Take The Protocol Pill | #297

May 19th, 2025: Greetings from Koh Samui. Today’s post is a public sharing of a nerdy rabbit hole I’ve been exploring over the past year or two. As there were a bunch of new subscribers to this newsletter over the last month or so, it might be worth checking out my About page, Archive, or this re-intro email 2 years ago, to get a sense of what this whole Pathless world is about. From the beginning, since 2017, I have shown up here most weeks, sharing whatever I feel like sharing. There is no goal, no sales sequences, no content teams behind the scenes, and no structured formats that I commit to. I only optimize for my long-term creative energy. Enjoy!

+ I came out of a year-long hiatus of my podcast for an interview with Nat Eliason about his upcoming sci-fi book which was excellent. Watch/listen here.

A fancy resort I am not staying at

Falling in love with operations…

I think I first became protocol-pilled while sitting in my Introduction to manufacturing engineering course in 2004 when I learned about “lean manufacturing” for the first time. We were reading A Machine That Changed The World, a book about how cars reshaped manufacturing, and then companies kept reinventing how it was done. It started with Henry Ford and went all the way up to the late 80s when Japan was the world leader in manufacturing, led by Toyota and its famed “lean” techniques.

We were going into depth on the techniques, not only specific to Toyota but most manufacturers in the world at this point (it was 2004).

I loved the ideas I was learning about. I was drunk on future operational efficiencies I would surely implement once I mastered all the frameworks and tools: value stream mapping, single piece flow, five whys, eight kinds of waste (or “muda” if you want to sound cool), poke-yoke, standardized work, andon cords, and more. It all made sense. It was all so simple. This could be a career.

In my senior year, I did a senior project where a small group of operators manufactured low-voltage switchgear. The product looked like this:

My project was to work with the operations managers to implement a line redesign to improve efficiency. The line was small, consisting of three men in their 50s. The goal was simple: eliminate waste, make things more efficient, decrease cycle time, and ultimately, make more profit for this tiny unit of GE.

So I got to work. I spent several days hanging out on the shop floor, paying my initial dues by bringing donuts each morning. Over time, they came to tolerate like me, and after I helped them solve some minor annoyances around the cell, they were down to participate in the project. Over the next couple of months, I would visit the assembly line a couple of times and week and I’d bring my donut offering, hang out, talk with them, and complete a lot of the analysis that I had learned in school like measuring cycle times, takt times, inventory analysis, and importantly, drew spaghetti diagrams like this:

After completing the analyses and sitting with the manager, my classmate on the project, and the frontline operators, we mapped out a new design for the cell. We got buy-in and met another day to move everything around. It took less than four hours.

In theory, now all we’d have to do is look at the output numbers and see the impressive improvements.

While the unit did see a performance improvement in the few months after I we finished the project, which made for a great result for my senior project, I heard from a classmate who ended up working at the same plant that summer: “They abandoned it and went back to the old way.”

Damn it.

Despite this setback, I was still idealistic and pursued future jobs in operations. By 27, I had worked in multiple manufacturing plants, was a manufacturing and supply chain researcher at McKinsey, and graduated from one of the top global operations dual degree programs in the world.

At school, I found myself excited about operations again. I went deeper into theories of supply chain, lean, and organizational design. However, I also spent six months working on a manufacturing floor at Raytheon, where I again confronted reality. In the first week of the project, the manager I was assigned told me he wasn’t interested in my fancy MIT ideas. He preferred old-school tactics like “pushing harder” (his words, not mine). Ultimately, I made some allies, moved to a different division, and made the best of it. I used a lot of that time to do the research for a 50+ page thesis on lean principles.¹

As soon as I was back at school, I decided that if I worked in operations, I wouldn’t be a happy person. I’d constantly be fighting against reality. And so I only applied for consulting jobs, and eventually moved away from operations altogether, focusing on organizational change, complex systems, and organization and talent.

While I was still interested in operations ideas, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned by the corporate world. Lean principles were beautiful and amazing when implemented well, as companies like Toyota and Amazon have shown, but most people in most organizations just want to implement the 80/20 versions of the latest tool to put something on their next performance review. I was a true believer in a world of pragmatists.

