The Energy Is Constant; What Changes Is the Direction

A colleague once asked us: is my position here just to cover for other people?

Our position first: there is no such thing as covering in this organisation. We look at ourselves with the same ruler we use on assets — fit is read off the angle, not the length. Why? Because length is only magnitude. Direction is the position.

Normalise before you go onto the sphere

When we look at a company we never start with how much it has raised or how high the valuation is. Those are magnitudes. A large magnitude does not mean the direction is right. Turn that back on ourselves and it still holds.

Degrees, rank and year of entry are magnitudes too. Normalise them away before going onto the sphere — set every length to one and keep only the direction. That is the geometric form of "no pedigree test" in the Archive: no weight given to degrees, rank or years in the industry, with reward following actual contribution and results. An elder is the person whose direction is right and around whom people gather naturally — someone who has taken a particular field to its limit and can think from the long-term interest of the organisation. Hierarchy is a means of management; the council of elders is a way of doing the work.

Is magnitude useless, then? It is useful. It just does not fix the position.

Directions should be spread apart

A team of just over thirty holds at least ten directions between them. Which means nobody can live off someone else's conclusion. With a denominator this small, that is the only way the account works. Learning here is not a benefit; it is the job itself. The price is that you never finish learning. The return is direct: everyone ends up sitting across from founders and the industrial front line. That is faster than any training schedule.

The wider the directions are spread, the more ground is covered and the less is duplicated; crowd them together and everyone lives at the average. Six SEAL teams are six sets of directions, spread as far apart as we can manage. Is there a limit to spreading them? There is, and the limit is headcount. In other words, a SEAL team is not a department. It is an angle.

Rotate, do not remake

This is the part that matters most: rotate, do not remake. Whichever angle is empty, someone turns to it. A person's energy is constant; only the direction changes. We do not try to remake one person into another. We only ask someone willing to turn when an angle opens up. Covering is therefore a geometric necessity, not a favour.

There is usually only one most valuable player on a team, but there can be many excellent ones. A shooting guard, a playmaker and a sixth man need completely different skills, and all three are equally real in value. Internal friction mostly starts when everyone wants to stand at the same angle. Three people crowded into one angle means two other angles are empty. As far as we can tell, separating the angles is faster than making people stronger.

Back to that colleague's question. Define yourself as the person who covers, and the work can only start when someone else speaks first; it gets harder and harder. Define yourself as an engine, and you have a reason to walk in and to go and build relationships yourself. Same duties, two self-narratives, and the output that grows from them is not the same. The role is actually chosen by you.

The precondition is one shared sphere

One precondition gets skipped easily: all directions have to be defined on the same sphere before they can be compared at all. That is why we align on one shared context so often. A meeting is not for agreeing on conclusions. It is for agreeing on the ruler. The context is the sphere itself.

Lose the sphere and what happens? The angles become misunderstandings.

On this one we are fairly confident. As for which angle each person should turn to right now, that probably has to be talked through face to face, one at a time.