Below Belief

I wish there were a way that blog posts could make their way effortlessly from brain to screen without the confounded, intermediate typing step. For one thing, typing slows down thinking. And for another, I’d get a lot more sleep.
So I was thinking yesterday how business organisations never learn anything. This is true on a number of levels. The main level is that as people come and go inside an organisation they make discoveries, learn things about how the business works but when they go, it goes with them. They are never encouraged (or paid) to document in any meaningful way what they learnt and the business ends up effectively subsidising their personal education (teaching them how to fish) rather than furthering it’s own aims. In general the business pays to relearn this stuff, next time there’s a “disaster” which needs it.
On other levels, from year to year running the business we all learn things – as specific issues come to the fore, get resolved, then go away again. And similarly we fail to record them – so that when a similar issue hits us, we have no way except to scrabble for an old document or spreadsheet or email long-forgotten on a disk – which may inevitably have been deleted by accident the week before we need it.
My point is there’s no ritualised capturing of this valuable “secret sauce” – the combination of all of the learned lessons is what lets the business succeed and yet we don’t ever incentivise (or even recognise as valuable) recording it. It’s the essence of short-termism, fuelled mostly by peoples’ fundamentally short-term personal interest in the business.
It’s true that business systems (normally involving technology) are able to begin to capture some of the learned lessons – and a lot of the lessons we learn are common to all businesses so there are already well defined ways of storing best practice (like GAAP accountancy or CRM systems etc). The systems stand a good chance of outliving most of the people but even so, this means of information capture is still decidedly short-term, definitely fragile.
This differs quite a lot from evolution. With your average single-celled organism, evolving gradually over a long period of time, you have the very essence of “knowledge capture” happening for all to see. Every time a “discovery” is made (albeit in this case fairly randomly, guided by natural selection) it is wrapped up and kept as part of the very fabric of the cell (“business”) so that it can benefit the future generations and let them worry about better, newer discoveries… Each generation is continually and smoothly building on the foundation left for it by the previous one – free to get better and better, more and more suited to surviving (“making a profit”)
Anyway, obviously the time-scales are somewhat different and it’s not entirely analogous but it got me thinking about ways to make your average business a little bit more evolutionary.
And on a related but tangential topic, would it be conceivable to build a truly evolutionary business? In my mind this involves basically removing people from the equation (in itself a good thing as far as I’m concerned) – other than to oversee it. So the question is this: could we conceive of an online system (technology) which could evolutionarily (if that is a word) adapt itself into a profitable position using nothing more than content, links, PPC, natural search. One that instantly comes to mind is an evolutionary algorithm for PPC bidding which could self-adapt. It’s an interesting thought experiment on which I shall ponder some more…