Jorge Arango Blog

Are you more of an analytical or a holistic thinker? The answer might depend on the culture in which you were raised — and will impact your ability to gain traction. In episode 44 of Traction Heroes, Harry read a short segment from Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, which argues that people in “WEIRD” societies — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — tend to think more analytically than holistically.

In Duly Noted, I warned of the allure of meta-work: the work we do to enable “real” work. Writing a paper is work; setting up and maintaining your writing environment is meta-work. Meta-work is important, but fiddling with tools is an occupational hazard. At least it was, until AI agents came along. I’ve wasted countless hours testing new to do apps, distraction-free editors, Obsidian plugins, citation managers, read-it-later apps, etc. Each promises to unlock productivity.

How do you delegate authority while maintaining coherence? That was the question at the core of Traction Heroes episode 43. It’s especially tricky in large organizations. Leaders can go about it one of two ways: top-down and bottom-up. The first is tricky, since there’s only so much leaders can do. The larger the org, the more likely they’ll lose touch with conditions on the ground. Bottom-up is preferable, but that’s where you risk incoherence. If everyone can do whatever they want, the org can drift.

You’ve heard this story many times. An entrepreneur starts a company with a passionate vision to change the world: giving people healthier food choices, marketing a revolutionary new technology, curing a chronic illness. Eventually, they lose control of the company to entities with less noble motives. The founder’s beautiful vision succumbs to destructive extraction.

My friend Stefanie Hutka has an upcoming book called What Your Machines Should Do. It’s about how organizations can use automation more intentionally — that is, to support their strategic agendas. Greg and I both read a preprint and were pleased to discuss it with Stef in the first of our Unfinishe_ Conversations, a new series about how leaders can successfully navigate the current moment. One of the main takeaways: AI is an accelerant. It’ll get things moving faster.

I’ve long known about techniques for giving good feedback. But it hadn’t occurred to be that knowing how to receive feedback matters too — and that the more you know about giving feedback might make you worse at receiving it. Why? As Harry put it in episode 42 of Traction Heroes, you may become ‘technique-y’. It’s also possible to over-intellectualize it. I learned about the technical side of feedback by teaching systems thinking in graduate school.

It’s been fifty years since information architecture’s coming out party in Philadelphia. Alas, the discipline is still widely misunderstood. The main obstacle? The very thing that brought it to many people’s attention: the World Wide Web. I’d venture most people who’ve heard the phrase ‘information architecture’ have done so in the context of designing website navigation systems. That’s understandable: The web is a huge deal and IA was exactly what it needed early in its development.

Smart businesses are realizing they don’t have to blow their budgets on frontier AI. At least, that’s the conclusion of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Models come in different levels of cleverness, and the “smartest” cost more. But not all tasks require the highest level of intelligence. A mix of models will give you the biggest bang for your buck, at the expense of upfront architecture.

How can craft help you gain traction? That was the question Harry and I explored in episode 41 of Traction Heroes. I brought to the conversation a short reading from a book that had a big impact on my career, Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design: Games must be designed, but computers must be programmed. Both skills are rare and difficult to acquire, and their combination in one person is even more rare.

We all work within intractably large and complex systems. How much agency do we really have? This was the question Harry and I explored on episode 40 of the Traction Heroes podcast. Harry read a passage from Eric Ries’s new book, Incorruptible (which I haven’t read.) It starts by citing John Steinbeck’s story of depression-era farmers dealing with bank officers who’ve been rendered impersonal as agents of a large organization.