I Can't Tell You My Secret, But I Could If...
Issue #16 of The Two But Rule
It’s been a big week. Forbes released my first article as a contributing writer on Wednesday. (Let me know if you have a story to cover in future articles.)
I wrote about five thousand words, and then we edited it down to about nine hundred. That’s a lot of detail about a complicated topic lost on the cutting room floor…but a lot of it will find a home here on The Two But Rule. Stay tuned.
We Need To Share…But We Can’t Share
The Forbes article is about Zero Knowledge cryptography (ZK) and how it’s becoming an important and practical tool beyond blockchain scaling and cryptocurrency privacy. But the story really turns on a subject that has been my obsession for twenty-five years. In a nutshell:
We need to share information, so that we can work together better in an increasingly complex and interconnected world — a world where what any of us does or knows, even internally, can affect everyone else.
But, we can’t share — not everything and not all the time, because some information is personal, sensitive and confidential. We have legal, ethical and practical reasons to protect it from leaks, misappropriation and misalignment.
So we can’t simply copy and send our most sensitive internal data to others, not even to our most trusted partners — not even when it would make everything we do together faster, smoother and less expensive.
But we could still improve coordination by 10x in spite of this constraint, if…
Your First Crush
You can’t throw a stick in any direction without hitting the “we need to share but can’t share” problem. You experienced it the day you discovered your first crush. You needed help. Surely your friend could get the friend of your newfound love interest to assist in the dangerous courtship maneuver. Maybe they could orchestrate a way to seat you next to each other at a movie. But…so many buts. Your friend, you’ll remember, had a big mouth. They could blab and ruin the whole affair. And you couldn’t be sure they weren’t interested in the same person…or that they would become interested, if they learned that you were.
Teenage courtships are a good illustration of the problem with sharing intentions. You need to know, before sharing, what your prospective confidante’s intentions are, and you have to consider how their intentions might change once they become aware of yours. That’s why, to this day, your blood pressure probably rises when remembering the first time you confided in someone like that.
The Problem Is Everywhere
Companies, governments — pretty much any assemblage of humans interacting with any other assemblage of humans — deal with this problem all day, every day. It’s so pervasive that most of us are numb to it. And yet, if you’re a CEO, I bet that thinking about the last time you had to reveal your plans in order to achieve a mutual objective jacks your blood pressure higher than remembering your first crush.
The first time I wrote about this conundrum was in Harvard Business Review in 2002. It has been the through-line of my career ever since:
Example 1: Multisided markets like taxis and ride sharing, which I worked on at Flywheel, are all about the problem of connecting people without violating their trust or putting them at risk by mishandling information about where they’re going. This gets even thornier when the applications making these connections involve dozens of third party web services like Google Maps and Twillio that sometimes need to orchestrate by passing customer data between them.
Example 2: The supply chains and logistics networks that we worked on at IBM function better when counterparties know more about what each other is doing. But the more data counterparties have about each other, the greater the risk of that information getting into the hands of bad actors and competitors. Consequently, attempts to collect that information have met intractable resistance from vendors and nations repeatedly throughout modern history.
It’s not uncommon to have two-party contracts where not only are the terms of the contract confidential, but the contract’s very existence can not be shared with the hundreds of other parties in a supply chain.
Supply chain management will remain balkanized and brittle until a way to square the “we need to share but can’t share” issue has been found and adopted.
Example 3: Imagine what we might discover if the world’s R&D labs could share everything about what they’re learning with each other, particularly if they could actually absorb and act on that shared knowledge. But…yeah, not going to happen. Still, we spent a lot of money and had a reasonable amount of success approximating that in Australia and the UK at IXC. (The program didn’t scale…but maybe it could in the era of ChatGPT, if…)
Big exception: Even though I got involved with blockchain technology (at least in part) because of an interest in the sharing problem, blockchain itself turns out to be an anti-pattern to a solution. It’s the technological equivalent of your indiscrete high school friend. It will tell your secrets to literally everyone.
But We Could Cooperate Without The Sharing Risk If…
Tools like ZK, Mongo’s queryable encryption, and machine learning with secure multi-party computation are powerful things, and what gives them purpose for me is the chance to find new solutions to the sharing conundrum. In future issues, we’ll dig into new ways that these tools are leading to breakthroughs and practical solutions. A few are mentioned in the Forbes article.
But the most powerful technique for dealing with the sharing problem is the two-but rule itself — momentum thinking. It’s my experience that many of the failed attempts to get organizations to work well together aren’t due to lack of technology but to a scarcity of buts. Not enough, “but that won’t work, but it would if…” thinking.
Announcing TacitPath
On Monday, I’ll update profiles and let folks know that the ink is dry on the formation of a new company called TacitPath. It’s assembling a network of people and resources that companies, governments and consortia need to tackle the sharing problem in multiparty coordination and automation. (And we’ll be helping clients that are facing this particular set of challenges design better products and services — using the principles of momentum thinking, of course.)
Take a look. Let me know what you think.
And if you share a passion for the sharing problem — if you have real-world experience dealing with it, have ideas on how to tackle it, or make technology that addresses it — here’s an offer:
Reach out and discuss your experience with me by April 30, 2023, and I’ll gift you a free year’s paid subscription to The Two But Rule. (Paid subscribers will receive 5% off TacitPath services engaged in 2023.)
Special Thanks To Ashley
Ashley Watters, our terrific editor, is away for a couple weeks. It’s a good time to thank her for everything she does for our merry band of but-heads. I’m sure you’ll appreciate what she does even more after reading my unedited screeds over the next few issues. :)