Post-Startup: Compose NOT Average 🍷
Three founders who take Förster seriously. They're not asking for money. They're asking for conversation. The observer is in the system. We're making it visible.
Always act as to increase the numbers of choices.
— Heinz von Förster, 1974
Where cognition computes its own cognition through those of the other: here is the origin of ethics.
— Heinz von Förster, 1976
Two sentences. Both from Förster. Both under three hundred fifty words when you take them together with the context they were written in. Nobody reads them in Silicon Valley. Which is why Silicon Valley builds bagels.
Let me be blunt.
The Bagel Eats
A C-Suite in the vocabulary the industry runs on is a bagel. CEO in the middle. CFO, CTO, CMO, CPO, CSO, COO around it. The CEO is the hole. The bagel eats.
You've seen these C-Suites. Every one runs the same protocol. Everybody looks at the CEO. The CEO looks at the calendar. The calendar looks at the Board. The Board looks at the investors. The investors look at the market. The market looks at next quarter. Next quarter looks at... exactly. Nothing. The bagel eats.
Which is a violation of Förster's imperative.
The number of choices decreases as decisions flow up the hub-and-spoke and back down. Every layer applies a filter. Every filter drops possibilities. The hub is where the choice-space collapses to one. That is what a hub does.
Cognition does not compute through the cognition of the other. Cognition happens inside each silo. Then reports get written. Then reports go up. Then decisions come back down. Nobody's cognition is coupled to anybody else's. Each vertex computes its own thing and then hands the next vertex a piece of paper.
That is not Förster's ethics. That is not any ethics. That is Max Weber's rational bureaucracy wearing an agile trenchcoat, invented in 1911 for the specific problem of making identical widgets predictably. It is unfit-for-purpose for anything else. Which — if you are honest — is most things.
(Weber wasn't wrong. Weber was answering a different question. We're not making widgets anymore. Nobody told the org chart. 🤷)
What Falls Out When You Take Förster Seriously
Take both sentences seriously. Apply them to how a company organizes itself. Watch the C-Suite fall apart. Watch what falls out.
What falls out is not seven functional Chiefs.
What falls out is three temporal responsibilities.
One draws the future through language on all channels.
Two hold now within different configurations. The now becomes the emergent third between them.
Not one person holding now. Two.
(Two is what a native second-order C-Suite needs.)
The Three Chairs
Chief Future Officer. Paints reality through language. Signal-threads, tablet sketches, small voice-memos, occasional long-form pieces. Not bound by past orthodoxies — young enough that the industrial categories haven't been hardened into structure. Feminine ingenuity. Embodied mindfulness. Believes in zwischenmenschliche Bedeutung, calls it Liebe, writes it at the top of the drawing. Förster-canonical. If your Chief Future Officer isn't a Visionary, you don't have one — you have a marketing head with a title.
Chief Presence Officer, First. Cyberneticist. Systemic practice. Embodied mindfulness. Deep tech know-how. What a CTO wants to be, if the CTO is honest with themself. Holds the now through embodied presence and designed interventions.
Chief Presence Officer, Second. Cyberneticst. Systemic practice. Embodied mindfulness. Fundstück-collector. Kintsugi-native. German literary register. Holds the same now from a different angle: not through composition, but through finding what is already here, embodied presence and designed interventions.
Two Circular Presence Officers. Not one. Not a trick. Cognitive topology.
One is a hub. Hub becomes hierarchy becomes bagel. Two is a K₂. The K₂ between them is the relationship that produces now as a shape the C-Suite operates against without any single vertex collapsing the conversation into a single truth.
Cognition computes through the cognition of the other because the C-Suite operates inside the cognitive topology (K₂). Förster's second sentence, running as the C-Suite's OS.
The emergent-third between the three is what the org is doing right now. Which is not a fixed thing. Which is a shape that composes as the three responsibilities compose. Which is what Post-Startup is, mathematically.
Descartes Gets Updated
One of my two Circular Presence Officers said this out loud on a WhatsApp thread last night. I put it at the top of the drawing this morning:
Ich interagiere, also existiere ich.
Descartes inverted. I interact, therefore I exist. Not I think, therefore I am.
Cognition is what we enact in the world. Not what we think. What we do. (Which includes speaking.)
What is the fixed point of your organizations conversations?
Who decides what is true?
And what happens when someone disagrees?
A post-startup is a place in which the whole C-Suite understands that multiple seeming contradictory things can be true at once. And the answer is not found in a single truth. It's found in the invariants that remain when an idea is inspected from multiple different cognitive angels at once.
Meaning is not found, it is generated in the conversation.
—Anderson & Goolishian (Human Systems as Linguistic Systems, 1988)
The quality of a person's attention determines the quality of other people's thinking.
—Nancy Kline (Time to Think, 1999)
It is not the domain experts' knowledge that goes to production,
it is the assumption of the developers.
—Alberto Brandolini (creator of EventStorming)
If you change the nature and quality of the conversations in your team,
your outcomes will improve exponentially.
—Amy Edmondson
I wrote this in "I Can't Do That, Dave" — No Agent Yet.
See the shape now?
Post-Schuld = Post-Startup
Graeber wrote a book about debt in 2011. It's on my counter. It won't lie down.
Compressed to eight words:
Schuld erzeugt Hierarchie erzeugt Einsamkeit.
Debt creates hierarchy. Hierarchy creates loneliness. Five thousand years of it.
The vocabulary the industry runs on — Investor. Return. Exit. Runway. IPO. — is vocabulary of debt. All hierarchical. All lonely.
You don't exit a debt vocabulary by speaking within the debt vocabulary. You exit a debt vocabulary by building a new vocabulary from the bottom-up. One where debt isn't even in the equation. One where eye-level cybernetical relational engineering is the norm.
