The Legibility Problem
Why do companies pursue only those they can define? (And why do people follow?)
The capital has its order, the village its customs. —Javanese proverb
Premodern rural areas were managed through a smorgasbord of many informal rules and practices that evolved over multiple generations. They detailed land ownership, shared responsibilities, plot use, obligations between neighbouring farmers, and could differ from village to village. They were understood and useful for the people that had adopted them, but a nightmare for any outsider trying to make sense of them. In the wake of modernisation, states sought for a way to structure this process for the purpose of uniformly applicable taxation. So the states did what states do best: send out surveyors to draw up maps with clear boundaries. But the state's insistence on doing so also changed the way villagers behaved. If a sole landowner had to pay taxes on what used to be a shared property, there was no incentive to keep it that way. So instead, life reshaped to fit the maps.
In James C. Scott’s excellent book, he defines “legibility” as “a state's attempt to make society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” This created modern states that were “partially blind” to the actual societal activities they were trying to depict, disregarding anything that wasn’t functional—or not easily definable—to the state’s intended goal.
In pursuit of this homogenisation, we have failed to acknowledge the complexity of the forces driving manmade systems and misjudged our ability to define and control them. Forced simplification makes complex systems brittle. Yet the same mistakes are omnipresent, and nowhere is it more poorly understood—or wilfully ignored—than in business. Many companies treat people like commodities, neatly defining them through specific requirements, disregarding the complexity of human nature. But by insisting those differences don’t matter, we encourage them to forget they ever existed in the first place.
All companies are tasked with the seemingly impossible job of finding talent. And the sheer mass of people applying to individual jobs doesn’t make this search easy. If you’re BigCo receiving over 10,000 (or in Google’s case 3 million!) applications per year, you’ll very likely default to credentialism, whether you like it or not. Posed with the same problem as the states, credentialism seeks to turn a very illegible resource—human potential—into workable data that can be easily categorised and understood. Any elements that don’t directly serve a company’s singular purpose are deemed unimportant and are therefore eliminated. That search for legibility, though, is an enormous tradeoff. It not only is an abstraction of a complex thing, but also, perhaps inadvertently, it creates an environment that forces people out of their illegibility. In the long run, legibility changes the people on whom it is imposed. They become the simplified version you asked them to be in the first place. An easily managed commodity, but a commodity nonetheless.
Legibility-demanding companies will always attract legibility-seeking people. The kind who care more about where to work than what to work on. This crowd tends to prefer optionality above anything else. Or to put it differently, does the job serve the resume? That longing for eternal optionality demands social recognition. Clearly defined benefits that carry high status, and are recognised by as many people and as many firms as possible. Hard skills that look great on a resume but don’t actually benefit the human listing them. Over time, legibility-seeking people trade character for compatibility. They stop chasing their true interests in service of the market. Intellectual curiosity is not possible in this world; chasing any indulgence that doesn’t serve the function of the market—as far as they can see—has no value. Instead, the market thinks for them. It functions as an ideological chastity belt that confines people to a vastly reduced version of who they are or could be. This is what the market does at scale. And it takes a whole lot of determination to swim against that stream when financial realities are at stake. You’d really like to indulge in your intellectual curiosities, but BigCo is hiring and rent sure is expensive. So who do you become?
This also has the corollary that ambition usually, and wrongfully, gets measured by comparison. Ambition is less recognisable when you have no social reference for it, and without an existing framework it automatically looks less desirable. So people are usually ambitious in all the familiar places, and you end up in the same alley as everyone else. Success, they reckon, is something measurable. So they go looking where they know how to measure. If venturing into the unknown is culturally scary, and economically unsound, no one ever does something new.
All of this comes from a flaw in reasoning. Do illegible people make worse candidates, simply because we can’t neatly define them? Of course not. But we’re so scared of that uncertainty that we’d rather do without it, even if that means we’ll be worse off in the end. Which makes sense in a static world, where we can neatly define the probability of different outcomes. But in a dynamic world, we need something more agile. Right now, companies are insuring for Knightian uncertainty; they have not the faintest clue whether a candidate will perform well at their job or not, so they try to mitigate the unknown by checking all possible boxes. But then again, if roles are so tightly described, and people falling slightly outside of that description are non grata, then the quality of the person you'll hire to do the job depends entirely on your ability to accurately describe their success. Last time I checked, job ads didn’t do all too well in depicting the multitude of human experiences possible to carry out a job. Instead, they are a reflection of the bare minimum we can define. This trickles down to the interviewing process as well. As we’re only able to dig up the legible side of a candidate, the perceived potential of a candidate will only ever be as good as the quality of the interviewer’s questions.
Peter Drucker is famous for his “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it” statement, and it’s become one of the many commandments for companies. But it’s also a typical consultant’s mantra. It’s not surprising that the Big Four aren’t very good at innovation. It’s not because they are unable to, it’s simply because they aren’t in the business of innovating. They’re in the business of optimisation and they can only optimise the things they know how to measure. By definition, that ties you only to the existing realm. Not the realm that could be.
In the arts, there is a general consensus that illegibility can teach us a great deal about life. Most books, plays, operas aren’t guides on how to live. Yet a good novel can teach you more about the human condition than any psychology textbook can. But we can’t straightforwardly put into words the value of a literary or philosophy degree in a business setting, so we deem it non-functional and brush it aside altogether.
So, why should you care? For companies it’s simple. I don’t believe we’re doing a very good job allocating the right people to the right jobs. If not everyone in your organisation is working at or towards the edge of their potential, you’re wasting resources. In the war on talent, having even a marginal edge on your competitors will set you apart in a big way. This means that a lot of time should be spent training people on the job, rather than expecting applicants to have all the skills upfront. Most business jobs require a slightly deeper understanding than a game of Monopoly, most of which can be trained on the job with directed effort and proper feedback systems in place. If you can’t rest assured that most people have the capabilities of figuring it out on the go, then maybe you shouldn’t be playing. Ability always beats skill in the long run. If you keep insisting on a strategy of legibility, you’ll continue dulling the sharp knives you acquire.
For employees the impact is more subtle. For many, jobs have become nothing more than transactions; a strategic move to later leverage for more money, more status, more clout. What I’m saying is that you’ll be hollowed out long before that strategy pays off. Mihir Desai beautifully explains the price of such an approach:
“The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.”
Consider carefully what you’re willing to pay.
Sadly or excitingly—depending on your glass of water—the invisible forces that are making the wheel spin are exactly the ones we can’t fully comprehend. But embarking on a quest for understanding is the wrong approach. In ‘Fooled by Randomness’, Taleb succinctly describes the point I’m trying to make here.
“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser. Mother nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table, nor does she deliver problems in a textbook way (in the real world one has to guess the problem more than the solution)”.
We shouldn’t attempt to deconstruct the complexity that is human potential; we’ll very likely fail. At the very least, though, we should acknowledge that this complexity exists, and try to deal with it in the best way possible. The only thing to seriously consider is that if legibility is what you’re looking for, then that is what you’re buying.
Credit: big props to Regina Onorato for copy editing the hell out of this piece!