Week of 2021-09-20
Intention and shared mental model space
Hamilton Helmer pointed out this amazing connection between intention and shared mental model space that I haven’t seen before. If we are looking to gain more coherence within an organization, simply expanding the shared mental model does not seem sufficient. Yes, expanding this space creates more opportunities for coherence. But what role does the space play in realizing these opportunities?
A metaphor that helped me: imagine the shared mental model space as a landscape. There are tall mountains, and deep chasms, as well as areas that make for a nice, pleasant hike. Those who are walking within this landscape will naturally form paths through those friendly areas. When a shared mental model space is tiny, everyone is basically seeing a different landscape. Everyone is walking their own hiking trails, and none of them match. Superimposed into one picture, it looks like Brownian motion. When the shared mental model space is large, the landscape is roughly the same, and so is the trail, growing into a full-blown road that everyone travels.
On this road, where is everybody going? Where is the road leading them? Shared mental models aren’t just a way for us to communicate effectively. They also shape the outcomes of organizations. The slope of the road is slanted toward something. The common metaphors, terms, turns of the phrase, causal chains and shorthands -- they are the forms that mold our organization’s norms and culture.
If my team’s shared mental model space is dominated by war metaphors and ironclad logic of ruthless expansion, the team will see every challenge -- external or internal -- as a cutthroat battle. If my organization’s key metaphors are built around evaluating the impact of individual contributions, we might have trouble cohering toward a common goal.
Put differently, every team and organization has an intention. This intention is encoded in its shared mental model space. The slant of that road gently, but implacably pulls everyone toward similar conclusions and actions. This encoded intention may or may not be aligned with the intention of organization’s leaders. When it is, everything feels right and breezy. Things just happen. When it is not, there is a constant headwind felt by everyone. Everything is slow and frustrating. Despite our temptation to persevere, I wonder if we would be better off becoming aware of our shared mental model space, discerning the intention encoded in it, and patiently gardening the space to slant toward the intention we have in mind?
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/09/23/intention-and-shared-mental-model-space/
Flux budget and predictability footprint
I’ve been thinking about this idea of the flux budget as a measure of capacity to navigate complexity of the environment. With a high flux budget, I can thrive in massively volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (yep, VUCA) spaces. With a low flux budget, a slightest sight of unpredictability triggers stress and suffering. If we imagine that the flux budget is indeed a thing, then we can look at organizations --and ourselves -- and make guesses about how the respective flux budgets are managed.
Reflecting on my own habits, I am recognizing that to manage my flux budget, I have to deliberately work for it. To peer into the abyss of unpredictable, it appears that I need to be anchored to a sizable predictable environment. I ruthlessly routinize my day. From inbox zero to arranging shirts, to my exercise schedule, and even the allotment of guilty pleasures (like watching a TV show or the evening tea with cookies), it’s all pretty well-organized and neatly settled. Observing me in my natural routine habitat without context might conjure up depictions of thoughtless robots. Yet this is what allows me to have the presence to think deeply, to reflect, and patiently examine ideas without becoming attached to them.
This reaching for the comfort of routine has obvious consequences. How many beautiful, turning-point moments have I missed while sticking to my routine? How many times has the routine itself led me away from insights that would have otherwise been on my path? Or worse yet, imposed an unnecessary burden on others? Let’s call this phenomenon the predictability footprint: the whole of the consequences of us creating a predictable environment to which to anchor in the face of complexity.
I am pretty excited to be learning more about the relationship between flux budget and predictability footprint. The whole notion of the footprint (which I borrowed from carbon footprint) speaks to the second-order effects of us seeking solid ground in the flux of today’s world -- and how that in turn might create more flux. A while back, I wrote about leading while sleepwalking, which seems like a decent example of a vicious cycle where a leader's predictability footprint increases the overall state of flux, placing more demand on an organization’s flux budget.
These framings also help me ask new interesting questions. What is my predictability footprint? How might it affect my flux budget? What are the steps I can take to reduce my predictability footprint?
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/09/24/flux-budget-and-predictability-footprint/
Ecosystems from product and user perspective
In a couple of conversations this week, the word “ecosystem” came up, and I realized that there were two different ways in which we employed that word.
The first one I heard was using “ecosystem” to describe a collection of products with which users come in contact. Let’s call it the product ecosystem perspective. This perspective puts software and/or hardware at the center of the ecosystem universe. Users enter and exit the ecosystem, and changing the ecosystem means making updates to products, discontinuing them, and shipping new products. It’s a fairly clean view of an ecosystem.
The other way I’d heard the word “ecosystem” being used was to describe the users that interact with the product, or the user ecosystem perspective. Here, the user is at the center of the ecosystem universe. It is products that move. Users pick them up or drop them, according to interests, desires, comfort, or needs. Users are humans. They talk with each other, giving out their own and following others’ advice, giving rise to waves and wanes in product popularity. This view of an ecosystem is messy, annoyingly unpredictable, and beautifully real.
It feels intuitive to me that both of these perspectives are worth keeping in mind. The empowering feel of the product ecosystem perspective is comforting for us technologically-inclined folk. It’s easy to measure and prioritize. Diving into the complexity of user ecosystem perspective provides deeper insights into what’s really important.