Doug Engelbart – Faster Than 20

Confronting Despair, Building Muscles, and Saving Democracy (and the World)

For the past 18 years, I have begun almost every introductory conversation about my work with the following questions:

What was your best experience collaborating with others?
What would your life be like if all of your collaborative experiences were at least as good as your best?
What would the world be like if everyone's collaborative experiences were at least as good as their best?

People’s reactions are fascinating. Some respond quickly with great stories. Most do not. Many seem to find it easier to think of stories from their personal rather than their professional lives. Everyone finds it easier to come up with terrible experiences than with great ones.

We all want to live in a world where our experiences working and being with others feel vibrant, productive, and meaningful, where we feel more capable and alive with others than we do by ourselves. I believe that this world is possible. It’s why I do what I do. Most people with whom I come across don't share this belief, and I can understand why. If it's so difficult to come up with one great experience collaborating with others and if most of your experiences collaborating with others are terrible, why would you believe in the collective potential of groups?

Belief. This is where the work has to start.

All the Bad Things

My friend and colleague, Travis Kriplean, had his first kid three years ago. As with many of my friends, impending parenthood caused him to reflect about the world he was bringing his son into and what he could do to make it better. As part of that, he began a deep inquiry into the impending planetary crisis we find ourselves in.

As Travis started to emerge from his inquiry, he pulled together a reading list and started organizing one-on-one discussions with friends, including me, to help him make sense of what he was learning. I read each of his carefully curated items over the course of a few weeks, then we talked for over two hours about the readings. I happened to be in the middle of my own little experiment around sensemaking, and as part of that, we both agreed to draw and share a picture that somehow represented what we had heard and felt from our conversation. The following day, Travis sent me his picture of our conversation. He had taken my vision image that’s on the homepage of this website and performed a cheeky (and accurate) cut-and-paste job:

As was clear from his reflection of our conversation, I had been completely demoralized by the readings and our conversation. The day after we talked, as if to punctuate the all-too-likely doomsday scenarios we had discussed, San Francisco became engulfed in a smoky haze from the Camp Fire, which ended up becoming the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. The filthy air enveloped us for two weeks, reminding me that blue skies and breathable air might soon become a thing of the past.

What made it worse was that I wasn’t exactly starting from a place of cheeriness to begin with. Watching intolerance, white supremacy, and isolationism become normalized, even celebrated, all over the world has been disheartening to someone whose mission for the past two decades has been to increase self-awareness and empathy, to encourage critical and systemic thinking, and to find healthier ways to lean on each other for the benefit of all.

For the past three years in particular, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether I’ve been doing the things I need to do to move the needle on the world I want to live in, or whether I’ve been fooling everyone, myself especially, peddling false hope, smoke, and mirrors. It’s been a tortuous process, and I’ve made many changes as a result.

Despite all of this, I still believe.

Forgetting

Twenty years ago, when I was in the gestation period that would put me on my current path, I learned something interesting about Benjamin Spock, the famed pediatrician and author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946. For 50 years, Spock’s book was the number two best-seller in the world. (Number one? The Bible.)

I found this startling. How could this be? Humans have been around for thousands of years, and we’ve been parenting that whole time. We have a lot of practice and experience and wisdom to build on. Why would we suddenly seek validation and knowledge from this one person about something we’ve been doing for so long and that’s so inherent to whom we are? Was Spock so much more insightful than anyone else about parenting? Was he better at explaining parenting than anyone else? Had we collectively forgotten how to parent?

As a child of immigrants, I am acutely aware of how easy it is to collectively forget. Like many immigrant kids of my generation, my parents taught me and my sisters English first, because they didn’t want us to speak with accents and they didn’t realize that it was easier to learn multiple languages when you’re young. Like many immigrant kids of my generation, I never ended up learning to speak my parents' native tongue, Korean.

When I was 14, my family went to visit my grandfather in Korea. He had not seen me since I was three years old, and he didn’t realize that I couldn't speak his language. As soon as we arrived, he asked me to come into his room to speak with me privately. He then started asking me questions in Korean. I felt disoriented and ashamed as I tried to explain to him in English that I didn’t understand him and as I watched his face shift from confusion to deep disappointment.

I never got another chance to speak to my grandfather, as he passed away the following year. It wouldn’t have mattered. I still can’t speak Korean, which means that I can’t speak to most of my relatives, I can’t read through old family letters and documents, and that so much of my family’s history and tacit knowledge will end with me.

