
Parts that stood out from each:
Microsoft – differences x differentiation, order x disorder, orbits and centers
Microsoft was finally, not just strategically but also organizationally, a services company centered on Azure and Office; yes, Windows existed, and still served a purpose, but it didn’t call the shots for the rest of Microsoft’s products.
….
And here I am in May 2024, celebrating a Windows event! That celebration, though, is not because Windows is differentiating the rest of Microsoft, but because the rest of Microsoft is now differentiating Windows.
This latter quote loosely reminds me of the “differentiation x differences” and “order x disorder” that Christopher Alexander wrote in Timeless Way of Building.
In short, the use of (pattern) languages does not just help to root our buildings in reality; does not just guarantee that they meet human needs; that they are congruent with forces lying in them—it makes a concrete difference to the way they look. . . . This character is marked, to start with, by the patterns underlying it. . . .
It is marked by greater differentiation.
If we compare these buildings [the ones with the quality without a name] with the buildings of our present era, there is much more variety, and more detail: there are more internal differences among the parts. There are rooms of different sizes, doors of different widths, columns of different thickness according to their place in the building, ornaments of different kinds in different places, gradients of window size from floor to floor. .The character is marked, in short, by greater differences, and greater differentiation.
But it is marked, above all, by a special balance between “order” and “disorder”.There is a perfect balance between straight lines and crooked ones, between angles that are square, and angles that are not quite square, between equal and unequal spacing. This does not happen because the buildings are inaccurate. It happens because they are more accurate. The similarity of parts occurs because the forces which create the parts are always more or less the same. But the slight roughness or unevenness among these similarities, come from the fact that forces are never exactly the same. . . .
Walmart – contexts, forces, and patterns
Two bits from the Walmart story:
Walmart, meanwhile, finally realized a couple of months ago that while they are really good at retail logistics, that skill doesn’t translate to e-commerce in the way they hoped. I wrote in June:
All of those analysts who assumed Wal-Mart would squish Amazon in e-commerce thanks to their own mastery of logistics were like all those who assumed Microsoft would win mobile because they won PCs. It turns out that logistics for retail are to logistics for e-commerce as operating systems for a PC are to operating systems for a phone. They look similar, and even have the same name, but require fundamentally different assumptions and priorities.
These remind me of what Christopher Alexander (CA from now) said about patterns in Timeless Way of Building (TWoB from now)…. How pattern(language)s can’t be just ‘plugged and played‘.
In order for the building to be alive, its construction details must be unique and filted to their individual circumstances as carefully as the larger parts. (Timeless Way of Building, chapter 23)
A simple generative process
… to build something that has the quality of “being alive”
Expanding the previous quote from Timeless Way of Building, chapter 23:
… the details of a building cannot be made alive when they are drawn at a drawing board.
The details of a building cannot be alive when they are specified in the form of working drawings, because these drawings always assume, for the sake of simplicity, that the various manifestations of a given part are all identical. But if the builder builds according to a detailed drawing, he then makes the detail identical, to follow the drawing-and in the actual building this becomes dead and artificial.
To make the building live, its patterns must be generated on the site, so that each one takes its own shape according to its context.
It is essential, therefore, that the builder build only from rough drawings: and that he carry our the detailed patterns from the drawings according to the processes given by the pattern language in his mind.
This is commonplace in nature. When the spider builds its web, the process is standardized; but the parts which are created are all different. Each web is beautiful, unique, perfectly adapted to its situation. Yet it is created by a standard process: and there is just one process. It is very simple. Yet this simple process interacts in an infinite variety of ways with different circumstances to produce different particular webs. The individual processes are standardized, and very simple. But the actual parts which are produced are infinitely various-they are infinitely different manifestations of the patterns which the processes define.
Barnes & Nobles – decentralisation of power and tech as centralising force
Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Barnes and Nobles. Here’s one snippet from the Walmart story that will take us there:
…and while Walmart’s executives seem to have finally learned that extending a bricks-and-mortar business model online doesn’t work, it always takes even longer for that lesson to filter down to middle managers primarily motivated by their own specific responsibilities that often aren’t aligned with the future.
Q: … However, tech is inherently centralizing, you’re doing this massive amount of investment in this technology that you can get high leverage by extending it broadly. How much of a challenge has that been? To get this omnichannel you have to understand inventory in each store, but that means more restrictions on the store manager. Has that been a real difficult thing to figure out?
