Photo by Ivan Obolensky
We sometimes look at our results, whether in business, the arts, sports, or any other pursuit, and notice that others are doing better than we are. At other times, we want to make marked improvements, but when we search for reasons why we fall short, we cannot always see them clearly. In many cases, the causes lie not in what we are doing, but in what we are not doing. What is absent is the organization and infrastructure required to attain a significantly higher level of results.
Let us look at this more closely, starting with organization.
The word means how something is arranged. It comes from the Greek organon, an implement or tool for making or doing. A literal translation is “that with which one works.” In this sense, an organization is an arrangement of parts by which actions and functions can be performed. Setting up an assembly line to manufacture a product is an example of organization. Establishing a chain of command to coordinate and execute military campaigns would be another. 1 What creates products is organization, whether it is completed sales, a brilliant work of art, a successful competition, a military campaign, or even a resolved situation. Creating anything requires organization and infrastructure.
What is infrastructure? Infrastructure refers to the public works of a country, such as its electrical grid or highway system, but it can also refer more broadly to the underlying foundation or basic framework of any organized system. It describes the organizational structure that supports and accomplishes all that needs to be done.
For example, suppose you make garden hoses or some other manufactured product. The machines that produce them, pack them, ship them, the employees involved, the economy in which your business operates, your country, your government, your customers, your bank accounts, your credit lines, your methods of payment and monetary exchange, describe the physical infrastructure that allows the business to function.
Infrastructure is not confined to the physical. The beliefs and attitudes, which you, your customers, your employees, and those of the society around you subscribe to, are also part of a more abstract infrastructure that accounts for the willingness of those inside and around your business to support it. These, along with branding and goodwill, are abstract concepts that, when damaged or absent, will harm an enterprise’s reputation despite having no physical presence.
When combined, the size, scope, and efficiency of your infrastructure (both physical and abstract) determine the quantity and quality of your results.
Note that the above applies to you as an artist creating art, or even to you as an employee.
If one wants to rise above the average or function at one’s highest level, everything connected to one’s performance must scale upward.
By scaling is meant representing something in proportional dimensions as it expands.
In physical terms, suppose you wish to build a pyramid ten feet high out of one-foot cubes. One starts with a single cube. A two-foot-high pyramid requires five cubes: a single cube at the top and four underneath. A three-foot-high cube requires nine at the bottom, four in the next layer, and one on top for a total of fifteen cubes. For every foot of height, one must add progressively more blocks at the base to support it. A ten-block high pyramid will require a base of one hundred blocks to support it—an alarming number compared to the increase in height.1
This is scaling. The reason a large company doesn’t double in size year after year is that the infrastructure needed to double its production must expand many times faster and more extensively than the growth that is observed.
This also applies to individuals.
In the individual’s case, these building blocks include the physical means of production, techniques, experience, knowledge, and relationships, such as lawyers, accountants, personal assistants, tech support, marketers, clients, and the list goes on. All together, these comprise your support systems, your organization, your infrastructure, and the networks that allow you to produce whatever it is that you make.
As a rule, if the results of your production are not in the desired range, then doubling its quality or quantity requires that the supporting infrastructure increase by a factor of four.
To emphasize this point, if you want to increase production quantity or quality by a factor of ten and reach a whole new level, your infrastructure must increase in size, scope, and efficiency by a hundredfold. How much work will that require? A lot. The effort required to develop it is daunting, to say the least, but you now understand the extent of the work involved and how much new infrastructure is needed.
This poses an interesting question: Is there a way around the need for four times the infrastructure to double performance?
The answer is yes, to some degree, and the following is why ours and other global economies have moved so decisively in the direction of connectivity, networking, and social media.
In 1993, George Gilder formulated a law attributed to Robert Metcalfe and called it Metcalfe’s Law. It posits that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of actively connected users of the system. 2
For example, a single telephone is useless, but a phone's value increases with its ability to contact others. The more people you can connect with, the more valuable your phone becomes and the more useful the network is. The extraordinary fact is that for every ten active users, the value of the network increases by one hundred rather than a mere ten. This multiplication factor explains and supports the extraordinary rise of the Internet and the values assigned to the companies that created it, support it, and work to increase its reach. This is also why influencers appear to have a disproportionate influence on social media and ultimately on society. It is not what they do that determines their value, but the vast number of people they are connected to and continue to be connected to, which translates into perceived value and disproportionately large incomes.
Given the above, connecting with others and maintaining those connections is by far the most efficient way to increase the worth of a business, unfortunate but true. It is sad because not all individuals wish to connect with others all the time, and secondly, most people who thirst for fame and fortune tend to overlook the word “active”.
“Active” signifies meaningful communication with others. How many of those thousands, if not millions, of connections are active? I doubt anyone really knows, but whether valid or not, a great deal of infrastructure and organization must exist behind the scenes to regularly support that amount of communication. In addition, connecting with others is only half of what it takes to create a sustainable business or enterprise. The other half involves physical, real-world elements that can only increase linearly, not exponentially.
Moving to a sustainable higher level of performance or production requires that all aspects connected with producing that product or performance scale upward, not just a few.
Let us return to the original problem.
What to do when our results don’t meet our expectations? The solution is to create the necessary infrastructure and to know that the amount required is much larger than one thinks; otherwise, you would already have it in place and be performing, creating, or producing at that higher level. Does that make sense?
For example, if you are a student, your infrastructure must include the time you dedicate to studying, your desire to learn, and the methods you use to study. It might mean reading not one but two textbooks on the subject, and should you want to reach the top of the class, then consider not just doubling your efforts but quadrupling them. (Note: that continuous learning in one’s field is often omitted, even by professionals.)
If you are an artist, your infrastructure includes your techniques, the time taken, the care, effort, and skill. To double one’s output or impact means that all of the above must increase by a factor of four.
In the case of professional athletes, note the extensive infrastructure that supports them. There are coaches for this and coaches for that. Every part of their day is choreographed, structured, and engineered to produce the skilled performance that generates the income necessary to provide and maintain that infrastructure. It is this infrastructure that often makes the difference between not just winning and losing, but also in reducing the impact of injuries from overuse. Infrastructure allows for sustainability. Note also that the difference between those who win at the highest level and those who merely qualify to compete with them is surprisingly small. That difference can be found to no small degree in the infrastructure that supports one and not the other.
In today’s world, extraordinary efforts, organization, and infrastructure go into producing what appears to be an effortless performance or outstanding creation, but don’t be fooled into believing it doesn’t exist just because one can’t see it. It is always there behind the scenes, like the thousands of hours of practice and study that are invisible at first glance. That, too, is a form of infrastructure.
In conclusion, if your results do not meet your expectations, examine your organization and the infrastructure that supports it, and note what is missing when compared to others who are performing better. The difference is where the solution lies. Great art requires comparable greatness in everything that makes and supports it. Could achieving excellence be that simple? Perhaps it is. The answer is to appreciate and build out what is missing.
1. Etymonline. (n.d.). In Etymonline.com. Retrieved from https://www.etymonline.com/word/organization
2. Penn, P. (2010). Metcalfe’s Law and Social Media: Size does matter. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from http://www.christopherspenn.com/2010/12/metcalfes-law-and-social-media-size-does-matter/.