It takes just one generation to forget, and the conditions for forgetting keep getting more optimal. Over the past century, families have separated and gotten smaller. Civic and community engagement have deteriorated (as Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone), seemingly replaced in this day and age by clicks and swipes.

There was a time when we, as human beings, understood what it meant to thrive together, both in work and in play. We passed along the know-how and the rituals for generations. Now, it seems like we’re starting to forget. As our memories of what it means to be and thrive together wane, so does our faith.

On the one hand, the timing couldn’t be worse. On the other hand, maybe the popularity of Spock's work is simultaneously a sign of remembering as well as forgetting.

Remembering

In 1949, three years after Spock first published his book on parenting, the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, delivered a lecture entitled, "The Question Concerning Technology." In it, he argued that the essence of modern (i.e. post-Industrial Revolution) technology was to make us see everything — including each other — as things to be exploited and manipulated. Seeing and engaging in the world in this way resulted in us forgetting our humanity.

It’s a bleak essay, especially in the context of these times, but Heidegger does offer one tiny glimmer of hope. Toward the end of his lecture, he quotes the poet, Friedrich Hölderlin:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

He then argues that the act of losing your humanity also makes you remember it, maybe even value it more. This awakening is a necessary (but not sufficient) first step in taking back what you’ve lost.

Heidegger’s framing of technology and humanity resonates with me on many levels. I think of it often when I think about my mentor, Doug Engelbart, who is the reason I'm in this business. Doug is most remembered for the long list of technology that he and his lab invented in the 1960s, including the mouse, graphical user interfaces, and hypertext. But Doug was never about inventing things. He was about lifting people up, about addressing the challenges that we were about to face, about augmenting our collective intelligence.

It took me a while to understand how radical and threatening these ideas were at the time. Most of the research in computer science in the 1950s and 1960s was focused on automating intelligence, replicating, even replacing humans, further validation of Heidegger's critique of modern technology. Doug was ridiculed, even reviled, but he was stubborn, and he was fortunate to have some visionary support in high places.

When I first met him in the late 1990s, it seemed like there was a large-scale awakening in society that had started happening, an appreciation of Doug's centering of people, which still felt radical, although perhaps no longer reviled. Still, he was scarred from those early experiences, and he continued to be troubled and depressed by how few people took his dire warnings about the future seriously. He passed in 2013, and I can't imagine how he'd be feeling if he were alive today.

Doug's commitment to his enormous vision was powerful, but that was not what ultimately had the most profound impact on me. What affected me most was how he treated me.

From the very beginning until the very end, he was curious about me, and he valued and cared about what he saw. When we first met, I was in my early 20s and hadn't accomplished anything of significance. None of that ever mattered to Doug. He treated me like a peer, and he cared about all aspects of me as a human being. I spent a lot of time wondering why he treated me so well and why he was so generous with me, before finally understanding that he treated everyone this way.

Imagine that. Doug treated everybody well, like they mattered, simply because they were fellow human beings. This impacted me more than any of his brilliant ideas, it's why I do what I do, and it's why I still believe. It seems so ridiculously simple and obvious, but I believe we've collectively forgotten how important it is, and more importantly, we're out of practice. If we start here, we have a chance. But we can't skip this step, because without it, we won’t remember how good it can be to be with others.

Practice, Hope, and the Trickle-Up Effect

Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of working with Sarita Gupta, who is not only a brilliant leader and organizer, but who also treats people the way Doug did. Before transitioning into her role at the Ford Foundation late last year, Sarita was the long-time leader of Jobs With Justice and Caring Across Generations, and had spent her entire career focused on the well-being of workers around the world. I spent a good amount of time with her and other progressive leaders trying to understand and help synthesize their visions and theories of change, so that they could see and explore where they were aligned.

Here’s what Sarita explained: Living with each other harmoniously, productively, and equitably at a national (or larger) scale doesn’t just happen, even when there’s structural support (which, for many people, there’s not). It requires lots and lots of practice to do it right. Trying to practice at a national scale is hard, perhaps impossible. However, it becomes viable and is just as valuable when we try it at a much smaller scale — with families, friends, community groups, schools, unions, the workplace, and so forth. When enough of us are leveraging these smaller spaces to practice, then we start to build collective power, a natural trickle-up effect starts to happen, and things start improving at a larger scale too.

Said another way, if we want to thrive collectively at a large scale, we need to start by learning how to thrive collectively at very small scales. When we ask each other, “What’s the best experience you’ve ever had collaborating with others?”, we need to be able to easily come up with stories. If we can do this, we will remember and believe. In these exceptionally challenging times, it’s hard to imagine anyone truly believing in democracy otherwise.

