Batman Was Wrong

Why Heroism is Overrated

Last week, we welcomed systems thinker, complex adaptivity guru, and tinkerer supremo Alex Komoroske to the show. Alex’s Medium is a treasure trove of high-signal insights into leadership, decision-making, and organization building in complex systems. There’s far too much to summarise here, so instead, here’s a riff on some of his ideas around heroism and incrementalism. For more from Alex on these topics, check out his excellent essays, The Magic of Acorns, The Live Oak Playbook, A Dangerous Addiction, The Sarumans and The Radagasts, and The Iterative Adjacent Possible.

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Welsh singing sensation Bonnie Tyler is much loved for her raspy ‘80s power ballads, but her systems thinking needs work.

Contrary to the strategic advice in her 1984 hit song: resilient, sustainable systems should NOT be Holding Out For a Hero.

We’ve all seen heroism in the workplace. It’s the kind of adrenaline-pumping, fire-fighting, chest-thumping, muscle-flexing chaotic energy we unleash when, facing a tyranny of tiny problems, we spray half-arsed solutions from the hip like we’re Tony Montana.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I feel seen,” you’re not alone. As Alex notes, heroism feels *amazing!* in the moment:

“I was battling an existential threat, pushed to the absolute limit of my ability. Adrenaline was pumping, and when I vanquished the threat, everyone cheered and celebrated the miracle I accomplished. I got promotions, I was showered with praise. There was a never-ending stream of fires I could fight. It was hard not to become addicted.”

The heroic impulse comes from a good place: a desire to keep things moving or the ship afloat. Sometimes, it’s necessary—in small, rapidly growing organizations, for example, an all-hands-on-deck approach is unavoidable. Likewise, if the boat is sinking, the captain sometimes has no choice but to pitch in with a bucket.

However, heroism is inefficient. Spending all your time whack-a-moling each little issue means you lose track of the big, scary, structural problems that lie upstream. By pouring your energy into heroism, you allocate your resources to the effect, not the cause. Surely Bruce Wayne, the smartest, richest, and most influential man in Gotham, could find a higher-leverage way of cleaning up the city than smashing in the faces of a series of low-level street thugs for six hours a night?

The more you deal with problems via heroism, the more the chaotic, feel-good energy of essay-crisis leadership permeates the environment of those around you. How can your team be expected to calmly and rationally plan for the future if your righteous thrashing is “kicking up clouds of dust and randomization”? Even worse, your hodge-bodge heroic fixes will likely be short-term, causing a compounding series of future problems. After all, if Batman had never shown up in Gotham, then neither would Joker, Scarecrow, or, presumably, the somewhat unimaginatively named Man-Bat.

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Heroic leadership is not confined to street-level firefighting. It manifests, too, in long-term strategic ambition. Here, the tech world's heroes need not wear capes. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are lauded for their unbridled ambition and ability to reach into the future, clasp their hands around an impossible reality, and pull the rest of the world towards it by sheer force of will.

The allure of Big, Bold, Heroic Ambition can be hard to resist. Yet, Alex notes, this style of leadership hides a darker reality. When we focus on the self-selecting roster of Great Modern Leaders, we idly scan over a graveyard littered with the bones of those who have attempted something similar and fallen to their doom.

Progress comes from a compounding series of iterative decisions. Each such decision is contextual, depending on previous choices and its environment. With each decision, new alternatives open up, and others shut down.

By taking giant leaps towards cosmically ambitious endpoints, we predetermine the litany of smaller choices we need to make along the way at *precisely* the point where we have the least possible information to make those decisions. Unless we are in the vanishingly small group of people with the skill, insight, and sheer luck to launch ourselves into the heroic pantheon, the result will likely be an evangelical inflexibility that leads to redundancy or death.

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So, maybe it’s time to hang up the cape. But if heroism won’t lead to long-term, sustainable success, what will?

GARDEN-MAN would be a terrible addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but, Alex argues, it is in the gardener's quiet, patient, nurturing approach that resilient growth lies:

• Take a step back: You must find the space to calmly plan, plant, and care for seeds that will blossom over time (Alex has long maintained a work-from-home, no-calls policy on Fridays to give himself the space to think long-term.) At first, taking a step back may feel self-indulgent, but nothing lasting will grow if you become so focused on pulling out weeds that you forget to plant anything.

• Slice up your decisions: Just as gardeners iteratively make tiny adjustments based on weather, temperature, and the surrounding environment, your decision-making should be sliced as small as possible so that you “only make the ones you need to make now, deferring the rest. You can kick the can down the road to make the later decisions once you have more clarity on how things play out.”

• Optimize for survival: Each tiny decision should first optimize for one key metric—if this goes wrong, will it kill you or the thing you are growing? If the answer is “yes”, you may want to reconsider. If Gotham is as dependent on Batman as he thinks it is, it sure seems unwise for him to run directly into gunfire to take down Anonymous Goon #01 and #02.

• Identify your North Star: Your North Star, which Alex defines as “typically a vision: a simple narrative that can be expressed in a page or two of succinct prose describing an outcome many years out,” helps ensure that your small decisions take you to a place you ultimately want to go. It is specific enough to provide directional advice but fuzzy enough to leave you with maximum agency when considering each iterative decision.

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Take a step back, start small, optimize for survival, and maintain a North Star. It’s deceptively simple advice, but to paraphrase Michael Corleone, just as you think you’re out, the heroic impulse has a habit of reaching out and pulling you back in.

Next time that happens, remember: keep the heroism going for too long, and you may live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

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