The Tyranny of the Micro

Micro has become a dominant strategy in almost every industry. Micro-UIs, micro services, agile breaking work down into smaller stories, tasks, and sub-tasks. Micro markets, audience of one, elevator pitches. News stories become new mentions become ticker sentences.

Micro is the logic response to complexity. Dissect the complicated. Break it down into components that are simple to communicate and easy to manage. Shareholders and executives don't have time for large, complicated stories, you must have a strategy that can be communicated in minutes.

While there are benefits to breaking down issues and opportunities into smaller pieces, there is also tremendous risk. Primary among these risks is the systems we seek to simplify are not simple. In our effort to reduce the complexity we deny the complexity existed at all. The part is not the whole. Any effort that does not take this into account is delusion. When we no longer recognize the complexity, we forget the system behaves as a dynamic, interconnects system. We develop micro solutions that work for the part but not for the whole. All things become linear processes instead of circular ebbs and flows.

In our rush to analyze, we are losing the ability to synthesize, to understand complex problems in-vivo, to see the world as a collection of dynamic interactions. Decisions made from a summarized collections of abstracted metrics have had painful results, one only need look at military and political campaigns over the past decade to find examples. Examples abound in public policy and corporate strategy as well.

Perhaps most concerning, as the focus on micro increases it is becoming harder to find people with the skills to understand and work with systems. Not only are we only working with partial understanding, we may soon have no other alternative. While systems thinking has become a popular trend, the reality is we lack the people with diverse backgrounds required to truly understand complex systems. We are training quants while abandoning humanities. Our scientists can explain what is happening without being able to find out WHY those things are occurring. The concept of a renaissance education with a background in science, mathematics, history, art, sociology, and biology has been replaced by a focus on the micro, a hyper specialization on one facet of a segment of a component. In this environment, is it any wonder that our actions result in avalanches of unintented and deleterious consequences?