S5 E1 - Laksh Raghavan - Multidisciplinary Thinking in Complex Systems Part 1

In this episode of The Profound Podcast, I welcome back cybersecurity expert and systems thinker Laksh Raghavan. Laksh explores how multidisciplinary thinking bridges the gap between theory and practice in solving complex problems.

The discussion begins with Laksh's professional journey, highlighting his early dissatisfaction with conventional consulting and his pivot toward systems thinking and complexity science. Inspired by figures like Kurt Lewin, Charlie Munger, and Russell Ackoff, Laksh outlines his approach to integrating insights from diverse disciplines to better address both technical and socio-technical challenges.

A central theme of the episode is multidisciplinary thinking, which Laksh describes as synthesizing insights from various fields—physics, psychology, and economics—to build a latticework of mental models. He compares this process to what Charlie Munger advocated for in investing, but applies it internally to organizational design and problem-solving.

We delve into foundational concepts like epistemic humility, the "blind men and the elephant" parable, and the challenges of communicating complex ideas to diverse audiences. Laksh critiques what he terms the "Silicon Valley syndrome," where reductive technical solutions often miss the human elements integral to sustainable success. Examples like Elon Musk's organizational strategies and the "doorman fallacy" underscore the need to see systems as adaptive and human-centered.

Laksh also highlights the importance of psychological insights in addressing organizational and cybersecurity challenges. He emphasizes education reform and the joy of learning as critical to fostering creativity and resilience in individuals and teams.

The conversation concludes with reflections on W. Edwards Deming's principles and their relevance to modern organizations, particularly in viewing systems holistically and embracing uncertainty. Laksh's current work with Cyb3rSyn  embodies this vision, aiming to create environments where multidisciplinary learning thrives.

You can learn more  about the Cyb3rSyn community and join through the following links below:

https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/

https://www.cyb3rsyn.com/p/announcing-cyb3rsyn-labs

Transcript

John Willis: Hey, this is John Willis and a profound podcast. Got a a regular guest and just an awesome person. You know, one of those people, you know, like I said, I said this in the last podcast I did, I feel like I'm very lucky. I get to sit around and have conversations with billion people and just learn. And this is just one of those guys that literally.

You can't help but just learn from so, Larkish, you want to go ahead and introduce yourself again to the listeners? 

Laksh Raghavan: Thank you, John. I think you're being too kind. It's, it's an honor to speak with you. I've been on your podcast a couple times already but for those listeners that haven't listened to those old podcasts I've, you know, been one of those people who's been in the cyber security My entire professional life started the first eight years as a consultant as a vendor type of a role.

But that left me very ungratified. Because all of the recommendations that I would give to my clients, whether it's a two week pen test [00:01:00] or a six month, you know, software, you know development type of integration type of a consulting project. I had no clue whether my ideas worked, what were the long term implications?

What were the unintended consequences? And, and it, I was also so naive to think that. Like, how hard can this be? Because I'm going to these Fortune 500 companies year after year, right? It's the same SQL injection. It's the same XSS year after year, same applications. Sometimes it are different applications, but these are really smart people.

And I get like, these are not, you know, like, these are really smart people. And individually, while they are brilliant, collectively, are they realizing their true collective potential? I wanted to know. Yeah. And so that's exactly what I did by spending the next 11 years at PayPal in various leadership roles.

And, but I've kind of always [00:02:00] been responsible for product security there. And that's where I got lucky. I got a a lot of insights into systems thinking and complexity and learned a lot of. lessons accumulated scar tissue and moved on to a couple of more different complex systems and learned a lot more lessons from them.

So all of this time, you know, inspired by Kurt Lavin, the practical theorist, Taking theory and then, you know, learning through experimentation and iterating through multiple ideas. And for systems thinkers, obviously, you know, starting from hard systems thinking and then, you know, learning more about soft systems thinking and second order cybernetics and so on.

