S5 E2 - Laksh Raghavan - Multidisciplinary Thinking in Complex Systems Part 2

In this episode, I continue my conversation with Laksh Raghavan, a cybersecurity leader and systems thinker, diving into profound insights on applying multidisciplinary approaches to organizational challenges. Picking up from Part 1, this discussion illuminates the principles of W. Edwards Deming and other thought leaders in fostering organizational reliability, productivity, and innovation.

The episode opens with a discussion on Herbert Simon's "satisficing" and its organizational implications. Laksh emphasizes how businesses like McDonald's excel by prioritizing reliability over perfection, ensuring consistent experiences across global markets. He connects this to Deming's principles of variation reduction, explaining how psychological perceptions of quality—rather than objective measures—often dictate success. This theme extends to companies like Apple, which masterfully align human psychology with technological precision to command premium loyalty and profits.

We also explore behavioral science's role in technology and consumer behavior, from Uber's elimination of uncertainty in ride-hailing to Google's laser focus on search quality. They highlight the importance of understanding human psychology when solving organizational problems, as demonstrated by the famous "elevator mirrors" anecdote from Manhattan skyscrapers. Laksh masterfully ties these insights to modern developer productivity, arguing that reducing psychological friction, rather than merely optimizing technical processes, leads to sustainable performance improvements.

The conversation crescendos with a deep dive into systems thinking, advocating for leadership frameworks that address interconnected "messes" rather than isolated problems. Laksh shares the vital role of education and storytelling in cultivating systemic thinking within organizations, drawing parallels between Deming’s teachings and modern challenges in cybersecurity and software delivery.

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Transcript

John Willis:  You know, one of the things in, on this sort of Silicon Valley syndrome, you talk about, and this is something that I'm sort of fascinating to, for a lot of reasons, is sort of Herbert Simon's satisficing, because actually, It actually plays into, I don't want to go too far here, but I'm writing a book about the history of AI right now, and like, that's sort of the launch pad for some of the first AI systems that Herbert Simon created without Alan Newell.

But let's just stick to how it applies to, you know, organizational productivity. 

Laksh Raghavan: Sure. So satisficing. is a word that Herbert Simon coined from satisfy and suffice, kind of reflects how people often settle for satisfactory options to avoid catastrophic outcomes, right? Especially in situations of uncertainty or complexity.

Right. Right. And so we kind of, Prioritize solutions that are good enough rather [00:01:00] than seeking the absolute best or optimal optimal choice. Rory Sutherland explained this in a very creative way. He takes the example of McDonald's, right? And, and, McDonald's is the most popular restaurant. Not by coincidence, right?

But in terms of number of people it feeds, right? That whole idea is underpinned by satisficing where people prioritize reliability and safety over perfection or luxury, right? My McDonald's success lies in its ability to meet basic expectations. consistently, right? You, you go to the McDonald's here in the USA, or you go to the one in Hong Kong or India, you know, the restrooms are going to be clean.

You can expect the same quality of food, the same tasting food. Of course, there's going to be local flavors and variations, but you can expect that consistent quality. You're not going to get the shits the next [00:02:00] day. So much so that the Olympic athlete, Usain Bolt. Reportedly, like he eats McDonald's the previous night, like you get you know, with, with the nuggets, you get a bunch of protein, it's clean food, right?

He's traveling with different places even if you go to Michelin star restaurants, there's no guarantee you're not going to get the shits next day. And so this really connects well with the idea of reducing variability. In perceiving quality, right? When, when not and bolt is of different shapes and sizes.

And, you know, if there's too much variability, the quality gets screwed up. And so the way we perceive quality psychologically is through that reliability, right? Of staying consistent and I think that's what Apple deeply understood. Steve jobs was, you know, he. He always, you know, took pride that Apple will always stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities.

He proudly said [00:03:00] that, you know, at the end of, you know, a lot of his presentations and so that's what they get is to bring that human psychology, like how we feel right from the first experience with the unboxing of the product, right? They, they sweat and obsess about those details and the perceived quality.

