Learnings from “Seeing like a State” by James C Scott

Seeing like a State inspects attempts of states bringing “administrative order of nature and society” that’s led to disastrous outcomes. It is an interesting window into inspecting how large, people based systems work at scale.

High Modernism

The book inspects state’s appetite to use “high modernism” to solve issues at scale. “High modernism is a form of modernity, characterised by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world.”(1) There is less consideration given to history and practical knowledge held in the grassroots.

States employ these high modernist schemes to simplify, standardise and make things more legible (easier to catalog and understand). Simplification and legibility makes it easy to monitor and control outcomes. For example, cataloging land ownership makes for easier track assets and income, leading to more efficient taxation.

It is incredibly difficult to simplify how a community operates. These societal systems tend to have multiple hidden outcomes; they tend to be complex ecosystems. Forcing change solely around an outcome the state is focused can cause a lot of disruption. They can go against the natural order of things. Often, the result is failure.

There are learnings here we can apply to large teams and companies. Teams are complex ecosystems too. They have many hidden outcomes that are not visible to “people at the top”. Therefore, we have to be careful when we apply new processes to get specific outcomes or do reorgs to align to new direction. It might look great on a spreadsheet or a diagram (high modernist?) but does it work for the humans who have to adopt it?

Visual Order

One of the key points made in this book is this idea of visual order over system order. States (and its planners) appreciate visual order, which is mistaken for actual order in a system. If something looks visually simpler and easier to understand, it must be better! However, it is often the case that visually appealing macro order leads to micro confusion. Complexity has meaning in a large systems; their order requires more context and knowledge to appreciate. A small example might be how a jet engine works. It may look complex to the untrained eye. However, its complex design has order, which yields the desired outcome.

If you are a leader of a company or someone designing software architecture, it is well worth thinking about this idea of “visual order”. Are teams laid out in a way that is easy to collect reporting reflect how work actually happen? Is the architecture side stepping the complexity of the business, which in turn gives it a competitive advantage? Are we causing confusion on the lower decks?

Mētis

“Mētis” stands for “practical wisdom” in greek. The author talks through examples of every day innovations that come from having context and experience. Not all problems can be solved at scale because the conditions of these systems are unique.

Excerpt from the book:

While doing fieldwork in a small village in Malaysia, I was constantly struck by the breadth of my neighbours’ skills and their casual knowledge of local ecology. One particular anecdote is representative. Growing in the compound of the house in which I lived was a locally famous mango tree. Relatives and acquaintances would visit when the fruit was ripe in the hope of being given a few fruits and, more important, the chance to save and plant the seeds next to their own house. Shortly before my arrival, however, the tree had become infested with large red ants, which destroyed most of the fruit before it could ripen. It seemed nothing could be done short of bagging each fruit. Several times I noticed the elderly head of household, Mat Isa, bringing dried nipah palm fronds to the base of the mango tree and checking them. When I finally got around to asking what he was up to, he explained it to me, albeit reluctantly, as for him this was pretty humdrum stuff compared to our usual gossip. He knew that small black ants, which had a number of colonies at the rear of the compound, were the enemies of large red ants. He also knew that the thin, lance-like leaves of the nipah palm curled into long, tight tubes when they fell from the tree and died. (In fact, the local people used the tubes to roll their cigarettes.) Such tubes would also, he knew, be ideal places for the queens of the black ant colonies to lay their eggs. Over several weeks he placed dried nipah fronds in strategic places until he had masses of black-ant eggs beginning to hatch. He then placed the egg-infested fronds against the mango tree and observed the ensuing week-long Armageddon. Several neighbors, many of them skeptical, and their children followed the fortunes of the ant war closely. Although smaller by half or more, the black ants finally had the weight of numbers to prevail against the red ants and gain possession of the ground at the base of the mango tree. As the black ants were not interested in the mango leaves or fruits while the fruits were still on the tree, the crop was saved. (2)

Successful workplaces allow employees to innovate and solve problems they observe on the ground. Sounds weird, given that is very much the job of an employee. However, processes and constraints put in place can discourage people from applying ingenuity altogether. Couple of things to do:

1. The culture of your workplace has to embrace individuals using judgement to sidestep guidelines and rules that doesn’t make sense. When people blindly follow processes, leaders must push for using common sense. This is difficult for leaders as they are more concerned with order and ensuring everyone follows the same set of rules. Best to have less rules :).
2. We must fight our impulse to solve every problem for people we manage/mentor/advice. It is a leader’s job to anticipate issues and clear the path ahead for teams. However, fixing every issue is unnecessary. Let the professionals on the ground figure it out by encouraging a bottom-up approach. Make it okay for them to be makers (think → do). Instead, work on issues that are more widespread that attack your value system or product direction.

Conclusion

We do have to solve issues at scale. This book doesn’t discourage that. However, it is well worth understanding the complexity of systems we change and be careful not to oversimplify. It is difficult to have a full picture of how or why an ecosystem works. There are always second and third order effects for all new ideas introduced. We need to evolve systems in a way that can leverage scale to its advantage while not destroying the hidden goodness that drive outcomes forward.

Seeing like a State was well worth the read, despite its, sometimes, tedious academic writing :). I left out a wealth of good ideas presented in the book. Hope this summary helps you carefully inspect complexity that exist in your workplace.

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Notes

Couple of detailed reviews of the book:

• https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
• https://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-seeing-like-a-state-by-james-c-scott-1998/

Citations

1. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 4.

2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 333.