So you're kind of your journey as your journey goes, your experiments change. And your learnings and insights change. And so I wanted to see if this type of a learning by bringing in the great ideas from multiple disciplines [00:03:00] and bringing, creating an environment where there can be theory based learning, put different people together so that's what I'm working on which I'm sure we'll get into the details of of my new startup Cyb3rSyn community.

John Willis: Yeah. I mean you know, we met. Basically you know, I think online via sort of a Deming conversation, which then brought us into a big, broader discussion about system thinking and and I think, you know, now you've been sort of like a man on a mission, like, I think, you know, over the last year or so, you've been, it's been clear, you know, That you're sort of like maybe some of the things that you probably couldn't quite do in a corporate setting now, it seems like you've, the, the, the sort of the the, the bridles or whatever are off.

And so it's been fascinating to watch, you know, even keep up really with your stuff, but I think what we wanted to talk about here is and I, I think you know, we kind of created this topic as sort of foundations of multidisciplinary thinking, right? And I think, so like, I guess the first thing that I would ask you is, what do you mean by multidisciplinary thinking?

Laksh Raghavan: [00:04:00] Sure. You see, a good explanation of our universe has to traverse multiple disciplines. Right. Mathematics, physics, chemistry but the way our education system is structured today, you'll learn them in silos, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology but, but our universe. the reality out there as it is, is everything all at the same time.

And so you need to build a worldview by taking the key fundamental truths and insights from multiple disciplines and put them together. It was Charlie Munger. I'm, you know, deeply inspired by Charlie Munger have been for the last A couple of decades. And he's been a great inspiration and a proponent for multidisciplinary thinking and Munger actually viewed corporations as complex adaptive systems from the [00:05:00] outside in for investing purposes.

Well, all I did was, you know, shamelessly copy him, but I did an inverse Munger, where I started looking at corporations as complex adaptive systems. Along with purposeful actors and that type of a worldview then completely changes your approach to software, you know, security, software development, leadership you know, cybersecurity approaches and things of that nature.

John Willis: And a little background on Munger, who, like, the, the, just a little short background most people. Sure, sure. 

Laksh Raghavan: Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's partner and he is a multidisciplinary thinker and I would recommend his book Poor Charlie's Almanac to all listeners of your podcast. And actually I would, I would there's one thing that I would like to recollect from, from the book in top four of the book it's actually titled practical thought about practical thought.

And there is an editor's [00:06:00] warning that suggests, um, that goes like this, right? Most people don't understand this talk. Charlie says it was an extreme communication failure when made, and people have since found it difficult to understand, even when read slowly, twice. Charlie, these outcomes have profound educational implications.

So Charlie thinks it's super important that he talks about this. But then every time he's trying to communicate this multidisciplinary thinking he is, he's failing. Right. And so when, when people asked him, like he, you know, he, when Stripe Press, Martin Collison, you know, Patrick Collison, like they actually did a special edition a couple of years ago.

Of the poor Charlie's almanac. So in that monger, you know, before he passed away, he looked at the top and then he, he gave his thoughts and he said, look, I [00:07:00] displayed gross folly as an amateur teacher. And so that is where I am starting today, John. And so I start from that position of epistemic humility.

But I know the difficulty of communicating these ideas for broad adoption So many people have attempted and failed at this. 

John Willis: It's incredibly important here, and to me it resonates, right, like I, I interview a lot of people, you know, I, I sort of, we, we, we joke like I, I get to you know, I, I play down how smart I am, but like the, the, my, my strength is, I work really hard of trying to understand really smart people, so I can sort of re explain it, you know, and people, like Jay Bloom is a good example, you know, Jay is an incredibly smart guy, really good at sort of dissecting and sort of meeting people where they are.

But still, I have really smart friends of mine say, you know, I listen to it. I had to listen to that Jay Bloom podcast three times, you know, and then I, you know, I'll try to give a presentation about, and I think, you [00:08:00] know, I was, I was, I was, Reading about what you said, and I haven't read his book, but, but you know about that whole point about like these, these ideas have to be explained.

