The Philosophical Implications of Technology: A Conversation with Anders Indset

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture podcast. Today, I'm sitting down across many miles with Anders Indset. Anders, welcome. Thanks for taking the time to meet with us today.

Anders Indset: Yes. Thank you for having me, Shane. Pleasure to be here.

Shane Hastie: My normal starting point is who's Anders?

Introductions [01:06]

Anders Indset: Yes. Anders is a past, I would say, a hardcore capitalist. I love tech. I got into programming and built my first company, set up an online printing service, an agency. I was a former elite athlete, playing sports over here in Europe, and I was a driver of goals, of trying to reach finite goals. And over the years I didn't feel success, maybe from an outside perspective, it was decent. It was, people would say that this is something that makes a human being successful.

I sold off my company and I started to write and think about the implications of technology to humanity. Dug into some deep philosophical questions in German literature and the language of German to get into that nitty-gritty nuances of the thinkers of the past. And today, I play around with that. I see philosophy as a thinking practice. I've written six books. And today, I also invest in tech companies. So, I like to have that practical approach to what I do. I'm a born Norwegian, Shane, and I live in Germany. I've been living in Germany for the past 25 years. The father of two princesses. And that's probably the most interesting parts about Anders.

Shane Hastie: So, let's dig a little bit into the implications of technology for a philosopher, or perhaps the other way around, the implications of philosophy for a technologist.

The implications of philosophy for a technologist [02:24]

Anders Indset: Yes. I've written a lot about this in the past, and I saw that come up at the tables of leaders around the world, that the philosophical questions became much more relevant for leading organizations and coping with exponential change. So, whereas we had society of optimization, that was a very binary way of looking at the world. It's your opinion, my opinion, rights and wrongs, thumbs up, thumbs down. We sped that up and from a economical standpoint, we improved society. The introduction of technologies and tools have improved the state of humanity. We were gifted with two thumbs and the capability to build tools. And so, we did.

And I think the progress of capitalism and the economy and the introduction of technologies have been very beneficial on many fields for humanity. But with that comes also a second part of the coin, if you like, and I think that's where we have seen that people have become very reactive to impulses from the outside. And that drags you down and wears you out, and you need to take your sabbaticals and retreats and to act, to perform, to be an active human being becomes very exhausting, because a lot of the things that we live by are rules and regulations, impulses from media, tasks in our task management tools, going into Zoom sessions, becoming more and more zombies. I write about being an undead state where our lights are still on, but there's no one home to perceive them.

So, the implications, I've written about this development, but it has become much more fast and rapid than I had foreseen. I wrote a book called The Quantum Economy that outlined basically the next 10 years from 2020 to 2030, I see we are at the midst of this state where anything in technology today, we have to take a decision, do we really want to have it? What kind of future is worth striving for?

So, that led me to the book that I've just published, The Viking Code: The Art and Science of Norwegian Success, where I look at more of a philosophy of life, a vitality on how you could get out and shape things and create things and experience progress. Coming back to what I said about my own felt success, that everything was reactive and trying to reach finite goal, and I didn't have the feeling of agency that I was the shaper and creator of my own reality.

So, this is a part that I've thought about a lot. Going back to your questions, this book, The Viking Code, is basically about that philosophy, where I look at business, education and politics, but I take that back to a phenomenon that I looked at at my fellow countrymen, that all of a sudden around the world became very successful at these individual sports, or on the political scene, or in business, coming from a country that did not value high performance. So, it led to that journey of writing about how to build a high-performance culture that is deeply rooted in values.

And that's where I play with those also philosophical concepts, but from a practical standpoint, because I want to make implications in the organizations and with leadership and also the next level of technological evolution.

Shane Hastie: A culture of high performance, deeply rooted in values. What does that mean to me as the technologist working on building products on a day-to-day basis?

