Margins of Maneuverability
A no-win scenario reminds us we have room to experiment. I speak with former Teen Vogue executive editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay about her new book, The Myth of Making It.
For justice-minded people, navigating the 21st-century economy can feel impossible. Like there are no good options. A catch-22. A real Kobayashi Maru.
What's that? You're not familiar with the Kobayashi Maru?
The Kobayashi Maru is a fixture of the Star Trek universe. It's a simulation used to test Starfleet cadets in a no-win scenario. The simulation begins with a distress signal from the Kobayashi Maru, a stranded civilian ship on the edge of enemy territory. The unfortunate cadet is faced with the decision of whether or not to attempt a rescue.
If the cadet attempts a rescue, they face an inevitable attack by enemy warships—putting the lives of not only the Kobayashi Maru's crew in jeopardy but their own crew as well. If they decide not to attempt a rescue, they forfeit the lives of the Kobayashi Maru's crew and defy the ethical standards of Starfleet.
There is no correct answer. The simulation isn't designed to be beat. It's a psychological exercise in impossible choices—precisely the kind that Starfleet officers face at one point or another in their careers.
Of course, there's one Star Trek character who isn't satisfied with a principled psychological exercise. You guessed it—it's Captain Kirk. Played by William Shatner, Kirk is the only cadet ever to have successfully completed the Kobayashi Maru simulation.
Except that he cheated.
He reveals that he reprogrammed the simulation to allow for a successful solution. And receives a "commendation for original thinking."
But is it original thinking? Reprogramming the simulation isn't creative or original at all. Kirk's action demonstrates that he accepts the flawed belief that the simulation is designed to counter—that there’s always a way to win. He says, “I don’t believe in no-win scenarios.” By hacking the Kobayashi Maru, Kirk reasserts the win-lose binary. His action, then, is reactionary rather than creative.
As a psychological exercise, the Kobayashi Maru allows cadets to practice working within a margin of maneuverability. The cadet knows they cannot win, but they're given the chance to shrug off obvious choices and discover the non-obvious ones. They're reminded that there is always an opening to experiment and the potential to generate some positive effects even when the situation is dire. Spock demonstrates that potential near the end of The Wrath of Khan, the film that introduced us to the Kobayashi Maru.
I picked up the phrase "margin of maneuverability” from a new book, The Myth of Making It, by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a feminist writer and editor based in Brooklyn.
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
Today, we're going to dig into both the theory and application of margins of maneuverability and examine the no-win scenarios we face daily. From the narratives we have about working hard, to the challenges we face as bosses, to the unique position Samhita was in during her time at Teen Vogue, to the practices she uses to manage with care and curiosity today, we'll examine how uncertainty and constraint open the door to experimentation and hope.
The Margin of Maneuverability
More working people have become aware that our struggles and stress are often due to trying to manufacture individual solutions to systemic issues. She writes, "We sit now at a career crossroads, wondering what our next move is."
We don't get to opt out of the systems that set us up to fail. Even what passes for opting out, like Kirk hacking the test, tends to reassert entrenched systems. Samhita writes, "We have to find ways to earn money while maintaining some sense of morality but also while being able to pay our rent or our parents’ rent or to have a child and put them through college or, I don’t know, finally go on that vacation."
Expanding and playing in our margins of maneuverability is a central theme of The Myth of Making It. Instead of accepting that our choices are limited, she argues for situational and contextual non-obvious choices. She characterizes the core tension we are navigating today as between the posture of collective action and mutual aid and the posture of leaning in and pursuing individual success.
When we spoke, Samhita explained how she sees the margin of maneuverability in the tension between theory and practice. When we talk about women and ambition, for instance, we either speak in broad strokes about feminist or labor theory, or we talk about the practice of leaning in. How we maintain a justice-oriented, pro-labor stance while handling the particulars of our careers or businesses is largely undeveloped.
"I wanted to speak to what I see as a new generation of young people who are navigating both," she told me. They recognize that "hustle culture" and "neoliberal workplace feminism hasn't really given us the liberation and freedom we thought it would give us." While leaning in has undoubtedly worked for some, Samhita pointed to the race and gender pay gaps, as well as gender-based and racial discrepancies in starting salaries and career advancement.
While there's growing awareness that collective bargaining could move the needle on some of those stubborn problems, that doesn't immediately translate into retirement savings or better health insurance. "It's very hard to integrate that into your day-to-day life if you're not part of a unionization effort," said Samhita. We need ways to exercise our values and look out for our personal needs. "The margin of maneuverability is the space between," she continued, "these dualities of how we understand the modern workplace."
