Have you ever been asked -
or, let's be realistic, told -
what your "North Star" is?
What the fuck does that even mean?
My name's Jesse Alford,
and you're reading Issue 5 of Nonlinear.Garden,
a newsletter about technology, cognition, and humanity.
I love metaphor. I love precise, beautiful metaphor.
I love sloppy, broad metaphor.
I love bizarre, overly-specific metaphor.
I love them differently, though.
My love for the North Star metaphor is in its error,
and the power of that error to reveal other mistakes.
In case you haven't encountered it, I'm talking about organizational talk like "Customer Satisfaction is our North Star," for example.
The conversation goes on, people begin to say things like "what's our North Star metric?" by which, of course, they mean "the most important single thing we can measure." On a personal level people invoke "your north star" to be a "guiding light," beyond "goals" or "mission statements" - something you can always head towards to escape confusion. "Follow your North Star." That kind of thing.
It's a meant as a basis for building a solution to Problem Zero. It wants you to be able to look up, see if a nice legible point on a line is moving the way you want it to, and uh, govern yourself accordingly.
People using the North Star metaphorically do not, broadly, seem to connect it successfully to the details of its actual technical domain - navigation. You can tell it's navigation because we're not talking about it as Polaris, we're not talking about it as part of the Ursa Minor constellation, we're giving it a name with a cardinal direction, the one we tend to draw the biggest on maps, the one that tells us where to position ourselves relative to the map.
The North Star metaphor draws on all this, but there's a revealing short circuit there.
Do you see it?
We'll come back to that.
I think the North Star is the prototypical example of an "Astral Truth." The critical thing about an Astral Truth is that it is beyond locale, beyond interference, beyond human reach. It has that feeling of deep-space indifference. Of cosmic scale. Of objectivity, certainty, universal availability. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is another Astral Truth. So is, on some level, "the end of the day" from the infamous phrase "at the end of the day, it is what it is." Another example: the uncountability of the stars in the heavens. Deeply, unquestionably, actually true.
The North Star metaphor is deployed to help set direction, from leader to followers. Its astral grandeur helps overcome the clutter of very human-reachable, uncertain, unpredictable local terrain. It's meant to help people re-orient and contextualize other information, to make decisions by. "If you're getting lost, take a deep breath, find your north star, blazing in the night sky, and figure out how to move towards it."
Much like the Lighthouse metaphor, this is not how navigation works.
Polaris is not the Best Star.
The most important thing about it is that it is easy to base measurements on.
You do not follow the North Star in hopes of arriving at Polaris.
You do not, broadly, "follow" it at all!
North is not the Best Direction. It's just a direction.
The North Star isn't even especially bright.
Astral Truth cannot tell you where to go.
It cannot.
It cannot tell you, even, where you are!
Not alone.
The function people want to imply with their metaphor isn't there in the real thing.
Even as real navigational metric, you need the flat sea horizon to measure against to get even latitude.
The North Star is nonetheless special and important,
because it's aligned with the axis of the spinning globe,
and often visible to the naked eye, at least in the northern hemisphere.
You can find it, and it holds still enough to hold down its end of an angle measurement.
The high, cold, beautiful name of the North Star Metric generally turns out to be just another case of the drunk looking for his car keys under a lamppost because that's where the light is. Some star!
You can get information you can use to orient yourself if you find the North Star, if you make a metric out of it by relating it to a valid ground truth, but: note all the missing richness.
Note it, and let it ring a note of alarm.
Wake yourself up with it. We don't need or want soaring astral heights for what is usually just another goddamn poorly-constructed Key Performance Indicator with dubious validity.
The Beauty of Invalidity
I wasn't kidding when I said I loved the Product North Star thing and its various friends. The North Star Metaphor is an example of what Jerry Weinberg calls "lullaby language." Recognizing Lullaby Language is incredibly useful, because it helps reveal what people know and consider important but would not intentionally communicate.
Lullaby language is covering up difficulty, fear, and confusion - all the hardest parts - with soothing simplicity. Its use points directly to the things people are not willing to say, admit, think about, confront. The things people know that they do not know, or the things they fear may not be so.
Astral Truths tend to be used this way, and are ironically a better guide in pointing to dysfunction than in pointing to goals. They are true! You can make measurements and coordinate based around knowledge of them. But they don't mean anything except in relation to point and vector Ground Truth, and human intentions. And that's exactly the stuff people talking this way tend to want to avoid.
So if someone is talking about North Stars, listen for the rest of the navigational metaphor:
- horizons, and the dawn and dusk conditions generally necessary to clearly see both horizon and stars for measurement.
- vectors, points, and other coordinate information
- clocks
- compasses
What would those things be, metaphorically? What would we need, even to merely use a North Star to coordinate simple decisions? Even if we had them, we're still missing human reasons for the journey.
The Navigation metaphor the North Star is within is itself within the Journey metaphor,
which is a more grounded domain.
We are somewhere. We are going somewhere else. We will travel points in between.
We have a reason we are where we are!
We have a reason we need to go where we're going.
We have things and they're wearing out and we have food and we're running out - and on and on.
Dealing with the details of this more grounded domain competently is the essence of real human power.
It is incredibly hard, complex, and uncertain.
It feels good to raise our eyes to the heavens - and this is true of the people coming up with and talking about North Stars, at least as much as it is for those they hope to lead with them! But.
Everything elevated and abstract about an Astral Truth is anti-useful for goal-oriented behavior by humans on earth.
Join us next time!
We'll talk about better solutions to the problems people wish to solve with North Stars.