Using Protocols: Getting Started

Charlene Sequeira

In this first essay, Charlene delves into the intricate relationship between ideology and action, particularly in the context of environmental sustainability. Drawing inspiration from Venkatesh Rao’s “The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols,” Charlene explores how protocols—sets of rules and guidelines—can either facilitate or hinder our collective efforts to address planetary challenges. Read Part 2 at Using Protocols: Considerations.

When reflecting on humanity’s many insufficient attempts to address the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene, a multitude of intersecting patterns of epistemic errors and human-centered ideologies emerge. One such pattern is that of an imagination bound by technocratic frameworks. Technocentrism as an ideology is often flagged as shallow ecology¹ steeped in the belief that science and technology are always capable of solving environmental problems without necessarily addressing the ethical perspectives on environmental issues.² Moving from this default technocentric small-world view to dance between small-world and large-world³ views will require a collective and conscious effort to collapse our current epistemologies, and build new foundations on which more polycentric decision-making systems and ideologies can grow.

Protocols are a big part of putting any ideology into practice, forming decision-making pathways—affordances and blockers—that help institutions and communities organize, take action, and evolve. Protocols can simultaneously guide us with subtle embedded cues, and force our hand with rigid boundaries that seem impermeable and opaque. After reading and re-reading “The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols” by Venkatesh Rao et al., I wanted to offer some entry points to understand, engage with, and perhaps hack protocols to help accelerate action for a flourishing future by breaking away from our technocratic small-world propensity and allowing a more expansive polycentric ideology to take root. The hypothesis is that by creating an understanding of the characteristics and nature of protocols, one can leverage this in context-specific practice to achieve planetary prosperity for both human and non-human stakeholders. In line with Rao’s invitation to critique his essay,⁴ this piece is very much a work-in-progress that will ideally be built over time with many minds and hearts.

To start with, I’d like to offer a base understanding of protocols and will attempt to chalk out the characteristics of (fairly) successful protocols. Irrespective of where or when systemic interventions are tested, an understanding of protocols is crucial to effectively take advantage of them in order to meet objectives. Then, in a connected piece called Using Protocols: Considerations, I offer some prompts for the purpose of contextual hacking through the lenses of scale, agents, stewardship, learning, vocabulary, externalities, and plurality which are themes that echo across multiple pieces in this manual. The goal here is to strengthen our collective endeavors toward timely planetary-scale damage control, and simultaneously build sustainable pathways to an undefined flourishing future. So let us begin!

What are Protocols?

Protocols are sets of rules, codes, and guides that when followed, allow for complex, interdependent, emergent, multi-stakeholder coordination across time and place. According to Rao et al., 2023, “a protocol is a relatively simple and codified set of behaviors that, when adopted by a sufficient number of participants (human and/or artificial) in a situation, reliably leads to good-enough outcomes for all.” For example, stringent nuclear protocols allow us to maintain a sense of global safety and security, and an understanding of nuanced cultural protocols around caring for older individuals ensures respect for and protection of local and indigenous cultures, knowledge, and history.

Designing Successful Protocols

Protocols are constantly working in a multiplicity of ways to varying degrees of success and outcomes. In order for us to leverage and even create something so systemically ubiquitous and intangible as a protocol, I will try to unpack what makes some protocols more successful than others and provide a checklist for each point.

Protocols that are successful:

• Understand Boundaries and Constraints: Successful protocols have clear legible boundaries, that allow for efficient coordination and decision-making around design evaluations, consideration of trade-offs, costs, and benefits in order to solve a core problem. Good protocols are not insular in this process but also consider adjacent, overlapping, and related dynamic systems in their functioning. In this way, the boundaries of successful protocols maintain the right balance between being well-defined and malleable to its surroundings.

  A protocol understands boundaries and constraints if one can:

  • Clearly define the protocol’s boundaries—what it includes and excludes.
  • Identify the systems with which the protocol interacts, and chalk out how these interactions manifest.
  • Articulate clear and flexible limits of the protocols functioning, and fluid interactions with other systems.

