Floating Abstractions

This post started as criticism of executives who are imprecise in their language, and usually in their thinking, when they give guidance or explain decisions. But there is more depth and complexity in the concept I use to criticise them, so an elaboration is in order. The concept is “floating abstraction,” and it was coined by Ayn Rand.  

Let’s ask ChatGPT (the old v.3) for help: 

BT: “What did Ayn Rand mean by “floating abstraction”? 

ChatGPT: “Ayn Rand used the term "floating abstraction" to refer to a concept that has been detached from its proper referents and has become disconnected from reality. 

According to Rand, concepts are formed by the process of abstraction, which involves identifying and isolating the essential characteristics of a group of concretes. However, if a concept is not tied to specific, observable instances in reality, but is used in a way that is divorced from any particular context, it becomes a "floating abstraction." 

Rand argued that floating abstractions are a major source of confusion and error in philosophy, politics, and everyday life. For example, she believed that concepts like "the common good" or "the greater good" were often used as floating abstractions to justify actions that were harmful or unjust to individuals. 

In essence, Rand believed that when a concept is disconnected from reality and is used in a way that is not based on concrete, specific instances, it becomes a dangerous tool that can be used to manipulate and deceive people.” 

Pretty good from ChatGPT! 

How do these floating abstractions come about? The big societal ones are typically coined by intellectuals – philosophers, professors at famous universities, or other prominent figures in the “ideas” space – to achieve a specific goal. Then these concepts are picked up by the originators’ followers and promulgated in the culture, usually in books, speeches, articles, or interviews. We should pay attention to this process, because deliberate lack of clarity is always suspicious. Ayn Rand pointed to the classic floating abstraction example of “the common good,” which also surfaces as “the public good” or the “greater good.” Let me clarify why I think it is a true floating abstraction: in my piece on “Life as The Standard of Value,” I explained my position that the good is defined in reference to life, but since life is a property of the individual and not of the group, ‘the good’ can only be properly defined in reference to individual people. If we want to apply it to a group to make it “public,” then it would have to stand for a weird sum of benefits and harms across the individual members of the group – and that would not be a very useful concept. Therefore, “the public good” is not used as an arithmetic sum; it is used as an unquestionable semi-deity that justifies the sacrificing of some individuals, by force, in favour of other individuals. Sometimes this is done based on pure numbers (the individual vs. society), sometimes based on other characteristics (history is replete with those examples).  

For clarity, let me cover one more example: “climate change.” On its face, “climate change” should be clear: it must be the change in climate. And because every complex system is in constant change, the concept itself would be unremarkable and neutral – like “economic change” or “societal change”: that is, it can be either good or bad, based on specifics that need to be carefully measured, interpreted, and so on. But of course, this is not how "climate change” is used. It is used to denote very harmful or even catastrophic climate change – something extremely and imminently dangerous – but without the necessity to explicitly name it as such. Why is that? I’ll let you decide.   

Floating abstractions abound today. Just think of how many vague new concepts have sprung up in recent years, which, by virtue of their vagueness, have become polarising: from 3-letter acronyms like ESG, to the usage of the word “science,” to the interesting terms of mis- dis-information. When a concept is floating, there is no way to interpret it objectively – the side that promulgates it necessarily engenders resistance from the ideologically opposing side. And many seem to revel in the fight and accept it as natural. Indeed, some modern (or maybe “post-modern”) intellectuals claim that all concepts are social constructs – that is, floating by definition – and serve no purpose other than as linguistic tools for political manipulation. Interestingly, these enlightened souls jump out of the way of ‘socially constructed’ buses and exempt their theory from its own meaning: “trust us,” they say, “there is no reality, and no concept can be true, except our theory, which is absolutely true.” 

Unfortunately, almost no-one is interested in clarifying, instead of bickering – in calling out floating abstractions for what they are and advocating for proper use of concepts and proper thinking frameworks. That’s very hard. 

Now, it is important to distinguish floating abstractions from perfectly legitimate concepts that can, nevertheless, stand as “floating” in people’s minds. A good example is the word “strategy” - well-defined and useful, but often not understood by those who should understand it: namely, the executives in charge of defining and executing it. The same goes for many common concepts. I recall a hilarious example from Dr Leonard Peikoff, who observed that many don't have a solid grasp of the concept of “freedom.” The mental image the word “freedom” evokes in their minds could often be (I am grossly paraphrasing here) of themselves, strolling on a warm tropical beach at sunset, in light clothing, with the breeze gently blowing through their hair. Of course, this is a far cry from the proper meaning of the concept, which is about freedom from physical coercion.  