Uncertainty is the Source of Possibility
Samhita picked up "margin of maneuverability" from philosopher Brian Massumi. So, you know, I had to dig into the source material.
In his book, The Politics of Affect, he explains to an interviewer that "there are any number of levels of organization and tendencies in play, in cooperation with each other or at cross purposes." The way all the elements relate is so complex that it isn't comprehensible as a predictable system.
Massumi describes this as a "sort of vagueness surrounding the situation, an uncertainty about where you might be able to go and what you might be able to do." Therefore, our margin of maneuverability depends on uncertainty.1
The Kobayashi Maru works best when the cadet becomes so immersed in the simulation that they embrace the uncertainty. The cadet grasps the potential in every moment up until the very end. The ending is predetermined—but everything the cadet attempts before that point is not.
The future of work, on the other hand, is not predetermined. That vagueness and uncertainty can be a source of possibility. Not only do we have the potential in every moment and every choice, but we have the potential to make lasting change through our individual and collective actions.
Yes, we often experience this as overwhelming or confusing. It can lead to inaction more often than it leads to action. But Massumi argues correctly, I think, that this uncertainty can be empowering when we choose to see it that way—because "you realize that it gives you a margin of maneuverability" to focus on, "rather than on projecting success or failure." This uncertainty, he explains, "gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, to try and see. This brings a sense of potential to the situation."
Managing the Margin
That's what The Myth of Making It explores—those openings to experiment and a sense of potential. "This book was an effort to make those two sides of myself meet," she told me. One side champions worker-led organizing. The other angles for a promotion or raise. One side raises a fist in protest, while the other hustles harder for diminishing returns.
The professional-managerial class is becoming increasingly aware of this tension, Samhita explained. Drawing on her own experience in management roles, such as executive editor at Teen Vogue, Samhita pays close attention to the margin of maneuverability from the perspective of the boss stuck in the middle between non-management employees and their bosses in senior management.
For that frontline supervisor or middle manager, the readily apparent choices aren't great. A labor-minded manager might want to advocate for her team members but realize her job depends on toeing the company line. "We don't have a choice but to rethink what management means," she argued. "We don't have a choice but to rethink what it means to support your workers, and to support your employees, and how a workplace is structured."
It's this kind of rethinking that Massumi has in mind. If we accept our existing beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and our world, we won’t find much room for experimentation. But being present to uncertainty and shifting contexts allows us to "find a margin, a maneuver, we didn't know we had, and couldn't have just thought our way into." Discovering this potential has the power to change us and expand us, Massumi argues, and "that's what being alive is all about."
Being alive means finding small ways to do something different, accepting the tension we feel or the narrow constraints we're presented with, and choosing to do the unexpected. Whether we're managers or business owners (or in some other role altogether), our choices aren't binaries. They're not either/or. Sure, the obvious ones often are. But inventing non-obvious choices is one of the great joys in life, in my humble opinion.
Inventing Non-Obvious Choices
Inventing non-obvious choices is exactly what Teen Vogue did in 2016. As the teen-oriented spin-off of one of the world's most influential fashion magazines, Teen Vogue was an unlikely entrant into the world of political journalism and cultural criticism. Before the magazine started to go viral with cutting essays and commentary after the 2016 election, it had already started to incorporate more overt political content into its pages.
When Samhita became executive editor in 2018, the now digital magazine had a new reputation as a full-throated defender of intersectional feminism and progressive values. "I think Teen Vogue was doing something really innovative and different, but the institution didn't necessarily know how to navigate it," she told me. The infrastructure of the magazine wasn't "built on those politics."
The Teen Vogue team was tasked with making non-obvious choice after non-obvious choice when it came to how the magazine ran and what kinds of content it produced. It wasn't easy, but they did receive strong support from senior management at Condé Nast.
Samhita prioritized protecting the Teen Vogue team editorially. She told me that she, along with editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples, wanted the writers to feel as "creative and expansive as they wanted to be." "We really wanted it to feel like that rawness of teen politics right now," she explained, "I felt pretty supported in it in terms of just being able to think as ambitiously as we wanted to from an editorial perspective."
Embracing the Potential of Feedback
As a manager, Samhita uses feedback to play in the margin of maneuverability. "I take feedback really seriously," she told me. She sets up regular checkpoints and makes space for employees to express their needs and concerns. She uses frequent feedback conversations to let her team members know what they're doing well and how they could grow.