All right. If all they're trying to do is if you claim something is, is, is, is going to work that way. It better work that way. And they are ready to wait and delay things until that, that quality is there. And so that's why they're able to command a premium pricing. They, they take a lion's share of all the profits.

They may not be number one in revenue or volume, but when it comes to profits. They have like the lion's share of all the profits from smartphones because every other manufacturer is perceived, we perceive them as lower quality or crappy, but Apple has that repeat. You know, they, they keep you within the ecosystem.

It's very, very [00:04:00] sticky, right? A good test for a product is, do you like a product is. If it's broken, will you buy another one? 

John Willis: And if the answer is yes, you buy the same car, right? 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. And Munger invested, or rather Buffett invested in Apple, not because he understood technology, stayed away from tech stocks for the longest time ever, but he understood the customers of Apple really well and how they would even not buy cars that did not have car play that became a number one feature for many people's car decisions.

So he understood the consumer behavior. of Apple, just like how we understood the consumer behavior of Coca Cola customers, which he explains in the book Poor Charlie's Almanac. Then you understand, okay, when a company, the systems, how jobs set up the, the, the internal structure of Apple in such a way that They will always be design led, they will always look at psychology and obsess about quality and all of that stuff, [00:05:00] right?

Then the consumer behavior, when they saw the long term trend, it became obvious they invested. Full disclosure, I am long Apple, I got in before Buffett got in. Huh. But it's, it's less than 5 percent of my portfolio. 

John Willis: Well, they well, there's a lot, it's sort of interesting, like Steve, Steve Jobs talks about, like, Bringing in we've talked about bringing in Ackoff.

I actually 

Laksh Raghavan: it 

John Willis: was jobs. Okay. Okay. Okay. I thought some videos with him and a cough too, but it was definitely Juran. I think 

Laksh Raghavan: it connects well to the question that you had earlier, John, about epistemic humility. I, I suspect if jobs would have listened to Juran, if he was still the Apple CEO, Right.

He met Juran at next after he was fired that that ego crushing. Yeah, right. His whole worldview is broken. Yeah. And he's waking up as Neo in the pod and he needs a Morpheus. And that's Juran. 

John Willis: You know, I [00:06:00] was when you were talking about, yeah, no, I think it is. I think he does bring in Ackoff too, though. There are some videos where it dropped, but we'll table that for now. Sure, sure. I hadn't really thought about it. It keeps, I mean, it keeps going back to system profound knowledge, right? Like when you talk about satisficing, you earlier sort of equated it to the variance thing, when we talk about variation and sort of the Shewhart Deming, you know, how do we look at things like satisficing is in sort of parts, right?

And, you know, really anything, but like from the original parts, it's this sort of, it's the variance, right? Like there's like, we went from go, no go, you know, it's just sort of like the variance. And so now spec is like, it's between this many millimeters and that minimum. And, and so, and then, you know, what we're trying to do is I think what you're saying is satisfying is a form of that is like trying to get it perfect.

You know, it's like sort of Pierce's pendulum, right? If that makes sense. 

Laksh Raghavan: It's more, it's more about being reliable. Right. [00:07:00] McDonald's is not the best food. Right. It's not the most tastiest food you'll ever have. 

John Willis: But I guess that's the where I'm trying to make the connection between satisfying variants and McDonald's, which is, you know, at one point we're doing 

Laksh Raghavan: the reduction in variability is.

Are you able to ship out burgers and fries of the same taste and texture and quality over and over and over again? 

John Willis: And that is the variance of that business, right? They're like that. I don't know that they use control charts and all that stuff at the end of the day. They're freezing, they're getting the same meat ingredients, the same box, the same fries.

