Stable States
I had a brief chat yesterday with @meltingman about my last post, A Simple Agency. He asked me to put it in context.
I think most people are comfortable with the concept that things happen through phase changes. You take a glass of tap water and put it in the freezer. It’s water, it’s water, it’s water — suddenly it’s ice.
You can put the same thing in the terms of punctuated equilibrium: things go from statis to statis through rapid bursts of change.
One of the evolution theories that’s had the most influence on me is by Stuart Kaufmann. In At Home in the Universe he manages something quite remarkable. He shows how life emerged.
Kaufmann argues that systems of all scales (cells, organisms, ecosystems) tend to optimise to the edge of chaos. To within a wafer thin mint of implosion.
We all do business in an ecosystem of sorts and companies do gravitate to the edge of bankruptcy to compete.
Now, there are stable states, or sizes, for certain company structures. There was a time, as an agency, when we were eight or so people. At that scale, we were all involved in delivering projects.
We’ve now double that size and are a bit of a hybrid. Neither a small agency where doers talk directly to the client, nor a large agency where there’s a clear abstraction between account management and implementation.
We’ve been in this state now for a while. It’s not easy. I bumped into one of my colleagues last night when out having drinks. He reeled off a list of names working the weekend. Again.
There’s a saying that people get promoted precisely to their level of incompetance. I wonder if the same might be said of agencies. There are stable states but we tend to push on and self-optimise to the edge of staff burnout and client relationship implosion.
Unless there’s some sort of financial bunsen burner to power the leap from stable state to stable state, we end up raging through ambition against the shackles of our own construction.