As I left the workforce, I was desperate for new ways of thinking about organizations. I never really found any good models that led me to believe we’d see radical change in how big companies operate. The last thing I wrote on this had to do with chaos theory and my conclusion was simply that nothing is broken, but our understanding of organizations and operations is certainly incomplete.

Ten reasons why I think the emergent field of protocol studies is interesting

“Protocol technologies are notoriously terrible at marketing themselves.” -Venkatesh Rao

After years of chasing elegant operational ideas and watching them fall apart when I stepped into the “real world,” I started to question the deeper structures that shape how we coordinate. I had a brief love affair with chaos theory, but found that lacking in real-world application as well. Protocols and their emergent idea-scene are similar to many of the operations ideas I understand, but are different. They leave more room for messiness, have something to say about cross-institutional behavior, and have a more realistic or neutral stance on how the world works. More importantly, they don’t need to be greenlit by a VP of ops. This is because they already exist. You don’t need to design and implement them. Instead, protocol studies people are more interested in making them visible to more people and developing new ways of telling stories about how they can help us meet our aims.

All of the above is a very long-winded way to introduce you to the topic of protocols. But this is my newsletter, and I can do it however I like. This post is my attempt to work through these ideas, make sense of them on my own terms, and absorb them into my worldview, share why I think it matters for the world we are in right now, and selfishly get further nerdsniped by an emerging field. Or in other words, become “protocol-pilled.”

Over the last year, I’ve been slowly reading a lot on the topic with ChatGPT as my tutor. If you want to dive right in and skip my reflections, the Protocol Reader is the place to start. I am still slowly working my way through it again after reading many of the individual essays.

Here are ten interesting things about the field and ideas I’ve taken from it:

#1 It’s internet native and a remote-first scene.

A big part of why I have enjoyed my current path is that it allows me to explore ideas unconstrained. No Partner is telling me that “chaos theory” can’t be sold to a CEO, and no colleagues are suggesting that it’s pointless to follow random rabbit holes. And so for eight years, I’ve spent endless hours reading wherever my curiosity takes me. It’s been delightful. I’ve had quite a productive run thinking about our modern relationship with work, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I don’t think I could have produced what I have in Academia, consulting, or anywhere else. I thought about getting a PhD in business at one point, but was talked out of it by every professor I talked to. There are years of hoop jumping required that end up shaping what you think is interesting. Working independently as a pseudo internet researcher has been great for pushing the frontier of my thinking in interesting ways.

But I sense the future of ideas is not independent research, it’s internet native scenes that later morph into more formal institutional field. Protocol studies is one the first scenes I’ve seen like this I think it’s an initial prototype of what a future “academic” scene might look like.

The protocol field is one where you can get up to speed and start contributing next week. You don’t need to spend years getting the right degrees and living in the right places. It is also a remote-first scene. I’ve been impressed by the diversity of participants on various calls, with a large contingent in Asia, an area in which I’m personally invested and think is a dynamic part of the world that will start to rival the West in idea production in the coming decades.

Another good sign of a growing field: they are starting to work with professors, and I find this pretty fascinating. It’s proving out a new model of field development. Starting with ideas and social connections and then moving backward into the university. I think this is the right model in the age of the internet.

#2 Our current models of how the world works aren’t working:

Look around. Everyone is mad about everything. We know all the problems we are facing: climate change, housing shortages, healthcare access and delivery, political gridlock, inability to build anything, and countless global coordination failures. We even know what “good” might look like, or at least, everyone has some idea of the direction to move. But people keep coming up short. The complicatedness of the world silently crushes any attempts at change. We get angry and promote or elect the next person who promises to fix things.

This approach operates on the idea that “once and for all,” we can fix things.

Instead of assuming stability, protocol studies embrace the idea that systems must constantly evolve to stay functional. And thus the “solution” is never about fixing things “once and for all,” it is about noticing and tinkering with emergent, natural, and even designed protocols that negotiate across boundaries.

Their definition of a protocol is “an engineered argument.”

The protocol itself exists, and it is having some effect on and in the world. A lot of these effects cause what they call “tensions”:

A tension is a tradeoff plus a conflict.

As they write, this is a “subtle level-up of the more familiar engineering notion of a tradeoff.”

And I think this is why I find it so interesting. It embraces the real world dynamics that were often ignored in operations.