And it's a logistical, I mean, again, it's what, you know, Amazon does really well. Yeah. Apple, in fact, Apple, we do know, um, you know, Steve Cook came from us, you know, from a sort of supply chain, most likely influenced by Deming. And then what's his face at, at Amazon also. Wilke. Yeah. Wilke.

That's right. Wilke. for reminding me. Like, they both were. So, like, [00:08:00] I think that's, I hadn't really thought about, like, that whether McDonald's does it the way Apple and and at least, you know, 

Laksh Raghavan: I mean, McDonald's, like, they need a very terroristic approach, right? Like the physical movements of the cooks, the operators.

Right. They experiment. Yeah. They experiment heavily. And then they prove it. They iteratively improve the cooking ingredients, the methodology and, and the recipes and stuff like that. But. Their whole success lies in their ability to get a small group of people to ship out the same quality stuff. It's not the best, it's not high quality, it's the same reliable quality you can expect anywhere you go to McDonald's.

John Willis: No, it's like, you know, sort of like, you know, I think Five Guys has a lot to go too far on the burger thing, but they specialize a little more, right? One of their signs is we don't freeze anything here. Oh, yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: The psychological hack of Five Guys [00:09:00] is different. Like, like, the first time I still remember, I went and ordered a burger and some fries.

And I saw the, the, the guy, you know, scoop a lot more fries and then shouted my bag was like, Oh my God, that's a lot of free fun. I'm going back. 

John Willis: But they don't, you know, it's, it's, it's, 

Laksh Raghavan: it's the cost of the burger and the fries is already factored in, they're being trained to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the whole modus operandi.

So there's this lot of psychological hacks like not everything's behavioral science, John, but behavioral science is in everything. Yes. Right. We can discuss these psychological hacks even in technology products. Like, say Uber, for example. 

John Willis: Yeah, let's do that. Where, 

Laksh Raghavan: yeah, so, so, you know, it's not easy to just improve the speed at which you can get a car rental car, right?

Or a taxi cab, right? Because it's out of your control, right? There's [00:10:00] traffic and there's multiple players, incentive structures at play. And so what Uber is really. What Uber is really doing is there is from psychology, we understand our fundamental aversion to uncertainty, right? We want certainty. We seek certainty in everything.

And so what Uber is really doing is they eliminate the certainty the minute you open the app. You can see where you are and then it shows a few cars around you. Oh, there are cars near me, right? The zoom level can change and it can be several miles of difference. So you, at least you know that there are cars.

And then once you hail a cab, they show you how exactly how far away you are. The problem with the old model both of us are old enough. To remember having to call dispatch and, and, you know, and wait with uncertainty. I had no idea you had 

John Willis: some loose contract with we'll be there in 10 minutes or worse.

You're in the city and you have [00:11:00] to stand on a corner and you got to figure out which corner you got to stand on to even get it. Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. With Uber, you know, You're sitting in the bar and, and Oh, he's late by five minutes. Okay. I have one more beer and then you can walk out exactly when he pulls right in front of the bar.

And so that uncertainty removal is what Uber did. Similarly, you can apply the same idea to Google in its early days when all other approach, the competitors, Yahoo, we're building portals, right? They want you to stay on their portals. Google said, look, I'm I only do one thing and I specialize in it, search.

I want you away from my site as soon as you've gotten your answer, but I know you're going to keep coming back over and over, right? Go, go out fast. Don't try to keep, retain them. But, but the important thing is the perception. You know, I'm sure you, you know, both of us are old enough to remember back in the day when you walk into Best Buy, there's going to be A TV [00:12:00] with an inbuilt PCR and, and at least that, that used to be the case in India.

And you never picked that. A lot of people avoided them because if that broke, then the whole thing breaks and it's, it's, you know, and so you just go for things that are specially for one thing and you, you, you pick that, so you. Perceive that quality that way. And so that's the hack that Larry and Sergey intuitively understood.

And they played that really, really well. 