Building a culture of high-performance, deeply rooted in values [05:49]

Anders Indset: Yes. I think, first of all, it seems like a contradiction. I mean, high performance is delegation of task and just speeding up and delivering. A lot of people have felt that over the past years. As a technologist, as a creator, it's about having those micro ambitions. You are as a part of an organization, you're following a vision, a huge target, a goal, something that you have to strive for. You're working with other people. But within that, you're also an individual that I think at the core wants to learn and wants to experience progress.

So, I think, for a technologist in that space, it is about taking back that agency of enjoying coming to work or getting at your task, your passion, where you're not just focused on that long-term goal, but those small steps, the micro ambitions that you set for yourself, that you also experience. And I think that actual experience of overcoming some tasks is one of the most fundamental things to humanity. It's like a toddler that tries to get up, you fall down, and you just keep striving.

And if that is in your nature, that the strive for progress and the strive for learning and the curiosity to proceed, that's a higher ambition, that the anxiety to fail or just the brute force of doing tasks, I think that is where it's also very relevant for software developers and architects. And just to find that, "Why is it, to me, important that I progress here on this particular field?"

So, I think it's very relevant because those small, incremental changes to the software, to the programs, to the structures, they are like everything else in life, life is a compound interest, compounds into big steps. And if you can find that, and that's the individual part of it, then I think it has a very high relevance. And I think, obviously, the other part we probably get to is the relationship to collectivism and how working in the team is also of great importance for individual achievements.

Shane Hastie: I assert that in organizations today, the unit of value delivery is that team. So, what makes a great team?

What makes a great team? [08:06]

Anders Indset: First of all, I totally agree. And I write about this in the book, it's a concept called dugnad. So, dugnad, it's kind of like voluntarily work without the work. So, in Norway you just show up and you just help and support others. It's that communal service where you just get into that deeper understanding, most likely rooted in the culture of the ancient Vikings. So, everyone got in the boat and had their task of rowing, and they can only get as far as the collective achievement. And it was like that.

And for me, growing up in a small town in Norway, it was basically about, I did biathlon, cross-country skiing, played soccer, because if I didn't show up for the other guys, for their teams and their sports, they would not show up for me, so I wouldn't have a team. So, it was baked into that natural understanding of me achieving something or growing, that I had first also to serve the part of the community or the collectivism.

So, I think if we understand that also coming back to software development or working in technology, if everyone around me plays at a higher level, if I can uplift my team or the collective and I have an individual goal to grow as a person, I obviously can achieve more if the playing field that I'm in, my team, if they have a higher level of quality of work, if they're motivated, if they're intrinsically motivated to learn, if they're better, then I can rise even more. And you see that in sport, if you can uplift a team as a leader within the group, you can strive even more.

So, it's a kind of, sort of like a reinforcement learning model that many underestimate in a world where we are fighting for roles and hierarchies and to get across and get along and move up the ladder. I think the understanding that if we uplift the team and I do have an individual goal to grow, I am better off playing in that higher performance ecosystem, be it from a value perspective in terms of enjoying the ride, or be it also from a skill perspective.

So, I think supporting others to grow as an individual is a highly underestimated thing that you can and should invest in. And that's the delicate dance between uplifting the collective and growing as an individual. So, I agree with you. I think it's really important. And for many, it's difficult to buy into that philosophy and to see how that function in a practical environment.

Shane Hastie: And yet, in many of our organizations, let's just take the incentive structures, they're aimed at the individual, but we want people to work collectively, to work collaboratively, to become this great team. How do we change that?

Challenges with incentive models [10:51]

Anders Indset: The incentive models based on monetary system to progress, that's the gamification of the business structures. So, once that become a game that you can hack and play around and try to be efficient, you lose the essential target. I mean, I'm not saying that reward system should not exist. I think it's important for monetary benefit, but they don't really work. Studies show that for sales also, if you just put that on sole on monetary system, there are optimizations to hack the system. And these type of systems are for a short-term gain, they're beneficial. But for the long-term gain, there needs to be some underlying value, some purpose that you move towards. So, I think that if that is not felt and realized by the organization, and I think this is the task of leaders, I think it's very difficult to build those high-performance cultures. If you do it solely based on those metrics of reward systems, I think you're going to fail.

