The Elon Algorithm

I occasionally have colleagues critique me for being too critical. I might describe a clever solution as “dumb.” A project update might include ‘not great’, or ‘needs a lot of work.’ A particularly stellar project might earn a ‘pretty good.’ Despite the tone of these kinds of comments, I do not think of myself as a pessimistic person. Rather, it is the by product of a mindset that I believe is critical for good process engineering.

I felt reassured after watching an interview Elon Musk took with the Everyday Astronaut in Boca Chica, Texas. Layered into the five-step algorithm Musk shares is a subtle commentary on the way our ego gets in the way of effective engineering. Our capacity to be limited by our personal worldview is something William Blake would describe as “the tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.” I will argue that effective engineering takes active humility to overcome our personal reality distortion field.

Comparing William Blake, a mystic artist and poet, to the industrialist Elon Musk would seem, to many, like a great contradiction. On one hand, you have a person who once said “Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death”—to one who once said, “Engineering is the closest thing we have to magic.” However, in their own ways, both are astute observers of human nature.

During the two hours of the Everyday Astronaut interview, Elon shares anecdotes from his experiences at SpaceX and Tesla. He uses them to justify a five-step algorithm for effective engineering.

1. Make your requirements less dumb
2. Delete unnecessary parts
3. Simplify and optimize
4. Accelerate development cycles
5. Automate

As Elon develops his case, two patterns start to emerge.

• How important the order of the algorithm is
• How often Elon himself failed to follow his own advice

He describes an example at Tesla involving fiberglass mats in the Model 3 production line. Installing these matts was a major bottleneck in production. The team dealt with the problem by first attempting to improve the robotic automation (step 5) and then simplifying processes (step 3) by adjusting gluing or bolting and finally, realizing that the mat wasn’t necessary at all (step 1). A perfect example of where the cart was put before the horse and a lot of effort was wasted.

Engineers will optimize things that don’t need to be optimized. Teams will have requirements that don’t make sense in the bigger picture. He used stupid and dumb throughout the interview. Musk emphasizes that even the smartest engineers are susceptible, as he is himself.

Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time…all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.

Elon’s algorithm is essentially how to not waste your time working on the wrong things…because you will inevitably…because you are dumb. But William Blake might summarize our dumbness more pithily, as “the fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” While Musk observes and counters our folly, Blake helps us understand its root.

An Absurdly Short Introduction to Blake

William Blake was a 19th century poet, painter and engraver. He was an enigma in a period predominated by enlightenment thinking. There is a famous letter from Blake to a benefactor who commissioned work from him. In it, Blake, who died almost penniless, is defending a work commissioned by a wealthy benefactor. His principles cost him that commission, as in letter, he unapologetically defends the creative spirit of his work.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

What does Blake see as grand? He gives us an example:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.

Blake’s poetry is a rich exploration of the human condition. He is a spiritualist who shows frustration with organized religion and an artist struggling against what he perceives as the overly reductionist and narrow thinking of his intellectual peers. Blake captures this kind of thinking with the word Ulro – a prideful and overly reductionist worldview that he sees personified in the work of Newton. When we reduce the world around us to numbers, he believes, we are also reducing something in ourselves.

Blakes counter to the arrogant, overly simplified perspective takes the form of imagination. For Blake, imagination is an essential part of being human and the source of beauty. One who perceives the world with imagination is not delusional, but instead is tuning themselves to all possibilities—not just the most obvious, or immediate, or countable.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

The path Ulro takes might satisfy the ego but narrows our perspective. Imagination enlarges the solution space at the cost making one feel small.

Less Dumb Engineering

Given that engineering is so numbers-based, you may mistakenly believe that all of engineering is the application of Ulro. This is deceptively attractive. If the world was made out of perfectly geometric shapes, then indeed much of engineering could be reduced to formulas. But the world is vastly more subtle and complex. Just talk to anyone taking a fluid dynamics course.

Musk is proposing a fundamentally imaginative approach to engineering hard things. He’s never explicitly calling it imaginative. Instead his algorithm is a series of negations that stop Ulro from predominating our thinking. Let’s review the steps again:

1. Make your requirements less dumb

You may be smart, but you will still be wrong. If you think your requirements are correct: think again. Get your bias and ego out of the process, stretch your imagination, and ask yourself: do you really need this?

1. Delete unnecessary parts

At this point, it may be tempting to start optimizing the components of the solution. But here is another cold splash of humility: we are still too biased and narrow-minded to know what else can be simplified; so we need to actively remove parts. Musk tells us that “if you are not occasionally adding things back in, you’re not deleting enough parts.”

1. Simplify and optimize

A respite! Do what you do best, with the confidence that you are not wasting your time optimizing something that doesn’t need to be optimized. Yet there lies one more caveat: “it’s important that everyone is a chief engineer. They need to have a basic understanding of the whole system so they don’t optimize something at a cost to the rest of it.” Once again, we are forced to feel small and stretched.

1. Accelerate development cycles

Now that you’re being less pig-headed in your engineering process, you can start to move faster.

1. Automate

On four separate occasions, Musk admits to occasions where he jumped straight to automation. This step is the last one for a reason!

For Musk, good engineering is never finished. If he is overly invested in a solution, better options are obscured. I believe this same reasoning leads me to be consistently critical of the current state. Like the algorithm, it is an exercise in active humility – persistently and lightly pushing aside pride for the sake of uncovering better solutions. This light touch drives good engineering forward and can be a source of joy in its own right. And if this kind of thinking can get rockets to mars, it’s well worth the discomfort.

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise