Different Bests in Different Contexts

Another take on 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract

First published April 2017. I used to travel with a bag containing the three balls. It was such a pain inflating & deflating them that I gave up on the metaphor.

Heart-Tugging Childhood Reminiscence

A sea of shouting, running, jostling, and playing. My first day of first grade was overwhelming. I watched, back to a stucco wall, and tried to figure out what was going on. (This was at the old Miramonte school on Villa near Shoreline which was called Bailey back then but I digress.)

The game on the playground was kickball, a kind of baseball-but-with-kicking. I watched the whole first recess then spent the time until lunch trying to figure out the rules. At after-lunch recess (why don’t we have recess at work?), I was sure I understood. I wandered onto the field.The next time the ball came my way I picked it up and started running the bases.

Wrong. The kids told me, in unmistakable terms, that what I was doing was against the rules. Someone grabbed the ball. Someone else pushed me. I went back and leaned up against the wall, humiliated and angry and confused.

I eventually got good at kickball, moving up the pecking order until I was one of the people choosing teams. What never left me was that feeling of wanting to see the patterns, wanting to understand the rules, and fearing that I hadn’t really got it yet.

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Seemingly Unrelated Scenario

Imagine you and your team are on a big grassy field with white lines painted on it. There’s a ball and an opposing team. You pick up the ball.“Fweet!” goes the umpire in the striped shirt. You can’t touch it with your hands, you have to kick it.

“Fweet!” you can’t stand there. “Fweet!” now you have to throw it. “Fweet!” not like that. Eventually, through trial and error and fweet you figure it out—the rules, the strategy, the scoring. You start to win.

“Fweet! Fweet!” the umpire takes you to another part of the field. There is another ball and another opposing team. You kick it, like you just did. “Fweet!” gotta throw it first. “Fweet!” “Fweet!” “Fweet!” you’re back to losing. You’re not even good enough to be losing. You’re just thrashing around.

Eventually you figure out this set of rules. You figure out basic strategy. Some of the people who were great at the first game can’t contribute to this game. You need some new people. You start winning.

“Fweet! Fweet!” new part of the field, new opposing team, new ball. Same deal. Constant rule violations. Constant attempts to figure out the actualrules. And eventually, yes, understanding and strategy and success. It begins, though, with attempts to use what you learned from the previousgame. Those rules just don’t apply, except at the most basic level: there’s a ball, there’s a score, there’s opposition.

Now things get interesting. You and your team are playing all three games at once on different parts of the field. Players move back and forth according to their preferences, switching rules and strategy as they move.

Surprising Connection of Both to Work

Good advice or best advice? Or recipe for disaster? It depends. “Move Fast and Break Things” is a rule that makes sense in one game. So does “Ruthless Execution”. Just not in the same game.

It took me five years of participating and observing at Facebook to realize that they really had three games, three games with rules as different as rugby, football, and American football. Each game had “rules”, a “score”, and an “opponent”.

• Explore—The opponent in the Explore game is indifference. The strategy/feature/tiny twist that overcomes indifference is likely to be a surprise. The optimal strategy is to experiment quickly, informing each round of experiments with what you learned from the previous round.

• Expand—The opponent in the Expand game is scale. Bottlenecks are surprises. You can’t plan for them, you can only shine your headlights far enough forward that you see the next bottleneck in time.

• Extract—The opponent in the Extract game is inefficiency. You’ve scaled now. You need to extract “profits” (could be engagement, attention, or actual money) to fund the next round of explorations.

Call to Action

Development works best when we acknowledge the three games. We have ways of the games informally—hackathon & hackamonth are for exploring, lockdown is for expanding, roadmaps are for extracting—but we don’t consistently apply different strategies to different games. We have ruthless executors trying to get first releases just right. We have break-thingers breaking things we can’t afford to break. We have wild experimenters blind to bottlenecks until it’s too late.