Week of 2021-09-13
Organizing and sensing connections
Tucked away in a couple of paragraphs of the brilliant paper by Cynthia Kurtz and David Snowden, there’s a highly generative insight. The authors make a distinction between the kinds of connections within an organization and then correlate the strength of these connections to the Cynefin quadrants. I accidentally backed into these correlations myself once. What particularly interested me was the introduction of connections into the Cynefin thinking space, so I am going to riff on that.
First, I’ll deviate from the paper and introduce my own taxonomy (of course). Looking at how information travels across a system, let’s imagine two kinds: connections that relay organizing information and connections that relay sensing information. For example, a reporting chain is a graph (most often, a tree) of organizing connections: it is used to communicate priorities, set and adjust direction, etc. Muscles and bones in our bodies are also organizing connections: they hold us together, right? Organizing connections define the structure of the system. Nerve endings, whiskers, and watercooler chats are examples of sensing connections -- they inform the system of the environment (which includes the system itself), and hopefully, of the changes in that environment.
With this taxonomy in hand, we can now play in the Cynefin spaces. It is pretty clear that the Unpredictable World (my apologies, I also use different names for Cynefin bits than the paper) favors weak organizing connections and the Predictable World favors the strong ones. Organization is what makes a world predictable. In the same vein, Chaotic and Obvious spaces favor weak sensing connections, contrary to the neighboring Complex and Complicated spaces with their fondness for strong sensing connections.
Seems fairly straightforward and useful, right? Depending on the nature of the challenge I am facing, aiming for the right mix of organizing and sensing connections of the organizational structures can help me be more effective. Stamping out billions of identical widgets? Go for strong organizational connections, and reduce the sensing network. Solving hard engineering problems? Make sure that both organizational and sensing connection networks are robust: one to hold the intention, the other to keep analyzing the problem.
Weirdly, the causality goes both ways. The connection mix doesn’t just make organization more effective in different spaces. It also defines the kinds of problems that the organization can perceive.
A team with strong organizing connections and non-existent sensing connections will happily march down its predetermined path -- every problem will look Obvious to it. Sure, the earth will burn around it and everything will go to hell in the end, but for the 99.9% of the journey, their own experience will be blissfully righteous. The solution to war is obvious to a sword.
Similarly, if that engineering organization loses its steady leader, weakening the strength of its organizing connection network, every problem will suddenly start looking Complex. The magic of constructed reality is that it is what we perceive it to be.
This might be a useful marker to watch for. If you work in a team that merrily stamps widgets, and suddenly everything starts getting more Complicated, look for those tendrils of sensing connections sprouting. And if you’re working at the place where the thick fog of Complexity begins to billow, it might be the environment. But it also could be the loss of purpose that kept y’all together all this time.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/09/16/organizing-and-sensing-connections/
Prototype the problem
I was looking for practices that help expand shared mental model space and thinking about prototyping. I’ve always been amazed by the bridging power of hacking together something that kind-of-sort-of works and can be played with by others. Crystallized imagination, even when it’s just glue and popsicle sticks, immediately advances the conversation.
However, we often accidentally limit this power by prototyping solutions to problems that we don’t fully understand. When trying to expand the shared mental model space, it is tempting to make our ideas as “real” as possible -- and in the process, produce answers based on a snapshot of a state, not accounting for the movement of the parts. Given a drawing of a car next to a tree and asked to solve the “tree problem,” I might devise several ingenious solutions for protecting the paint of the car from tree sap. No amount of prototyping will help me recognize that the “tree problem” is actually about the car careening toward the tree.
My colleague Donald Martin has a resonant framing here: prototype the problem (see him talk about it at PAIR Symposium). Prototyping the problem means popping the prototyping effort a level above solution space, out to the problem space. The prototype of a problem will look like a model describing the forces that influence and comprise the phenomenon we recognize as the problem. In the car example above, the “tree problem” prototype might involve understanding the speed at which the car is moving, strengths of participating materials (tree, car, person, etc.), as well as the means to control direction and speed of the car.
Where it gets tricky is making problem prototypes just as tangible as solution prototypes. There are many techniques available: from loosely contemplating a theory of change, to causal loop diagrams, to full-blown system dynamics. All have the same drawback: they aren’t as intuitive to grasp or play with as actually making a semi-working product mock-up. Every one of these requires us to first expand our shared mental space to think in terms of prototyping the problems. Recursion, don’t you love it.
Yet, turning our understanding of the problem into a playable prototype is a source of a significant advantage. First, we can reason about the environment, expanding both our solution space and the problem space. For that “tree problem,” discovering the role of material strengths guides me toward inventing seatbelts and airbags, no longer confined to just yelling “veer left! brake harder!” But most importantly, it allows us to examine the problem space collectively, enriching it with bits that we would have never seen individually. My intuition is that an organization with a well-maintained problem prototype as part of its shared mental model space will not just be effective -- it would also be a joy to work in.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/09/17/prototype-the-problem/
The story of a threat
Continuing my exploration of narratives that catalyze coherence, I would be remiss to not talk about the story of a threat.
The story of a threat is easily the most innately felt story. When compared to the story of an opportunity, it seems to be more visceral, primitive, and instinctive. It is also a prediction of compounding returns, but this time, the returns are negative. The story of a threat also conveys a vivid mental model of a compounding loop, but the gradient of the curve is pointing toward doom at an alarming rate. Living in 2021, I don’t need to go too far for an example here: the all-too-familiar waves of COVID-19 death rates are etched in our collective consciousness. Just like with the story of an opportunity, there’s something valuable that we have and the story predicts that we’re about to lose it all.
Structurally, the story of a threat usually begins with depiction of the vital present (the glorious “now”), emphasizing the significance of how everything is just so right now. It then proceeds to point out a yet-hidden catastrophe that is about to befall us. The reveal of the catastrophe must be startling and deeply disconcerting: the story of a threat does not seem to work as effectively with “blah-tastrophes.” Being able to “scare the pants off” the listener is the aim of the story.
A curious property of the story of a threat is that it is a half-story. It only paints the picture of the terrible future in which we’ll definitely be engulfed. Unlike with the story of an opportunity, there is less agency. Something bad is happening to us, and we gotta jump or perish. In that sense, the story of a threat is reactive -- contrasted with the proactive thrust of the story of an opportunity. Being reactive, it propels the listener toward some action, leaving out the specifics of the action.
This half-storiness is something that is frequently taken advantage of in politics. Once the listener is good and ready, sufficiently distraught by the prospect of the impending disaster, any crisp proposal for action would do. We must do something, right? Why not that?
The story of a threat is a brute force to be reckoned with, and is extremely challenging to contain. Such stories can briefly catalyze coherence. But unless quickly and deliberately converted to the story of an opportunity, they tend to backfire. Especially in organizations where employees can just leave for another team, the story of a threat is rarely a source of enduring coherence. More often than not, it’s something to be wary of for organizational leaders. If they themselves are subject to the story of a threat, chances are they are undermining the coherence of their organization.