And you know, there's like a paradox here, they have to be explained because they're incredibly important, but then they're really hard to explain. And, and they're sort of by the sort of the people who aren't sort of academia or don't have, you know, aren't sort of like, and again, I will separate me from you or me from Jay Bloom or, or Dr.

Woods or a lot of the other people I have on my show is like, I'm really good at explaining to the every person. Right? So the, the, the, the paradox is, yeah. I'll try to grok it in a way that needs to be explained, but most of the everyday people like, you know, like half of the rooms like, oh, you know, I'm not going to see that guy anymore.

My head hurts. And the other half is like, you know, like the half that I love is the ones that were like, okay, like, that was really interesting. Where do I go next? Right? And, and they get on a journey, but like, Yeah. But the, the problem is, and then the [00:09:00] really smart people like you said, and Jabe, like, people listen to it, and I think, you know, I'm just using halves as a simple thing, math here, but, but like halves, like, listen to Jabe and say, boy, that's just gonna be way too much work.

And the other half, Like, it sort of changes their life, right? They go on a journey, but I think this is fascinating about what that balance between sort of cognitive load and assumed knowledge of the people that, of the messaging that we both believe and almost everybody that comes on this podcast is incredibly important to strive to get right.

Right. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah, I think, I think you're absolutely right. My approach to this yeah. Is that one learning has to be opted in and when I wanted to see if, you know, if you, if you have a cybersecurity certification, that's being used to filter candidates for recruitment, then that certification becomes a means to an end there is no real [00:10:00] learning there, right?

Learning is, it should, it should, it's a joy in itself. Yeah. Right. It's a reward in itself. And I think it was Simone Weil who said the joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing isn't running. And so I think we should, you know, we, we should really rethink education itself but I think once we, once we create, once we are able to filter.

The curious from the serious. I think just exposing them to different ideas in a theory based experimentation way is, you know, is one of the interventions I think 

John Willis: we should try. Is it as simple as they're just people that don't really want to learn and their people aren't? I told you before, the power goes out.

Conversation with an industrial engineer professor who was sort of unaware of like all the stuff that's going on in software and tech. And, and, you know, and I talked about like, it's important [00:11:00] to teach students that want to learn. And she said, two thirds of this, our students have no interest in learning.

And, you know, and I think there's a lot of people in the large corporation place that we would say that, but, but I, you know, I, I fundamentally kind of want to like optimistically believe everybody wants to learn. We just, Give them the, we don't put the right ingredients in front of, I mean, we don't do it in education.

I mean, 

Laksh Raghavan: absolutely. Look, I think any teacher that has that worldview. In my opinion is mistaken putting every student through a standard set of curriculum. Like what is education today? A lot of teaching is just telling it's about imparting a standard curriculum to every student. One student may be interested in the arts, the other in mathematics, the other in physics.

We don't let. Children to follow their passion without imposing the constraint of grades, right? You can't read the next [00:12:00] idea in physics unless you get to the next grade is severely limiting. I would say, and there are schools that are experiments obviously done where you. you get to like, you know, submitting papers in fourth grade, right?

Peer reviewed articles in fifth grade and stuff like that. And so we are all born with a lot of creativity and thirst for learning. That is, that is fundamentally us. So much so that, You throw a human being in any environment, whether it's Chinese, which is an incredibly difficult language to learn, or Japanese, or Tamil, which is my own mother tongue, or English, where there's only 26 alphabets.

You know, I'm thinking just in terms of number of alphabets. 

John Willis: Yeah, yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: That you have to memorize. And then, no mother teaches a child Proper grammar and syntax and, you know, all of that. And then says, you know, learn this language. Nobody teaches us formal ways of, you know, adjective pronoun and things.

No mother teaches the child. [00:13:00] The child just looks around and based on constant interaction with the environment, a lot of trial and error figures out even something as complex as language and has proper conversations with adults with. You know, in like, what, 32 years we're all just born with this natural creativity, which obviously, I know you're a fan of Deming, which Deming talks about how education like a cough and others also talk about this.

