The Napoleon Express

People in every era confuse the delivery mechanism with the purpose; the real purpose is getting meaning to the person who needs it.

It is March 1796. Napoleon Bonaparte is twenty-six years old, five feet six inches of concentrated ambition in a general’s uniform he has owned for less than a month. He received command of the Army of Italy on March 2nd. He married Joséphine de Beauharnais on March 9th. He left for the front after a honeymoon of forty-eight hours. As a wedding gift, he left his bride with a golden medallion inscribed with the words “To Destiny.”

He arrived in Nice on March 27th to take command of 30,000 French soldiers who were underfed, unpaid, and losing a war that had been grinding on for four years. The Army of Italy had not been paid in hard currency since 1793. The soldiers’ boots were falling apart. The generals did not take the young Corsican seriously. He did not care. He had a plan he had been refining since 1794, calculating everything with what one historian called his customary thoroughness. Nothing was left to chance.

Within weeks, he would defeat the Sardinians and the Austrians in four consecutive battles. Within months, he would redraw the map of northern Italy. Within a year, he would be the most famous man in Europe.

But on the mornings between battles, in field quarters that smelled of horses and gunpowder, before the couriers arrived and the day’s orders had to be dictated, he wrote letters. Not to the Directory. Not to his generals.

To Joséphine.

🥵

As adept with the quill as he was on the battlefield, and presumably standing all of five foot six had no impact on his prowess in the bedchamber.

The letter is folded, put in an envelope, sealed with wax, and handed off to travel by military courier. A man on a horse, and a fast one at that, carrying a sealed document across hostile territory, through mud and gunfire and mountain passes. The courier does not read the letter. The courier does not care about the letter. The courier cares about surviving the ride. And yeah, he probably did wish for faster horses. But this is 1796, that faster horses conversation won’t happen for another 100 years.

Back to Italy. See, Napoleon does not care about the horse. He does not care about the courier. He cares about exactly one thing: that Josephine receives the message. And the medium is the paper and horseback, but the message is that of his resounding affections.

And did he ever write! He wrote over seventy-five thousand letters in his lifetime, many from battlefields. The medium was whatever was available: courier, diplomatic pouch, military dispatch, stolen enemy post routes. The content was strategy, governance, love, fury. The medium changed constantly. The mission never did. Napoleon did not consider himself a letter-producer, he considered himself an orator, a warrior, and a writer of love letters.

And that letter had to reach Josephine.

But Napoleon had a problem that every general before him also had. The message could only move as fast as the horse. And by the time the letter arrived, the situation on the ground had already changed. Josephine only ever knew how Napoleon felt then, not now. She didn’t know where he was, or if he was even still alive. I presume she knew he was, he’d proven hard to eliminate. And as much as this story is about Napoleon sending messages and how they were transmitted, it is also about Josephine and how they were received.

More on that in a minute; first let’s switch continents. Fast forward.

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ya

It is April 3, 1860. A cannon fires at 7:15 PM in St. Joseph, Missouri, two hours behind schedule because the mail train from the East was delayed in Chicago. A young rider named Johnny Fry stuffs a leather mochila containing 49 letters, five telegrams, and a handful of newspaper dispatches into a specially made saddlebag and swings onto a horse named Sylph. He weighs less than 125 pounds. He is paid $125 a month, roughly three times what a carpenter makes. Cheering crowds line the streets as he rides to the Missouri River, boards a ferry with his horse, crosses into Kansas, and begins riding west at a gallop toward Sacramento, 1,900 miles away. He will ride 90 miles before another rider takes over. Then another. Then another. 190 relay stations. 400 horses. 80 riders. Ten days to cross a continent.

It lasted eighteen months. That is it.

The transcontinental telegraph will be completed on October 24, 1861, and the Pony Express will shut down two days later. The most iconic mail service in American history will not survive long enough to celebrate its second birthday.

An entire infrastructure (riders, horses, relay stations, supply chains) rendered obsolete in forty-eight hours. We have been telling stories about the Pony Express for over a hundred and sixty years. The thing itself existed for less time than most magazine subscriptions.

The riders who understood they were in the message business became telegraph operators. The riders who thought they were in the horse business became unemployed.

Now the telegraph, though it did not just make messages faster. It did something more fundamental. For the first time in human history, the message could travel faster than any physical object. The message separated from the medium entirely. The letter no longer needed a horse.

That changed everything about how humans organize themselves. And Johnny Fry? He was not in the horse business, but he wasn’t in the message business, either.

He would go on to join the Union Army and be shot dead by Bloody Bill Anderson’s guerrillas at Baxter Springs, Kansas on October 6, 1863.

Number, please? Number, please? Number, please? Number, please?

It is September 1, 1878. Emma Nutt is eighteen years old, patient, and in possession of what her employer will later describe as a cultured, soothing voice. Alexander Graham Bell himself hired her away from a telegraph office in Boston. She earns ten dollars a month for a fifty-four hour workweek, which is enough to cover rent on a four-room tenement with about four dollars and change left over for everything else. She reports for duty at the Edwin Holmes Telephone Dispatch Company at a switchboard mounted floor to ceiling, takes a seat in a straight-backed chair she is not permitted to slouch in, and becomes the first woman telephone operator in the world.

