Trim Tabs, Teams and Timing

“Real wealth is indestructible and without practical limit. It can be neither created nor lost — and it leaves one system only to join another — the Law of Conservation of Energy. Real wealth is not gold. Real wealth is knowing what to do with energy.”
- Buckminster Fuller

In his groundbreaking book Critical Path, architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller documented the broad sweep of technological innovation that has been driving human progress over the centuries. One of his key insights was that essentially all innovation is clearly marked by an increasing ability to “do more with less”. Over time, through trial and error, rigorous experimentation and serendipity — human thought and ingenuity unlocks increasingly powerful results with less and less effort, which leads to true wealth creation.

Here are five powerful lessons for getting more done with less, and launch your Rocket Goals faster than ever!

1). Use Money To Create Wealth
Fuller believed that many people continue to mistake money for productive wealth. Money itself has no intrinsic value, except to the extent it can help in creating “more with less”. Any technology or system of technology that can create more output with less input will rapidly gain influence in today’s hyperlinked global economy.

Whether it is Tesla delivering greater battery range, or AI companies delivering astonishing features for less money, or Google delivering faster, more accurate searches per click, or Uber organizing drivers and riders to deliver inexpensive rides, — wealth today flows to the teams and individuals who can use creativity and initiative to get more done with less. Fuller was impatient with artificial financial schemes. His view on wealth also made him pragmatically optimistic regarding humankind’s ability to feed and house the passengers here on Spaceship Earth.

Fuller’s equation for physical success of humanity can be summarized fairly succinctly:

A. True wealth = Resources + Human know-how applied to meet needs.

B. You can never learn less, you can only learn more, so therefore global wealth is constantly increasing as we increase our understanding of the world, ourselves and the Universe.

C. Teams and close collaborations help to rapidly unlock new observations and discoveries. Although he was very much a “solo-preneur”, during his long career Fuller thrived in many small teams and close collaborations - from inventing the Geodesic dome to building the world’s largest map he was able to gather and inspire groups of like-minded collaborators from all around the world.

Thus — while the supply of raw materials is a zero-sum game, and leads to a scarcity mentality — the wild card in wealth creation that breaks the zero-sum standoff is human ingenuity and teamwork that allows us to accomplish more and more with less and less. Fuller was convinced that every individual could make a contribution to this overall cycle of wealth creation.

2). Be A Tiny Trim Tab
Fuller also observed that oftentimes, combining elements and principles in new ways creates surprising synergies that cannot be predicted ahead of time. This is why it’s so important to keep running tiny experiments across every aspect of your life — because just like the caterpillar gives no hint that it will become a butterfly, it’s never clear beforehand where your greatest successes will spring from. In many ways, Fuller conducted his entire life as one continuous experiment, exploring and documenting the impact of what one person could accomplish. He even envisioned himself as a “trim tab”.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab.

As Fuller describes, a trim tab is a tiny nautical device that acts as a small rudder used to turn the larger rudder of giant ships, offering tremendous leverage in terms of steering and changing the direction of the ship. Drawing upon his naval experience, he saw the trim tab as a powerful metaphor for effective individual leadership: tiny and strategically placed interventions can cause large-scale and profound change.

What makes this metaphor especially useful is that the “ship” Fuller was referring to could be the entire planet, or any local system you are trying to steer or change direction. To see results with the trim tab approach, you need a clear understanding of the current direction of your ship, the flow of the currents it is moving through, the knowledge of where it is heading, and a vision of where the ship ought to be heading.

By becoming keenly aware of “where you are” in the larger scheme of things, you can start to identify those small but highly leveraged actions that will “turn your ship around”.

What’s also interesting about a trim tab is that it efficiently brings about change with minimum effort — in other words — doing more with less! The guiding questions for individuals and teams that emerge from a trim tab approach are easy to list — but much more difficult to execute:

a. What ship are you steering? Are you trying to change the entire world? Or maybe just your own department? What is the system you are seeking to steer or change direction?

b. What direction is your ship currently heading? Answering this question often requires careful discernment and reflection. What is the “big picture” direction and destination?

c. What currents, winds, tides, or events are impacting your ship? Sometimes these are obvious, and close at hand — but oftentimes they are remote either geographically, in time, or functionally, and it requires special instruments and measurements to gauge these outside factors.

d. Where should your ship be going? This is often the most critical question of leadership. What is the goal, the prize, which you need to keep in sight so that your regular adjustments to the tiller, in response to the changing currents of the environment, will keep you on target? What is the big picture goal, not next quarter’s profit margin, share price, or units delivered — but the overarching social good? How will your efforts help to increase overall global well-being?

e. Where can you most efficiently exert pressure for “moving the rudder” Answering this question accurately is only possible if you’ve taken the time to answer the previous questions! In the system you are seeking to steer, what is the rudder, what is the trim tab? In complex social systems, it is often instructive to ask, what is the rudder of the obvious rudder or the trim tab of the trim tab? These “trim tabs of the trim tab” need to be identified so that the least amount of effort is needed to change the system. It was while considering new types of cost-effective housing that Fuller began working on his famous geodesic domes.