DM: Taking ownership all the way down to department manager level for toys and store number #1113 has great value in it, and when a buyer feels like they’re really responsible for their category, there’s great value in that, but we have to, on behalf of the customer and in a customer-led way, have top down decision-making to say, “No, we’re not going to just respond to what you, the buyer, want the next tech priority to be”.
We’ve actually set the tech priorities driven off what we want to build for customers and what they’re asking us to solve, and that’s how it’s going to be, and that is a cultural tension even today because we actually want some of both, we want ownership. We don’t want to diminish that ownership and our store managers, they make this company go, and they make a lot of great decisions, and they’re fantastic…. But take a marketplace, we can’t build a marketplace one country at a time, you build one marketplace (my comment: and this is where the centralising aspect of tech is a feature). So there have to be people that are willing to give up authority so that that gets done in a way that’s most efficient and we’re doing that now, but I think that tension is going to be here forever.
This idea of redeploying of a sense of ownership and decentralization of decision making to the people on the front line who is closer to the “users” reminds me of Barnes & Nobles’ comeback story. As quoted from this interview that The Verge did with B&N’s CEO, James Daunt:
Q: How did you preserve the culture or keep people calm through that set of changes?
JD: We’re saying to the booksellers and the bookstore managers, “Look, you really have to take accountability and ownership of your stores. We are going to give you the tools to actually prove that you are good booksellers. We’re not going to tell you what books you’re going to have or what books to reorder. You have to make those decisions yourselves. You have to decide how you display them. You’re no longer going to have planograms telling you exactly where to put all of your books in the front. You have to decide. Scratch your heads, think about it, and put them as you judge best.”
Q: You’re describing a massive org chart change, right? What tools does a CEO have to solve problems? … you upend and decentralize your org chart. How is the company structured now?
JD: It is very decentralized. We do most of our heavy lifting from a merchant perspective out in the stores. We are continuing to necessarily invest in the things that support the stores, so we probably have more infrastructure centrally to do that — the store development teams, the construction guys who do all of the refurbishments and new store build-outs, and a lot of investment in IT and logistics. Otherwise, we’re very light touch. All of our book buying is done by essentially one person with two assistants, and that was a team probably of 40 or 50 before. That’s all we need to do centrally. The rest is all done out in the stores.
Some more quotes from this article in Axios:
Daunt said the retailer is profitable after he cut corporate staff in half and empowered local managers to make more decisions about their stores, including the books they carry and the way their stores are laid out. He also removed many of the products that B&N was selling that had no connection to books.
“It’s ironic for somebody who runs chains, but I don’t think chain bookselling works. All I’ve done is bring the principles of independent bookselling to a chain and exploded the very notion of what a chain retailer really is.”
The intrigue: At least two of those new stores will be located in former Amazon bookstores, all of which have shuttered. Daunt praised Amazon’s “extraordinarily efficient” business but said the company’s bookstores were “essentially soulless” and “very unimaginative.”
The of languages of users, designers, and builders
This brings me yet again to something Christopher Alexander said in TWoB, page 235 onwards (reorganised for coherence):
If I build a fireplace for myself, it is natural for me to make a place to put the wood, a corner to sit in, a mantel wide enough to put things on, an opening which lets the fire draw.
But, if I design fireplaces for other people, then I never have to build a fire in the fireplaces I design. Gradually my ideas become more and more influenced by style, and shape, and crazy notions, (then) my feeling for the simple business of making fire leaves the fireplace altogether.
So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use wil be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for “the many,” their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter how well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, because they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say.
The users, whose direct experience once formed the languages, no longer have enough contact to influence them. … as soon as the task of building passes out of the hands of the people who are most directly concerned, and into the hands of people who are not doing it for themselves, but instead for others.
So, it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists, the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality.
Closing thoughts
So many juicy parallels. Justified or not I don’t know, but I’m going to play with them for now.
Some other threads to pull on:
- How does the concept Flow and Friction come into play here? Frictionlessness doesn’t guarantee flow. As the three conditions for flow state are: a) a goal / direction with sufficient challenge, b) skill, and c) feedback loop. But some level of friction will hinder flow (and a lack of skill is just one form of friction).
- The constant quest for “The Formula”, the trick, the playbook that schmoozes The Algorithm, cargo culting. And what Ted Gioia shared as examples of this phenomenon in the music industry.
I’ll end here. Hope this tickles some neurons in your brain and get you interested in delving into the work of Christopher Alexander as I’ve only begun to, two years into hearing about him via the Twitter sphere.
Welcome to the rabbit hole. Hit me up to geek out more.
