Carts Before Horses
Carts Before Horses (CBH) is a system problem where the designers and builders of systems tend to start in the Drive phase of the system without proper consideration of organic, evolutionary, emergent dynamics required for system virtue and health. In healthy, sustainable systems, the overall systems growth is a “more than sum” product of the growth of each component unit. For example: the community grows because the people are growing. However, this requires a long time-line approach with very slow growth at first and lots of faithful mirco-investments. In an effort to get faster results, leaders will often build something that allows more units to be included at an earlier stage using more macro-investments in mechanisms to avoid or shallowly satisfy the Beta demands of growth. (An “if you built it, they will come” mentality.)
In spiritual communities, this error has often been experienced as a miss ordering of Church > Mission > Jesus. In order to create religious organizations at a scale that can support institution like real estate and salaried staff, designers and builders start by building a finished product that people can inhabit. Then, the institution must use mechanical means to do mission to populate the institution. All this costly, institutional, mechanical effort must be exerted so people can perhaps encounter Jesus in the usage and support services of the organization.
A more “movement” approach is to reverse this and do “organic discipleship” similar to the activities of Christian believers in the first century of church history. They followed a pattern of Jesus > Mission > Church. In other words, they introduced people to Jesus in a life-on-life way, went on mission together with Jesus, and the church community grew naturally out of this. A similar approach is the current shift to recover a Belong > Become > Believe flow for the spiritual journey rather than the Believe > Become > Belong flow that is focused on institutional protection.
Consequences of Carts Before Horses
Consumption and Consumerism
CBH necessitates a dangerous division of production and product or production and consumption, creating two unrelated classes of units with little relationship to each other and the over-all system having little creative tension between Alpha and Beta. This results in a system that promotes the negative effects of Consumerism and generates [X] The Maw of an exponentially consuming unsustainable system.
High Failure Rate for Start-ups
Because CBH does not follow a sensitive evolutionary approach where designer/builders develop in close conversation and experience with their market, it exposes start-up orgs to “hit-or-miss” at launch. Most orgs in this case will be a “miss” because it will be too expensive in complex markets to find the niche where their offering can be adopted quickly enough to support the mechanism they’ve built and its maintenance costs.
Because of this, more and more start-up incubators actively filter for CBH as a key factor against probable start-up success. Consider these quotes from Sam Altman’s presentation on start-ups based on Y-Combinators experience launching 4,000 companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, and Dropbox:
Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea.
– 50 Cent on what he learned founding Vitamin Water.
You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply.
This is probably the thing we see wrong with Y Combinator apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first.
– Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator and CEO of OpenAI
Because of this, Altman defines the founders role in a tech start-up as basically a two-fold evolutionary process: work endlessly on making your product the best that it can be, and talk to your early users daily.