And so I think our education system is fundamentally flawed. But there are people whose curiosity has not been yet crushed that are still curious to learn. And I think Those people are the ones that are more receptive end of the day. It's the listener who determines the meaning of your utterance.

And so they have to make sense of it from their own context. And we're all, you know, our life experiences shape us. And so maybe [00:14:00] those students are interested in something else. And they're doing this because it's a checkbox. And so it will be treated as a checkbox. 

John Willis: Well, and a good educator too, right?

Like, the difference between somebody who sort of interjects the passion and the thing I, you know, I liked about some of the things that when you're talking about Hmong is sort of those narrow experiences versus the broad, right, and it seemed to play well into this multidisciplinary idea is that if I could you.

help people. I mean, I do, we do it a lot, you know my, my scope is, I give my book, my Deming's book, right? I tried to use a lot of I've gotten some compliments because like, I tried to use the, you know, the, the miracle on the Hudson as an example to try to explain system thinking. Now, somebody in system thinking could get mad at me, who cares, right?

But, but at the end of the day, I wanted to introduce to my mother in law, Herbert Simon, and bounded rationality through a movie that I know she saw, right? Like, and so yeah, I mean, that's a, that's another sort of example of getting [00:15:00] people. More interested. It's kind of why I like Michael Lewis. I think he does.

And I think we differ on, on Michael Lewis, whether we like, you don't like Michael Gladwell, right? But I think you're okay with Lewis though, right? Yeah, 

Laksh Raghavan: look, any author weaves the narrative from his own perspective, right? There's obviously multiple, you know, reality is multifactorial and there's a lot more at play.

But, but I'll go back to the, to the point that you make, which is How do I connect these is like there's multiple schools of systems thinking, but there's one quote from a cough that resonates with me, which is systems thinking, not only erases the boundaries between. The points of view that define the sciences and professions.

It also erases the boundary between science and the humanities. And you know, it's all about, you know, expanding our, our boundaries, erasing boundaries, [00:16:00] and and trying to understand the different perspectives. different people how they come from, and, and to have that pluralistic, build that pluralistic worldview, as Churchman put it, System thinking begins when you're able to see through the eyes of the other.

And, and so from that lens I think what we need to do is take multiple ideas from the multiple disciplines and put them together. I think the way Munger, Charlie Munger phrased it was he said a lattice work of mental models. On which you can hang your ideas, right? And so as and when you learn multiple ideas from different insights, you kind of start to build a coherent latticework of mental models, which then kind of becomes a lens for you to view the world and change your actions and interventions.

So I think that's where I think multidisciplinary things Kind of resonates with systems thinking. 

John Willis: And so when you say inverse [00:17:00] Monger, so what I'm gathering from Monger, and I did a little research on him before the show, but the you know, he, he was, you know, worked with you know you know, the large investors And then, but he was invested in focus, so he was sort of building sort of multi discipline view to understand the complex adaptive system, but looking at it from a financial, should I invest or not invest, or, or should I put money, money.

So when you use the phrase, like, I like that idea looking at a complex an organization as a complex type, but you say inverse. Exactly do you mean by that? 

Laksh Raghavan: Oh, for outside in and inside out. 

John Willis: Okay. Okay. He's 

Laksh Raghavan: technically for, ah, for all practical purposes, he's outside the system, but I The system, yeah.

John Willis: Okay. Yeah. I should have got that. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So you're just applying the same thing, but you're inside the organization and you're sort of mm-hmm. Basically yeah, there was it was it was interesting. I, I was just looking for some notes. I just did a podcast with Bill Bellows and he's a big Ackoff guy, rocket scientist, big Deming, a take guy, and he was talking about.

Yeah sort of [00:18:00] Ackoff analysis versus a synthesis, so it's sort of very similar of a inside look, looking inward or looking outward. So I thought it was a nice parallel. And I guess I was going to ask, but I think it's an obvious maybe one line answer. Like, the thing I was thinking earlier is if somebody was listening and said, okay, I'm starting to learn a little bit about this system thinking.

