Gall's Law

John Gall was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book Systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail, which is a critique of systems theory.

Gall's law is a precept in which environmental Selection Tests meet systems design.

So, if you want to build a system that works, the best approach is to build a simple system that meets the environment's current selection tests first, then improve it over time. Over time, you'll build a complex system that actually works.

Problem is, complex systems beget complex systems. At least that's the way we're trained to think.

Gall's Law flies in the face of not only systems theory, but complexity theory.

UNPACKING COMPLEXITY

We can translate this law into reality using one of my own startups.

RAIR provides digital ownership encryption. This means that every single person should be able to autonomously own and manage their own assets. In order to do this, we needed to come up with a single functionality that would affect the system overall. So we did.

We achieved this, very specifically, in a unique cryptographic handshake.

The cryptographic handshake is this simple system. By simple, it is meant that it is straightforward, not that it isn't complex. Because it is straightforward, every other part of the system it connects to is made less complex.

You see how this works.

Now let’s zoom out and look at the broader picture.

SIMPLIFYING COMPLEX FUNCTIONS

I've noticed one very critical pattern over time: That people try to solve complex problems, like climate change, by trying to boil the ocean all at once.

With climate change, it's good to be clear about what is meant by this. The climate changes (and has been for billions of years) and therefore there are many, many factors as to why it changes - from the sun's radiation, to spectral distribution, to earth's magnetic polarities, to actual toxic emissions, and the like.

As such, there cannot be just one solution for climate change. To think or believe otherwise is preposterous. To reduce climate to simple carbon emissions is egregiously errant in its own right.

For example, it is a little known fact that NO2 or Nitrous Oxide represents 7% of all global toxic emissions at a ratio of 297:1. Methane comes in at a distant second as a trace gas at a ratio of 30:1, while carbon is also a trace gas with a nearly indistinguishable ratio of 1:1.

Why mention this?

Because carbon is not only indistinguishable according to global climate change standards, but it is indistinct from other pollutants - which are far more lethal. So, isolating carbon as the main culprit of climate change is not only fallacious, but it almost completely ignores the fact that CO2 is the source of all life on this planet.

SINGULAR SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONALITY

Yet, there can be a singular function that has a systemic ripple effect on the entirety of the environment in terms of industrial processes.

Clean hydrocarbons would have an effect on plastics made across supply chains.

Geothermal power would also have a profound effect on energy distribution across supply chains.

Thermal desorption units would also have a profound effect on supply chain waste management processes overall.

You see where this is leading: A single function that presents a solution in multiple contexts.

This is the essence of Gall's Law.

This is the kind of thing we should be paying attention to as we design simple systemic solutions. And they don't teach these fundamentals in schools. Not yet at least.