My point is not that we should have great understanding of every popular concept; rather, we should carefully think about what is important in our lives, then think about the major concepts affecting it, and then make sure we understand them. If you are a CEO, you should understand strategy; if you are a janitor, you don’t need to – but you’d better have good standards for “cleanliness.” I admit the concept of “agile” software development is fuzzy in my head, and maybe it should not be. It should certainly not be for a Chief Product Officer. And I am convinced everyone would benefit tremendously from understanding “freedom.”       

Now, back to the managers I meant to criticise. There are two types of situation where I have seen them either use floating abstraction or exploit the knowledge that their terms must necessarily stand as floating abstractions in the heads of their audience. The first, and probably the more innocuous one, is when they justify chronic inaction. “Why didn’t your team build the feature the CEO asked you to build?” “Well, we did not understand how exactly the strategy aligns with the “service blueprint.” After several alignment meetings, the feature is still not built, apparently because the product team still does not understand the strategy. In effect, the team is saying “your reasons for wanting this feature are floating in our minds, so we’ll give you some floating excuses as to why we haven’t done it.” The trick is to use industry jargon, interspersed with vague strategy references, so that the whole package does not sound wildly unreasonable.

As bad as inaction is, spurring action of dubious value is probably worse. During my stint in investment banking, I sometimes got late-evening instructions from hurried managing directors to the effect of “Do the deck for company X and courier to me overnight. Oh, and make sure to include [insert here a floating “pet” idea that the MD had coined for a particular industry that would, of course, be realised only if the industry did more M&A].” In my early days I rushed to read up on the industry to divine the meaning of my director’s grand ideas but soon realised that the best approach was to ask the other associates who had worked with the same director before. Very often they would say “Oh, yeah, that’s one of his blue-sky ideas. Basically, what he means is this... Grab that old deck for company Y; slide 6 is the one he really likes, just take it and change the company name.” Imagine the countless hours hapless junior bankers spend in trying to figure out what their hurried and hard-to-reach travelling managers want. But well, as they say, “part of the job.” One of my directors used to helpfully say that “there are always three reasons why a company should do M&A.” I remember only one of those - “economies of scale” (one of the troubles with abstractions, especially floating ones, is that they are hard to remember). The implications was that whenever I struggled to find ideas to put on a "Strategic Rationale” slide, I could drop one of the three generic ones. Whether it really applied to the company in question was not that relevant - the recipients would probably not read the deck, which often was just an accessory that one was expected to bring to a meeting, like a jacket or a tie.  

The above issue, but on steroids, occurs in large corporations when a senior executive comes up with an outlandish idea that makes sense to no-one but her, fails to articulate it, but nevertheless pushes for a grand presentation of said vague idea to the leadership above her. Then several teams scramble to align on possible definitions of the idea (“if she means this, then these are implications... if she means that, then hose are the implications”), shuffle decks and schedule meetings for weeks, leading up to a grand reveal, after which everyone is patted on the back with a “good job,” and the project is shelved. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with an executive saying: “I think there is something valuable in this nascent idea, but I haven’t thought enough about it, so please take it, develop it, and let me know if there is merit.” The problem is when the executive knows or suspects that there is no merit to the idea, but pushes an agenda, or, in a more innocent scenario, creates busywork to appear proactive or productive to the higher-ups.  

