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What we can learn from clocks, clouds, and Popper’s problems
Bruce is one of my most challenging clients. He’s an engineer, smart, disciplined, calm under pressure. You want Bruce in the room when things get complicated.
Despite all of these terrific qualities, he came to me frustrated—not because things were chaotic, but because they weren’t behaving as predicted.
His personal models and spreadsheets were some of the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen from a do-it-yourselfer, and it wasn’t just the pivot tables. Detailed plans. Clear metrics. Careful optimization. Health protocols. Career strategy. Variable tax scenarios. Discreet shifts for different interest rates and inflation scenarios.
He would ask me, “Why do I need a financial professional?”
The reasons were twofold. First, despite his incredible planning, his outcomes would drift from his carefully plotted projections. Second, these variations were immensely frustrating to Bruce.
Reality had mucked around with Bruce’s plans. He never established consensus with his family about their priorities. His career momentum flattened. Most significantly, his motivation dipped when his child was diagnosed with a mental health issue. Had conditions been perfectly predictable, then Bruce would not have needed me.
But reality is not predictable, and that’s why I introduced Karl Popper into our conversation.
Clock problems vs cloud problems
Popper was a 20th-century philosopher of science who asked a core question: Why do smart people keep being wrong about how the world will unfold?
Popper divided problems into two broad types:
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Clock problems: Systems that are deterministic, closed, and predictable. Think mechanical clocks, simple machines, or basic physics models.
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Cloud problems: Systems that are complex, probabilistic, adaptive, and partially unknowable. Think weather, ecosystems, economies—and humans.
Clocks can be optimized, but clouds can only be navigated. Modern institutions repeatedly treat clouds like clocks—which is the same mistake Bruce made.
Carl Popper in 1990, from Wikimedia Commons. Cover: Of Clocks and Clouds (1966).
How clock people lose to cloud problems
When clock logic hits cloud reality, people usually fall into one of three traps that follow AATM’s Planner/Procrastinator/Crasher framework:
1. The Planner (Bruce’s default)
Planners like Bruce love structure. Bruce was an A+ planner who had engineer-grade plans for everything. But despite his tremendous effort and great intelligence, he made an assumption that only works for clock problems:
If the plan is good enough, outcomes should follow.
That is a solution tailor-made for a clock system. Financial planning is about life planning, however, and life is a cloud system: messy, unpredictable, emotional, susceptible to wild swings that no model can fully predict.
In Bruce’s case, his stress shifted with the mental health issues of his daughter. His work incentives also shifted. His wife never wanted to talk about financial priorities, which made it much more difficult to set the goals he was planning for.
Not surprisingly, these curveballs made his results drift from his projections. Bruce then responded by doubling down on the clock problem approach: tighter tracking, more discipline, better optimization. That helped initially, but eventually diminishing returns kicked in when the next front of cloud problems moved in.
Bruce–a planner’s planner if I ever met one–finally admitted the unthinkable: “Tom, it appears that the plan is the problem.”
2. The Procrastinator (who lives inside the planner)
Planners often have a stealth procrastinator that emerges when variables change before a plan is able to adapt.
Bruce delayed certain moves—not from laziness, but from wanting confidence first. More data. More certainty. One more refinement. That’s clock thinking, the tinkerer’s mindset that all the plan needs is an adjustment instead of adapting to the new reality.
Waiting feels rational to a planner. However, in reality, it is the avoidance of uncertainty. In cloud systems, though, clarity follows action, not the other way around.
3. Crashers
Bruce’s story doesn’t have a crasher in it, but the archetype is worth remembering. Crashers never plan. They are immune to planning. The most aware crashers think of their lives as one big impenetrable cloud problem, absolving themselves of any responsibility for themselves or for others.
Crashers may also simply be oblivious, maybe up to or through the point that they crash and need to be rescued.
Planners will not turn into crashers, but they may have a crasher collide with their carefully constructed plans.
Popper’s point: All knowledge is provisional
Popper wasn’t anti-planning. He was anti-certainty. His core insight is that all knowledge is provisional. Every model is a guess. Every forecast is a hypothesis. Every plan is a draft.
Progress doesn’t come from being right. It comes from finding errors quickly—and correcting them. That’s how science advances. That’s also how humans stay viable in cloud systems.
How Bruce moved into the cloud
Bruce and I didn’t throw out his plans and replace them with advisor-grade analysis. We kept their core and double-checked the accuracy of his assumptions.
Then we did something different: We downgraded the authority of the plan.
Smaller bets. Shorter cycles. Faster feedback. Less “execute harder,” more “what is reality telling us now?” Within months, momentum and confidence had returned—not because the plan was perfect, but because it was flexible.
Bruce didn’t become less disciplined. He became less rigid in his planning.
AATM’s Popper principles
My philosophy at Age Against the Machine is not anti-systems. It’s anti-fantasy. Here are three takeaways that help adjust to cloud problems:
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Plan like a planner—but expect inevitable revisions.
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Act before certainty so you are not overcome by the fears of a procrastinator.
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Scan for crashers in your life, anticipate what help they may need, and make that part of your plan.
In the end, most people are still solving cloud problems with clock instincts. They want guarantees. They want the right answer upfront.
Popper’s warning—and Bruce’s lesson—is simpler:
The future isn’t predicted. It’s negotiated through action, error, and adjustment. Clocks may be comforting because they move in precise, predictable ways. Clouds are real, however, and when push comes to shove, we live in real life, not clock life.