Choose Your Own Adventure — Engineering vs Strategy
Fixing problems instead of planning outcomes can lead to strategic misadventures, as Facebook’s fake news quandary demonstrates.
Reading discussion of Facebook’s post-election autopsy I wondered whether a direct line could be drawn between the dominant hacker/engineer culture of Menlo Park and the platforms’ role in Trump’s victory.
With the benefit of hindsight it seems easy to predict that a network built for advertising which promotes commonalities, scrutinises arbitrarily and rewards indiscriminate virality could become a haven for disinformation and propaganda.
But each of these ‘flaws’ is actually a feature, engineered to solve a particular problem;
- Users not engaging with their newsfeed? Make engagement the metric which populates the newsfeed.
- Human editors accused of anti-Conservative bias? Replace human fact-checkers with algorithms.
- Not enough original content on platform? Reward clickbait content factories with massive distribution potential and analytics.
Now, let’s suppose that instead of looking to solve problems, Facebook instead had imagined ideal outcomes — would the same ‘flaws’ have been generated?
- Create a super-engaging newsfeed for every user — show the most entertaining and informative content — surprise and delight with every swipe and scroll.
- Be the Switzerland of content platforms— create an editorial policy that openly and publicly promotes neutrality with tools that support this aim.
- Become the destination for discovery and sharing of content — reward quality of engagement and content, instead of volume and velocity.
(It’s probably worth noting that this alternative outcome-enabled Facebook looks more like a media platform than a social network. But given that nearly half of Americans get their news on Facebook, this doesn’t seem a huge leap of faith.)
The point here wasn’t to add to the ‘Facebook — media or technology company?’ debate, but more to consider whether augmenting engineering with strategy might produce more positive outcomes, not just for Facebook but also other hacker-driven companies.
A strategist might be as likely as an engineer to consider a solution to a problem, but will often reframe the problem as an undesirable outcome, postulating a positive outcome as its desirable counterpoint. The idea that leads towards the positive outcome won’t necessarily be the solution to the problem or negative outcome. This philosophy leads to the creation of a vision about what the world should look like and the role of the product/platform in this vision — a purpose if you will.
While Facebook tweaked their ‘Move fast and break things’ mantra a couple of years back, this is still a popular philosophy inside tech companies and those who seek to emulate their practises and processes. This thinking amplified by a hacker mentality leads to short-term fixes — patches and workarounds — rather than longer term executions of strategy. It takes time and thought and listening to disparate voices to consider a range of outcomes and propose mechanics to achieve them.
A standard pitch from a startup will show the application of a technological solution to a given problem — from matching unused spare rooms to millennial urban travellers (airb’n’b) to negating the need to ever visit a grocery (Soylent). The engineering culture is a dominant one and the search for problems that can be solved by tech is one that continues in dorm rooms and coffee shops the world over.
Of course traditional strategists have plenty to learn from engineers — the benefits of prototyping; the deploy-learn-tweak speed of development; the ship or get off the pot drive to see ideas out in the world.
Anticipating problems is much harder than offering potential outcomes. And when the scale of problem is an election result with far-reaching global consequences putting your hands up and saying ‘Our bad, we’ll get it right next time around’, feels too little, far too late.
Strategy should propose outcomes for us to consider — solutions to problems that haven’t yet occurred. Only then can we replace hindsight with foresight.
