Turtles all the way done: hijacking stories to your own ends

There’s an old parable that I first remember encountering in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It often surfaces in explorations of the collision between science and myth. In Hawking’s retelling, the story goes like this:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

With the recent resurgence in adherents to belief in a Flat Earth, this tale is offered as a cautionary reminder of the power of compelling myth in the face of plain old evidence. That’s an important reminder in a world buffeted by change. Whatever your commitment to reason and evidence, you only replace a story with a better story.

I want to see if I can hijack the turtles metaphor to my rational ends.

My interests are in connecting technology and organizational realities. I’ve used the obvious image of building bridges but that may be too simplistic to be helpful after everyone nods that a bridge would be nice to have. Perhaps a stack of turtles can help us navigate the space between.

The realm of computing and communications technology is still a relative newcomer in organizational settings. Learning to wrestle the complexity to the ground is a key task in developing comfort and proficiency with technology. One of the principal methods of getting technology under conceptual control is the notion of a stack; of discrete layers of technology the interact with one another in sharply constrained ways.

There is a well known observation about dealing with technology first offered by computer scientist David Wheeler that:

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection

When things become too complex, we hide the complexity underneath a new layer of abstraction. Tim Berners-Lee invents a scheme, the url, that hides the details of reaching out to another computer and grabbing a file or document. Pretty soon, we’re watching reruns of I Love Lucy in our web browsers.

The number of layers you might traverse in  any given technology environment can become quite deep. The design challenge in new technology often revolves around how cleanly you can define and navigate the stack of layers.

Which brings me back to my turtles. What if we extend the stack upwards from the technology into the organization? Don’t think of the process as a single step across one bridge. Think in terms of what new layers (or turtles) make sense to cross the span. Now your problem is one of working out how to move up or down a layer at a time.