There's a few moments in here where I realize that I am inventing a thing that has already been super well-documented elsewhere, but I think generally this is a pretty good podcast! I've been a fan of Simone for a long time. Do meet your heroes.
A few favorite bits.
Contracting for Creativity
You would think that when you focus more on internal pricing or you focus more on contracting with somebody, that you drain the impact out because all you’re thinking about is the price and the economics of the deal. But in fact, what I’ve observed personally in the work is that when organizations and when teams and when individuals focus on making that clear and clean—that economic contract between parties—and it might not be something that is explicitly paid. It might be a chargeback within an organization. Who knows? But as long as you make that clear, you start to have that growth of creativity that we’re describing before. Creativity thrives in structure. Okay. What’s the structure? Well, probably a contract. Okay. Well, how do we get more impact? We allow people to work more creatively. We give them more agency in their work. They create more impact. That comes back to better structure, better pricing, better economics, a better focus on the contract between parties.
How do you do this? A few ways that I wrote about in the book, like clear assets (maybe these assets are APIs or MCPs?) and standards (maybe a design system?), or clear CLOUs or Team Charters that declare relationships between units.
23. Domains, Assets & Standards
Clear ownership of domains and assets reduces friction; each team knows its decisions and resources.
Clay Parker Jones
40. Colleague Letter of Understanding
Explicitly document working agreements among colleagues.
Clay Parker Jones
Contracts redistribute power
Contracting and platforming of work is explicitly political, meaning it deals with how power is distributed, how it’s legitimized, how it’s contested, how it’s exercised. I think people are rightly observing that oftentimes the decisions that we’re making when we are explicitly contracting are not going to be good for them, or they’re not going to be good for people that they have kinship with. And that to me is a great signal. That to me shows me that we need to rethink the contract that we’re engaging in or the way that we’re developing a platform.
Coordination problems often conceal questions of authority...
Why Nothing Gets Done Around Here
Hundreds of thousands of hours are getting wasted on bad decision-rights. It’s got to stop. (Contains at least two good ways to fix this problem.)
Clay Parker Jones
But that's OK if you can harness it.
38. Conflict as a Resource
Treat constructive conflict as essential and beneficial for progress.
Clay Parker Jones
The more we give to computer, the more we want to give to each other
The joy that we get from our work is from, yes, achievement, but also from the people that we do it with. And I think that’s an interesting paradigm that we might see for these post-AI firms: that they are deeply focused on the human experience. And one cynical version of that is, “Oh, it’s like 996, and they’re just trying to make a buck, and they’re young, so they’re pushing each other to work harder and harder and harder.” But I think there’s something that is worth recognizing in this, and that is that, as we give more to the computer, we want to also give more to each other.
Which I wrote about in everybody's favorite essay:
The End of Role Clarity
Role clarity is a symptom of relational poverty, and small team with real trust are going to out-deliver our absorptive capacity unless we do...something.
Clay Parker Jones
Simone's writeup on the ep is here, on his new Boundaryless site. It's nice.
Clay Parker Jones on Why Agency Needs More Structure
Clay Parker Jones and Simone Cicero explore how clear contracts and explicit rules of the road give people more room to act and to create.