I already shared Sarita’s beliefs around the importance of practice and building “muscle,” but her overall framing has given me greater clarity and resolve around my own strategic focus. Specifically, we can have the impact we want on the larger world if we all start small, if we focused on spaces and groups in which we already have agency.

We can start with this simple principle, which Doug and Sarita modeled so well: Treat everybody well, like they matter, simply because they are fellow human beings.

When we invest in our personal relationships, we are building collaboration muscles necessary for a stronger democracy. When we invest in our own teams and organizations so that they have exceptional cultures where everybody brings their best and feel valued, we are building collaboration muscles necessary for a stronger democracy.

As we start to experience vibrant, productive, and meaningful relationships in small spaces, we will start to remember how powerful and wonderful it is to engage with each other collectively, which will inspire us to flex our collaboration muscles in all aspects of our lives. The more of us who start to do this, the more we will start to see larger-scale shifts.

This is how we will remember. This is how we will believe.

This is why I do what I do. This is why, despite all of the challenges we face today, I still believe.

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Rubber Bands and the Art of Visioning

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up (1936)

My mentor, Doug Engelbart, was a visionary and a doer. When he first embarked on his career as an engineer in the 1950s, only a handful of computers existed — expensive behemoths controlled by stacks of punched cards. Doug had the audacity to envision a world where everybody had access to computers, where they could engage with these devices in real-time using graphical, interactive displays, and where all of these machines were connected to each other.

His ideas were so far-fetched, he spent the next 20 years battling detractors and disdain. That didn’t stop him from making his vision a reality, which he unveiled in 1968 at an event that would later become known as the Mother of All Demos. While he wowed everyone in the room that day, it turned out he was still yet another 20 years ahead of his time, as the technologies he demonstrated that day didn’t become widespread until the late 1980s.

Doug permanently instilled in me the importance of thinking big… then thinking even bigger. Thinking big requires thinking long-term, because big things take time.

But he also showed me that whatever you imagined also had to be realistic. As crazy as Doug’s vision for computing seemed to be in the 1950s, he knew it was possible. His ideas around display technology came directly from his experiences as a radar engineer in the Navy during World War II. Furthermore, he had spent some time studying the rate at which computing technology had been advancing — Moore’s Law a quarter of a century before Gordon Moore had articulated it as such — and he knew that it would be a matter of time before scaling effects would make computing technology both powerful enough and affordable. “A matter of time” happened to be four decades, a long time for sure, but well within the realm of possibility.

Finding the right balance between big and possible is the essential challenge of effective visioning. Doing it well requires the ability to shift back and forth between radically different perspectives without getting dizzy and losing your orientation. The challenge for practitioners is figuring out ways to support this dance between big-picture thinking and cold, hard pragmatism.

None of this is easy.

Getting Real

Last year, I helped support an innovation process for Forward Together, an amazing social justice organization based in Oakland. I led a cohort of staff and funders through a four-month Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets training in preparation for the actual experimentation process, which was led by Rebecca Petzel.

Rebecca kicked off the process with a two-day workshop, where participants rapidly brainstormed and refined ideas. We invited several guests who brought different perspectives and helped stretch what our cohort had previously thought was possible. This resulted in lots of energy, inspiration, and great, creative ideas. Everyone was in high spirits after the first day and a half.

Then Rebecca told the participants it was time to get real. She put up several large, poster-sized calendars, and she asked people to get out their personal calendars so that we could flesh out the plan for testing the ideas.

As people looked through their calendars, you could see their shoulders slump and their spirits deflate. Everyone was busy, and they were having trouble seeing how any followup would be possible. One person after another voiced this same concern loudly and clearly. It was like an avalanche of negativity.

I was taken aback. I had expected folks to get real, but I had not expected complete demoralization. After a very low-energy discussion, Rebecca and I huddled about what to do next. I had been scheduled to review some of the muscles and mindsets work we had done, especially for those in the room who hadn’t participated, but I wanted to scrap the exercise. “They need more time to work through the roadmap,” I argued.

“They need to review the mindsets and all the work they’ve done the past four months,” insisted Rebecca. “It will remind them of what’s possible.”