Our current world operates under the belief that we just need to tell people the right social distancing strategy for a virus to stop spreading. The protocol world assumes that this is only an “argument” made that will create new tensions, and require continued awareness of all the messiness that continues to exist.

In operations, most of the thinking stopped after a solution was implemented. With protocols, the thinking often starts with the implementation and requires social IQ:

Where tradeoffs precipitate decisions, which often enjoy the benefits of finality once made, tensions describe dynamic states that require ongoing management and can call for sophisticated social skills.

This kind of frame is difficult and frustrating because it means that much of what emerges can’t be controlled by any single person.

It leads to the following shifts:

• From trying to sokve problems, to designing spaces for ongoing negotiation.

• From top-down control, to distributed coordination

• From final decisions, to persistent tensions

These reframes help explain a lot of the failure of large-scale change programs I observed in consulting. But in that world, everyone just kept moving on, never addressing the underlying issues. Why? Because to do so would threaten the idea that super smart CEOs can decide reality:

where an individual auteur architect or engineer might powerfully shape major tradeoffs by fiat and with finality, protocols tend to evolve through, and as, structured arguments that no one actor can dominate

A shift from engineered agreements to engineered arguments.

This is unsettling for many who have faith in the “great man” view of the world. As Venkatesh writes, our current paradigms often depend on eager or reluctant “benevolent dictators for life” (BDFLs)

“The seeming indispensability of BDFLs often leads people to the tempting conclusion that the very nature of technology calls for such a source of charismatic authority. The traditional theory of technology is what we might call a Great Man theory of technology.

Protocols mean a world that may not require them:

Protocols though, as engineered arguments, appear to have an unreasonable capacity to evolve coherently without the need for a fiat authority, and make use of the talents of exceptional individuals without becoming vulnerable to their caprices or blindspots. Or to make a stronger statement, they resist BDFLs. Even ones with historical claims to fiat authority.”

#3 It’s a cross-boundary field

A lot of the failures of leaders to handle real world complexity happens because most of our tools, mental models, and frameworks are designed for working within the narrow bounds of individual institutions.

As Venkatesh Rao writes in the protocol reader, “Over the last four decades, our environment has gotten increasingly technologically structured, sophisticated, and abstract, in ways that cut across traditional institutional boundaries.”

We haven’t updated much to integrate this new kind of thinking. We just hope for things to work out, or look to the “strong man” to make things happen by force. Neither seems to be working all that well.

These cross-boundary interactions are increasingly important. Technology touches almost everything we do. Buying my coffee this morning in Thailand required a global dance of information exchange through cell networks, financial infrastructure, and several global banks. No one is responsible for this end-to-end interaction and there aren’t many people even thinking about how these sorts of patterns shape our reality. It is simply a relationship of many different APIs.

As Venktatesh Rao writes, “Unlike a protocol, an API can be, and usually is, the design outcome of a fiat perspective that aims to solve a problem once and for all, to serve the interests of a single dominant actor.”

In other words, the thinking about processes often stops at the walls of the institution. No one is responsible or interested in the cross-boundary interactions.

But what if they were? What are interactions that fail consistently or that we haven’t even imagined possible yet? How could a cross-boundary reframe help us rethink healthcare data, air traffic control, or even new creator collaboration possibilities via a new payments infrastructure?

#4 Protocols produce “good enough” outcomes or in other words they are “unreasonably sufficient”

A lot of our thinking rests on the pursuit of perfect solutions. Since perfect solutions are usually hard if not impossible, we come up short.

I love the idea of protocols being “unreasonably sufficient”:

While protocols vary in their effectiveness, the remarkable thing about them is they are unreasonably sufficient. They solve more of the problem than we expect, more completely than we expect, relative to their size and complexity. Good protocols, in short, manage to catalyze good enough outcomes with respect to a variety of contending criteria, via surprisingly limited and compact interventions

We live in a world obsessed with collapse but protocols keep things moving. They are “unreasonable” in that they unlock outcomes we usually assume require top-down control or heroic leadership:

This characteristic yin-yang feature of successful protocols is at the root of their unreasonable sufficiency. Good protocols seem to strike a robust balance between ensuring order at some loci, and inducing serendipitous creative chaos at adjacent loci. As a result, within their sphere of influence, they create conditions of exceptional serendipity, or at least significantly reduced malevolence

We assume complex problems need complex solutions, or that only powerful institutions can coordinate meaningful outcomes. But protocols suggest another path: that under the right conditions, simple, legible behaviors can scale into resilient protocols that make our world better.

