Week of 2021-08-02
Triggered, intentional, and spontaneous coherence
I’ve been chatting about organizational coherence with a few folks, and this question intrigued me: what are the conditions that lead to coherence emerging? Sifting through my experience, I ended up with these three (still playing with the labels for them): triggered, intentional, and spontaneous. I also have this vague intuition that they are sequenced in relation to each other.
Imagine a team that finds itself in some existential crisis and must come together to overcome it. Here, the coherence is triggered: people align on the same goal to counteract the outside pressure. When I suddenly find the strength to jump that too-tall fence after being chased by a dog, my body is demonstrating triggered coherence. In response to a threat, I am capable of going beyond my imagined limits. The triggered coherence works the same way in teams, popularized by a familiar story trope of a bunch of underachievers going the distance in extreme circumstances.
When a team is at the feel-good apex of that story, it might even look like a team in the state of intentional coherence. However, there’s an important distinction: triggered coherence is reactive, and intentional coherence is proactive. An organization that is capable of intentional coherence decides to cohere in pursuit of a goal. When I go to the gym despite the aches and that sweet temptation of skipping just this once, my body comes together in intentional coherence.
To spot intentional coherence, look for a mission, a sense of purpose to the action, not obviously attached to some perceived threat. The team pushes their limits intentionally, having enough confidence that together, they are greater than the sum of their individual capabilities.
At the top of the game, it might even feel like coherence is effortless within such a team, almost like the coherence is spontaneous rather than willful. However, as soon as the object of intention is captured (or is clearly within reach), it’s worth looking for signs for coherence dwindling. If it does, the coherence is likely more intentional than spontaneous.
What does spontaneous coherence look like? Typically, there’s minimal organization. Everything just kind of happens. People working in teams that exhibit spontaneous coherence are regularly surprised by the high quality and consistency of the outcomes they produce. “We just jammed around and I pitched in here and there, and whoa, this came together really nicely!” I have precious little experience working in spontaneous coherence environments, but there’s something about these environments that is phenomenally appealing. There’s none of the existential angst of the triggered coherence nor the teeth-gritting of the intentional coherence. It just feels like air, like “why wouldn’t I be doing this” -- and I cherish every moment being part of such an environment.
My guess is that spontaneous coherence is also impermanent, and the overarching sense of joy and appreciation for the environment holds a tempting potential to become an intention in itself (“let’s keep doing this for as long as we can!”) -- thus eventually sliding back into intentional coherence.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/08/06/triggered-intentional-and-spontaneous-coherence/
Orders of humility
Alex Komoroske and I had a great generative conversation today and as usual, I have a new framing to write down.
We often look for a humble attitude toward new information in those who we collaborate with. It signals to us that they are willing to listen and shift their perspective, to see what we see -- even if temporarily. We recognized that there might be two different kinds of this humility, seemingly stacked on top of another, the first order and the second order.
The first order of humility feels like this general sense of curiosity, a hunger for new information, excitement toward it. People with strong first-order humility are information sponges, asking more questions, pulling on threads, actively engaging in conversations, seeking insights and incorporating them into their understanding of the world. They have enough confidence in this understanding to the degree that they aren’t experiencing much angst in the presence of disconfirming evidence.
This confidence also conceals the limit of the first order of humility. Even though I might be eager to take your new idea for a spin, I only do so to enrich and reinforce my current understanding. In this order of humility, my understanding of the world remains largely immovable, a vessel that I am happy to pile my new insights into, sorting useful ones into one pile, and the useless ones into another.
At the second order of humility, this illusion is shattered. Usually through lived experience, a person who acquired this kind of humility has watched that vessel turn into mush, or disappear, break down, and eventually emerge as something completely different -- taking all those piled-on useless insights and Copernican-shifting them into a whole new reality.
Lost is the confidence in the concreteness of the world, and with it, the ease of sorting insights into useful and useless. Disconfirming evidence is met with wonder and awe, as a possible precursor to another metamorphosis.
We also noticed that orders of humility seem to correlate with horizontal and vertical development framing. Both are representative of the acceptance and appreciation of development. The first order of humility seems to correspond to commitment to horizontal development (“learning makes you better”), and the second order of humility to vertical (“learning transforms who you are”).
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/08/05/orders-of-humility/
Limits to seeing: capacity and attachment
Helping a colleague process tough feedback this week, I’ve been reaching for a framing to describe something subtle around the nature of the limits to seeing another’s perspective. This story tries to get at this subtlety.
When we find ourselves in a situation where a colleague or a friend says something that doesn’t make sense, we might be encountering one of the two obstacles in our way: the limit of capacity and the limit of attachment.
The limit of capacity to fully grok another perspective is fairly straightforward. Trying to explain derivatives to a three-year old is an example of such a limit: the child is not yet capable of holding mental models of this complexity. Similarly, I could also be overloaded with other things. My favorite example here is an anecdote from a colleague of mine, who was masterfully conducting a status update meeting to senior leads. At the end of the update, one of the leads said: “This is all very cool, nice work! If you don’t mind… Can you tell us why you are doing this?” Leaders have full plates, and this project simply fell off, going beyond their collective holding capacity.
The second kind of obstacle is much trickier. With the limit of attachment, taking a perspective feels unsafe for some reason. I am attached to my view and intuitively want to defend it against anything that might change it. Either there’s a painful admission of some truth that’s hard to come to terms with, or an entire construction of the world might come undone if this perspective is taken. This limit has a very prominent marker: a sense of unease, a spike of emotional temperature in the conversation. “Whoa, this meeting just got weird.”
The distinction between these obstacles feels significant to me because the approaches to overcoming them are drastically different. For the limit of capacity, I typically look for ways to decrease the notional capacity of the perspective I want to convey. Can I create a simple, more accessible narrative? Perhaps connect it to something that’s already well-understood and habitual? Framing, describing, articulating, narrative-making are all fine tools for this job.
These tools are also futile and possibly harmful for the limit of attachment. When I am firmly attached to my perspective, these attempts to “better explain” will feel like attacks, like blades that are shredding the essence of my being. Until I myself bring my attachment to the foreground and reflect on it, I will remain stuck. The “myself” in the last sentence is key. In my experience, the limit of attachment can only be overcome from the inside. So if you’re having a “just got weird” meeting or email exchange with a colleague, it might be worth gently pinging them to see if they recognize bumping against their limit of attachment, giving them a moment to reflect and regroup. And be prepared to walk away if the ping goes unheard.