So, progress, to me, comes from two things. One is trust and one is friction. And if you have trust in an organization, it used to be a space where we had a trillion-dollar industry happening called the coffee place, the coffee machine, where people just bumped into each other. We had a base trust because we were working for the same company, but we just met up. So, the awkward conversation of what happened last night could be done at the coffee machine. So, you build a relationship. Serendipitous moments where ideas can be sparked and things can happen that was not set up from a structural standpoint, happened at the coffee machine. Right? So, having that trust in the environment where we have friction, where ideas can meet and things can be spoken out and discussed, that's the foundation of not only building a culture but literally also progress.

So, if you have trust and friction, you can progress to something new, the unknown, move beyond, come to a new way of looking at the problem that you're working on. So, I think when you work in that field, and also in software development or in that structural technology, you're not really solving tasks, you are building better problems. And that's very philosophical. So, if you get into that discussion of finding a better problem, of getting down to first-principle thinking and thinking with people that have a different view of things on how to progress, then you have a healthy environment. And I think that is something that starts in a very, very micro ecosystem. That's why I use the example of the coffee place. So yes, to me, that's the foundation. And I think that is if you build that, then you can have a healthy environment that can strive.

Shane Hastie: So, if I'm a team leader working in one of these technology organizations, an architect, a technical lead, an influencer of some sort, how do I bring others on this journey? How do I support creating this environment?

Culture cannot be copied [13:50]

Anders Indset: That's the challenge in all ... Culture cannot be copied. So, it's not like a blueprint that you can just take it out and write down the steps, right? And that's the magic of things. If you have an organization with a good culture, you feel it, but you cannot really say what was the journey and what is it exactly about.

I write about a couple of things that I believe in, in the book. In The Viking Code, I write about things that I see when I meet with organizations or when I travel the world. One thing that I find really important is that you trust yourself. That you, as a individual, you build self-trust, because if you can trust yourself, then you can start to trust others.

And I see a lot of people in the organization today that use power play and try to come from authority. And to me, that's very often overplayed insecurity, a facade that does not build healthy relationship. So, I think it's important to train yourself trust, do things that you feel awkward with and try to go into that vulnerable space. If you lean into that awkward feeling, and particularly in technology where you always have to look important about being on top of things with new changes that are happening. If you're a leader in front of your team that said, "Oh..." You have that gut feeling because someone is talking about some new acronym that you haven't wrapped your mind around, right? You're an expert, so you'll get it, but you just haven't got it.

So, instead of saying and trying to play around with that and trying to look important, you just lean into that awkward feeling and you just say to your colleague, "You caught me off guard here. I cannot answer that question. I don't know what you're talking about. So, let me go back home and read up and get the deep insight here, so that we can have a healthy discussion tomorrow". That builds a lot of trust. And you can show that in front of the people. That's where you get into a space where it's not just a playing around into top of things, but getting deep into healthy conversation that can drive change.

And the other part that I would mention is I think we can only do it together today, so we need to practice our voices. When I say so, I look at the old rhetoric of the Greeks, the ethos, the pathos, and the logos. So, you have a logical explanation, what you want to say. So, you have your message figured out and you have thought about, "What do I want to bring across?" You have some kind of pathos. So, you get into the emotionality of the person, that you can get some reaction to what you're saying. People will lean in and listen to you. And the third part is to have some ethos, a value system where you have two, maximum three values that you as a leader stand for, that everyone around you can relate to. So, when you're woken up in the morning at four o'clock and they would get you out of bed, you have those two values, maximum three. I don't think we can cover more.