But when they work, they often become invisible…

#5 The Are Only Visible When They Don’t Work But That Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Magical

From “unreasonable sufficiency”:

Yet, precisely because they turn into invisible backdrops when they work, good protocols tend to become visible only when they fail, reinforcing pessimistic views of the problem domains they address.

A way to point to the positive side of protocols is their idea of identifying a “Whitehead advance. This is an idea from Alfred North Whitehead’s famous assertion that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

As they write:

Not only do good protocols deliver civilizational advances, they do so in sustainable ways. “Stability without stagnation” is the condition good protocols aspire to and surprisingly often manage to achieve and sustain for long enough to produce and consolidate significant civilizational advances.”

#6 Protocols are hard to grasp and that’s probably a good thing for the health of it as a field of study

“Protocols, however, seem unusually resistant to broadly illuminating and monolithic conceptual metaphors. This resistance is perhaps at the root of their illegibility relative to peer concepts. Notably though, protocols are not so illegible as to be impossible to talk about or work with. They can be made sufficiently legible through a variety of metaphors that are, if not aesthetically satisfying, at least workable.” - Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols

Something that has intrigued and perplexed me about protocols is that they have a very “negative capacity” vibe in the Keats sense. They very clearly exist but are hard to point to. They seem promising as a field of study, but I can’t quickly convince the average person that’s true.

The world of operations and manufacturing I immersed myself in for almost ten years was like this, too. There is an initial period of study that one must get past to see the world differently. Once complete, it can be intoxicating, as if you’ve discovered secret knowledge. This is why so many people who are deep in the world of “lean thinking” become obsessed and devote their lives to the work.

This can be intoxicating in the right environments. In grad school, surrounded by 47 other students in my global operations program, it was nerd heaven. We would go on factory tours and delight at our ability to “see” everything through a different lens. Stacks of inventory were no longer random material, they were evidence of a failure to implement single-piece-flow systems. Safety checks at the start of a random meeting were evidence of a world-class safety culture or a cynical culture, depending on how much people cared.

It was also fun too. We would make fun of ourselves for implementing inventory control systems for toilet paper at home and share our obsessions about optimizing anything you could think of, including the ideal moment to start walking to class. We even had a Japanese elder, steeped in the traditions of Toyota and Japanese “lean thinking,” who joined us on factory tours, encouraging us to use our “third eye” to see things differently.

I think this was generally good for the field and from the 1980s when these ideas were taking off until now, it helped to seed these frames into the core of most operations departments in universities across the world, into almost every large global organization’s operations functions, and helped to seed a dynamic ecosystem of researchers, teachers and practitioners. I would not be surprised to see protocols make the same journey over the next 30 years.

The downside of this kind of field, however, is that it exists as a sort of “secret knowledge” world. It offers tools, stories, and frameworks that shift people’s perspectives in ways that are not normal. When I was in school, it was easy to work on teams where others fully believed in a systems-first approach to problems and could share the language, but when I was on the factory floor, operations managers didn’t “see” systems. Instead they just saw their “idiot material managers,” or “lazy frontline workers.”

Translating these ideas to larger audiences is a future challenge, and I’ll explore that in the next section. For now, I think the field is in a good place. The barriers filter out opportunists and attract people who are genuinely curious. I don’t see older institutional leaders trying to co-opt the ideas, and there aren’t TikTok protocol “experts” flooding the space like we saw with crypto or real estate in 2020 to 2022. Right now, the filter is simple: you have to actually study and contribute. This is part of my own proof of study too!

#7 Protocols themselves are vision-neutral

“most people intuitively imagine the future to be “the current world, plus their pet thing.” In reality, the future emerges as a traffic jam of multiple things that are changing in unexpected ways simultaneously, driven by actors with different priorities and headed towards different destinations, creating emergent tensions that all must learn to manage.”

Olivia Steiert argues that, “protocols inherently lack a distinct imagination of the future that differs from the moment in which they emerge, especially when they are purely repetitive and operate with what I have called a circular temporality.”

This is because protocols often emerge in response to “crises or uncertainties” and end up preserving existing environments.

