I’ve had this minor fixation on a pattern I’ve observed in the world, and I find it fascinating that this seems to be repeated so much and in so many different areas of our lives.

This might eventually become fodder for some kind of more deliberate study or research project, but for now I want to ramble a little.

I’ve observed what could be summarized as three phases which seem to affect most systems that transition between different humans running these systems. In a nutshell, these phases could be identified as “introduction,” “maintenance,” and “decay.”

This idea came to me from studying post-industrial history, mainly, but I began to notice it everywhere.

Originally, I was curious: “why does it seem like most family-owned business fail after about 3 generations?”

I spent some time looking up histories of various companies, all of which had become defunct, and while businesses often fail for all kinds of reasons, I noticed what seemed to me to be an interesting trend: these periods of system transition from one “system custodian” to the next almost always resulted in loss of knowledge, expertise, or integrity, each of which ultimately contributed to dooming the business.

And it’s not just businesses but… all KINDS of things. Countries, video game franchises, TV/film franchises. The more I thought about it, the more I saw this pattern repeated.

As best as I understand it, you could describe it this way:

In the first generation, the “introduction phase,” everything is still trial and error to some extent, people are figuring out what works, and then building on that. You might try 5, 10, 20 different things, and you would likely discard everything that doesn’t work, and you’d likely only continue doing what worked, but this record of attempts and failures, the trials and errors, they are rarely logged and recorded. So as our founders are establishing these systems, they lay out these foundations without necessarily trying to record everything they are doing, and WHY every decision is made. That “why” is important.

Sooner or later, people get old and either die or decide to retire, so there comes a day that every system either transfers to the administration of a new person or group, or it ceases to exist (or at least, to be maintained). Once the people who built the initial system have all transitioned away from the system, it will be run by the “maintenance” phase crew. This generation of administrators over the system know what to do, but they don’t necessarily know why they should do everything they should do, and why they do not do the things they do not do. They say that the people who handed them over the system instructed them to do this or that, and so they do. They keep the system functioning, but often without much in the way of developing anything new. Maybe they try new things but repeat past mistakes? Maybe they try new things and are discouraged by failure where the “introduction phase” administrators weren’t, but either way, you generally see innovation stifled in this phase.

That being said, none of these phases are definitive states, this is all much more like a spectrum. It’s likely that any system has many people involved in its upkeep, so you’ll rarely have an entire system shift in a moment from one phase to the next, it has a lot more to do with “turnover” of one kind or another, either through death or retirement or job changes or loss of interest or whatever. As the population of the administrators changes from being the “introduction” group to the “maintenance” group, you’ll likely see fewer and fewer of the original administrators present.

Eventually, the “maintenance” group also leaves and is replaced by either yet another “maintenance” group, or the “decay” group. I am inclined to assume that the “maintenance” phase of any system could be prolonged indefinitely as long as procedures are recorded, honored, and understood, but I also think that this rarely actually happens in practice. Sooner or later, communication breaks down.

I think what happens much more often is that as these “maintenance” administrators leave their roles, they are replaced by new administrators who are either never equipped to continue the “maintenance” phase, or for their own reasons they decide that doing things different is better. Sometimes you see this in companies that buy out a business, liquidate as much as possible, sell their stocks and then bankrupt the company, but you see the same thing in other family-owned businesses as well.

Baker’s, a Southern California burger chain, recently declined in quality and has seen a huge influx of negative reviews, because the previous owner’s kid (s) took over the business and started using lower quality ingredients. Whether we’re dealing with Baker’s, or Bain Capital, there are some overt trends that many now refer to as “enshittification,” but what if this isn’t some modern way of milking us for every cent, but instead something deeper in human psychology?

Something we’re innately prone to?

Is it a modern idea that systems should be immortal? That systems should outlast people, and should never really require revision or overhaul?

The United States seems another possible example. Are we entering, as a nation, our “decay” phase? Have we lost so many who cared to uphold the original intent behind the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness? Most of our current political representatives seem to have more in common with the Baker’s heads, sabotaging their own legacy for profit.

Alternatively, maybe we can stave off this “decay” phase through a continuation of the trial and error practices that are typically used in the “introduction” phases by the founding administrators. Just because a system works and is stable is no reason that you cannot still try other things to see if they result in improvements or not.

These kinds of experiments have innate costs and do not always result in any kind of profit–if anything they are often sunk costs with no material value, but could it be possible that by experimenting and verifying that your best practices, identified as “best” some 30-50 years earlier, are still actually “BEST” practices?

Our environments shift around us constantly, new people enter and leave our ecosystems, and talent is ever-changing. Just the human element of it all is enough to mean that everything is ALWAYS in a state of flux, but we enter the “maintenance” phase and we decide that just sticking to the plan, doing what’s safe, and making money is best. We get complacent. We stagnate. We lose the ability to explain why this or why that, how one thing is better ore worse than the other, and what EXACTLY happens when you pull that lever. And eventually those in the “decay” phase take over and lack any sentimentality toward that which they oversee, so they use it to further their own ends, rather than to try and uphold the integrity of the system–they didn’t build the system in the first place, so they have no real concept of how delicate it is or what would break it. They chase only profit, when malignant, or apathy when benign.

You see this with parents and families, too.