Rebecca was right. The first step in my Muscles & Mindsets program is for the participants to identify a core set of productive mindsets that they aspire to have, as well as the corresponding less productive mindsets that they want to shift. As it turned out, four of the five shifts they had chosen seemed to apply to this exact scenario:

Feeling stuck “I’m scared of the unknown and would prefer to avoid it.”	⇒	Innovation “When I walk into the unknown, I’m going to learn and grow. I don’t know what the answers are, but I’ll figure them out by trying things.”
Not enough time “I don’t have time for anything more than what’s in front of me.”	⇒	Slow down to speed up “Slowing down will help me make better choices and save time.”
Fixed reality “There aren’t enough time or resources.”	⇒	Flexible reality “If we think outside the box, we’ll see ways to create time and resources. To do that, we need to be conscious of power and equity.”
Me “Everything depends on me.”	⇒	We “We’re in it together. I don’t always have to be out in front. I need to be compassionate with myself so that I can be supportive of others.”

Reviewing these helped our participants become viscerally aware of how quickly they had snapped back to the very mindsets they had been working hard to shift. That relieved some of the anxiety, and we were able to end the workshop on a strong, hopeful note. Still, it was a stark reminder of how simply bringing people together and giving them an inspiring, one-off experience is not sufficient to move people on an ongoing basis, especially when faced with everyday realities.

Stretching the Rubber Band

My friend and colleague, Kristin Cobble, is skilled at getting people to a hopeful place and supporting them in staying there, and she strongly influenced how I approach visioning. In addition to sharing many specific techniques, Kristin introduced me to Robert Fritz’s rubber band metaphor, which has become a central principle for how I think about this work.

In short, a powerful vision is both inspiring and grounded. Think of it as two poles: Where you currently are and where you want to be (the vision). Fritz asks that you imagine a rubber band stretched between those two poles. The goal is to create just enough tension so that you feel pulled along by the vision. If the aspiration is too wild, the rubber band will stretch too far and snap. If it is too conservative, then the rubber band will lie there, limp.

Most visioning processes fail in one of two places:

They don’t find the right tension in the first place.
They don’t support you in maintaining that tension.

How do you find that right tension?

It starts by being specific, both about where you are and where you want to go. One of my favorite tricks, courtesy of Kristin, is to specify how far forward you want to look, then have you write down your age in that year. You can’t get more specific or grounded than that!

Another trick is to start with vision, then work backwards. Two of my mentors, Gail and Matt Taylor, have been harnessing group genius for almost a half century, and they’ve formulated a set of helpful axioms along the way. Their first two axioms are:

The future is rational only in hindsight.
You can’t get there from here, but you can get here from there.

In other words, articulate a clear vision, assume that it is true and that you are currently living in it, and work backwards. Tell the history of how you got to the future (getting from there to here), a process called backcasting. Working backwards in this way results in greater specificity and also helps you gut-check your vision. There’s also good research that shows that grounding your vision in this way makes it more actionable.

In a similar vein, Danny Spitzberg of Peak Agency recently shared a powerful trick that he uses with the Goals / Success Spectrum. After he has people articulate minimum, target, and epic success, he asks people to assign a dollar amount to each column designating what they think the cost is for achieving that success. Nothing grounds a conversation better than talking about money. Not only does it help surface different assumptions about costs, it helps people get real about what it will take to achieve different goals, which helps people adjust their rubber band accordingly.

How do you support others in maintaining the tension of their rubber bands?

This is the harder problem, one that has been driving much of my work for the past three years. Most of the time, spending a few days with a group articulating a clear vision and finding the right initial tension is not enough. Worse, it can be demoralizing and even destructive if there isn’t any followthrough.

Maintaining tension requires an ongoing practice of reflection and adjustment. One way to support this is to make sure the vision is captured somewhere accessible, so that people can find it and remind themselves of it constantly. This may sound obvious, but I am amazed at how often people seem to skip this step.

Another way to support this tension is to build in accountability structures. For example, build in time in standing meetings to revisit and check in on the vision. Assign accountability partners, or even hire coaches.

Creating a grounded, compelling vision is hard. Living into it is harder. One of the most powerful ways to support this tension is to acknowledge that it’s hard, to talk openly about what falling down looks like, and to expect that you will fall down often in pursuit of your vision. At our Forward Together workshop last year, Rebecca’s instincts to revisit the mindsets reminded our participants of how challenging this work was, and it enabled them to re-calibrate their rubber bands.

Celebration and Community

I first met Doug in 1998, 30 years after the Mother of All Demos, and I started working with him two years later. At the time, he had a corner office at Logitech headquarters in Fremont, California. To get there, you had to walk past rows and rows of cubicles, each of which had a computer — usually with a web browser open — and a mouse.

