On Self Similarity

23.7.16

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to be a better leader lately, and one concept I keep thinking about is the potential for self similarity between how I have led myself and how it might make sense to lead at scale.

What is Self Similarity?

Self similarity is a mathematical concept found all across nature. Effectively, it describes something that follows a pattern across multiple levels. As you zoom in from a far out view, you notice many of the same characteristics repeated. There are some cool applications to financial markets, but the most compelling examples for me are trees. Example below (the fact that I can use a fake plastic tree to make my point may be a testament to fake plastic tree makers).

If you start out by looking at the tree, and then zoom in on a branch, and then zoom in on a twig on that branch, and, finally, zoom in on a leaf, you’ll see a lot of striking similarities — essentially, it is a column with spokes, over and over again.

Why does this happen? I won’t pretend to know. It’s a very real thing, though, and the similarity isn’t just visual, it is mathematical. If you’re curious, a deep dive into the broader concept fractal geometry could be fun. If you’re financially inclined, The (Mis)behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot is a good starting point.

I’ve been using the concept of self similarity as a framework from which to think about scaling up principles, from myself, to an organization.

Impetus

I was recommended a number of leadership books by someone who is quickly becoming a mentor for me, one of which was Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin. Other than inspiring me to train to get my 1.5 mile run from 10min 30sec down to 9 minutes, the book is a gold mine of information.

One anecdote that stuck out to me was about the SEAL rule “cover and move,” which essentially boils down to trust and teamwork. The example given in the book describes Babin leading a SEAL sniper team out of a dangerous position in Ramadi, Iraq, back to a military base. They employ the strategy cover and move — while a few team mates provide cover, watching and deterring potential threats, the other team mates move. Then, the sub teams switch roles, leap frogging out of harms way as safely as possible.

Lief applies this exceptionally well with his own unit, effectively escaping the dangerous area. However, he was chastised upon returning to base for failing to scale the principle of cover and move up: there was another SEAL sniper team that was returning from a near by building at about the same time that Lief was. It would have been much safer for Lief to have coordinated with the other team as well, scaling up cover and move across the organization — instead of just having members of his own team breaking up to cover and move, his own team could have covered and moved with the other team as well, taking turns with to get across the city.

In brief, he missed a chance to rely on the self similarity of his principle to improve the performance across his organization, not just within his team.

My Own Principles

I am far from a perfect human — there are two million ways in which I need to grow. However, I think there are one or two things that I have learned from others & then validated with my own experience. One that I feel may yield high impact if I were successful in scaling it to my ventures is disciplined consistency.

Description from an example: about 3 years ago, I wanted to write a novel. So, I committed to writing at least 1k words a day. That was the absolute minimum. No matter what, I would write at least 1k words. If I was really in a flow on a given day, I might write 2k or 3k words. But, regardless, 1k words was the floor. Even if they were low quality & I had to write over them later, I had decided that getting something out was better than putting nothing on paper.

A novel is only 40k words. So, in a little over a month, I had written a novel. That was pretty cool. I ended up completely rewriting it at least twice, but, I still had something. Progress is more important than perfection. If I had waited for the perfect outline or the perfect characters or the perfect plot, I would have never finished the book.

20 Mile March

Probably not coincidentally, another book I was recommended to read, Great By Choice, by Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen, discusses a topic called the “20 Mile March,” which maps pretty wonderfully onto my own 1,000 word a day writing march from a few years ago.

As mentioned last week, the book compares companies that outperformed their peers by multiples, discerning what actually made them different. One of the biggest factors the authors discovered that contributed to a company’s comparative success was a disciplined approach to growth, the 20 Mile March. You go forwards, slowly but surely, increasing value at a reasonable rate, not jumping too far ahead on good days and never giving up when the going gets tough. This could be Intel’s adherence to Moore’s Law or Stryker hitting 20% annual revenue growth 20 years in row.

Self Similarity to my ventures

For writing a novel, the input/output is quite obvious. You write words, and you get closer to the objective. Scaling up my disciplined consistency to a business via a 20 Mile March is a little bit less obvious for me.

The problem, I think, with Ultima, is I don’t know EXACTLY what our priority is.

Now, to be entirely clear, we have a plan, we have targets, and we have goals. We are going to do everything in our power to return value to our investors.

However, we have not explicitly stated a unified, underlying mission. My cofounders and I all have wondrous ideas of where we’d like to go, but we don’t have a single, concise statement to anchor on.

When my goal was writing a book, the disciplined behavior I had to apply to myself to achieve that goal was pretty straightforward: write words. Words make a book. On the other hand, even if Ultima was a media company, writing a book would only be one part of the puzzle. It is more nuanced — there is not just a single goal. There are many goals. That very fact makes a mission all the more essential — it gives you something to validate the goals against, it allows you to ask if the goals are even the right goals.

A mission statement is different than but self similar to a goal. In my mind, a goal is bounded by time, but a mission is not. I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking a robust mission doesn’t have an expiration date. On the other hand, a goal is a target that you can achieve. You benchmark actions and decisions against a goal: do these choices get me closer to the goal?

Zooming out, perhaps a mission statement is what you benchmark the goal against. You ask, is this goal, regardless of the time horizon, congruent with my mission statement? In that way, everything goes back to the mission statement — actions are meant to achieve the goals, goals are meant to achieve the mission.

So, I’ll let you know when we hone in our mission, and I’ll let you know when we reflect disciple up to the organizational level with a 20 Mile March. We’ll commit to something, something that will make it a little bit easier to determine if we’re walking in the right direction.

Cheers,

Noah Jacobs