My dad was treated pretty poorly by his dad growing up, and so my dad never repeated the same mistreatments of me that he was subjected to by his father. But that doesn’t mean he was perfect; in knowing only specific behaviors to avoid, he wasn’t necessarily equipped to know the best way to handle every situation so he still made mistakes and handled things in his way. He was taught how to be a father mainly be being shown what NOT to do, his primary role-model for fatherhood was his grandfather, but he died when my dad was relatively young.

If we re-framed this as a series of systems, my great grandfather would have been essentially one of the “introduction phase” administrators, who actually nourished and improved the system. My grandfather served more as a “maintenance/decay” administrator over our family system, and so naturally when my dad’s dad failed to properly relay how to be an adequate father, the only option available was to return to trial and error. He was never provided with the “documentation” to know how to maintain the system. He had to figure things out on his own. Trial and error.

And just like I’ve observed that my grandfather failed to live up to the kindness and decency of his father, my mom’s mom was raised by a lovely, decent women, but failed to actually embody any of those traits when she became a parent/adult herself.

And so similarly, mom was raised with her only same-sex model of parenthood coming from her grandmother, because her mother had no interest in embracing anything resembling familial bond.

I’ve observed this in people I know well, even now. One of my dearest friends was neglected and mistreated by his parents for his entire life, and now that he has his own son I know it was difficult for him to learn how to be a better parent than he ever was provided, but it has required incredible effort because he was never equipped with that information from any first-hand source, he would have only seen it from sitcoms and maybe friends’ homes. (And I believe he succeeded because he refused to accept that failure was an option; he would not reproduce the mistakes of his parents, no matter how hard it was, and he and his wife succeeded in raising a brilliant young man.)

I know a woman who is an incredible mother, decent and kind, but her now-adult children have no appreciation for her, and frequently take advantage of her kindness so they can be irresponsible and neglect their own children to go out and have fun. I fear that the future that awaits them is much the same as what my parents went through–a kindly/benevolent maternal/paternal grandparent, but lacking real parental support. People destined to belong to the “decay” phase of their system, unless they are willing to experiment with methods they were never taught or exposed to. A return to trial and error.

We all move in these systems. They are inescapable.

But they have these patterns, they follow semi-predictable trajectories.

If you did not create a system, then you must do one of two things, if not both, in order to allow that system to thrive (especially once you exit the direct administration of the system):

• Record what works, and pass along the information to those who come after you
• Record what doesn’t work, and why, and pass THAT along to those that come after you
  • For both of the above, assume nothing–you can’t predict what information will be “given” 20 years from now, and what might be lost to “common sense”. Even seemingly basic things should be recorded, because they may not always be “basic.”
• Innovate. Experiment. Never, ever stop. Some will fail, maybe most. But it is better to fail 99 times and succeed once than to never try at all.

Most importantly, there needs to be some kind of post-industrial reckoning that despite our best efforts to make humans all perfectly interchangeable with the introduction of the assembly line, we actually aren’t. When a company or a family or a country invests in someone who is upholding that system, that person cannot simply be discarded and replaced with some other figure who can just as easily do everything their predecessor did.

Humans are among the “lossy-est” forms of data transmission in this world. We can store petabytes of information, available for near-instantaneous recall, but TRANSFERRING that data into another being is nearly impossible. It’s not a carbon-copy, rather it’s the receipts in your check-book that barely legibly reproduce what you wrote. The faintest impression of the original.

I wonder if a society that is designed around the idea that everyone is replaceable has inculcated the idea that we are replaceable in all facets of life?

If perhaps many of us subscribe to the idea of our own replace-ability. If perhaps by believing that we contribute nothing of unique value, we are incapable of innovating–of making any kind of meaningful contribution to whatever “system” we find ourselves in.

If we don’t all just accept ourselves as buoys in the current, and not boats with rudders.

If you believe your contributions are no better than anyone else’s; if you believe, like the company does, that you could be replaced by anyone, at any time, then what incentive would you have to innovate, or to try and uphold something bigger than you?

Could it be that by accepting this post-modern, post-industrial concept of the self as being yet another cog in the machine we are actually defacing our human integrity, and squandering our actual potential?

I believe that human potential is virtually limitless–it is limited only by those limits we accept internally, the ways in which we tell ourselves we are not good enough. A man who says and truly believes “I can do anything” likely can.

So is the converse true? If you tell enough people that they are only good for whatever you can use them for, to then be discarded and replaced, will they internalize these ideas and refuse to uphold whatever systems they are put in charge of administering?

If they are all replaceable, if nobody is special or unique or particularly talented, why would anyone assume their contributions would be meaningful? Why would they do anything at all besides the bare minimum to keep the system stable?

How do we disrupt this tendency? How do we ameliorate the deleterious effect of turnover in systems–the loss of human data, experience, and information?

I wish I had an answer, but this… this pattern, this tendency, it’s been on my mind.

Anyway, if anyone took the time to read this madness, I’m sorry to have wasted your time, but maybe I said something you found interesting? Or maybe you were in the bathroom and didn’t have better reading material available. Either way, I apologize to have deceived you into spending time on this, I mostly typed it out so I could get it out of my head and move on to other thoughts. I hope the rest of your day is more productively spent, and I hope you’re well. Take care of yourself, and go out there and make something. Anything! Just do it. (but boooo, Nike, boooo)

-E