There is an occupational hazard attached to being spectacularly successful: eventually somebody asks you why, at which point you have to decide whether the answer is superior judgement, heroic application, an unusually advantageous arrangement of neurons, dumb luck, or the lessons you have learned.
Discovery CEO Adrian Gore has chosen the last option, although in his case there is rather more intellectual scaffolding underneath them than normally accompanies the answer. His new book, The Four Principles, identifies disciplined optimism, focused urgency, declared goals, and the Pareto Tail, the idea that a relatively small number of high-impact decisions account for a disproportionate amount of what happens to us.
I’m enjoying it enormously, partly because Gore has always struck me as one of South Africa’s most interesting business thinkers, and his advice is just wonderful. Its clarity, certainty, and conviction make it a compelling read.
But ... for me, it provokes the irresistibly vain question: if Adrian Gore has four principles, what are mine? This is admittedly a little like reading The Origin of Species and deciding Darwin has left room for a sequel.
Still.
Gore’s principles are largely about individual effectiveness, whereas the ideas I keep returning to are more about how societies work (or don't ), and specifically about why some societies seem capable of organising themselves effectively and some don’t. Ours for example.
After scratching around in things I have written over the years, if I had to isolate my four principles - something I’m actually in principle against because I’m very suspicious of simplification - these are the four I would isolate: iterative liberty, open access, forward motion, and corrective power.
Since four abstract nouns in succession have roughly the entertainment value of the Municipal Finance Management Act, I thought they needed characters. Movie characters.
So here is my alternative of the principal characters in the cast of The Four Principles: Mark Watney from The Martian, Katherine Johnson from Hidden Figures, Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon, and Juror 8 from 12 Angry Men.
Marvel will presumably be calling shortly.
Mark Watney: Iterative liberty
Watney gets left behind on Mars, which even by South African municipal standards represents a fairly serious service-delivery failure.
What makes him interesting is that he doesn't survive because he is relentlessly optimistic, although he certainly needs a strong dose of optimism; nor does he survive because he possesses a comprehensive Martian five-year development plan. He survives by trying things.
He calculates, experiments, grows potatoes, blows things up, revises his calculations, tries something else, and slowly converts a sequence of incomplete solutions into survival.
This is the iterative-liberty principle, and I think it is one of the strongest practical arguments for freedom.
We normally defend liberty morally, and correctly so: people should be able to decide how they live because it is their life. But freedom has another huge advantage that is almost economic or informational. Liberty is society’s inbuilt trial-and-error mechanism.
Nobody sitting in an office - no minister, economist, chief executive, columnist, or exceptionally advanced committee - knows in advance which ideas are going to work. Freedom permits lots of people to make lots of bets, most of which will be mediocre, some of which will be magnificently stupid and a tiny proportion of which will change everything.
The crucial thing is that failure contains information.
Gore cites scientific research to back up his principles, so allow me to do the same. Rembrand Koning, Sharique Hasan and Aaron Chatterji studied technology companies adopting A/B testing, which allows firms to test alternative versions of products cheaply rather than convene another meeting to discuss everybody’s feelings about the widget. Firms that adopted experimentation generated more product features and better performance; young ventures were more likely to fail quickly when their ideas were bad, while more mature firms became more likely to scale when experiments identified something that worked.
That first result is particularly important. Failing faster can be progress.
We have a strange tendency to judge systems according to how successfully they prevent failure, when the better question is often how successfully they permit failure without making it catastrophic. Markets do this. Science does this. Democracy, at its best, does this.
Dictatorships can produce spectacular decisions too, of course. Unfortunately, nobody gets to run the A/B test.
The freedom to fail is the freedom to discover.
Let people try.
Katherine Johnson: Open access
Then there is Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician portrayed in Hidden Figures, who has the slightly surreal experience of helping the United States put people into space while working inside a segregated computing unit in an organisation that was not entirely sure she should be allowed into the room, let alone attend technical meetings.
This is the open-access principle: talent is widely distributed; opportunity isn’t.
The moral case for allowing people into institutions, professions, and markets is familiar. But what interests me almost as much is the waste involved in keeping them out.
Economists Raj Chetty and colleagues demonstrated this spectacularly by studying 1.2-million American inventors. Children born into families in the top 1% of the income distribution were ten times more likely to become inventors than those born below median income, and the gap remained huge even when the researchers compared children showing similar mathematical ability when young.
Exposure to inventors also mattered enormously: children who grew up around innovation were much more likely to become innovators themselves.