John Willis: Yeah. I think about it. So, and so like, 

Laksh Raghavan: it's not just the quality of the results, Google, right. SEO as a business. Has been successful for a long, long time. And PageRank was broken immediately you know, after their launch, but they still kept up that perception of that they are high quality.

John Willis: Well, that's the thing I used to think about, like in, in sort of software delivery, right? Like the, sort of the mistakes we make you know, I think maybe the, you know, [00:13:00] the, the, the, how people wind up giving up on security, right? Like. And we don't like, you know, and it's part of that sort of like I build a system, you know I taught him how to use it if they you know, if if they can't learn how to use it, they're stupid, right?

like yeah, and you know, like I like the whole How many times I've done these sort of qualitative discussions with teams and they tell me how the you know We you know, I tried to play that whitelist game on role mobilities I I give them the whitelist, you know, and then the next release they come out it starts all over I gotta do it again, right like And like, so now I don't even bother, you know, like, and now I try to, like, ignore their sort of events to tell me that there's a vulnerability, you know, in a, you know, you know, an SQL injection in code where I don't do any sort of any.

Yeah, it just sort of lose faith in the whole system because there's no consistency, but if like the most important thing if you're going to do in an organization is if you wanted people to adhere to [00:14:00] accepting the vulnerabilities, creating them and treating them as a first class citizens, make sure that when they send you the whitelist ones that they don't want to hear about.

You don't deprecate that whitelist every quarter, right, because now you you know, that's not the McDonald's version of being the security team at an organization. I mean, does that make sense? Or 

Laksh Raghavan: I, I, I think I get where you're coming from. The way I, the way I would phrase it is problems are abstractions, right?

When a CISO says, There is like, vulnerability management is broken in their organization that is, you know, as Akoff puts it, the adjective in front of the word problem says nothing about the problem. It says something about the person saying it. And so no wonder the CISO says they have a vulnerability management problem.

But when you start peeling the layers of the onion. What you notice is it's not vulnerability [00:15:00] management that's broken or non existent. It's asset management, asset inventory, config management, organizational structure too, right? I mean, it's organizational design incentives. Right. And so, and so Ackoff uses the technical term messes, where all of these different problems are interacting in complex ways.

And that's a mess. So the job of a manager is to manage the mess. Right, right. And so it's about finding the right problem. valid. There are no solutions. There's only trade offs. That's where systems thinking really comes through the picture of how do you take all of these different perspectives. There's a business to run.

And so how do you come to that trade off and how do you work on the underlying conditions? Like security is an emergent property of the system. You can't fix software security in isolation without fixing the underlying software development practices, and you can't fix. software development practices without fixing the [00:16:00] underlying management systems in play.

And so, and so it really starts from the leaders changing their worldview and bringing people together and having that pluralistic multi perspective view to co create their, their future. 

John Willis: Is it fair to say that, like, I've had these conversations with with CIOs periodically where I earn their trust and they, they'll ping me and, you know, they'll throw out some of these what ifs, right?

Because they, you know, most of their sort of discussions are with their large vendors, right? Either large service providers or consultants or, and, you know, every once in a while they'll be like, you know what, let me talk to that John guy, you know, because I know he's not going to have an agenda, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And And so, and I do have an agenda. I want to eventually sell them something, but, but, but at least I don't have a sort of specific, like, I'm not coming from a perspective of a large vendor product or, you know, sort of a large consulting service and, you know, at some points I, I, I, I, I've only done it once or twice where I say, you know what, you [00:17:00] know, I think you're ready to hear this in the Obi Wan Kenobi scheme of the world, if it was me, I would get everybody in the organization sort of a mandatory learning.

And somehow give them a system thinking, you know, like you have, like everybody in an organization has to take a checkbox course on how to deal with phishing. Like, and I, you know, I said the other day to somebody and, and, and they corrected me really quick that everybody in the organization should read Danello Meadows Thinking of Systems and they're like, yeah, that's a terrible idea, John.