The first time I met him there, I asked him what it felt like to walk past those cubicles every day and to see his creations on every desk.

He looked at me sadly, and he answered immediately. “It feels like failure.”

Interactive, networked computing was only a tiny part of Doug’s vision. What he actually cared about was a world where people lived in harmony with each other and the planet. He saw, in the 1950s, that we were moving in the opposite direction, because our challenges were getting harder faster than our ability to grapple with them. He thought he could stem that by creating tools that would help people get smarter collectively. He did exactly that, but it took a lot longer than he expected, and there was a lot more work that needed to happen. Even though he lived in a world where many of his 30-year old inventions were more or less ubiquitous, people seemed to have missed the point of why he had created all of those tools in the first place.

Doug was depressed for most of the time I knew him (he passed away in 2013), and he spoke often about how he was a failure. That didn’t stop him from his single-minded pursuit of his vision, but it also didn’t seem very productive.

Moreover, I most certainly did not agree with his assessment. I was never a very nurturing, feel-good type of person, but I was always good at voicing my opinions. “You have to look at two things,” I would tell him, “Where we are now, and where you think we would have been if you had not done the work you had done. Furthermore, if you insist that we have a collective responsibility to change the way we are, then you cannot beat yourself up individually for our collective inability to do so.”

I wasn’t the only person to say these sorts of things to him, and I don’t think any of us ever swayed him or made him feel better. But while he remained stubbornly self-critical, he always took delight in the tiny, practically inconsequential victories of the many, many, many people who were inspired and touched by him.

I learned so many things about the importance of vision from working with Doug, but maybe the most important lesson is the one with which I continue to grapple: Celebration and community are critical to maintaining the right tension. If this work is so hard that you will fall down many times, then every time you get up is cause for celebration. Recognizing and doing this effectively is an art, one that is made infinitely easier with the support of others.

Brooking Gatewood, who is both a poet and a skilled practitioner, recently shared these wonderful words from Wendell Berry’s essay, “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” which I found both beautiful and apt:

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form…. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Documenting Is Not Learning

Part two of a three-part essay on facilitating group learning. See also part one, “Getting real about experiments and learning.”

A few years ago, my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel, wrote about a participatory art exhibit where the artist asked, “What is transformation?” One of the replies was, “Moving beyond documentation.”

I laugh every time I read this, but I also shake my head. How and why did documentation become so synonymous with learning (or worse, transformation)?

My mentor, Doug Engelbart, always said that the distinguishing characteristic of a high-performance group was its ability to learn and improve. One sign that a group was good at learning was its ongoing care and maintenance of what Doug described as a “dynamic knowledge repository.”

When people asked Doug what a “dynamic knowledge repository” looked like, he always described something digital. That made sense. Among the many things that made Doug a visionary was his recognition that digital technology had the ability to transform the speed at which we act and the quality of those actions. It’s something I still believe wholeheartedly.

But there was always something that seemed inconsistent and incomplete about how Doug described these knowledge repositories. For one thing, he used the word, “knowledge,” not “data” or “information” — both de rigueur terms of the time. For another, as much as he talked about the potential of tool systems, he also stressed the importance of human systems.

Knowledge can manifest itself as external artifacts, but those artifacts themselves are not knowledge. The essence of knowledge is that it’s actionable, and humans can’t act on knowledge unless it’s in their heads. I can have a whole library of books on nuclear physics, but it doesn’t become knowledge until I figure out a way to internalize what those books represent. I can read all the books I want on how to ride a bicycle, but it’s not knowledge until I actually demonstrate the physical ability to ride a bike.

I know that Doug understood this. I had many deep, wonderful conversations with him about this. Doug focused on the digital, because he was always looking at what was possible, which was way beyond what everyone else could see. That was one of his many gifts to the world.

Today, too many of us are fixated on digitally capturing our knowledge. That is the wrong place to start. We shouldn’t be so focused on externalizing what’s in our head in digital form. We should be looking at the problem the other way around — figuring out how best to get knowledge into our heads. That is the much more challenging and important problem.

How do we do that?

The number one thing we can do to help groups learn is to create space and time for reflection. How many of you take the time to do that with your groups?

Externalizing our knowledge can be a valuable way for individuals to reflect and internalize, but it’s only valuable for peers and colleagues if they take the time to absorb it. In theory, having access to written forms of knowledge — digital or otherwise — gives people flexibility as to when they can sit down and read it, which is one way to create time. However, that time is easily outweighed by the possibility that reading someone’s writings may be the worst way to learn something.

