Brackish Strategy
Issue #41: Monthly Note on Protocols for Business
In this issue: learnings from the first month of our Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business. From the importance of conflict to ideas from basketball and bear management. Brackish (adjective): a mix of saltwater and freshwater, at once quenching and sapping.
Sodium is a dual-action nutrient. On the one hand you need salts like sodium and potassium to rehydrate effectively. On the other hand, too much salt will pull the water out of cells — and can be deadly.
In 2005, Blue Ocean Strategy hit the shelves of airport bookstores and business schools. Its authors urged firms to escape cutthroat “red oceans” by creating new, uncontested markets.
If there was ever a sign that conflict-avoidant tendencies had saturated the minds of managers, that was it. An executive who fears clashes with competitors is like an ultramarathon runner who’s scared of his salt. Trade-offs, arguments, competition, and tensions are necessary parts of corporate life.
In other words, there are no blue oceans. Only blue kiddie pools.
Last month, Summer of Protocols kicked off three special interest groups (SIGs) – one on memory, one on formal theories, and one on protocols for business (P4B). I host the SIGP4B call every other Monday, which you can join on Discord.
This group studies a few overarching questions: How do businesses use protocols? Could they use them better? What can we gain by seeing an organization as a series of protocols?
Simple, but not simplistic questions. The impetus for this group was an ongoing thread of research in protocol studies called tensions, which we define as a trade-off plus a conflict. Businesses not only make constant trade-offs between things like efficiency and thoroughness; they also navigate conflicts that stem from those trade-offs — internally, with partners, between teams, and among stakeholders.
Protocols are a tool to manage tensions between different individuals, teams, or groups. Safety protocols balance security and productivity. Data management protocols negotiate different preferences for privacy and freedom. Meeting protocols, like Robert’s Rules of Order, govern the flow of information between decision makers through a cascade of debates and agreements.
What are the patterns that make these protocols so effective?
So far, we’ve spotted a few promising threads.
First and foremost, it’s clear that using protocols effectively will require a brackish strategy that straddles worlds of peacemaking (freshwater) and of bloody competition (saltwater). A kind of strategic field guide that helps professionals build the capacity to be both streetfighters and diplomats, to be both engineers and marketers, rather than shying away from one dimension of the job.
“Protocols are neither state nor market, but essential to both.”
- David Lang, Standards Make the World
We’ll also continue to study the idea of tensions. Many folks have already made inroads to this idea-space under different names: paradox, polarity, both/and thinking, ambidexterity, wicked problem, parallax. We hope not to replace that work but rather to work towards a complementary, empirical study of these phenomena.
And who do I mean by we? The SIGP4B is a seriously diverse group of professionals, whose jobs include video game design, consulting, construction management, DAO stewardship, constitution-writing, engineering, occupational health, and economic theory.
Below are some case studies we’ve discussed and some more ideas that have cropped up along the way.
Showdown at Apple, Revisited
The canonical Jobs-Sculley split is usually told as a melodrama of personalities. Jobs was a young, insurgent creative. Sculley was a disciplined moneymaker. After the Apple board allowed that creative tension to escalate into a brutal ultimatum (“It’s me or him”), they exiled Jobs.
A costly period of calm followed as the dominance of the Apple II product line pushed the company’s innovative streak, and therefore its long-term prospects, to the periphery.
We started with this case study because it eventually ended happily. Apple resurrected itself through a deliberate orchestration of conflict. Aesthetics and performance were revitalized in concert with supply chain discipline. Jobs returned, shaking things up, and Tim Cook crushed unit costs.
What the Apple board originally did wrong they eventually did right. At first they sought to give Jobs and Sculley each their own uncontested space — product and operations, respectively. It worked out better when they surfaced the productive fight within the firm and redirected it toward a compounding advantage.
Hybrid Logic at Lloyd’s of London
A recent ethnographic study of Lloyd’s of London’s reinsurance market demonstrates how even century-old institutions can convert endemic tensions into a stable engine of collective performance.
Smets, Jarzabkowski, Burke, and Spee identify three micro-level balancing mechanisms: segmenting, bridging, and demarcating. Through those, underwriters shuttle between a communal “subscription” ethos and firm-specific profit imperatives.
Segmenting spatially decouples practices: actuarial modelling occurs in private offices, while reciprocal horse-trading is confined to the public “box.”
Bridging selectively carries information or favours across that divide, releasing complementarities without erasing boundary distinctions.
Demarcating reinscribes limits via peer ridicule, risk-review rituals, or self-monitoring to prevent drift toward either pure communalism or unbridled market opportunism.
The cyclical interplay of these mechanisms sustains what the authors term a “conflicting-yet-complementary” equilibrium — practices anchored in one logic augment, rather than dilute, the value generated under the other.
