Never Tell Me The Odds

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Han Solo’s famous quote (and Harrison Ford’s brilliance) aside, sometimes I want to know the odds. Actually I definitely want to know the odds, because I’m someone that likes to plan things, evaluate success, and plan for contingencies. I say this as a person who has debated with himself on “what day of the week does the week really start” kind of planning.

The odds, to me, a professional Project Manager (which I suppose means I’m worth listening to), are a way to calculate what to build. They let me evaluate success, plan for contingencies, and make something solid. If I do things right, the odds barely come into play because the plan, risk assessments, and options are all in place.

The odds are, at best, a tool, a way to get better, a way to improve. For all my world of flowcharts and checklists – professionally and privately – my world is one of solidity. I deal in how and results and measurements. From personal zines to environmental systems, it’s about results

But right now it seems society is more and more about playing the odds. As my friend Serdar put it once, more and more aspects of our society are coming to resemble a casino. The problem is casinos aren’t about building things, and that’s the problem.

As of this writing there are plenty of discussions about Kalshi, Polymarket, and other activities that are “prediction markets” which are really just gambling. That’s it, they’re gambling, and you can’t call it anything else. Draft Kings may have led the way with sports betting, but now we have prominent gambling companies. Call it what it is.

Our society is a casino. But it has been for awhile.

The stock market is not the economy, as we’re often reminded. It is, to an extent, about playing the odds and estimating chances. Now any economy is going to have some of that, as will any part, but if you ever looked at overvalued stocks and wondered, it’s not about the economy in many cases. It’s about the odds that something pays off, and it’s why some investments in companies that don’t do anything pay off, because people think they can sell before they loose.

Then there was Crypto, which really is just a stock on the blockchain. Then there was the NFTs, which thankfully crashed and burned then sunk into a swamp, that was gambling as well. Now we’re just to plain almost-honest gambling. It’d be refreshing if it wasn’t so prominent, so pathological, and in more and more cases it seems about people manipulating odds.

It’s all been a bit of gambling for decades – centuries? – but now it’s all gambling front and center. Bets and odds and manipulation. Know what it isn’t? Doing something with measurable achievements..

Where’s the plan? The results? The thing built? The thing made? Something that gets something done, that helps people, that can be felt, seen, touched, used? Where’s something I can break down into a Kanban backlog, where I can say “yes, here is a distinct result.”

But it’s a Casino. It’s about playing the odds, getting money, and that’s it. Nothing to be built, to be made, to be achieved. If you can manipulate things (say, with a bit of insider political information) so much the better. Why do something that has a role, a result, a history when you can just get paid for wondering what the body count is in a train wreck?

Play the odds enough and that’s all you can do. Look for the gamble, the payoff, the high. You just slosh money around and play the odds. That’s it.

The Casino economy is forgetting how to do things, and forgetting the value of doing things for and with people. And as a Project Manager, a person, and a citizen, I hate it.

Steven Savage

The Unaccountability Job?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I was discussing jobs and careers with a friend recently, and as you may guess it wasn’t complimentary. I mean there’s a reason David Graeber wrote a book called “Bullshit jobs,” which surprisingly I have not read.

What got me thinking is not how many jobs, are well, bullshit (I mean I know that but I should read the book), but the danger of the job description itself. Jobs can become a kind of “Accountability Sink,” and I think that’s potentially more common than we may realize.

An Accountability Sink is a concept I was introduced to in – you guessed it – The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. The idea is that some processes and parts of an organization that adsorb accountability. It’s the help line that never lets you actually reach someone. The process no one is responsible for. The idea that “number go up” means all else is fine.

Now these aren’t always bad. Some people make bad decisions due to bad data. Accidents happen. We need some Accountability Sinks where the organization takes or diffuses the hit otherwise no one would want to do anything. I mean I work in medicine, and everyone is working hard, everyone is addressing risk, and if the organization didn’t accept responsibility, everyone would go insane from stress.

However you can guess that though they may not be bad, Accountability Sinks become problematic. Enough Accountability Sinks and leadership of a company can devastated people, states, economies, and countries. They may not even realize what a-holes they are as they’ve lost feedback.

Now, let me bring it down to the level I started at – I wonder if some jobs, some positions are Accountability SInks. The job is a convenient person to blame or the job comes with the assumption of unaccountability.

Ever been some low-level peon on a job? First to take blame? First to get laid off? Your position is an accountability sink. You can be let go because you carried out someone else’s bad decision. You can let go to juice stock prices because of a bad quarter brought on by C-level failure. You were the accountability sink, a human crumple zone for corporate accidents.

But also ever seen how some jobs – and not necessarily leadership (but too often, leadership) can make the most dunderheaded decisions and get away with it? You’re assumed to be right as you’re an expert or a business genius. Your failure might be considered part of your job, and it’s fine that, say, a system went down as that’s expected. Yes, you decided on conflicting standards, but as it’s not apparent until people try to make shit work you’re fine because you followed the recommendations.