I'm like, yeah, no, you're right, right. That goes back to our original conversation about cognitive load and, and you know, the, the sort of Munger what do we call it, the Mung Munger, uh, editors warning. Right? So but anyway, but, but again, it, I think, isn't it fair to say though that, you know, at the very least we should have a top down, you know, organizational way to try to get people, I mean, I, I think this is what Deming was screaming about [00:18:00] in both of his books or both of his commercial books, like.

And, and we don't like, we don't, I guess one, what we do is in sort of educational mandatory training, lowercase t, is all the things you can't do, and we never really create something where like, hey, Like, I want you to tell you, and it's like, some of the optional ones is learn more about how we implement our flywheel at this car.

I mean, okay, fine. But, but the, the real point is like, no, no, like, I need everybody to take this thing that isn't sort of a demanding, you know, once you're done, you're going to get a quiz and like, I want you to sort of exercise your brain and by the way, you have to take this as well. And it should be some 

Laksh Raghavan: level 

John Willis: of exposure to system thinking.

I mean, am I crazy for thinking that? Oh, no, no, no. 

Laksh Raghavan: Clearly as the saying goes, anything taught by force doesn't stay in the soul. 

John Willis: That's right. Learning 

Laksh Raghavan: has to be an opt in an autonomous [00:19:00] billing process because it's inherently joyful and it's in itself. It's it's the act of doing it is its own reward. And so I think leaders should understand that fundamental insight and it really comes down to

how do you bring people together by storytelling and storytelling is a big part of that because we humans are moved by stories, you know, shouting from the rooftop that we need 32 percent profit margin next quarter doesn't doesn't inspire doesn't inspire anyone. Thinking about that human perspective of how do you bring it and unleash that creativity in an organization is key.

It reminds me of this New York City elevator story that Ackoff talks about, which really actually connects all of these ideas together. I'm, I'm sure you know that story junk. Should we, should we go into that now or, yeah, no, do that and let's top over. 

John Willis: Let's do that and [00:20:00] then let's transition into your community.

We'll go right now. Absolutely. Because it's a good story. I like this. The Ackoff elevator story. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah, it's this skyscraper in Manhattan where, you know, the there are multiple businesses and individuals in that skyscraper and they are complaining to the management of the building that look, the elevators are so goddamn slow.

And they obviously, you know, they bring in a consultant, you're going to pay them first, and they say, okay, we're going to do a study, right? And they, they come back after a couple weeks and they say, look, situation is bad. The average wait time for all other elevators in New York is like 30 seconds.

It's here. It's like 1 hour, like 1 minute, 30 seconds or whatever. I, you know, I don't remember the exact numbers. It's bad. You know, it's but we have to do another study to see how we can fix this. And so you pay the consultants again, and they go back for 2 weeks or 1 month, they come back and say, look, here are your options.

Nothing looks good. We can obviously demolish part of the [00:21:00] building internally and then build another elevator. But the economics of that is not going to work out because so many offices would have to evac, you know they, they have to move out the, the, the, the revenue is not good enough. So it's not feasible.

And so they have this crisis, right? And then the, the management the, the leader then calls everybody that works there and says, look, we have this crisis. People are going to you know, end their leases and go. It's good to be out. So I'm open for any ideas. And then there's a, there's an employee, I, I don't know, I remember it's an intern or somebody who has an idea and he's hesitant.

And the leader says, no, no, no. You should say it. All ideas are welcome. Open up. And he says, look, maybe it's not that people maybe, you know, it's, it's, it's, they're just bored, right? Why don't we just fit mirrors in all the elevators and waiting halls so that they can, you know, people look at each other.

[00:22:00] And so they don't have that perception of, of waiting, so their boredom is immediately cured and that cost them like 500 bucks or whatever, instead of the million dollars they were quoting elsewhere. And so and that actually turned out to be, that's true. That hypothesis was true. And that's not what standard you'll notice mirrors are everywhere with, with elevators.