Giving and receiving feedback is a perfect example of how the illusion of either/or choices shuts down our creativity and experimentation. Feedback is often thought of as definitive evidence of what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong—or even evidence of occupational safety or occupational danger. Either you win at feedback, or you lose.
The understandable anxiety that narrative creates makes learning about ourselves and our performance really difficult. Instead, feedback can awaken our sense of potential, or as Massumi puts it, "where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do."
Samhita wasn't always such an advocate for feedback. "I was way too insecure to ever get feedback. I didn't want it. I just wouldn't always assume the worst," she said. But earlier in her career, after a botched client meeting, a colleague modeled feedback for her in a way that was open, constructive, and empowering. "That was the first time where I was like, 'Wow, that could really help people.'"
Since then, Samhita has made generative feedback a pillar of her approach to management—and that's exactly what her team members are looking for. In her experience, younger team members are hungry for feedback. They want to know how they're contributing and what they could do to improve.
"There's an opportunity to have a conversation and say, 'Look, I know you are doing your best,'" she explained. After affirming their effort, Samhita offers an account of everything she saw going right and all the things they were clearly trying. Then she explains why it landed wrong or created a negative impact, as well as how they could do things differently next time.
"You also have to be like, 'Hey, I screw this up too!'" she admitted. Honesty and vulnerability go a long way toward making feedback land the way we want it to.
Keeping It Contextual
Whether it's navigating the role of a middle manager, pushing the boundaries of a media publication, or giving and receiving feedback, we inevitably run into constraints. We might feel confident that we can predict the right move based on those constraints. But if we remain open, we can play in the margin of maneuverability created by those constraints.
Given the constraints of our current economic and political climate, I asked Samhita what her vision was for a workplace that's more alive and has more room to maneuver than what we've come to expect:
I love a local feminism. I love thinking locally, building locally, building small, building humble. How I end the book is like, 'What does it actually mean to have enough? What does it actually mean to grow to a point where I am happy?' How do we get more comfortable being in community with each other without feeling like we need so much and need to be competing with each other about what we have?
How we explore these questions can be a blueprint for building our work lives.
Samhita also pointed to the role the family plays in how we relate to work. "How does caretaking play into all of this?" she asked, "What does it look like to have a workplace that actually integrates care without diminishing the veracity of the work that you're doing?"
To borrow Samhita's phrase, embracing a local feminism means asking what this particular situation, this particular relationship, this particular business needs every day. A local feminism doesn't follow a set of matriarchal best practices decided within the upper echelons of feminist theory. A local feminism is present, specific, embodied, and hashed out between everyone involved.
A local feminism is always on the move, rethinking assumptions, and inventing non-obvious choices. And so is the question of "What is enough?" What is enough today might be more than enough tomorrow—and vice versa.
Samhita's book does a phenomenal job of laying out the situation at a national and sometimes global level. She draws on her own personal experience and the experiences of her friends and colleagues to shine light on need for and potential of change.
Some might find it short on prescriptions and light on advice. But that's exactly the point—embracing our margin of maneuverability means recognizing the possibility that our next move is one that's never been tried before. For as intransigent and obstinate as our economy and work cultures can be, new ways of working, managing, surviving, and thriving are being invented every day.
As Brian Massumi puts it:
Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness and uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones, that's not necessarily about commanding movement, it's about navigating movement. It's about being immersed in an experience that is already under way. It's about being bodily attuned to opportunities in the movement, going with the flow. It's more like surfing the situation, or tweaking it, than commanding or programming it.
"The dream workplace," Samhita told me, "is one that you can show up as your full self." There's no need to hide your body, your family, or your emotions. "That is all part of you being a part of that workplace—and that's something that I really think would be utopian."
No company can succeed without humans who are invested in its success. The dream workplace considers our needs, our hopes, our potentials because work only works if we do. The companies we work for and the businesses we own have their own margins of maneuverability, too.
Introducing Summer Seminar.
Summer Seminar x What Works is an 8-week guided learning and reflection experience that provides a structure for examining your relationship with rest.
From June 24 to August 23, we’ll read the two Monk & Robot novellas (about 45 minutes per week) and four short essays to help us reflect on the story. I’ll guide you with prompts for reflection and discussion—and I’ll offer my own reflections along the way. And yes, if you want more reading, I’ve got that too!
We’ll meet for four live group discussions on Zoom, and we’ll discuss the readings and your reflections asynchronously through written comments on each week’s assignments.
At summer’s end, you’ll have engaged with new perspectives on rest and comfort, explored your own assumptions, and experimented with a new story of your own creation.
Massumi’s characterization of hope and possibility reminded me of Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant Hope in the Dark.