The researchers called the missing inventors “lost Einsteins”. The point of opening an economy is not merely to redistribute the opportunities that already exist. It is to enlarge the pool of people capable of creating opportunities that don't yet exist.
A society that excludes people wastes intelligence.
And importantly, nobody actually knows where useful intelligence is hiding. Genius is inconsiderate like that. It refuses to confine itself to approved postcodes, schools, surnames, races, genders, or professional networks.
Let people in.
Hiccup: Forward motion
My third character is Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon, which admittedly sounds like a slight lowering of the intellectual tone after Katherine Johnson. Bear with me.
Hiccup grows up in a Viking society organised around the central proposition that dragons are the enemy. This proposition is old, widely accepted, supported by tradition, defended by extremely muscular men and, consequently, almost completely wrong.
Hiccup discovers that the existing arrangement is not the natural arrangement.
That is the forward-motion principle.
Progress depends not simply on inventing new things but on allowing old arrangements to be displaced when something better becomes possible. Progress is iterative, not ordained. The future doesn't arrive automatically like a Discovery Health debit order; people have to build it, and frequently they have to build it in the teeth of people doing quite nicely out of the present.
The economics profession gave the 2025 Nobel Prize to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for work that sits almost exactly here.
Mokyr’s historical work emphasises that sustained technological progress required societies receptive to new knowledge and sufficiently open to permit innovators to challenge established ideas, while Aghion and Howitt formalised Schumpeter’s great idea of creative destruction, in which economic growth occurs partly because better technologies, products, and businesses are allowed to replace worse ones.
The destruction part tends to receive rather less enthusiasm than the creativity part, for obvious reasons.
Everybody loves innovation until the innovative thing is competing with his company, profession, subsidy, taxi route, regulatory exemption, or job. At that point innovation suddenly becomes an important matter requiring extensive consultation.
Yet the alternative to creative destruction is not creative preservation. It is usually stagnation.
Hiccup's great discovery isn't really dragons. It is possibility.
Don't confuse the existing order with the natural order.
Build forward.
Juror 8: Corrective power
Which brings us to Henry Fonda's Juror 8 in 12 Angry Men.
Eleven jurors are ready to convict a young man of murder. Juror 8 does something extraordinarily unfashionable: he admits uncertainty. He doesn't begin by announcing that everyone else is wrong and he alone possesses the truth. He merely thinks the possibility that they might all be wrong deserves examination.
That is the corrective-power principle.
Human beings are astonishing creatures. We are intelligent, inventive, cooperative and capable of decoding the genome, landing on the moon and creating Woolies' rotisserie chicken. We are also tribal, overconfident, suggestible, self-interested, and capable of believing almost anything provided enough of our friends believe it too.
This creates a slight problem with power.
If individuals are fallible, then political systems built around fallible individuals are by definition taking a fairly heroic punt.
The great virtue of liberal institutions is not that they guarantee wise decisions - anybody who has watched parliament for half an hour will be swiftly cured of that idea. Their virtue is that they create mechanisms for correcting foolish ones.
Daron Acemoglu, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo and James Robinson examined democratic transitions across countries and estimated that democratisation increases GDP per capita by roughly 20% over the long run, with higher investment, schooling, and health among the mechanisms. That does not establish that every democracy is economically brilliant - plainly - but it is powerful evidence against the old proposition that authoritarianism is the price societies must pay for getting things done.
Power without challenge becomes error without correction.
Make power answerable.
So there they are: Watney experiments, Johnson gets through the door, Hiccup challenges inherited arrangements, and Juror 8 asks the question that should terrify every absolutely certain person: what if I'm wrong?
Iterative liberty. Open access. Forward motion. Corrective power. These four “principles” are really one argument.
Freedom creates experiments. Openness increases the number of experimenters. Progress allows successful experiments to displace unsuccessful ones. Accountability ensures that somebody can eventually stop the experiment when it turns out to be an appalling idea.
And perhaps this brings me back to Gore and his disciplined optimism. I am slightly sceptical of the idea that progress belongs particularly to the optimists. A society consisting entirely of pessimists would probably never leave the cave; one consisting entirely of optimists would leave immediately, without checking whether there was a lion outside.
The truth is, I suspect, that optimists depend on pessimists and vice versa. The pessimist asks what could go wrong; the optimist asks what might go right. The optimist explores, the pessimist tests, and everybody copies what works. The process is iterative. Perhaps rational progress is not the triumph of optimism over pessimism at all, but the product of the argument between them. 💥
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