And so bringing in that psychological solution rather than the Logical solution like quantified thing. There is time. You can quantify time. You can say I want to improve from one hour to 30 minutes or 30 seconds, whatever you can quantify time, but you cannot really. There's no standard way to quantify boredom.

So how do you factor that in? Right. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Laksh Raghavan: And it translates well to technology because when it comes to developer productivity, most leaders that lead those functions think it's all about improving the speed, improving the security scan time by, you know, five [00:23:00] seconds and build times by 20 seconds. But their developers are waiting for days and weeks to do the compliance reviews and security reviews.

And. Checkboxes and all of that stuff as if improving this quantified thing is going to improve the overall productivity is, is like, we need to understand the psychological disposition of the developer, which is frustration, right? Death by a thousand cuts. 

John Willis: Yeah, well, incorporate all of that. There's two stories that come to mind there.

One is, you know, one of the things we found when we were doing the DevOps automated governance stuff, right? You, we, the, you know, this idea that you could create immutable, you know, digitally signed immutable attestations of the things you did in the pipeline, right? Because the alternative was like creating a service now record having.

Spending four to six weeks every year with just chaos of, you know, internal audit, second line, first line, just, you know, just chaos, like what, why make this change? What was the evidence? Well, let me find the lock, right? I was to like, you know, sort of like an immutable you know, sort of Merkle tree implementation, like six star with the data.[00:24:00] 

Here it is. Like, it's, you know, as my Bill, good friend you know, Bill says it's, you know, it's tamper evident, right? The evidence. Yeah. So we did that and sort of like, and one of the things I knew it was working really well, which was when we went into one of the banks that was implementing, you know, one of the things that sort of prompted me to sort of help push this idea, which was, I couldn't believe when I go and interview people and they'd say, we don't tell auditors things they don't already know, and that was so common.

And then you tell other people, like, what's wrong with that? To the point. 

Laksh Raghavan: Yeah. 

John Willis: And then, and then all of a sudden this one bank that's implementing it. Yeah. They're telling me they're actually starting to track, like what do they call self identified risks, and self identified risks are going up. So now the engineers that literally didn't want to tell second and third line people of identifiable risk, because they knew it was going to be more work, They were getting excited, like, pinging them, saying, Hey, I think this might be a brand risk.

You know, some latency issue, right? And I thought, like, [00:25:00] that, again, like, that whole perception, just flipping it, by just, like, creating this system where so everybody got closer to understanding. But the other one, and I won't go too deep in this, but, you know, I've written a couple of blogs about my experience of taking a Japan study trip.

And one of the last Anderson, right? Yeah. And the last day. We've got a tour of the actual in the Tokyo Station JR East. And one of the things like people would just wait because they had that's where they turn around the train, right? And then people would be like, why do I have to wait? I want to get on train.

And they literally created what they call Shin Shinko Theater, where they literally had these people who clean the train and like a very. Consistency, right? They did it, I think it was like, they, they, there was like seven minutes, right? Two minutes to get off, and a certain amount of time for them.

And people would watch, they have the windows open, and they called it theater because they, they, instead of being waiting, they were [00:26:00] literally like, well look there, look they're going to, look what they did, look how they cleaned all those tables and all the trays, you know, and, and. And it was the same amount of time, but like now all of a sudden the people were like, and they like clap when they got off the train, right?

Same time, you know you know, a little faster because they sort of automated and put some, but at the end of the day, they were still waiting seven or eight minutes, which, you know, again, without, with no mirrors in this case, you know, Absolutely. 

Laksh Raghavan: Like dollar for dollar, or rather actually pound for pound.

What improved passenger satisfaction in, in, in the London Metro trains was not, you know, bigger cars, you know, faster trains. It was a simple dot matrix display in every station that displayed how many more minutes are there for the next train, right? It is common for us. It's absolutely fine for us. We'd wait even for 10 minutes for a train peacefully, as long as we know that it's coming at that time.

