Last week this newsletter turned two years old 🥳. I have written 212K words, or just under 800 pages of a book, across 96 different weekly editions.
Thanks for your continued support 😁 We’re just getting started!
I had a great three-hour coffee chat with a new friend this past week. One interesting line of discussion was my database of 25K book highlights, and the 3.2 million words in my Obsidian vault. There’s a lot of information in there! I’d like an easier way to access it with AI, but I prefer it to be private, which isn’t easy to do.
The conversation with my friend was the spark I needed. When I got home, I sat down to figure it out, using AI. Like most projects, I tried new things, and it wasn’t straightforward. Mistakes were made, but in the end, it worked!
The first results were dumb. The system gave really bad answers, or couldn’t find information I knew was in there. I had to start making tweaks.
The good news and bad news of this project are the same: I don’t know what I’m doing. 🤣
That’s great because I was able to get this done without having to know how. It’s also bad because I wouldn’t be able to teach someone else. I’d just be like, “use AI and figure it out.”
That said, it reminds me of when I learned HTML in the 90s by right-clicking to “view source” on websites I liked. This enabled me to see the code that accomplished the result.
This project was similar. Even if the AI is walking me through the steps, I am learning along the way.
Eventually I got good results with the project. It all centers around Ollama and Python, and I use Raycast to invoke it. So all it takes is a hotkey and I’m talking with my notes.
I now have YEARS of notes and all my book highlights embedded, vectorized, and available to interact with via AI. No internet connection needed. Everything stays local.
This seems like a great solution for health stuff, journaling, or anything else you really don’t want to be sending to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. I can load information in Obsidian, re-index the vault, and then get the power of AI with full privacy. Not bad!
If you’ve done any interesting AI experiments lately, I’d love to hear it. heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Kevin
A Quote
“
Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.
— Scott Young in "Ultralearning"
Three Things
1 - 🧠 mymind App This app sits in the “second brain” space, but is a lot more free-form. Instead of structured notes, you’re just throwing in thoughts, bookmarks, articles, and anything else you find while you’re working. It relies on search and discovery to make sense of it. My brain needs more structure, but I wanted to share it in case this would work well for you!
2 - 💿 Roadwork Rappin’ by Aesop Rock Aesop Rock can rap about anything. This is a bop no matter your age, although having read construction books to children may be a factor. I listened to this on repeat while cooking breakfast on the day it came out.
3 - 🛗 Advice from Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake Frank Slootman, author of “Amp It Up,” is inspiring in his tenacity and speed. I love his analogy for choosing a career and industry as "getting into an elevator," and you want to get into an elevator going up. You’re not more powerful than market trends. You’ll have an easier time in your career if you go where there’s growth, not stagnation or shrinkage.
(Enjoy this 6️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive Freedom in the Frame
Do you know the classic image of really small kids playing soccer? All the kids on the field swarm the ball, with no regard to position or overall strategy.
The very same things happens with your team unless you’re consciously designing around it.
A mental model called “Freedom in the Frame” can help us prevent this type of outcome. This is important because running your team or company like kids soccer produces bad outcomes and is highly inefficient.
The term comes from AG Lafley’s book, “Playing to Win.” In it, he’s specifically talking about the interconnection of strategy throughout a company that he calls a “choice cascade framework.” In this cascade, different ‘frames’ are created, and people are given ‘freedom’ within these frames.
It’s a powerful mental model that can be applied outside of the way Mr. Lafley introduced it. Applying this to org. design can make people happier and increase efficiency - win win!
What is Freedom in the Frame?
As a quick aside, I’ve become to dislike the term “first principles” because it’s so overused. A host of a podcast will ask, “How did you solve [blah blah blah]?” and the guest will say, “Well, we started with first principles…” - and then often proceed to describe something that has nothing to do with first principles.
THAT SAID, the concept of first principles are really important because you can solve novel problems by having a good library of concepts that you use to build from the ground up.
"Freedom in the Frame" is one of those building blocks. It’s so simple, there’s actually not much to explain!
There are two steps to creating frames: 1 - Define the outer boundary. 2 - Carve up the inside into frames.
Ta da! Frames.
Et voila; that’s it!
Once you have frames defined, next you need to establish how entities operate within those frames - the ‘freedom’ part.
Think back to the kids soccer example. I remember briefly playing soccer when I was a kid, and they painted little rectangles all over the field, placing one player from each team inside. Those kids were ‘free’ to play however they wanted, as long as they stayed within the ‘frame.’
I’ll get into the nuance around how frames can operate with each other, but first let me share a few examples of where this concept appears in real life.
Applications of Freedom in the Frame
One of the cool things about discovering building blocks like “Freedom in the Frame” is that you can start to see it all over the place.
Sports I haven’t thought through every team sport, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of one that didn’t look like an example of freedom in the frame. Take baseball in the US. On defense, you’ve got nine players on the field. They each operate in a specific location and have certain actions they take. You won’t find them all bunched up in the infield by the pitcher. Everyone is free to operate in their own frame.