f. How can you most efficiently exert pressure for “moving the rudder”? Once you understand where you are going, and where change needs to happen in order to move in that new direction — the final step is to envision and plan how to make the change happen. Fuller had great faith in the individual’s ability to build artifacts, tools, and creative responses that would “move the rudder”. Not only that, but he recognized that each person would make his or her own unique contributions, based on their skillsets, life-history and available resources. The point is not for everyone to go out and invent new types of geodesic domes — rather, each person should be equally inventive in their own way.

g. How do you continue to navigate successfully through changing tides? One of the most remarkable things about Fuller’s life is that he was able to reinvent himself and his particular area of focus on several occasions — while keeping his core values constant. Then drawing on the knowledge and experience from one phase, he was able to realize even higher levels of creativity and inventive breakthroughs than in the previous phase. This process of continual learning, creation, modification, and synthesis culminated in his global lectures during the 1960s when he spoke on hundreds of college campuses — captivating the younger generation with literally a lifetime of insight, observation, and wisdom. In steering by key guiding principles, Fuller was able to navigate a complex century, making a unique and lasting contribution.

3). Respect Gestation Rates
Fuller was very attuned to the rate at which wealth and progress occurs. He often pointed out that everything has its own gestation rate. A baby takes 9 months, a new computer chip 18 months, an elephant 22 months, and a typical automobile three to five years.

In Critical Path, Fuller details literally hundreds of years of human technological “gestation”. In the second-half of the 20th century, these gestation rates began to pick up in speed and frequency as one set of technological breakthroughs would impact on another. Recently, inventor Ray Kurzweil — very much in the Fuller tradition — has carefully documented in his book Singularity that even the change in the rate of change itself is accelerating. Fuller referred to this phenomenon, back in the 1960s, as accelerating acceleration.

The implications of accelerated gestation rates are profound. Carefully identifying and then synchronizing with the gestations rates of various changes you are facing helps insure that your solution, invention, plan, or reorganization arrives at just the right moment. Timing is critical in today’s fast moving economy. If you arrive too early either in the actual marketplace or the marketplace of ideas — your solution runs the risk of being still born; it will not gain traction. If you are late to market — then chances are that your solution will be forever playing catch-up to the established solution.

4). Envision the “Ideal Future State”
Fuller also used another technique for coming to grips with the future. This approach did not involve predicting or forecasting where different technological or resource trends were heading, but envisioning the “Ideal Future State” — what the world should be like. Over the course of his life, Fuller developed a comprehensive moral vision that told him what the world should look like given our technological capabilities — a world where everyone’s basic human needs were met, the environment sustained or regenerated, and a world safe and secure from the threats of war and social injustice were three of the linchpins of his vision for how the world should be. Many people found this “big picture” moral vision to be just as attractive and inspiring as his technological artifacts.

Flowing out of his trim tab philosophy, Fuller came to the conclusion the most effective leverage can almost always be found not by trying to directly change people’s habits — but by reforming the physical infrastructure in which they live and worked. Thus, many of his projects focused on large complex systems such as housing, automobiles, energy, etc. Fuller was convinced that if these large scale systems could be optimized through tiny innovations, then there would be a broad impact on human society as whole.

5). Solve Problems Through Action
Fuller’s theoretical writings were supported by an incredibly diverse creative portfolio, spanning nearly six decades of continuous leadership and invention. Beginning early in the 20th century, his life’s work documents a truly stunning range of projects (from shelters to flying cars, bathrooms, floating cities and social policy), interests (from geometry, to cosmology, architecture, technology, and humanity’s function in the Universe), writings (27 books, hundreds of articles and thousands of letters corresponding with people all over the world), as well as drawings, photographs, videotapes, and observations. By taking action in the world, and then carefully documenting the results Fuller was able to demonstrate the impact that one person is capable of making.

Take-aways

1). Use Money To Create Wealth — Invest money to get faster and smarter, thereby building wealth. Constantly think about how to accomplish more with less. Be sure to harness the power of teams to further refine and leapfrog your solution even faster. This is the basis for all technological progress and true wealth creation.

2). Be A Tiny Trim Tab — A tiny rudder can turn the rudder which can turn a giant ship. Understand where your ship is headed and where it needs to turn, and then concentrate your energies on the influential tiny changes that can bring about a big change in direction.

3). Respect Gestation Rates — Take the time to identify how different systems are evolving along different timelines. In today’s economy, many gestation rates are accelerating, so be ready to act quickly on your new and innovative ideas!

4). Envision The Best Possible Future — While it’s important to gain a clear and accurate picture of the current situation, envisioning the Ideal Future State is a powerful tool for unlocking next level innovations and breakthrough thinking.

5). Solve Problems Through Action — While ideas are important, it is only through taking action that you can learn what works and what doesn’t work.

If you’d like to learn more about Fuller’s design principles, be sure to visit the Global Solutions Lab.