And if you have that clear and people can relate to you, you become relatable. Your flaws and your things that are ... Sometimes you go too far. As long as you can get you back to those two values, there's a foundation to stand on and that's the ground to build relationship. And we are by all means, non-perfect entities. We are failtastic. We can do beautiful, crazy things. But if we have that foundation of value, I think then we can lean in and we can start to build those relationships.

And those are, over time, the things that make your team build something bigger than the sum of its part. And I think that is when we refer to culture, it is that. You see people motivated, active, doing things. If something goes wrong, that's not the drive, the drive is to progress. So, they learn and build and reshape and rethink. So, I think those two things, basically the voice and also practicing self-trust would be where I would start.

Shane Hastie: So, let's go back to you made the point about, "We're not building products, we're solving better problems". How do we find those better problems?

Anders Indset: We're not even solving them. We are creating better problems. Right?

Shane Hastie: Creating better problems. Yes.

We’re not building products - we’re creating better problems [17:46]

Anders Indset: So yes, I think this is one of the things that I see today, and it goes, I think, across industries, is that we are so reactive because we're looking for that rapid answer. So, we are conditioned to solve tasks. And this has also come from this social media way of communicating. So, we have instant reward systems that rewards to reaction. So, "What do you think about this? Bam. Bam. Give me your 2 cents". Right? That's basically the reward system. It gives you likes, it gives you money, it gives you headlines, it gives you click. And that has become conditioned on how we communicate and how we work.

And I think that that is a big challenge because we end up creating great solutions or great answers to the wrong question. And that is, when it comes to problem solving as we have been taught, and if you think from a philosophical standpoint, everything we do is about progress. Everything we have has a solution is built on an assumption. So, if you play with knowledge, there is always an underlying assumption. And we are not standing on solid ground. And for anyone that has took the time to dig into quantum physics, know what I'm talking about. There is always a base assumption, be it that our conversation is a real thing and we are not part of some higher simulation, without going into the simulation hypothesis. But that's basically what we're doing.

And then, Elon Musk has talked a lot about first-principle thinking and that type of operational models for organization. I think that's very healthy. So, when you have something as an assumption, I ask you, "Okay. Why do you think that? Why do you see it?" I don't propose a solution to your answer. I want to understand where you come from. So, I ask you, "Why do you think that?" And you start to play with that. And I get a second why, and a third why, and a fourth why. And we just get deeper and deeper. And all the way we realize, "Oh, this is maybe where my argument, I haven't thought about this, and this is where we get into our relationship and get a new complexity into the equation". And here is where relations pop up that we can understand the problem better.

They've got a very practical approach that many can relate to. There's been a lot of writing about how flying is bad for the environment and it's terrible and people should fly less, and we have to come up with regulations on airplanes and airlines to punish them. And it seems to me, first of all, people are still flying, they're just not posting it as much on social media. The airports, as least where I've been, are crowded. But if you punish the airlines and they don't make any money, you will end up slowing down innovation. So, first of all, I think flying is one of the most important inventions in human history, because we got together and got to talk in a physical space. So, we kind of tuned it down killing each other, which I think is a good thing.

And the other part of the development is that a continent like Africa is now growing from 1.5 to 4 billion people, because the six, seven and eight children are surviving. So, the population is growing like crazy and most likely they will not all die. Most likely they will not swim to Europe and we will see them drown. We will figure out a way to build some kind of structures that will lead to a middle class and you will have 400, 500 million new passengers coming into the industry that have never taken a flight. And alongside the older population of the already existing high-flyers, you will just increase the market.

So, you could ask then, "Is it a good solution to reduce flying and punish airlines? Or, do we actually need to speed up innovation and investments to figure out, to solve the actual problem or to make the actual problem better, which is not related to flying, but it's related to the technology with which we fly?" So, we get into that understanding and say if the market is growing, we are just slowly killing off the planet. If the assumption is the market will increase, then we rapidly so need to fix that fuel problem and come up with a better problem to flying. Right? And that could also be an incentive for behavioral change, which is always better than punishing.

If the incentive is higher to take the train ... Like in Germany, the trains don't work, so there is no incentive for people because it's not on time. So, they take the plane. If there is an incentive for train, then you change behavior, then you buy into that. So, that's kind of the dance that I'm looking for when I mean getting better problems. So, getting down to, what am I working with here? And are there things that I'm not seeing? And that's just going into that first-principle thinking.

And then, of course, it's not a perfect solution, but it's progress. You have improvements and you have better problems that lead to new problems and they're going to cause better problems. So, that's the model of discussions and a working mode that I think is very healthy to train in today's society. Whereas, I said in the beginning, we are trying to find the perfect solution to the wrong answer on, it seems, many occasions.

Shane Hastie: So, as technologist digging into those better problems, but I'm under pressure to just build the next release. How do I balance that?

Balancing the need for deep thinking and coping with current pressures [23:27]

Anders Indset: Yes. That's the challenge. I think that's the big challenge. If I can take analogy here to team sport. So, there are times in the game, if you're in the final or you're playing something, then it needs to work. So, there are things that you have your quality measurements and you're rolling out and you're on that target, then it just has to work. There's no room. We don't want a failure culture when it comes to these type of things, right? I don't want to have a failure pilot flying into New Zealand, or I don't want to have a surgeon that has a failure culture. We need perfection. And I think in terms of agility and speeding up, those are the things that we need to tighten the processes and find those things.

But then there also needs to be a playing field, like a pitch where you train, where you play around. And I think that is, even though we're under pressure, if we just keep acting and trying to react, we are not seeing the big picture, we are not seeing the different solutions. So, I'll take an example from software industry in Germany that I see with a lot of the DACH's companies. They have a crazy infrastructure where they are patching softwares of the past. They have the different structures of development models where they have a waterfall model and have all their challenges to get things to fix. So, they're so busy because it's just dripping all over the place and the systems are not working, and they're patching here and patching there, and optimizing servers. Working on a crazy infrastructure that is so far off how you would build a new system today.

And I think here it's really important to also take some radical decisions because you have to foresee where this is heading. You have to step outside and play around with different ways of looking at things. What can you take out? What can you remove instead of what can you add and build in? Those are the difficult challenges. And those happen in a different work environment. Those happen in an environment where you actually have time to think deeply and get into people and everyone is involved to challenge, without having a definition of the outcome.

So, you're coming to an open discussion and say, "Okay. This is our project. This is what we're doing. But if we go long-term on this, is this the best way to do it? Is there a way that we can take out something? What will happen if we removed parts of this?" And that's the analogy to the practice pitch in sports where you come in and you train stuff, and you do new things and new formations. You work on new relations. You do some new moves and try completely new ways to approach the game.

And I think that is where we have to figure out in businesses, when are we on that game feel where it just has to work and when do we set off time for practice for the pitch? And obviously, we don't have time for that, that you said, but this is where leaders and reflective thinkers understand the value of radical changes to how we see things and how we can completely restructure it. It could be greenfield approaches where you try to disrupt your own software, your own industry, your own business from a greenfield approach, from the outside. And from the inside, you need those leaders or even those Gallic villages where there are some rebels that tries to do something new. It's not easy, but you have to be a good leader to understand the value of that practice pitch within a high-performance environment.

Shane Hastie: Anders, a lot of really deep and good ideas here. If people want to continue the conversation, where can they find you?

Anders Indset: Yes. Thank you, Shane. I'm on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out and link up. And yes, if you're interested, obviously happy that people would read The Viking Code and give me some feedback in what they think about it. I'm obviously curious about how engineers and architects, if they can take some valuable lessons also from the book.

Shane Hastie: Thank you so much.

Anders Indset: Thank you, Shane, for having me.

Mentioned:

• Anders Indset on LinkedIn
• Book: The Viking Code