I would say don't overthink thinking system thinking, right? That'd be your first problem. But like you know, for me reading Danella Meadows book was really my personal best anchor to get, to figure out, okay, I get it now. You know what I mean? Like before I was so afraid that I didn't get it in front of people who did get it.

Now, now I went through her book. But like if we talk about multidisciplinary thinking versus system thinking, can we put that in context in case anybody's confused? It sort of begs the question, is there a difference? What's the difference? 

Laksh Raghavan: Oh, no, no. I think the Ackoff code is the connection.

Right. Where he says systems thinking not only [00:19:00] erases the boundaries between the points of view that define the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology. So system thinking erases those boundaries, like from that lens of systems, how you start putting things together, right? Synthesis is all about putting things together, looking at interactions and putting things together.

And so when you learn these different ideas, You learn them separately in, in, throughout education, we, we just don't have a way to put things together. And that's what Munger was talking about in terms of multidisciplinary thinking is start building, understanding the big ideas, the fundamental ideas from all the big disciplines, then put them together as the latticework of mental models.

Okay. Then you, you, you, it's a process of continuously shaping your. world view, your ideas, the map and the territory, right? [00:20:00] It's the first, the first starting point is your map is not the territory. 

John Willis: Yeah. Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: You have a much more simplistic reductionistic view. And, and as you change the map, as you update the map, 

John Willis: the territory also 

Laksh Raghavan: changes.

John Willis: I was thinking about this, this podcast I did with Bill Bellows the other day. And then with this is, you know, is the fundamental, the fundamental problem is, most people don't understand mental models. Right? In other words, in order to, I could picture somebody saying, what is he talking about? Like reality is reality.

Right? None of you know, like one of the. The 1st hurdles here is not understanding that, you know, we, we all like the, we have to build the map or the model in our head. And I think a lot of people go to, like, you said, like, a reductionist view. Well, I mean, it's simple. Like, you know, I mean, Richard Cook used to have this presentation where he'd have above the line below the line.

I don't know if you ever seen it. He talked about a system. Above the line would be a picture of like all these things connected servers and, and, you know, network devices and routers and switches and all [00:21:00] this stuff. And then he'd sort of uncover the bottom half and be blank. And he said, you know, like, like, there is no.

Laksh Raghavan: I think a better story to tell here is the old Indian tale of the 6 blind men and the elephant. Okay. 

John Willis: Yeah. Brilliant. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: Right. It's it's that picture of, six blind men standing around an elephant one, you know, touching the tail and says, Oh, this is like a rope. All right, one touching the trunk one, you know, so we're all like that, where we have access to these partial truths of the universe around us.

And one of the, the fundamental flaws that new systems thinkers fall into the traps that they fall into is that they think that they can now see the whole elephant, that there is an old elephant. That's, that's, that's a misconception. Like the, nobody can see that the whole elephant, 

John Willis: the 

Laksh Raghavan: whole elephant is shaped by our own [00:22:00] different perspectives.

Right. Like just look at the social realm. Ideas like money, country, corporation, these are our imaginations, these are our constructions, and so we construct our world. Like, look at even the physical reality, the color of my table, right? The, the, the tree that's in front of me through the window is the greenery.

None of those colors exist in the universe, right? They're just photons of different frequencies and wavelengths. My brain literally constructs this worldview. Some abstraction. Continuously error corrects based on feedback loop from my senses. 

John Willis: And so I think then, I think the, what I think was really cool is when you talk about what epistemic humility, Right.

That's accepting that we are blind, like, you know, like, look at the blind and the elephant. Well, they're blind. Of course, they don't know. But like, but like the [00:23:00] epistemic humility is that you are blind to almost everything that you sort of do and touch and say, 

Laksh Raghavan: yes, I think there's a, It's a Heinz Wernfeuster quote that goes something like this, which is you, you begin to see only when you realize you're blind.

And it starts from that from, from that point of view, where it's, you know, there's been multiple attempts at this, John, with like, starting from Plato's Cave. Have you heard that story? 