Many years ago, my team and I burned the midnight oil for a week, working on how to monetise the concept of “groupsona.” Someone in Marketing had conjured up that word, and it had somehow caught a short-lived fire, though no-one knew what exactly it meant and no-one supplied a connection between “groupsonas” and the capabilities or the ambitions of the company. “Groupsona” loosely stood for a “group persona” - something like an “average” behaviour across a social circle. Why it wasn’t simply called a ‘group’, or a ‘social circle’, or a ‘group type’, it wasn’t clear. In fact, it could have been simply “persona” (in its common marketing usage), because that’s exactly what a marketing persona means. Anyways, in a transitory obsession with groups, someone felt compelled to create a new word, and that should always raise a red flag. Do we really need a new word? Is it a legitimate concept? In this case, the trouble was not so much with the word itself, as with the adamant push from a certain executive to “size the groupsona opportunity,” without first clarifying what the groupsona product could realistically look like, how such a product would help the business differentiate itself, and so on. So, it was the product and strategy implication that was “floating.” But the goal was to send out a deck with lots of scenarios and tables as evidence that we were doing something proactive, so tens of Excel sensitivity tables with tens of millions in future groupsona revenue were churned at 2 a.m. Later we heard the presentation had landed really well. You just have to love those transportation analogies! These days we drive projects (and sometimes cars) and land presentations (and planes). “To land” is actually apt in the context of this article, because it means “to be understood and well-accepted” – that is, to be no longer a floating abstraction! So, kudos to the person who came up with the plane analogy! In any case, a few short months thereafter, the pilot (the exec pushing the groupsona work) and the destination airport staff (the higher execs with whom the work had apparently “landed”) had moved on to “pursue to new challenges,” the plane mechanics (the hapless souls pulling all-nighters) had resigned, the plane itself (the groupsona) and the manufacturer (the marketing sub-department) were scrapped. 10 years on, "groupsona” is yet to enter the Oxford English Dictionary. 

We can delineate three broad groups of people in the workplace, based on their attitude to floating abstractions. The first is the “peddlers” - those who either coin new floating abstractions or, much more often, adopt them from the culture or industry and embed them in their own organisation, usually because it’s the popular thing to do. Once they bring them in the company, they usually keep them floating – that is, avoid clarifying them with a proper framework. Take the “E” in “ESG”: do most vice-presidents in charge of the “ESG mandate” clearly articulate an objective (e.g., human prosperity vs. zero impact) and fundamental assumptions (e.g., nature as sufficient and caring to humans vs. nature as neutral to humans)? Do they even define the “Environment” as including humans or excluding them? I’ve used bits of Alex Epstein’s framework as an example above, but the main point is: do executives bother to articulate any sensible framework? In many cases, sadly, no. The same can go even for non-floating concepts, such as the North Star, which some executives fail to ground in reality, leading to haphazard strategy and operations. It would be remiss to always imply malicious intent or even follow-the-crowd impulses for this group – there is often just sloppiness and lack of skill.  

The second, and biggest, group is the “followers” - those who acquiesce to the floating abstractions. Some of them are opportunistic: “No-one gets this new strategy, but hey, I can use it to spin-off a couple of new projects, add three more direct reports, and build my little fiefdom.” Others sense a problem, but keep a “pragmatic” attitude: “Why rock the boat?”, or “Who am I to question this?”, or “It’s best to go with the flow for now, and when things get bad, I’ll jump ship.” As with all pragmatic approaches (I use “pragmatic” in the philosophical sense of “unprincipled”), theirs will not bring them long-term job satisfaction and a genuine sense of achievement.  

And, of course, there are the “fighters” - those who seek clarity on every concept that strongly impacts their work (and life). They are the real drivers of long-term success. In a badly functioning company, they might feel like exiles. If they prevail, then the company gets turned around and thrives. If they fail and quit, the company often sinks into oblivion.  

In some departments of a former employer there existed for a while a fetish for “ambiguity.” As an exponent of the ultimate pragmatic approach, some managers did a 180-degree turn on their values and enshrined the exact opposite of clarity. They proudly stated in interviews that the most important factor in their “success” was the “ability to thrive under ambiguity.” They evaluated their employees on “comfort with ambiguity.” “Ambiguity” became an unquestionable positive mantra to be repeated ad nauseam in performance reviews and distribution list emails. If you pressed those managers on the true epistemological meaning of the term, they would weasel out with platitudes about how "it’s actually more about taking initiative..., about not having to be always told what to do.” But of course, this is a different matter altogether. The reality was that floating abstractions were entrenched at the top of these departments, and everyone down was pragmatically scrambling to keep themselves occupied. Eventually, something akin to the “fighter” mentality prevailed at the top, these departments were eliminated, and the company performed much better.  

The healthy approach – epistemologically and ethically – is the “fighter” one: to seek clarity. Just as faking reality, by lying or evading the truth, is damaging psychologically and often materially in the long-term, so is the “comfort” with floating abstractions that beat down on us and demand action. If we don’t understand the abstractions, we can’t tell if the action demanded by them is in accordance with our values. It’s critical that we don’t allow this to happen.