Whereas even if you had to wait for four minutes, It's with no indicators [00:27:00] of full uncertainty, it's, it's, it kills us. 

John Willis: How do we, and I think this is, we're going to sort of go down to sort of finish up talking about your community and wrap this up. It was awfully long, but I don't mind long podcasts, we can break it up in two, but you know, I want to sort of maybe next podcast, let's like, like, how do we get it to think more like this?

Cause even. And I think about my, you know, not on this trip, but in a previous trip I did, you know, I went to Nagoya and Toyota City and got to see the, the, the place, right? The, the Toyota manufacturer, right? And, and like the one thing that like stands out, like all the things that are phenomenal, and I love going to manufacturing plants.

I was at a Toyota forklift plant about four months ago and it was amazing. But, but in Toyota, when you see those Kanban boards, those lights, And you like, and it moves you from like, oh, the Kanban thing's. Interesting. And now we can manage our standups to realizing that any place. On the floor, you can look up in this tight little sort of and on sort of means like light or [00:28:00] radiate and information.

No, can't bet not in a camp in and and like, you can tell that anybody in the factory at any place in the factory can tell you exactly what's going on with everything that's happening in the line. Yeah. And like, oh, my goodness. Like, you know. We don't have that kind of stuff. We don't, I don't see examples.

And again, 

Laksh Raghavan: Every, you're absolutely right. Like every leader has to think about how many Boeing engineers are there in their own organizations, just looking at a valve. Right. One buddy, somebody owning a scanner, somebody owning the results of the scanner, somebody owning the dashboard, that executive C for that scanner.

And somebody owning, you know, somebody else working with the developer is, and you know, it's, it's. It's, you know, it, micromanagement comes in multiple flavors. This is the worst that says, I know the problem. I know how to break down the problem. I know how to give the different pieces to different people and get, no, [00:29:00] you're increasing the complexity.

John Willis: And, and, you know, I'll go back to, I went to a Toyota forklift factory about four months ago. Right. And it's in Indiana. And, and, you know, it, it has like all the TPS ingredients. And I think, I don't remember exactly, but like you, you stand in one area. In fact, you start at the end and you go back to the front.

And you said the end, you see these beautiful, you know, really, you know, state of the art forklifts, right? And then you get to the end of the tour and you're like where it starts. And they said, by the way, from here, you get one of those in three hours. Like, that's incredible. You like, and you can't get that by just having tools and like, it's got to be the Kanban boards where everybody knows where everything is.

It's where the Kanban shelves are being loaded. You've got this sort of just in time. I mean, like, everybody has to know when there's a problem. Like, you know, the, the, like the, every, there's the swarm is like, you know, and, and like, you know, I think we get away with a [00:30:00] lot of sort of ugliness, which, you know chaos, you know, when the software delivery works, that's great.

Right. But like, when it doesn't work, it's a freaking nightmare and it's when it doesn't work, it's more 

Laksh Raghavan: about the emotions. That the people inside the company feel have to go through every day in order to get that thing working. As you said, that small ragtag team of people were getting a lot of stuff done, but maybe their emotional disposition was one of excitement and learning and they are happy because they are in the full picture.

John Willis: Disciplinary, they're not multidisciplinary, they're not sort of like, you know, like what Taguchi would sort of say. They don't like provide this sort of the the systems aggregate, you know, economic value or whatever his quote is. All right, let's end up this up. We we definitely need to go deeper on this.

But let's let's tell people about your community and you know how we can You know what people can do and you know, I'm going to be involved. And, and so let's, [00:31:00] let's sure. 

Laksh Raghavan: Sure. So I, you know, taking the advice of monger and having experimented with multidisciplinary thinking and learning based, you know, doing and learning and looping through that through my entire career.

I wanted to see if, you know, this type of learning can be scaled. Because I, I don't think you're gonna gr all of this stuff with one book or one course. It requires multiple years of learning and unlearning and interactions with, with multiple systems thinkers and cyber nutritions. I've learned a lot from my interactions with them, right?