John Willis: Refresh my memory. I have, but like, again, 

Laksh Raghavan: It's like the oldest tale in Western philosophy where, you know there's, there's okay.

I think instead of saying that story, a much more better story that resonates with most tech people, your listeners would be basically the matrix. It is like Neo waking up in the pod and then looking at the new worldview. Like we all think we, we understand the world that's out there, the [00:24:00] complex. reality, which is shaped by the interactions of the various perspectives we all humans have constructed.

We think we understand that and that is, you know, the, the, the happy living inside the matrix. And then you're getting broken up and then you have a completely different worldview is, Oh yeah, the reality is much more complex than I thought. And now how do I, Act in this complex, uncertain world as a human being, as a corporation.

And so having that world model like how, you know, we, we talk about, yeah, video generators, like Sora and stuff. It's not the same as a picture, right? Like creating a video You have to understand physics, how lighting works, how gravity works, how wind works, and so you can, you can completely screw up things.

So you don't need a video model. It's not just about training it. You know, you need to build a world model of how the world is. 

John Willis: Yeah. Yeah, and that was just remind fresh my memory on Plato's cave, right? They're in a cave. They live [00:25:00] their whole life in a cave and it's shadows. So, yeah. All right. Well, then, you know, the other thing I think, which, you know, this is sort of like the, like, let's get level set because in one of the things you wanted to talk about, and I think it was kind of interesting that you call the Silicon Valley syndrome and like, I think we're leading up to we'll talk about like the the thing that you're creating and how we can get, like, we talked multidisciplinary.

Right. Hold on folks. We've got an idea for you that we might be able to get a little better, better at this as an industry. Yeah. But like, okay, so how do we sort of like start talking about the immediate problems that we're seeing with sort of the Silicon Valley syndrome, which, you know, again, we can Absolutely.

Hundred ways. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. So the, what I call by Silicon Valley syndrome is. This reductionistic worldview where we think everything's like a technical problem rather than a socio technical problem, like completely missing the human element, the [00:26:00] insights from human psychology. And I say this knowing full well that more than, you know, 50 percent of the papers in psychology are not, you know, that you can't replicate and we have a replication crisis.

And You know, we can talk about it if need be, but I think not incorporating the ideas and insights from psychology, and we can go into very specific examples to explain this better to your audience. And we can take different perspectives. One, when you build products. For for the outside, right?

We can talk about Google. We can talk about Uber as specific examples. And I want to use the same ideas because people are people. And so when you're trying to do something internally, like whether, what, let's say you're a CISO and you're trying to solve a complex vulnerability management problem that you have, how can you apply the same insights from systems thinking and psychology and whatnot?

So we can get a different examples, but I want to start with the idea that. This is a story that Rory Sutherland [00:27:00] tells the doorman fallacy, right? So what we tend to do in Silicon Valley is we ask the question, what is the job of a doorman? Oh, it is to open doors. And then you quantify, okay, how much are we paying that doorman a year in salary?

We need three people for three shifts benefits, Oh my goodness, it's running to five hundred thousand dollars or whatever, right? And so I can replace those three doormen with one revolving door for fifty thousand dollars and we've saved four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Now that is the doorman fallacy and I'll tell you why.

Because a doorman is not just a doorman. Right. He's ballet. He can hail a cab. He can carry luggage. He can strike a conversation as people are waiting for the 

John Willis: best deal on for tourists for cameras. And yeah, like, there's even been movies about like, absolutely court in a dormitory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Laksh Raghavan: absolutely.

And so you implement this automation. [00:28:00] And one year down the line, what happens drug addicts are in the lobby, there's no safety, you know, the whole, the whole business is gutted. And, and the return customers don't, don't even come like, Hey, if you don't, don't even have a doorman, how are you going to charge 200 bucks a night for that hotel, right?

And so the whole business could be gutted. And so the, the blind obsession with efficiency. Efficiency and effectiveness. Yeah, 

John Willis: yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: And and that's just because missing you, you miss the human element. You take the human element out of it. You can, your decisions can be disastrous. 