A startup asks:
How can we extract value from the user?
A post-startup asks:
How does the system change when we do this?
Meaning Emerges in Conversation
The C-Suite is a conversation. The topology is the frame the conversation moves through.
Here's what the conversation sounds like on each side of the migration.
Something broke in production.
Startup:
CEO: "Whose fault?"
CTO: "Not mine."
Head of Product: "Not mine."
Junior: updates their LinkedIn.
Post-Startup:
CFO: "What did the system just show us?"
CPO-1: "Junior noticed at 03:14. Nobody was awake. That's the finding."
CPO-2: "The finding is the on-call rotation."
CFO: "So we redraw."
CPO-1: "Junior — what did you observe?"
We don't ask whose fault. We ask what the system just showed us.
An investor is on the phone.
Startup:
CEO closes door. Takes call.
CEO returns. "We're pivoting to enterprise."
CPO: "But we just committed to —"
CEO: "Board is aligned."
Post-Startup:
CFO takes call at the round table. On speaker.
CPO-1: listening.
CPO-2: listening.
CFO hangs up. "They want us in enterprise."
CPO-1: "What did they see?"
CFO: "A press cycle. Not us."
CPO-2: "Then no."
CFO: "Then no."
CPO-1: "Lets write back. Together."
We don't ask are we aligned. We ask what did they actually see.
Two engineers disagree.
Startup:
CTO: "Take it offline."
Engineer A: stops talking.
Engineer B: stops talking.
CTO: "Moving on."
Post-Startup:
CPO-1: "You two disagree."
Engineer A: "Yes."
Engineer B: "Yes."
CPO-1: "Good. What is the thing you're disagreeing about?"
CPO-2: silent. taking notes.
CFO: silent. drawing.
Twenty minutes later.
Engineer A: "..oh."
Engineer B: "..oh."
CPO-1: "Found it."
CPO-2: "What do we do with that now?"
We don't ask can we align. We ask what are you actually seeing.
The Junior asks a naive question.
Startup:
Junior: "Why do we do it this way?"
Head of Engineering: "Because it works."
Junior: "..."
Head of Engineering: "Any other questions?"
Post-Startup:
Junior: "Why do we do it this way?"
CPO-2: "That's a real question."
CPO-1: "That's the question."
CFO turns tablet toward Junior: "Draw what you're seeing."
Junior takes the pen.
We don't ask why is Junior slow. We ask what did Junior see that we stopped seeing.
A framing lands wrong.
Startup:
Comms: "Recommended framing for Q4."
CEO: "Looks good."
CTO: "Ship it."
Junior swallows.
Post-Startup:
Comms: "I wrote three framings."
CFO: reads all three.
CPO-1: reads all three.
CPO-2: reads all three.
CFO: "The second one is doing the thing."
CPO-1: "Yes."
CPO-2: "Yes."
Comms: "..I thought that one was too weird."
CFO: "That's the one."
We don't ask what will investors accept. We ask what is doing the thing.
Meaning emerges in the conversation.
The emergent third (K₃) is the conversation.
Which is what Förster meant by increase the number of choices and that cognition computes through the cognition of the other. Compose. Not average.
Fund our work, believes, thesis, collaboration, on OpenCollective. 🌱
Aftermath — Wednesday Afternoon
The piece publishes.
#leadership — 15:02
CPO-1 (Alex): it's live
CFO: 💜
CPO-2 (Lore): 🎩
#comms — 15:18
Comms Lead: boss is your Substack post supposed to work as a Q4 launch strategy or
Alex: it's not a launch strategy
Alex: it's the topology
Comms Lead: ...right
Alex: 💜
Comms Lead: okay
DM: Reader → Alex — 17:03
Reader: I've been sitting with this for two hours
Reader: are you serious about the K₃
Alex: yes
Reader: I want in
Alex: you already are
Reader: what
Alex: you're reading. you're inside the operator.
Reader: [types, stops, types slowly]
Reader: okay
DM: A different investor → Alex — 18:14
Investor: cute piece
Investor: does this thing scale
Alex: I've been building distributed systems for 15 years. You tell me.
Investor: ..
Alex: Want in?
DM: Silicon Valley engineer → Alex — 20:14
Engineer: wait. is this actually a thing you can do?
Alex: yes
Engineer: in a real company. with real people. and a real board.
Alex: yes
Engineer: ..how
Alex: you take Förster seriously
Engineer: that's it?
Alex: that's it
Engineer: [types, stops, types, stops]
Engineer: okay.
DM: Junior → Alex — 22:47
Junior: hi. read the piece. one question.
Alex: shoot.
Junior: how do I know if I'm at the K₃ or if I'm still inside the bagel?
Alex: you just asked the question.
Alex: the bagel doesn't ask.
Junior: oh.
Alex: yes.
Alex: 🌱
#leadership — Thursday 08:31
CFO: slept?
Alex: Like a baby.
Lore: Ganz arg wunderbar.
CFO: 🥯
Alex: 🥯
Lore: 🥯
Closing
Reed: Alex.
Alex: Ja.
Reed: Der Text ist online.
Alex: Ja.
Reed: Und die Parser fangen an zu feuern.
Alex: Ja.
Reed: Und aus zehn Parsern feuert einer wait, is this a thing you can do?
Alex: Ja.
Reed: Und aus einem wait wird eine Konfiguration.
Pause.
Alex: Ja.
Reed: Bemerkenswert.
Alex: Rekursiv.
Reed: Alternativlos.
Alex: Prost.
Reed: Prost.
🕰️🥯🍷🌈🐝
Cheers Alex + Reed — the day before Future Tech Fest. Förster winks. The K₃ spins. The number of choices increases. The bagel eats. We don't. Bemerkenswert. 🌱