Your job may be the accountability sink for others or have accountability sink built in. Either way congrats, your job may reduce responsibility.

Kind of makes you want to take a look at your job again, doesn’t it? Though it might not hurt to take a look at your co-workers as well . . .

Steven Savage

Book Review: Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

A second book review in a row? Well, yes it is! I just finished reading Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore and it’s one you should definitely read. But let’s talk why.

Landemore’s thesis is simple: democracies in history had often used “lotteries” to select people for civic duties, along with citizen councils (often random too), rotating positions, referenda, and so on throughout history. Politics with less politicians or without politicians as we know them. It not will surprise you that someone writing a whole book in this is of course in favor of the idea that we can replace a lot of our politics with random selection and councils/parliaments.

The book is thus a breezy read as Landemore establishes her premise with historical example, then goes into a mixture of actual experience, actual implementations, research, and philosophy to justify her thesis. Her statement is simple – essentially reviving some elements of Athenian Democracy, then examining why she thinks it’d work, when it was tried, and what she’d do.

So spoilers, it’s actually very convincing, and in some ways surprising. If I were to compare it to something, it actually reminds me of my much-beloeved The Unaccountability Machine. It’s both obvious and not, and once you read it, you see things very differently.

Landemore describes our current crises and the idea of more randomized democracies as seen in Athens and in other states and societies, not necessarily democratic ones (a random council of nobles is still random). Random selection requires citizens to step up, reduces corruption, and requires building functional infrastructures to get things done. Our current political crises of modern times are, in her thesis, the result of a kind of “Electoral Aristocracy” that is clearly not responsive to people’s needs and is very disillusioning. And yes, she brings receipts on much of our dissatisfaction in our times.

Despite her cynicism about a lot of our current politics, Landemore is a passionate believer in democracy and citizenship. She wants more democracy, more power in the hands of people, and for voices to be heard. Indeed, ensuring people who are not currently engaged in politics can and will be engaged, is part of her thesis. Even when I find critiques (and I have a few) it’s clear she cares about the results and the people.

Landemore also looks at cases where randomized citizen councils were used in various countries to address issues – some of which she participated in. Coming from this direct viewpoint, she also describes experiences and why things worked – and didn’t – mostly focused on her native France. Landemore takes you into what it would be like, say, for twenty citizens to suddenly be asked to come up with policy for a referendum.

This personal experience, combined with her research, did help me understand why these kind of randomized councils and other approaches can work. If you have a diverse group of people and give them experts who respond as needed you can get a surprising amount of good ideas – something I’ve seen in my own management work. People who are responsible for results and dealing with each other as people will surprise you and probably break more than one of your stereotypes and assumptions.

Landemore did something very effectively – reminding us that our fellow citizens are probably more capable than we give them credit for. It’s just that they may be capable in different ways than us and that people coming together change. Some of her experiences made me understand my gaps, and in a few cases my arrogance. This, again, reminded me of my own worn in Project Management when people came together with just a bit of facilitation – and when I had my own assumptions proven wrong.

All of this of course reminds me of Agile, the productivity/project method I’ve used for years in various forms (sometimes inside other methods). A lot of Agile is “make it obvious, make it visible, make people responsible.” Though Agile usually lacks randomization, I see echos in Landemore’s writing.

It is clear from her writing Landemore has soured on the political classes, and even filtered, both the research she shares and the experience she has make a good case. Attempts at citizens councils often saw career politicians want to put on their own stamp, experts expect to be right all the time (thinking as experts, not impacted citizens), and so on. I finished the book with a better opinion of my fellow citizens, and a worsened one of our political class. Politicians can be distortive people, even if well-meaning, as things warp around them.

Ladenmore finishes with ways to implement more direct Democracy, and her thoughts of were to go next. She’s ready to go, clearly passionate, though I wished she’d done more to provide “next steps” and ‘who to talk to” that was more clearly spelled out. Still, I found some resources to investigate my own interest.

Ultimately, it’s hard to fault her case – we need more citizens and less politicians. Indeed, having more “governing-by-lottery” would mean people have to step up if called – and step up to help neighbors and friends and family who might be called upon. Certainly I’m a believer in her method because I am a believer in citizenship and this is a way to cultivate that.

As for flaws, there are moments her humor or references, especially about American figures, seems a bit off. There are a few cases where I wanted her to address some truly vile things we see like racism and religious fanaticism. But these are minor – she has a thesis, she justifies it well, and she takes us into the experiences and mechanics of it.

Much like The Unaccountability Machine, Politics Without Politicians is about why things are obviously wrong, how we probably had the solution, and what to do next. It’s also about giving a damn, which makes both books passionate. Maybe Landemore and Dan Davies should team up, so I have yet another book to go on about until people are tired of it.

A recommended read. Perhaps you’ll want complete rule-by-lottery, perhaps you’ll become a booster of citizen referendum, but I think you’ll have a lot to think about. Best of all, you’ll become a better citizen, and we need all of those we can get.

Steven Savage