The Cacophony of Micromanagement

By Samuel Wehner

The Stepping Stone, July 2024

Actuaries are often natural leaders within their organizations, regardless of their position or tenure. A partial foundation for this is their rigorous understanding of the interplays between experiential, prospective, and ethical analyses; an understanding which provides a robust system for making critical decisions. In a fascinating metaphor, this foundation for leadership can be conceptually explained through the act of real-time, impromptu music composition.

Before we dive straight into the analogy, let me give a partial summary of my musical background. I have been playing piano by ear and singing since 2006 and have written over 500 musical compositions over the years. My methodology centers around playing and singing impromptu execution of patterns until I have felt a convergence to something robust and meaningful.

In 2012, I performed a deep-dive analysis of how my mind was choreographing the ensembles I created. This led to a realization of a concept that drives me to this day in music and many other facets of life which I call Hierarchal Temporal Fractal Projection (HTFP). Using this framework, I created a number of generative music algorithms that produced music from images and text.

Essentially, HTFP is a robust framework encapsulating the behavior of anticipation. The next action in a system is not only a result of past actions, but also dependent on projections of time-linked actions into the future at different time scales. There is also a dependency on the patterns of actions at different scales of time (hence, temporal fractal).

In real-time music creation, the next note played is rarely only a function of the previous notes. We place goalposts, or flags, on the time horizon at where we want to be and then fill in actions taking those flags into account. For example, I may have a pattern of measures where I have already mentally decided on the first chord of each, but other chords during those measures are left to decide once the time has arrived at those points, all of which will consider the pre-thought structure of measures.

A key takeaway for leadership is if I start overanalyzing the chords being filled in, I forget the anticipating pattern, make mistakes and the dance of the notes falls apart entirely at every level of anticipation. This is similar to micromanagement, albeit the speed and actions of a musical phrase are faster than the life of an organization. It gives a cautionary tale of why micromanagement breaks down the cohesiveness of teams and generally results in the opposite of what the micromanager desires.

The actions being conducted within an organization at different scales of leadership and individual contribution follow a similar dynamic to HTFP. While a solo impromptu musical composition has a single decision-maker handling the different time scales on their own, an organization divides ownership of time-scaled decisions to various leadership levels.

The CEO is the lead conductor, providing the over-arching vision of the organization at the longest timescale. At each leadership step below the CEO, the timescales in which projected actions are designed become shorter.

The stream of actions projected into the future at each time scale can be compared to the prospective analysis of reserving we actuaries are all too familiar with. The projection of the assets and liabilities into the future, along with the actions linked to such instruments, creates a stream of actions that are anticipated to take place in the future. The decisions made today and the near future are guided by these projected actions much farther out into the future. An important concept to realize here is that the projected actions are strictly tied to the point in time in the future; these actions do not occur until said time (if at all).

A leader who micromanages risks the cohesiveness of their branch within the company. Moreover, it has been my observation that micromanagement is contagious: leaders below micromanagers are prone to become micromanagers themselves out of survival, or leave entirely to find better pastures elsewhere. Micromanagement creates a domino effect of instability and loss of trust.

An analogy is the breakdown of an impromptu musical score on a very fast timeline. A standard radio song has a life of roughly three minutes. In a three-minute song being played live, it takes 10 seconds (personal anecdotal experience) of micromanagement for the song to become fatally unstable. That is roughly 5.6% of the expected length of the song. What if a company that was expected to last five years until acquisition or exit had a 5.6% window to fix the micromanagement? That would be roughly three months’ time to recognize and resolve it.

Magic and beauty occur when the leaders of an organization conduct their actions like a real-time symphony. They produce the music of actions in accordance with the timescales they are responsible for and in harmony with the longer timescales of leadership above them in the hierarchy of conductors. Hierarchies are not only for dividing work amongst multiple groups that can then work in harmony; they also provide a fractal structure of timescales that play off each other like an impromptu jazz band.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.

Samuel Wehner, ASA, MAAA, is CEO and technology strategist for The Matharitan Group LLC, as well as an accomplished pianist and singer songwriter for Sam Wehner Media. He can be reached at sam@matharitan.com, via LinkedIn or on YouTube.