Her sister Stella becomes the second, a few hours later.

The boys had been there first. Teenage boys had made perfectly good telegraph operators, but it turns out that talking to live human beings was a different skill set. They were impatient. They swore. They played pranks on callers. Customers complained. Bell’s solution? Hire women instead. Require them to be unmarried, between seventeen and twenty-six, prim, proper, and with arms long enough to reach the top of the switchboard. Emma said “Number, please” an estimated 120 times per hour, eight hours a day, six days a week, and never once told a customer to go to hell.

It worked. By the end of the 1880s, nearly every telephone operator in America was a woman. By 1930, there were 235,000 of them. By 1950, over 342,000 women sat at switchboards across all 48 states, plugging cables into jacks, connecting one human being to another, one call at a time. They were the human routers of the communication system.

They did not create the message. They did not receive the message. They managed the connection between the people who did. And then an undertaker in Kansas City changed everything, for a reason that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with human nature

Almon Brown Strowger was a funeral director who kept losing clients to a competitor. He could not understand why, until he discovered that his competitor’s wife worked as the local telephone operator and was routing every incoming call for an undertaker to her husband’s business instead of his.

Strowger complained to the telephone company. Nothing happened.

So he went home, sat down with a round collar box and some hat pins, and built the first automatic telephone exchange. He patented it in 1891. He bragged that his system was “girl-less, cuss-less, out-of-order-less, and wait-less.” The first automated exchange opened in La Porte, Indiana in 1892.

An undertaker, furious about a human router sending his messages to the wrong destination, eliminated the human router entirely. He did not build a better switchboard. He did not train better operators. He bypassed the medium altogether.

Emma Nutt worked as an operator for thirty-seven years. She retired sometime around 1915. She had memorized every number in the New England Telephone Company directory, a feat that no longer mattered once the dial tone arrived. Strowger’s first automated switchboard launched in 1892, yet manual switchboards were still used for another 100 years. In fact, Bryant Pond, Maine (my state!) had the last manual switchboard in the country.

It did not convert to automatic dial until 1982. 90 years and an anagram.

So the answer to message delivery, for nearly a century, is a human being sitting at a switchboard, physically plugging cables into jacks to create circuits between callers.

The switchboard operator was not in the telephone business. She was in the connection business. But, the intent was the same, where Johnny Fry would saddle up and ride, Emma Nutt would plug cables and say “Number, please?”

Horsebound courier. Switchboard operator. The mission persisted. The medium dissolved. Every profession has its version of the Pony Express. Lawyers have billable hours. Developers have sprints. Doctors have rounds. Designers have workshops.

All the upturned faces with the lamplight in their eyes

It is June 9, 2016. Erika Flowers stands in front of a room of 43 people at Intuit headquarters, building 1, in Mountain View, California. It is a building which shares a parking lot with some of the Googleplex, the Android mobile and some of the YouTube offices to be exact. She is running a service blueprinting workshop by projecting an OmniGraffle file onto 3 sheets of 8x4’ white foamcore taped together as a makeshift portable screen.

She joined the company as a service designer, but would quickly become known solely as the person who can run the workshops. One year later, Mark Tippin and Jim Kalbach from Mural would come to help onboard Intuit to an enterprise plan, and the Practical Service Blueprint format would be born after a night of talking punk rock and the stand-up bass at Paul Martin’s steakhouse on El Camino Real and San Antonio street.

The workshop was my first, last, and primary form of creating movement. How else do you curry alignment across a broad range of people who all think differently?

And the answer, for the past two decades, has been the workshop. Sticky notes. Miro boards. Journey maps. Affinity diagrams. Design sprints. Two-day offsites where forty-three people stand in a room and converge on a shared understanding (or at least on a shared photograph of the sticky notes).

About two weeks ago at the time of this writing, Mark Tippin, friend and former colleague still at Mural and one of the deepest thinkers I know on collaboration, described this beautifully: the planning, persuasion, and persistence it takes just to get people into the room. The energy required to hold the space. The skill needed to guide a group toward a shared outcome. The follow-up to keep the momentum alive.

Mark is not wrong about any of this. The value he describes is genuine. If you have ever facilitated a room full of people who arrived disagreeing and left aligned, you know that feeling. It is real. The skill of the facilitator who holds that space is real. I have nothing but respect for it; it’s one of my superpowers.

But the workshop is still a little bit like the Pony Express. Or at least, the way they have been done so far. It is a logistics marvel that delivers alignment at the speed of the slowest horse: the calendar, the room, the travel, the synthesis, the Confluence page nobody opens. And by the time the alignment arrives at the team that needs it, the sprint has already started, the requirements have already drifted, and the sticky notes are a photograph in a deck that was last opened three weeks ago. There was nothing wrong with the letter, the rider, or the pony, it just took so long to get there, the message loses potency simply because it cannot avoid becoming instantly stale.