John Willis: I mean, you know, I've got two experiences.

One is I actually inherited a large corporation. I got tired of travel. My wife was working there. There was somebody who was retiring early. And they, I got this job where I had this ragtag team, this is way before DevOps, but they, you could have called them DevOps, but they were, they did everything.

Like, it's GE, right? It's a GE, right? So like they did everything. And some of them were from corporate, like Cincinnati GE, some of them were from, [00:29:00] and we outsourced our business to IBM. And and we found, which was these guys, this ragtag team had done everything for everybody in this corporation. And once we put it on a contractual basis where we moved out to the like, literally, like, they was, you know, I had to start telling you can't do that.

Like, it's not in the contract. And like, things just started breaking because these were the guys. And Decker, you know, talks about the getting shit done guy, right, like the, he has it on his hard hat and they follow him around and like, what is, what does he do, you know, like, I'll tell you what he like, you know, like, it isn't what he does, like he doesn't do here, like, like you, what would happen if you didn't have him or her, right?

Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: It's interesting. It's, it's simply remarkable how much people can go and achieve beyond your wildest imaginations and expectations when, when you empower them in the sense [00:30:00] that you're able to give them the full picture. Like I can give you a specific example. example from Elon Musk, you know I, I want to stay out of the politics.

And, and I, I think I, I, I want to learn even from the worst of my enemies. And so whether you hate him or like him, I think there's something to be learned here. Because like you hit a hole in one once. You know, I'm not that interested in you, but you do it over and over again with Tesla and SpaceX and Neuralink.

I, you know, I want to understand, okay, what is this? What are his mental models when it comes to organizational design? And so here's what happened like the, after the space race, a lot of people were inspired to go and study about aeronautics and all of that stuff. And so that in like a lot of people, smart people ended up in corporations like Boeing and NASA.

Right. And so there would be really smart engineers in Boeing. Where their entire career is all [00:31:00] about, they own a single valve, right? It's all about managing the contracts and the vendors and the bidding process for that valve. And then from the lowest bidder, trying to get it built according to spec, right?

That's their entire life. And Elon, when they hired them, they said, look, you work on the entire rocket. You pick what's priority number one and you, you know, you, you figure it out and I'll, I'll be there. And the big difference is. There's no bureaucracy. He's the CEO because it's his own money and you convince him of a technical solution on an approach that you have to take.

You already secured the funding. You don't have to go to CFO and build presentations and do the dog and pony show, right? And they got the whole picture when, when you get people to see the full 

John Willis: picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, and it either happens because it's sort of serendipitous that it's this guy who has a ton of money who's can create this crazy things that he decides to do.

I've been to SpaceX,

I had a [00:32:00] friend that worked at SpaceX, so the only way to get a tour at SpaceX is, it has to be an employee.

And so I've actually been twice where once I took my son, the other time I took my family. And like, the stories that you'll hear, Are you know, like when they're prototyping something and everybody's sitting around, like, how are we going to do this? And somebody's like, hold on, I'll be right back. And they go down to Lowe's and buy bamboo, like, like that can never happen at NASA.

Right. Like, you know, like that would have to be a requisition system, you know, like you said, and then, you know, the, even the way they would think about like, you know, I'm always trying to sell software services, even to my friends, as my friends know. And I was talking about like, what about consulting?

He's John SpaceX. You any money you want to spend, you got to answer this question. Will it get a human to Mars faster? 

Laksh Raghavan: No 

John Willis: better example of a real true North, right? And those things like that. From what we think about and try to decouple the the, you know, sort of the, the, what Deming would call the [00:33:00] you know, what does he call it?

The, the, the badness of the, the prevailing systems, right? That, that exists on this and all the corporations. That's beautiful. Those just those 2 ideas that people could just run out, you know, and, and just go grab bamboo to do a prototype. Or other people like, okay, well, in order that we're going to have to get, you know, PVC, we're going to have to get, we're going to have to requisition that.