I don’t have a lot to say about this other than to note that a lot of our world has mapped ideology onto almost everything.

If you were able to look at something like masking, vaccine rollout, or traffic protocols as something that doesn’t have a vision about the future, how does that change how we might think about designing modern systems?

#8 The field is embracing storytelling

One of the most interesting things I’ve seen this scene embrace is experimental storytelling, especially fiction and AI-copilot writing.

There is a lot of fear right now with new technology. People are overwhelmed. People are scared to experiment. But one of the leaders of protocol studies I think frames it right:

In their protocolized newsletter, they’ve featured experimental forms like fiction and AI-copiloted writing. I have been impressed. It’s also made me realize that in order to make a dent with a new field, you MUST be content first in your thinking. Everything is competing for attention and to win that attention you must tell more interesting and better stories.

Last week, I read this fictional story on workweeks. It was really good:

The 40-Hour Work Week

It made me realize that a lot of “normal” content writing is likely in the process of dying. Lots of people are still doing it, but it feels increasingly stale and boring. New forms are required for new fields.

#9 The Idea of the “Hardened Commons”

"We have fallen way behind on the task of creating new kinds of order out of all this rich, wild technological phenomenology

Commons need to be resilient to threats, but they also benefit from some openness and vulnerability. Total resistance is less effective than maintaining a dynamic, porous relationship with challenges.

Timber Shroff recently introduced the idea of a “hardedned commons” in a recent talk:

In his words:

A Hardened Commons is a system that produces or stewards shared resources, made exceptionally resilient to classical vulnerabilities through technological means.

Classical vulnerabilities: Capture, lemon markets, free-riding, pricing externalities, minority rule, Goodhart’s Law dynamics, Tragedy of Commons, principal-agent problems, regulatory capture, monitoring limitations, exploitation.

The world of protocols embraces the messiness of reality and assumes that things ignored by many other disciplines and domains are part of the thinking. Of course things will fail, we need to embrace that.

In thinking about a hardened commons and resiliency, protocol studies is wildly ambitious. They want to work on the hardest problems instead of ignoring them.

#10 It aims to self-destruct and perhaps is best thought of as a meta-discipline

At the end of the Reader, this passage took me by surprise:

“As the discourses we aim to catalyze become self-sustaining, hopefully supported by a growing number of individuals and organizations with a variety of perspectives and motives, the Summer of Protocols program, we hope, will become unnecessary. The goal of the program, in other words, is to create a hardened commons around the art and science of protocols, and then stop.”

While earlier in this piece, I was thinking that protocol studies may be injected into formal disciplines by moving from the internet to the Academy and board room, perhaps I’m ignoring the obvious fact that protocol studies itself might best be thought of as a protocol too.

If the field succeeeds, it will do so invisibly. It’s thinking will be absorbed by other disciplines, protocols will inject self-sustaining approaches into institutions.

I’m still thinking a lot about this

Personally, some rabbit holes I want to explore:

• How do shifting “workweek protocols,” for example, the emergence of more self-employed people in a city, shift the lived realities of the people in that location?

• Globally, how do different visa programs shift the mix of populations, expats, remote workers, and digital nomads in ways that lead to innovation and creativity

• Are there new protocols for funding creative work in our world, and why are people so resistant to attempting to make money in new ways?

As always, we will see where this curiosity takes me!

I plan on hosting some podcast episodes on these topics soon, and if you’d like to riff on ideas, please reach out.

What do you think about protocols? Are you interested in going deeper now?

Thanks for hanging out here…

Which I’ve been doing since 2015. I’ve somehow figured out how to hack a living doing things like this.

If you like what you read here, you’ll probably enjoy my books The Pathless Path and Good Work:

grab them here

If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths”, you can join The Pathless Path Community.

Some things I endorse: Crowdhealth, an alternative to US health insurance; Kindred, a home-sharing app; Collective for handling your S-Corp accounting needs; and Nat Eliason’s Build Your Own AI Apps course

If you received this and find yourself in a state of outrage, thinking, “How the hell is this silliness allowed in my inbox?” I strongly encourage you to unsubscribe below. It is your god given right, and there is plenty of good stuff online.

A reminder: I don’t check unsubscribe alerts and never look at my subscriber list. So if you feel like unsubscribing, you can do so below.

1. The paper is here if you are interested: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/73395?show=full