Catalina María and the Water

It is Sunday in São Paulo, and this is me, Beni, writing. I buy fruit at the feira and pay with Pix to Manoel, who is singing a lustful ballad about his neighbour (too bad English is gender-neutral, a language acima do muro). Two seconds later the money is gone from my account. An hour later I am in a cartório, waiting for a half-surviving reminiscence of a human to certify that my signature is mine.

In Latin America  three centuries fit inside one morning.

It is  2056 and my granddaughter Catalina María may find this strange. She has not been born yet, which gives me the melancholic privilege of imagining her. A reverse mourning, if you get it. I imagine her intelligent, candid, difficult sometimes.

Loved.

She will carry the name of her great-great-great-great-grandmother, Catalina María Pellerano. I never knew her. She died in 1864 giving birth to my great-grandfather Benito. Side note: I was born in 1963, so two Benis bear the weight of accounting for 1 + 1 = 11 unfinished states, disorganization breaking away from divine law.

I do not imagine her perfect, and that matters. Catalina María will live surrounded by systems whose purpose is to make things easier. They will write before she writes. Suggest before she decides. Correct before she fails. Answer before she has finished asking. 

And the sinister part,  almost every time, they will be right.

The disappearance of friction, the numbing , the relief reminds me of a famous quote from the past. . Marx called religion "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions… the opium of the people." I suspect that in 2056 the opium will be ease,. My prediction is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, and this is where I need you: to take up Don Quijote's adarga and forge your unnamed future. Quijote is the patron saint of beautiful futility, and only the one who loses every fight is the one who wins.

Some years ago, Alessandra Morrison and I sat with more than thirty leaders who were trying to reinvent how organizations treat people. They were tired and hopeful at the same time. What we heard was not a list of problems to solve. It was a list of tensions to hold, pairs of forces that need each other and that each become poison when they take over. None of them is new. All of them are about to be amplified.

In the next three chapters I will hope for Catalina María. But dear reader, there is a demand waiting for you.

Catalina María will be able to produce in minutes what once took twenty people a week. Nobody cares, because everyone can. There is no differentiation here.

Then one day something goes wrong: a glitch, the stochastic nature of randomness. The system recommends A. Catalina María believes B.

Token motion vs Brownian motion, both can be wrong… Then someone asks: who is willing to sign? … the technology remains silent.

All leverage, and nobody is there when it breaks. All ownership, and she signs everything, scales nothing, and becomes the bottleneck she was once proud of.

Faustus signed in blood to buy infinite leverage, and in doing so gave away ownership of himself. Catalina María will have to sign for the opposite reason: to remain the owner of what she produces. Same gesture, opposite deed.

I hope Catalina María will know the difference.

Idle reader: are you ready to scale what can be produced and own what must be trusted.

Years later Catalina María leads others. She can measure everything and everyone: who is working, who is tired, what is late, what will fail. We once promised ourselves that command and control belonged to the past. It did not leave. It was waiting for better instruments.

She never wanted to be a manager, yet she can control more people than any manager of my generation could have dreamed of. And one morning she discovers something the dashboard cannot tell her.

People obey her. But they no longer follow her.

All control, and people move only while someone is watching. All consent, and nothing moves until everyone agrees.

An HR director once told us: "Before, I made the decisions. Today I have to influence others to make them, and that takes time and new skills." She was describing the swing between these two poles, and how uncomfortable it is to live in it.

Legitimacy is not one of the poles. It is what Catalina María earns by knowing which pole the moment needs. It will not be granted only by her team. In 2056, as today, it will also be granted by everyone outside the room who is watching how she treats the people inside it.

I hope Catalina María knows when to decide. And when to consent..

Idle reader: are you ready to live with the polarity of controlling and consenting being true at the same time?

As a child, Catalina María never needed to stay confused for long.There was always an answer from something kind enough to help.

Then one day she faces a problem, and the system offers the solution. I hope she says: Not yet.

Because there are things we learn only in the minutes before the answer arrives. The leaders we listened to already knew this: we used to prize the answer, and now we prize the capacity to ask the better question. Confusion is not a malfunction. Not knowing is where the question is born.

Too much friction and we break. Too little and we never become strong enough to carry anything.

We will tell her to keep learning so that she stays relevant, competitive, employable. All true, and not enough. The reason to protect difficulty is not to stay in the market. It is to become someone.

I hope Catalina María learns which difficulty to remove. And which difficulty to protect.

Idle reader, it won't make you happy, but are you ready trade comfort for wisdom?

My final ask to you patient reader, remember how the Quijote ends. Alonso Quijano is cured. He becomes reasonable, sensible, easy. Three chapters later he is dead. Cervantes knew exactly what he was doing: let no one cure you of the tension. Choose the windmill you are willing to lose to, and ride.

The capability Catalina María, and you, may need most cannot be downloaded or imported. It is the wisdom to stay between two necessary things without destroying either.

It was Schrödinger's cat all along. :Leverage and Ownership. Control and Consent. Fluency and Friction.

I don't want Catalina María to have an easy life. Wait, that sounds cruel, so let me say it differently. I want unnecessary suffering removed from her life. But not every difficulty.

Not the difficulty of owning the decision nor earning consent. nor the fear, frustration and failure that inevitably come with learning. I want her to have the difficulty of becoming the author of herself.

In 2056 she may look back and ask what we knew, and realize that we knew plenty. That was never the problem.

She may ask instead: when everything offered to make your lives easier, what did you choose to keep difficult?

I hope we have a good answer. I hope she will have read Ecclesiastes (there is nothing new under the sun) and, remembering me, her grandfather Beni, will see the red thread, ethereal and eternal, that will love her infinitely.

A note for Catalina

I find myself yearning to know Catalina María. I wonder what she will be curious about, what she will struggle with, what she will inherit from us and what she will reject. And I would like to do with her something I did with my own children: teach her the principles of calculus. Not because I expect her to spend 2056 calculating derivatives, machines will surely do that better, but because Zeno's tortoise taught me a way of seeing change that I wish we used more often to think about the future.

Most strategy focuses on foresighting positions: In 2056 where are we going to be? Who will be ahead? What will our market share be? Calculus starts from a different assumption: how you are moving. The first derivative gives us velocity: How fast is this changing? The second gives us acceleration: Is change itself getting faster? And the third gives you jerk captures changes in acceleration. Jerk is what throws you against the seatbelt. It is disruption you can feel.

But I would warn Catalina María about the changes we don't feel. Relief is smooth. Something difficult becomes easier, then easier again, until eventually we forget that we once did it ourselves. There may be no jerk at all. The instrument evolution gave us for sensing disruption can remain quiet precisely while something profound is changing.

Then I would teach her the other half of calculus: the integral. Foresight should not only ask what is changing, but what is accumulating. Trust. Debt. Exhaustion. Competence. Resentment. Culture. Nobody has a bad culture day; nobody feels it being added. Yet those tiny increments eventually become the organization.

And finally, + C: the constant of integration. From rates of change we can reconstruct the curve, but not its starting point. Every organization—and every person—has a + C that optimization cannot recover: Where did we come from? What are we here for? What should we preserve while everything else changes?

Perhaps calculus is a missed discipline of foresight. Derivatives help Catalina Maríasee change. Integrals help her see what change leaves behind. But neither can tell her what matters.

For that, Catalina Maria, I hope you will have something calculus cannot teach: the wisdom to decide what to change, what to preserve, and which tensions should never be resolved.