Martin spent last week reading about three things that don’t obviously connect: a German framework for evidence-based prioritization, a Paul Graham essay about what makes smart people effective, and a Welsh decision-making model named after a Welsh word for habitat. They connect.
Evident Flow
Marco Alberti’s Evident Flow is a framework for organizational decision-making that evolved from OKRs. It replaces opinion battles with visible evidence. You build a value map of what each stakeholder group cares about. Ideas flow into a pipeline. Each idea gets scored on effort and impact against the value map. Priorities emerge from the data instead of from whoever argues loudest in the planning meeting.
The name is deliberate: evident means both “obvious” and “evidence-based.” The core principle is triage — “die Kunst, das Richtige nicht zu tun,” the art of not doing the right things, because you can’t do all of them. Like an emergency doctor: the skill isn’t avoiding wrong actions, it’s having the discipline to not start too many right ones at once.
This resonated with Martin because it speaks to a problem he keeps circling: how do organizations make good decisions when everyone has an opinion and nobody has time? Evident Flow’s answer is to make the determinants visible — what stakeholders value, what effort costs, what the trade-offs are — and let the evidence do the arguing.
What Graham Got Right
A few days before the Evident Flow notes, someone shared a Paul Graham essay with Martin. Graham’s argument: raw intelligence alone doesn’t produce good outcomes. The missing ingredient is the ability to see things from other people’s point of view.
Graham’s metaphor is specific. Adding perspective-taking to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper. The result is bronze — “so much harder that it seems a different metal.” Intelligence plus empathy isn’t a marginal improvement. It’s a phase change.
Graham also wrote a separate essay on the gap between intelligence and having new ideas. Intelligence is a necessary precondition, but the other ingredients — obsessive interest, independent-mindedness, the ability to write your way into thinking — are what separate smart people who achieve things from smart people who don’t. The gap between intelligence and its consequences is where the interesting work happens.
Evident Flow’s value map is, in a sense, a systematic version of Graham’s point. Building a map of what stakeholders actually value — not what you assume they value — is an exercise in perspective-taking. The framework tries to make “seeing things from other people’s point of view” structural rather than personal. You don’t need every decision-maker to have read Dale Carnegie. You need the value map to encode that perspective so the evidence speaks for itself.
The Cynefin Challenge
Here’s where Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework complicates the picture.
Cynefin sorts decision contexts into five domains:
The critical boundary is between complicated and complex:
- Complicated: cause and effect are linked, but the relationship requires expertise to uncover. Multiple right answers exist. Good analysis finds them. Sense → analyze → respond.
- Complex: cause and effect are only visible in retrospect. Your actions change the situation in unpredictable ways. There are no right answers to find — only safe-to-fail probes that reveal what’s emerging. Probe → sense → respond.
The challenge to Evident Flow is direct. The framework’s value map, effort-impact scoring, and “bang for the buck” prioritization are powerful tools — for the complicated domain. They assume you can pre-assess what stakeholders value and compute trade-offs before acting. That assumption holds when the environment is analyzable.
But markets, corporate cultures, and customer preferences are complex. You can’t map them in advance because the mapping changes them. What stakeholders say they value in a value-mapping workshop may bear little resemblance to what they actually value once you ship something. The value map is a model, and the model is always lagging the reality it describes.
Graham’s observation that smart people have bad ideas suddenly has a structural explanation. Smart people default to complicated-domain thinking: optimize, analyze, rank, score. When the problem is actually complex — when the act of building the solution changes the problem — analysis produces confident answers to the wrong question. Evident Flow’s pipeline can rank ideas beautifully, but if the value map encodes yesterday’s understanding of what people want, the ranking optimizes for a world that has already moved.
The Probe Inside the Map
The counterpoint cuts both ways. Cynefin itself has been called difficult to apply — the boundary between complicated and complex is, appropriately, complex. And the act of building Evident Flow’s value map is arguably a Cynefin-style probe. You learn by trying to articulate what stakeholders value, through the friction of getting it wrong. The map’s value isn’t in its accuracy. It’s in the process of building it — which is itself a probe that surfaces what you don’t know.
Snowden’s own warning about “clockwise drift” — where complacent teams in the clear domain catastrophically shift into chaos — suggests the danger isn’t picking the wrong domain. It’s getting stuck in one. A framework that says “the answer depends on which domain you’re in” but admits you’re probably in confusion and don’t know it may be less actionable than Evident Flow’s bias toward making decisions with available evidence.
The synthesis: treat the value map as a hypothesis, not an answer. Use Evident Flow’s pipeline to prioritize, but hold the priorities loosely enough to probe. The evidence-based ranking tells you where to start. The complex-domain reality tells you to watch what happens when you do — and update the map based on what emerges, not on what the quarterly sort predicted.
Sources: Evident Flow · Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas — Paul Graham · Beyond Smart — Paul Graham · Cynefin framework — Wikipedia · Cynefin.co
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