Notes on Meta-Systematization

In the Context of Work

All of the highest performing creative people I know have metasystematization skills.

When you get systematic, you immensely increase your effectiveness. This is such a huge effect that it dominates all other predictors of effectiveness, so lots and lots of management is obsessed with systematization and making sure that employees are systematic. Metasystematization is not that.

Metasystematization skills are what you bring to bear to wisely choose what frameworks to apply to particular challenges. At an even higher level of metsystematic skill development, you can develop new frameworks of systematization that are significantly more useful than all previous ones. It takes those kinds of metasystematization skills to perform what David Chapman calls ontological remodeling. When an innovation at that level becomes widely adopted, it’s called a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are visible and thus widely studied. But metasystematization skills don’t require mass adoption to be successful. In fact, I believe they’re widely employed by creative high performing people while being completely misunderstood by everyone else.

Most effectiveness comes from systematization, not metasystematization

There are plenty of successful leaders who have no metasystematization skills. They succeed by learning some framework of leadership or other and then applying it systematically. In fact, the supermajority of all the pretty effective people in the world have developed their systematization skills as a kind of general purpose muscle that can be applied anywhere, regardless of importance or passion.

Some jobs inspire such passion that they also inspire systematization. Some writers find writing to be like that; they have to write every day. But most jobs suck, so the drive to be systematic must come from within. And often, that drive manifests as a commitment to systematization in general. If you’ve ever had a boss who treated any lack of systematization in your behavior as a defect, that’s what was happening. To the world of people who have developed their systematization muscle like this, your ability to show up to a meeting on time comes from the same place as your ability to produce a great product or deliver a great service. If you suck at one, they’ll expect you to suck at the other.

And they’ll be right in a lot of cases! But all the absolutely highest performing people I know have developed metasystematization skills. They choose, better than almost everyone, what frameworks of systematization to apply, and where to apply them. Some of these people are also consistently systematic, but not all of them. If you are brilliantly metasystematic but not consistently systematic, you are bound to be misunderstood by the merely systematic, in the same way that, in 2-D Flatland, movement on the z axis can look like a change in diameter. To everyone in Flatland, you’re not going up; you’re shrinking!

The most common interpretive failures I’ve seen are bad theories of mind and bad differentiation between intrinsic and extrinsic factors of success. Misunderstanding metasystematization with bad theories of mind: speculation about emotions.

The rational use of different frameworks for different problems looks like logical contradiction to people who can’t see that move. The rational joining of two categorically unrelated domains into a useful but counterintuitive superdomain can likewise appear irrational. In the face of these cognitive mismatches, I’ve seen the behavior of even the most stone cold, brilliantly calculated rationalists explained away with wildly incorrect course, we’re all emotional creatures speculating about someone’s emotions is the only move a systematizer can make when trying to construct a theory of mind that explains metasystematic behavior. Sometimes that speculation is accurate, but it has no explanatory force. (A useful corollary: one should be deeply skeptical of emotion words used to explain Chesterton’s fences. Those explanations are almost always both lazy and incorrect.)

Misunderstanding metasystematization with bad analysis of success factors

When you succeed in a way that the systematizers don’t understand, because they rightly don’t recognize you as one, they may suspect cheating. Once they rule out cheating, many will conclude with certainty that it’s blind luck. This misunderstanding is confounded by the truly huge impact of luck on success. It is obvious that luck is a component of anyone’s success, but it’s quite difficult to discern exactly how. That discernment takes another under-recognized skill, what Peirce called abduction, to wisely decide which actions, selected out of nonlinear life, are the relevant ones to back-construct a linear “chain” of events that lead to any outcome.

Metasystematicity is usually the key to setting new highs in leverage

Metasystematicity is certainly the key reason why software development has one of the highest leverage ratios, when measured by the number of human beings it takes to change the world. Moreover, software development keeps hitting new highs in leverage. The systems get systematized. Ever higher levels of practical abstraction are achieved. That’s metasystematicity in one of its most tangible forms. Learning is a lifelong process and I have no doubt that anyone can get better at anything with systematic diligence. But 10x improvements are not usually gained by improving upon weaknesses. They are more often gained by getting metasystematic with the application of strengths.