The Hedgehog and the Fox

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’—Isaiah Berlin

The comparison of thinking styles between the hedgehog and the fox is an ancient one, and has recirculated often in business (and particularly in forecasting) where leaders are encouraged to think like a fox—by being agile, curious, and adaptable. However, it recently popped into my head as I was thinking about the value of composable architectures (especially relative to legacy DXP approaches). Certainly there is an easy and almost literal comparison to be made between the two: Composable architectures are, by definition, made up of many things and a DXP is literally “one big thing”.

On the innovation side, the technology industry is moving in this direction—and fairly rapidly. The advantages of not being a hedgehog and betting the infrastructure of the company (and your career along with it) on a single vendor were already well known. As a reminder of that, just recently, I saw a post on LinkedIn where Allison Adams of Gartner was referencing the fact that in January 2023 “Oracle changed its Java subscription licensing model from Named User Plus and Processor to a single Employee metric” -- https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7031987143115730944/ . I admit, not being a Java architect (or a contract lawyer)—I don’t know what any of that means, and if you are a marketer, you probably don’t either (and more importantly, don’t want to know!). But if you are running on top of enterprise software that depends on Java (like Adobe Experience Manager does) someone in your organization has to expend the time and effort to find out (and in turn, cost out those changes).

Certainly the move to SaaS is removing the complexity of managing that underlying infrastructure, so that is already a step in the right direction. At the same time, there was also a move away from server-side rendering languages such as Java towards more front-end and client-centric frameworks. Mathias Biilmann Christensen of Netlify coined the term “Jamstack” as an initialism of “JavaScript” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWTMEDEPw8c , “APIs” and “Markup”—but quickly found that many people implementing on that pattern were often using languages other than JavaScript, or Markup coming from a CMS, so the language started to shift towards composable and the pattern and away from the actual implementation.

However, the important bit is actually somewhat left unsaid, but has been expanded upon by Isaiah Berlin (when applying to Tolstoy in his famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox), and summarized by Michael Ignatieff in a forward on that essay:

“It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know.”—Michael Ignatieff

This is probably the most important thing to understand about composable systems—instead of focusing on a single technology (vendor, programming language, etc.) you are actually focusing on an approach in which the vendors and technologies are far less important than the practice of how you bring them together.

And this is where Netlify and others in our ecosystem are actually foxes: they realize that the big innovation isn’t “JAMstack” per se, but actually the composable approach—because the next front-end innovations might not come from JavaScript or Markup. In fact, we are at the point where we can comfortably and confidently say we don’t know where the next area of innovation will come from, but a composable approach doesn’t actually care about those details—only that you can easily swap out technologies and implementations as they evolve.

But it’s not just around innovation and advancing tech trends—thinking like a fox also makes a great deal of sense for risk mitigation. In 2019, I wrote a blog post about vendor viability in the space ( https://markdemeny.com/2019/09/good-product-bad-business/ ) and since then, the number of vendors has only grown, with the growth and capital conditions becoming even tighter. The solutions I prescribed then essentially advocate for a composable approach to technology and how your business is structured, and I’m really proud to say that Uniform has been working towards making those solutions around innovation and risk mitigation a reality. The ability to minimize the friction of integrating and changing underlying content, commerce and customer data sources means being a more nimble fox, and that’s a good thing.

#composable #mach #composablecommerce #contentmanagement #digitalexperience