• Embodies Stability Without Stagnation: Even in relatively volatile contexts, generative protocols are usually not erratic and fleeting but slow-changing. Most often, they take shape in the slower systemic layers of culture and governance and then bleed into relatively faster components of the system like infrastructure, commerce, and fashion.⁵ But good protocols are also responsive to the faster layers, learning and growing to stay relevant, useful, and generative.

  A protocol embodies stability without being stagnant if one can:

  • Spot built-in mechanisms that identify and comprehend shifts in the system.
  • Map protocol pathways that are flexible enough to respond (and not react) to unprecedented multidirectional changes in the system.

• Generate Additional Value: In addition to codifying clear pathways that effectively solve their stipulated problem, successful protocols are able to create sustainable and generative modes of flourishing around these intended pathways. Protocols that go beyond self-serving models and generate additional value increase their chances of longevity and relevance in progressively dynamic and volatile contexts of the polycrisis.

  A protocol generates sufficient additional value if one can:

  • Focus on the periphery of the protocol and map out the flow of value being generated into overlapping and adjacent systems.
  • Find embedded structures that create opportunity and capacity to nourish and multiply these subsequent-value outcomes.

• Generate Decentralized Value and Commitment: Not all value created by protocols are equal. Value creation that is centralized and siloed would stifle adaptive behaviors and compromise a protocol’s longevity. Protocols may be considered successful when they can generate sufficient value and virtuous cycles autonomously across their system. This would allow for decentralized adaptation that could mitigate varying externalities over the course of time. According to Rao et al., successful protocols create “more complex patterns of voluntary commitment and participation than are achieved by competing systems of centralized coordination.”⁴

  A protocol generates decentralized value and commitment if one can:

  • Chart outflows of value that are not restricted to a single or dominant self-serving source.
  • Identify multiple co-evolving value cycles amongst and between various participants or agents.

• Are Teachable and Learnable: A protocol’s capacity to generate sufficient decentralized value is highly dependent on the ability of various participants to learn, implement, share, and even hack their codified patterns through peer-to-peer relationships and interactions without the exclusive need for formal instructions. When an effective culture of learning the codified behaviors of protocols is consciously embedded into their functioning, participants can voluntarily commit to and productively participate in them—creating a positive feedback loop.

  A protocol is teachable and learnable if one can:

  • Identify multiple stakeholder groups that can access and comprehend its codified patterns.
  • Notice strong relationships and voluntary participation between those stakeholders built through some form of decentralized learning system.
  • Easily access and comprehend enough of its codified patterns without the help of formal institutions.

• Evolve and Create Value as Lines of Defense: The mortality of protocols is based on their ability to adapt and respond to both internal deviants and problematic externalities to avoid succumbing to capture and corruption.⁴ By embodying characteristics of generous legibility, purposeful clarity, malleability, and adaptability, good protocols evolve to produce improved versions of themselves without dying. Additionally, their ability to produce sufficient value prompts virtuous cycles amongst its stewards, that consequently mitigate both internal and external issues that could otherwise undermine the system over time.

  A protocol evolves and creates value as lines of defense if one can:

  • Map out some form of built-in decentralized mechanisms of repair, reflection, and reform.
  • See evidence of ongoing relationships and invested stewards in support of these mechanisms.

The interplay of these characteristics maintains the relative success of a protocol that “reliably leads to good enough outcomes for all.”⁴ Taking stock of these elements in a way that embraces the contextual complexities of an active or revised protocol is the first step in mapping out the territory and is no small feat. However, the reliability of past knowledge structures that have built our protocols and policies thus far seems to fail us more often, and with increasingly dire outcomes. This forces us to ask if creating the best “good protocol” is sufficient to meet our objectives.

The major challenge we have yet to crack is our inability to act fast enough, at a scale large enough, that benefits all of us—both human and non-human entities.