Lloyd’s might exemplify a brackish institutional design in which antagonistic currents are neither blended into homogeneity nor kept in hermetic isolation, but continually re-balanced to preserve both liquidity and discipline.
Only Openings
Frank Chimero’s parable of the wolves and the bears is evergreen. You can solve problems or you can manage them.
Some designers prefer solutions — like those who crafted the policy of wolf extermination that led to a trophic cascade in Yellowstone. Like Jobs, those wolves were eventually reintroduced.
Some designers prefer to manage problems. Our protocols at national parks are made to reduce bear-human interactions, without reducing the population of either party.
The logic of Only Openings is like a strange variant of chess where there are no endgames. We play only in a perpetual middlegame. As it happens, one reigning operating principle for middlegame play in chess is to keep the tension. It’s mathematically easier to build an advantageous position when there are more pieces on the board — the web of their potential interactions is the raw material of your strategy.
Chess is not life, but the parallel is too rich to dismiss. Organizations are also stuck in a perpetual middlegame — what many refer to as an infinite game. Teams within an organization operate with conflicting logics (the shrewd accountants versus the eclectic marketers). Organizations, from businesses to governments, profit by keeping healthy diplomatic channels open. You win by keeping the game — and all of its bloody conflicts — going, not by winning the game.
The Heresy of Zone Defense
Zone defense was illegal in the NBA until the 2001–2002 season, despite its effectiveness. Why? Spectators hated it.
Tension triads between basketball spectators, players, and managers are a rich case study. Furthermore, zone defense itself might be a profitable lens through which we can reexamine our organizations.
The Anna Karenina Principle, distilled from this (translated) Tolstoy quote — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — states that a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavor to failure. Consequently, a successful endeavor is one for which every possible deficiency has been avoided.
When we imagine an organization as a field of tensions, it resembles an enormous team playing zone defense. Each division is responsible for guarding against a particular problem: bankruptcy, loss of trust, indemnity, irrelevance, stagnation, low morale, fraud, workplace accidents, declining market share, etc. This analogy is a good first step toward a useful protocol-based org chart
Subject to the Anna Karenina Principle, any successful business is one where major internal and external tensions are adequately managed. A healthy organization is brackish by nature — full of conflict, but also optionality and potential.
Help Formulate a Brackish Strategy
There are three ways to catch this rising tide.
Some of the research and lessons from SIGP4B will be taught in a module of the Protocol School this fall. Get some skills, knowledge, and a certification that will set you apart. Applications close August 22.
The Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business meets every other Monday to discuss tensions, trade-offs, protocol design, and more. Want to approach your business problems from a fresh angle? Drop in next week via the Summer of Protocols Discord or participate asynchronously in the #🧲-protocols-for-business channel.
Request or attend a corporate workshop or seminar on protocols.
The State of Climate Protocols
Today’s protocol town hall with engineer, analyst, and artist Cory Levinson was live-streamed on our YouTube channel and here on Substack. Missed the stream? Here’s your catch-up.
”A lot has changed in the world of climate protocols over the past few years. In 2023, when I last presented a talk on the current state of affairs to the SoP community, the worlds of DeFi and traditional carbon markets had recently fully collided, with questionable results leaving both sides of the table trying to pick up the pieces in the years to follow. Regen Network, where I was working at the time, had been broadening focus out of carbon and into other environmental markets such as biodiversity crediting - an area that has seen strong engagement from both UNDP and UN Environment Programme with initiatives like the Biodiversity Crediting Alliance. Meanwhile, traditional carbon markets (consisting mostly of reforestation and avoided deforestation credits) continued to face strong headwinds, both from a plummeting in corporate demand after the Guardian’s exposé in early 2023, as well as continued slow progress on instrumentalizing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — a key piece of international climate protocol puzzle that aims to clarify how voluntary carbon market credits will be treated in the context of jurisdictional national climate commitments.
As a response to this crisis, a small corner of the carbon markets has been gaining traction in both the regulatory and corporate sustainability worlds – that of “durable carbon-dioxide removal”. In many ways this renewed focus on more permanent carbon removal and storage technologies (often abbreviated CDR), is an attempted rebranding of carbon markets – away from greenwashing and questionable “counterfactual claims” of avoidance based credits, and towards scientifically verifiable removals with storage guarantees on the scale of 100s to 1000s of years. Books like the CDR Primer do a great job of laying out the complexity of this landscape. Academic researchers and climate startups today are racing to explore these emerging technologies and pathways – each leveraging different mechanisms for CO2 sequestration, whether engineered or natural, biological or geochemical. Protocols, both as a market standardization mechanism or as a means for accelerating scientific understanding of specific CDR pathways, already seem to have a front seat at the show. During our hour together on Wednesday, we’ll dig into the many different pathways being explored for durable CDR, unpack the current state of play, and look at a few specific points of leverage where protocol thinking can help the CDR industry reach the “gigaton scale” that many hope to see in the coming decades.”