This was my biggest surprise seeing how huge operations run even at a co like Uber, which is v technically competent and in theory should be able to measure anything. The fog of war, even inside the walls of your own castle, is very thick. Insanely hard to get data you can trust https://twitter.com/zackkanter/status/1343631380543021056

I remember playing simulation games as a kid and thinking “this is fun! Why wouldn’t running a business be as fun!”
And that’s fun too, but I really think that most of the difference is that in a simulation game you have 1/ clear, up to date data that you can trust

2/ a few levers that you can pull, with certainty on what will happen if you do (as opposed to an infinity of levers that you can perhaps pull, and you’re not sure what’s gonna happen for most of them)

Plus of course 3/ very tight feedback loops

Another advantage of decentralization: the tower cannot run w/o data; the square is mostly comfortable in the fog of war. In fact we tended to trust ops more than data. If an ops looked at a data scientist’s slide and went “that doesn’t look right,” the ops would often win