10 Years After the Best Tech Policy Movie Ever

The Lego Movie teaches us what emergent leadership looks like

Check out this terrific and charming thread about the now ten years old The Lego Movie going viral on a 7-hour flight (link):

The Lego Movie may be the best tech policy movie ever. It inspired my book, Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World. To celebrate, here is a book excerpt explaining what I learned from the movie:

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In 2018, I stood on stage in front of a large auditorium at a Federal Trade Commission event full of serious technology policy lawyers, economists, advocates, and engineers and told them that the most thoughtful and insightful policy movie ever made was Warner Bros’ 2014 film The Lego Movie. (Mild spoilers ahead.)

In this animated film, little, yellow-faced Lego people live in a world of Lego bricks. The main villain is President Business. He is a total dictator with comprehensive designs for Legoland. He generates plans to solve every social need, using a bunch of Lego engineers trapped in a cylindrical prison. (In an inside-the-Beltway joke surely missed by the average child Lego enthusiast, he calls this prison his “think tank.”)

President Business believes his expert designs are superior to the weird, inexpert, or even useless designs of others. He can’t understand why people might prefer different, probably inferior designs. And he imposes his designs on others, through soft propaganda-like ad campaigns (“Everything is Awesome” is the constant, viral musical refrain) but also through forced construction or demolition.

But there is team of rebels and a boring everyman named Emmet. Some of these Lego rebels are master builders, skilled at real-time use of the materials around them to solve the specific problem they face. Emmet isn’t an expert. In fact, his allies ridicule his constructions. Yet even Emmet’s absurd constructions (like a double-decker couch) help solve the problem at hand (hiding from the bad guys). Unlike President Business, Emmet and his more experienced fellow master builders don’t have plans for everyone else. They apply local knowledge and their own creativity to solve the problems they face.

Obviously, President Business doesn’t like the rebels. Even more so than normal Legoland residents, these rebels mess up his plans by building ugly and weird stuff. Tired of people disrupting his designs, President Business plans to superglue all his superior Lego designs into place so that no one can muck up his planned society. A fight ensues and the rebels win, in part by convincing everyday Legoland residents that it’s okay for them to design and build their own solutions without a central plan.

When I talked about Legos to the FTC audience in 2018, I had no plan to write a book at all, let alone this book. But in retrospect, that movie inspired this book. The Lego Movie is about emergent leadership—and it quite entertainingly captures many of the lessons of this book.

President Business is a leader who goes to extremes seeking control. He is the opposite of humble; he believes his plans are the best for everyone. Rather than regulatory humility, he typifies high modernism, to return to a phrase from anthropologist James C. Scott that I introduced in Chapter Seven. He sees society as something to literally be taken apart block by block and reassembled according to his top-down plans. He embraces what can be a very strong temptation for those in power: the desire to design a single perfect policy solution. In my experience, this mindset is particularly common among those who come to policy from engineering backgrounds. After all, shouldn’t it be possible to write legal code like we write computer code, to handle all the conditions and exceptions? Shouldn’t a political machine work like a washing machine: just pick the proper policy cycle, turn it on, and out comes Downy-fresh law?

But as we’ve talked about throughout this book, humans are not bits, gears, or billiard balls. As individual humans (or Lego people) interact, the result is the dynamic, unpredictable, emergent system we call society. It’s not chaos; patterns abound. Personal habits and routines, social and ethical norms, markets, institutions, political structures, and legal strictures—these are all patterns in our emergent society. These emergent patterns are not like a perfectly predictable pendulum; they are more like an eddy or whirlpool in a stream. They are recognizable and powerful but difficult to predict or control.

When President Business cannot control the individuals in Legoland, he seeks to glue everything in place according to his plans. He hates the messiness of bottom-up innovation; he’d rather everything be under control. But, as we’ve seen throughout this book, imposing top-down solutions on emergent systems is often as disruptive and ineffective as plunging one’s hand into a stream to grasp a whirlpool. If such solutions work at all, they do so by changing this dynamic, fluid system into a static, solid system. They freeze the stream or dam it. (Remember the Romanian steel towns stuck with 100 percent unemployment?) Like President Business’s superglue, this solution is far worse than the problem.

Unlike President Business, Emmet and his friends exhibit emergent leadership. They use the materials around them to solve the problems they face. They are (or learn to be) tolerant of different approaches to solving a problem, including imperfect and “weird” solutions. Most importantly, they equip those around them with the tools, training, character, and community needed to tackle big problems in a bottom-up manner.

My goal on that stage in 2018 was to convince the audience to resist expert-designed top-down policy solutions. Don’t try to be President Business, I was saying. Be like Emmett! Search for policy approaches that support emergent experimentation and that free individuals, including nonexperts, to make the most of their unique knowledge and creativity. Many problems can be solved through social, market, or technological innovation rather than legal innovation. And rather than one single comprehensive solution to a problem, there may be many partial, personal, and imperfect solutions evolving over time. We should try to capture the wisdom, experience, and the talents of the many, not just a few experts.

I’m not sure my speech succeeded. Feedback was sparse, honestly. The one piece I recall was a tweet from someone saying that her big takeaway from the FTC event was that she needs to rewatch The Lego Movie. Soon after, I realized that my audience was people seeking policy and legal solutions, and I was telling them that many problems don’t need policy solutions. That’s a hard sell. People who do policy naturally look for policy solutions. Bottom-up, non-policy solutions can feel unsatisfying to people who want a big solution to big problems.

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(You can, of course, read the whole thing again here.)