Like jumping on a Zoom call with you and or jumping on a Zoom call with other people or talking via WhatsApp and sharing messages and having those. questions. And so you learn from the interactions, you learn from the books, and you learn from experiments. And so it's a multi year journey. It's so much so completely changes your [00:32:00] worldview.

It's like waking up like Neo in the Matrix. And so it completely changes your worldview. And so I wanted to see if we can bring this type of a learning and, and scale it. And so what I'm doing is all these amazing systems thinkers and complexity thinkers and cyberneticians and philosophers. Who's writing, who's been writing about this and training people, teaching people, like Graham Beresford has been teaching for several decades.

And so I'm bringing all of those multidisciplinary thinkers together with tech practitioners, entrepreneurs, executives, to enable that cross disciplinary learning and experimentation. Anybody can propose an experiment based on an idea and, and work together dynamically. So it's a community and it's, you know, there's obviously going to be emergence and self organization.

So I really can't wait to see what happens when we put all of these people together. So these multidisciplinary thinkers, they're bringing their own exclusive content, very pertinent to software [00:33:00] development, to technology, to cybersecurity, and I'm writing a book about a multidisciplinary approach to cybersecurity, like a field guide.

You know, a complexity field guide of sorts for any CISO or security leader within within an organization. And as it turns out, you know, it's, it's, it's. You know, given my cybersecurity background, a lot of the members are also cybersecurity professionals, executives in the community. And so I invite any curious learner to join the community and the multidisciplinary thinkers read their books, have conversations and learn from each other.

John Willis: Yeah, and we'll get the link out to it and all that good stuff. And, yeah, I think it's pretty fun. This is, I mean, I think this is, you know, back to where we started earlier in this conversation. You know, we're talking about the, you know, the sort of the, you know, the, the, the monger learning is that, you know, like, we've got, these are really important topics.

And I think this is, the, the, the idea of system thinking and, and, and [00:34:00] multidisciplinary thinking. As far as we know, as much as we've studied enough to know, like, that's got to be the closest to the true north to the right answers, right? So, so like, and, and maybe the only, our only stumbling block is, can we get better at explaining and getting more people engaged and get more people.

I found with the Deming stuff, which is amazing, you know, the couple of book clubs I've ran, right? You know, there's a handful of those people now are just doing an incredibly better job than I've done, I can do on explaining Deming. Yeah. And that makes me so freaking proud, you know, that like they came in like, who is this Deming guy?

I've been following John for a while because of the DevOps thing. And now they're like prophets of Deming and writing stuff and doing examples with, with testing and like stuff that like, I don't even have time to do. So yeah, I think this is important. To create a place where people can come in and we can grow.

So 

Laksh Raghavan: yeah, absolutely. I think I think the trick is learning by doing [00:35:00] when you actually take those ideas and take them seriously and then go and think about it and apply it to your own context and and and run experiments that doesn't work. It doesn't. So I think that's the key. And that's where I got a lot of value from is practical experimentation with ideas and iterating.

And I, I, I think I would definitely recommend Dr. Michael Jackson's book around critical systems heuristics. He has a few book out that's called the, that's a practitioner's guide as well. So I highly recommend What type of systemic thinking the world be the schools apply to what context, whether it's organismic or, you know, social or mechanistic or what have you, I think, bringing that again that multi perspective view is very, very critical.

John Willis: Well, great, man. Always good stuff, right? We'll, you know, we'll try to get something going and, you know, see where we go next. And I definitely would like to talk about second order [00:36:00] cybernetics. I think that's a fascinating Absolutely.

It 

Laksh Raghavan: is. John, as always, thank you so much for having me on. Thank you. I, I you know, I'll, we'll leave some links for the community with the show notes. Yeah, yeah. 

John Willis: All right, my friend. All right. Thank you, John. Appreciate it.