It is one of the biggest pain points of my own profession. The alignment was real in the room, yet the medium failed to preserve it in transit. Like that undelivered letter in Johnny Fry’s bag, the dropped call at the switchboard, or the letter that never reached Josephine when a cannonball ripped through a courier in the wrong place at the wrong time, how many rolls of butcher paper or virtual stickynotes gather dust, never to be seen or heard from again? Some of my most powerful, best attended, highest potency workshops never actually made it to the public.

QuickBooks, Mural, even NASA, so many things have never reached you that me and the people in those workshops did simply because that despite the workshop working and producing brilliant solutions, by the time they could be actioned, the rest of the organization had moved on.

And this is not just about workshops. Every handoff document, every design review, every sprint ceremony, every ticket refinement meeting, every spec that had to be translated from one discipline’s language into another’s: all horses. All relay stations. All mediums that the people operating them mistook for the mission.

The facilitator is not in the workshop business. The facilitator is in the alignment business. The workshop is the horse. The telegraph wire is going up. Johnny? We hardly knew ye.

Mark Tippin, left. 1987

The Distance Is Zero

McLuhan told us in 1964 that the medium is the message. For sixty years that was the most provocative thing you could say about communication. In 1967, Eric McLuhan and Harley Parker ran an experiment at Fordham University where they showed the same films two ways: projected onto a screen (reflected light, like cinema) and displayed on a television (emitted light, light coming through the screen). Same content. Same audio. Same films. The audiences responded differently. The cinema audiences were more critical, more detached, more analytical. The television audiences were more immersed, more emotional, more passive.

The medium was not carrying the message. The medium was reshaping the message on contact, the way a glass bottle and a clay cup change the experience of drinking the same water. Does it taste different? I personally ran an experiment in college while getting my psych degree. We had people taste white vanilla ice cream, and green mint ice cream. Every single person called out the mint as being more minty.

They were the exact same ice cream, one dyed green.

Now, with the collapse of the translation layers and handoff delays, something is happening that McLuhan did not predict. The medium and the message are collapsing into the same thing. In the workflows that are emerging now, the alignment does not travel from workshop to spec to ticket to code. The alignment is expressed as the code, as the artifact, as the product. Building is aligning. The act of making the thing is the act of understanding the thing.

The message does not need a horse because the message is not traveling. It is forming in place. It is hibachi, the order, cooking, eating, talking, all happen at once. There is no waiter because the chef is cooking at the table and tossing shrimp into your mouth as you clap and demand the onion volcano go higher.

This does not mean facilitation disappears. See, the skill of understanding how humans think differently, of surfacing the unspoken assumption, of holding space for productive disagreement: that skill is more valuable now, not less. But the medium through which that skill is expressed is changing. The two-day offsite was the horse. The facilitator was never the horse.

The letter does not need to reach Josephine because Josephine is in the room where the letter is being written. The relay station closes. The switchboard goes dark. The message arrives anyway.

The distance is zero. But there is someone we have forgotten. All of what we do as builders, designers, creators is typically framed from our POV, what we deliver as the ones carrying the letters. But remember that the point of a letter isn’t to be sent or even delivered; it is to be read.

But What Did Josephine Want?

We started with Napoleon writing love letters from a battlefield. We followed the message through horses, telegraphs, switchboards, workshops, and zero-distance workflows. We tracked the medium as it evolved from physical to electrical to digital to dissolved.

But we never asked the only question that matters. What did Josephine want?

Josephine did not want a faster horse. She did not want a telegraph. She did not want a switchboard or a Miro board or an AI agent. She wanted the letter. She wanted to know that Napoleon was alive, that he was thinking of her, that the war had not taken him.

She wanted the message. “I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.”

The end user never cared about the sprint ceremony. The customer never cared about the design system. The patient never cared about the journey map. They cared about the product understanding their needs. They cared that the message arrived. And that is the message I hope I am conveying here about how we choose our tools and processes:

It isn’t about us. It isn’t about how much pride we take in our craft, taste, our prowess with Figma or with code or with AI. It isn’t about how well we run a workshop, or how many followers we have on social media. All of that is horses and switchboards; none of it is message.

Every medium we have ever built (relay stations, telegraph offices, switchboards, workshops, design sprints, handoff specs) exists to serve the recipient. And every medium we have ever built was mistaken, by the people who operate it, for the mission itself.

The mission is the message. The mission has always been the message. The message is: we understand you, we built this for you, and it works.

Napoleon could not get his letter to Josephine faster than a horse could carry it. Two hundred and thirty years later, a designer can ship a working prototype to a user in the time it used to take to schedule the workshop about the prototype.

The horse became the telegraph. The telegraph became the telephone. The switchboard operator became the automated switch. The workshop is becoming something else entirely. The medium keeps changing. The mission never did.

So: what is your message? And who is your Josephine?

Deliver the message to Josephine.