If you’ve used a copy machine, you might remember how faded the copies get over time. The machine can’t pick up every detail of the original, so you get a slow degradation with each run.
It’s called generation loss, and the 80s and 90s were full of it.
As the original document is replicated, minor errors, imperfections, or distortions can accumulate, resulting in a final copy that is noticeably different from the initial source.
The telephone game has similar issues. Minor details from the original message are not picked up, so it degrades with each pass. What’s communicated to the last person in line is oftentimes not what was described initially.
You start off with “two tiny toads ate fat flying flies” and the next thing you know it’s “your briny toes taste like cats frying eyes.”
So, what’s going on?
As information is passed along, it gets filtered through the lens of the receiver. The copy machine uses an actual optical lens that can’t pick up every little detail from the original. For people, it’s the lens of bias, perception, and experience. Or maybe the messenger just mumbles.
It’s important for us to know this about ourselves and others. Each generation, the information is getting more distorted.
But not all systems filter, distort, and devolve. Some evolve instead. Improving with each iteration. The door swings both ways.
It’s what made humans from little rodents.
But it’s also what made chickens out of T-Rexs.
How do we make sure things are evolving instead of devolving?
Avoid the copy of a copy of a copy mistake.
You’ve heard the story. Grandfather was a Harvard man, Dad was a Harvard man, and now Junior wants to be a Harvard man as well. But he ends up cheating, or worse, a Nazi-sympathizing backup quarterback.
It’s very common.
My company started out by hiring people just like the founders. As the company grew, it sent these copies to the new markets, and the copies hired more copies. They called it culture. They kept trying to recreate what they had back in Richmond Virginia, quickly becoming a group of middle-aged white guys all attempting to be like the founders who were long gone by then.
We’ve since wised up.
The copy of a copy of a copy was getting really faded, generation loss, so we hired some originals.
They probably thought I was a copy. I’m sneaky that way. But a lot of the time, even when you try to find originals, copies appear right before your eyes.
When I first became a husband and later a father, I caught myself doing the ‘husband’ and the ‘father’ things.
“Honey, I’m home.”
Who says that?
It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t me. But I thought, hey, this is what I’m supposed to do.
Social pressure says to join the crowd and be a copy.
Being a copy feels safe. You know that people like the original, and you know the original works, so you copy that sucker.
The logic is sound. It just doesn’t work.
Many people copy based on a desire to be successful. Striving. Why do you think we have so many lawyers and investment bankers in the world? You don’t think people actually want to do those jobs, do you? That they were playing shortstop on the little league team, ran off the field, and just had to tell Mom and Dad they wanted to spend their days doing corporate litigation?
No. They noticed somebody had a nice life and a pretty wife and they said, “I think I can be a pretty close copy of that.” And they were so smart and so ambitious, they achieved it.
Luke Burgis writes about this in his (terrific) book Wanting.
When discussing Billionaire Peter Thiel‘s experience at Stanford he said Peter “noticed that there was a decent degree of diversity among the career goals of newly arrived freshmen. But over the next few years, the goals seemed to converge: finance, law, medicine, or consulting. Thiel had a nagging sense that something was off.”
What was off is that these college students were making copies all on their own. Sad.
Dude from the frat gets a job with McKinsey and rolls into town with a cell phone and a new Ford Explorer.
They were Stanford kids so hopefully they figured it out.
What we want is something closer to evolution, biological rather than analog or digital. We are humans after all. Each generation uses natural selection, keeping the strongest traits.
No attempt to copy. The system is hardened over time.
When you make a hire, find someone that has some of the best traits of the team and fills the gaps as well. Where is the team lacking?
Don’t just try to turn out a copy of what has worked in the past.
Evolutionary pressure says only the strong survive so it’s not going to be easy. Do you think that the first rodent with legs was welcomed back to the burrow with open arms?
Outcast!
But it was worth it.
Making copies is tempting, and being a copy has its own allure. But a copy of a copy of a copy is a system that erodes over time.
Focus on setting up systems and practices that evolve, so each generation is an improvement from the last.