We've got to figure out what our supplier is and we've got to go through purchasing, you know, like, you know, and then the idea to have it through North, right? Like what Toyota had. Yeah, no, I, I think that you you know, you have to, I'm in a debate right now, which is like, it's a little side story and I don't know why I get myself into these.

I do it to To take it to the point of if there's an opportunity for people to learn, but then when they start getting snarky, like, okay, get out of it. But somebody said that Deming created TPS. You know, I'm like, yeah, it's like, really? You know, that's like, I love Deming, but like. You just can't say that, right?

And, you know, and I, I [00:34:00] went through, like, sort of, I tried to argue the list of things you probably should read. You should probably read Shingo's book, Ono's book, Nomoto's book. You should read Kisumo, who's got the authoritative research on the Japanese automobile. And then I said, like, I don't recommend, I don't necessarily like Shoresh and, and Juran's view on Deming and, and you know, and to Susie guy to, I mean, they're very anti Deming.

I mean, they're like, but like, you need to read their work. If you're going to go around making statements that Deming created TPS, in other words, what I'm saying is, I think that's a thread that both of you would encourage and both ourselves, you know, we need to, like, learn what our enemies do, right? If for any reason there, if they're right, right?

Right? So, 

Laksh Raghavan: yeah, you know, I'm not much of a historian, but I stay a curious student. I don't know who said this quote, I'm trying to recollect, but it was like, two things are certain in life. You know, taxes and revisionist history or [00:35:00] something like that. So, so every historian is trying to tell a story and you know, they start from a narrative and everybody had their own biases.

John Willis: But And here's the worst thing is I think the thing we get ourselves in trouble with. Yeah. And it's easy to become, I sit back and I, you know, I think about, in fact, you were talking about psychology earlier, right? We've talked about this. That's why I think Deming's system of profound knowledge is so profound.

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. 

John Willis: Right? Because most people will include some form of system thinking, some people will include variation or some type of statistics or probability, you know, others will you know, sort of maybe have a more advanced thinking about epistemology and all. But then to make sure that an equal element of that complexity view is psychology, it puts Deming on a level, but even there, you know, you, you, I mean, I can't, you know, I, I, you know, you know, I wanted to be clear in my, my Deming book that like Deming did not create the miracle in Japan.

[00:36:00] Japan created the miracle in Japan, right? So again, the, the, I think we, we learned stuff. We get excited about who we learn about. I mean, these people are, Ackoff is an incredibly interesting person, right? Like, how could you not, you got to sort of guard yourself against being a hero of Deming, Ackoff, Senge, you know, I mean, we can go on the list, right?

You have a longer list than I have, but we gotta be careful there too. Right. Cause I get trouble. 

Laksh Raghavan: Absolutely. I think, I think, you know the key there is for me, like I started, I'll, you know, I started with Deming. I've actually spent some time working in Japan. It was, it was, you know, less than a year for sure.

But that true lived working experience, like even then I didn't fully grok, even though I knew Deming. I knew him as the father of, well, I didn't grok. Any of that stuff. So, but then when I started reading more about his books, that's where I actually started. But then the journey for me [00:37:00] was much beyond that because even in the last podcast, we discussed about epistemology and why and how, you know, we, there was not like I wanted to deep dive, right.

And dive deep. And so that led me to understanding the different schools of systems thinking. So Deming belonged in the hard systems thinking, and there's the soft systems thinking method. And then there's obviously. Second order cybernetics and so all of these are about bringing that human perspective into the picture rather than saying, hey, here is the mechanistic system and we're going to view like large approaches in mainstream management today as it stands is to view the organization as a mechanistic system where you can.

predict the behavior that when two parts work in deterministic ways and deterministic ways, it works really well. But one department doesn't work the same way with another department. One human doesn't work the same way with the other human. They have their own perspectives of You know, from [00:38:00] their own, from their own incentive structures and motivations and biases.

And so the, the approach is completely change. And, and we can get into the details of second order cybernetics.