Programs of Work One of my favorite examples of this was from my time at Atlassian; something I called “Bingo 16.” We had a lot of programs we were trying to deliver. I worked with our stakeholders to define the 16 most important ones. This group of programs was our outer boundary. Then within it, we created each of the 16 programs as a frame. Each program was given a leader, team members, and success measures. Off they ran - free to pursue the goal as they saw fit.
Microservices Software development used to have one large code block referred to as the monolith. Everyone on the team had to interact with this large monolith. It was hard to troubleshoot, and created a lot of bugs. Later, modern development moved towards microservices, where each service was given a frame to operate within, and they spoke to each other via API. This decoupled teams and allowed for faster development and fewer issues.
Although there are many applications of this mental model, I’ll focus the rest of the newsletter to applying it to org. design. How can we think about this when setting our teams up for efficient execution?
“Teams become productive when they are operating in a “container” with clear goals, rules, and time frames that are fair (i.e., everyone has to follow them) and reasonable. With all of the complexity involved in human dynamics, reducing some of that variety without stifling creativity or freedom paves the way for much faster progress.” - David Komlos in “Cracking Complexity”
Applying Frames as You Scale
There are many small companies where roles are more broad, and defined by inertia. Meaning, someone starts doing something, then continues doing it, and therefore it becomes part of their role.
This is usually appropriate in small companies, where defining frames too soon can cause more problems than it solves. However, many companies hold onto this method for way too long.
If you don’t define frames, your company looks like a kids soccer team. Everyone’s swarming, people aren’t clear on what success looks like, and processes suffer.
If you’re a three person company, you don’t really need to be too structured about your definition of frames. After three, it starts getting more relevant. Once you’re 10 people, you really need to create the clarity and define frames (roles, in this case) clearly.
After 10 people you’re starting to get managers, and here you need to go beyond roles to define departments. What is each group responsible for?
Once you start setting up departments, then the game of defining frames continues at different scales forever. You might have a large holding company that has several companies under their umbrella. Those companies might be separated into large divisions. Those divisions will each have departments, teams, squads, etc.
With "Freedom in the Frame," it's turtles all the way down.
Setting Autonomy
Going back to the ‘freedom’ aspect of this concept, a central premise is that you’re defining frames in order to give relative autonomy within those frames. As you scale, no one person can cover the breadth and complexity inherent in so many frames (although many leaders try!), so the solution is to create autonomy.
But how exactly do you create conditions for autonomy? After all, autonomy doesn’t mean “do whatever the heck you want.” That is chaos.
We avoid chaos, but maintain autonomy, by creating constraint in the form of three things:
Defining Responsibilities Clarify what the team owns and, just as importantly, what they don’t. This sets boundaries for decision-making and keeps work focused on the team’s unique contribution to the business.
Setting Goals Establish the outcomes the team is aiming for. Goals translate responsibility into measurable success, showing whether the team’s efforts are moving the business in the right direction.
Defining Interconnections Identify the upstream inputs the team depends on, and the downstream outputs others depend on. Clear interconnections ensure the right information, timing, and handoffs happen between teams.
“Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them. If they forsake this principle and operate independently or work against each other, the results can be catastrophic to the overall team’s performance.”
In applying "Freedom in the Frame," you’re not just saying “you’re the marketing department” and then walking away.
You’re saying, “you’re the marketing department,” and you are: - Responsible for generating market awareness and qualified demand. - With goals to generate X marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) per quarter that convert to sales opportunities at ≥ Y%, supporting $Z in pipeline contribution. - Who works with product to craft campaigns, and sales to align on the handoff process.
Marketing has alllllll sorts of autonomy in here. They define the channels, the mix between channels, the creative strategies to apply, who they hire, their own org. structure, etc.
Constraining the team in this way is how you set the conditions that allow people to flourish, velocity to be high, and ensure every frame (department) is coordinating towards the bigger picture for the company.
"Freedom in the Frame" is one of those cool mental models that can be applied in many areas of your life, and it's especially useful in org. design.
You start by defining your outer boundary, then carving it up into frames. This is true whether you're a 100K-person conglomerate or a 10-person startup.
When you do this for teams, you also want to ensure you’re setting up autonomy by defining responsibility, setting goals, and defining interconnections.
This is how you’ll create a company where people can flourish, and work actually gets done.
Call to Action
Perform a quick assessment of your team against this concept.
How well have you defined frames? Is there a lot of overlap between frames? How about white space where no one is covering something important?
For each frame, is it clear what their area of responsibility is, their goals, and how they work with other frames (whether that's people, departments, divisions, or companies)?
If you’re deficient in any area, start working on a plan to shore it up!
Kevin
PS - Do you know anyone who is working on org. design issues right now? Forward this newsletter to them.