Last week, I wrote about my eight-year-old nephew’s physics experiment. He was learning by doing (i.e. experiential learning) and through mentorship and feedback. Would it have been better if I had written down everything I knew about physics and emailed it to him?

What if, instead of spending so much time, energy, and money on trying to get people to share more information digitally, we assigned people learning buddies? What if we incentivized time spent in reflection and with each other? What if we created systems for shadowing each other and for practicing the skills we need to be effective? Wouldn’t those be better first steps toward facilitating effective group learning?

See also part three, “The Key to Effective Learning? Soap Bubbles!”

Maximizing Collective Intelligence Means Giving Up Control

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos, where technologies such as the mouse and hypertext were unveiled for the first time. I wanted to mark this occasion by writing about collective intelligence, which was the driving motivation of the mouse’s inventor (and my mentor), Doug Engelbart, who passed away this past July.

Doug was an avid churchgoer, but he didn’t go because he believed in God. He went because he loved the music.

He had no problem discussing his beliefs with anyone. He once told me a story about a conversation he had struck up with a man at church, who kept mentioning “God’s will.” Doug asked him, “Would you say — when it comes to intelligence — that God is to man as man is to ants?”

“At least,” the man responded.

“Do you think that ants are capable of understanding man’s will?”

“No.”

“Then what makes you think that you’re capable of understanding God’s will?”

While Doug is best known for what he invented — the mouse, hypertext, outlining, windowing interfaces, and so on — the underlying motivation for his work was to figure out how to augment collective intelligence. I’m pleased that this idea has become a central theme in today’s conversations about collaboration, community, collective impact, and tackling wicked problems.

However, I’m also troubled that many seem not to grasp the point that Doug made in his theological discussion. If a group is behaving collectively smarter than any individual, then it — by definition — is behaving in a way that is beyond any individual’s capability. If that’s the case, then traditional notions of command-and-control do not apply. The paradigm of really smart people thinking really hard, coming up with the “right” solution, then exerting control over other individuals in order to implement that solution is faulty.

Maximizing collective intelligence means giving up individual control. It also often means giving up on trying to understand why things work.

Ants are a great example of this. Anthills are a result of collective behavior, not the machination of some hyperintelligent ant.

In the early 1980s, a political scientist named Robert Axelrod organized a tournament, where he invited people to submit computer programs to play the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, a twist on the classic game theory experiment, where the game is repeated over and over again by the same two prisoners.

In the original game, the prisoners will never see each other again, and so there is no cost to screwing over the other person. This changes in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, which means there’s now an incentive to cooperate. Axelrod was using the game as a way to try to understand the nature of cooperation more deeply.

As it turned out, one algorithm completely destroyed the competition at Axelrod’s tournament: Tit for Tat. Tit for Tat followed three basic rules:

Trust by default
The Golden Rule of reciprocity: Do unto others what they do unto you.
Forgive easily

Axelrod was intrigued by the simplicity of Tit for Tat and by how easily it had trounced its competition. He decided to organize a followup tournament, figuring that someone would figure out a way to improve on Tit for Tat. Even though everyone was gunning for the previous tournament’s winner, Tit for Tat again won handily. It was a clear example of how a set of simple rules could result in collectively intelligent behavior, highly resistant to the best individual efforts to understand and outsmart it.

There are lots of other great examples of this. Prediction markets consistently outperform punditry when it comes to forecasting everything from elections to finance. Nate Silver’s perfect forecasting of the 2012 presidential elections (not a prediction market, but similar in spirit) was the most recent example of this. Similarly, there have been several attempts to build a service that outperforms Wikipedia by “correcting” its flaws. All have invoked the approaches people took to try to beat Tit for Tat. All have failed.

The desires to understand and to control are fundamentally human. It’s not easy to rein those instincts in. Unfortunately, if we’re to figure out ways to maximize our collective intelligence, we must find that balance between doing what we do best and letting go. It’s very hard, but it’s necessary.

Remembering Doug today, I’m struck — as I often am — by how the solution to this dilemma may be found in his stories. While he was agnostic, he was still spiritual. Spirituality and faith are about believing in things we can’t know. Spirituality is a big part of what it means to be human. Maybe we need to embrace spirituality a little bit more in how we do our work.

Miss you, Doug.

Artwork by Amy Wu.