The value triangle
My colleagues and I were chatting about the idea of a “good change,” and a lens popped into my head, along with the name: the value triangle. I swear it was an accident.
When a team is trying to discern whether a change they are imparting on their product (and thus the world) is “good,” it’s possible that their conversation is walking the edges of a triangle. This triangle is formed by three values: value to business, value to the user, and value to the ecosystem.
When something is valuable to business, this usually means that the team benefits from this change. When something is valuable to the user, it is usually the user who perceives the change as desirable in one way or another. The third corner is there to anchor the concept of a larger system: does the change benefit the whole surrounding environment that includes the business, and all current and potential users? A quick note aside: usually, when we talk about this last corner, we say things like “thinking about long-term effects.” This is usually true – ecosystems tend to move at a slower clip than individual users. However, it helps to understand that the “long” here is more of a side effect of the scope of the effects, rather than a natural property of the change.
Anyhow, now that we have visualized this triangle, I am going to sheepishly suggest that a “good” change is an endeavor that somehow creates value in all three corners. To better illustrate, it might be useful to imagine what happens when we fail to meet this criteria.
Let’s start with situations when we only hit one of the three. If our change only produces value for our business, we’re probably dealing with something rather uncouth and generally frowned upon. Conversely, if we only produce value for our users, we’re probably soon to be out of business. And if we are only concerned about the ecosystem effects, it’s highly likely we’re not actually doing anything useful.
Moving on to hitting two out of three, delivering a combination of user and business value will feel quite satisfying at first and will fit right at home with a lot of things we humans have done since the Industrial Age. Unfortunately, without considering the effects of our change on the surrounding ecosystem, the all-too-common outcome is an environmental catastrophe – literal or figurative. Moving clockwise in our triangle, focusing on only producing value for users and the ecosystem yields beautiful ideas that die young of starvation. The third combination surprised me. I’ve been looking for something that fits the bill, and with a start, realized that I’ve lived it. The intricately insane web of Soviet bureaucracy, designed with the purpose of birthing a better future for humanity, captured tremendous amounts of value while explicitly favoring the “good of the many” over that of an individual. For a less dramatic example, think of a droll enterprise tool you used recently, and the seeming desire of the tool to ignore or diminish you.
It does seem like hitting all three will be challenging. But hey, if we’re signing up to do “good,” we gotta know it won’t be a walk in the park. At least, you now have this simple lens to use as a guide.
🔗https://glazkov.com/2022/01/13/the-value-triangle/
Lenses, framings, and models
At a meeting this week, I realized that I use the terms “lens,” “framing,” and “model” in ways that hold deep meaning to me, but I am not certain that this meaning is clear to others. So here’s my attempt to capture the distinctions between them.
The way I see these, the lens is the most elemental of the three. A lens is a resonant, easy to remember (or familiar) depiction of some phenomenon that offers a particular way of looking at various situations. Kind of like TV commercial jingles, effective lenses are catchy and brief. They usually have a moniker that makes them easy to recall, like “Goodhart’s Law” or “Tuckman’s stages of group development” or “Cynefin.” Just like their optical namesakes, lenses offer a particular focus, which means that they also necessarily distort. As such, lenses are subject to misuse if used too ardently. With lenses, the more the merrier, and the more lightly held, the better. Nearly everything can be turned into a lens. A prompt “How can this be a lens?” tends to yield highly generative conversations. For fun, think of a fairy tail or a news story and see how it might be used as a lens to highlight some dynamic within your team. Usually, while names and settings change, the movements remain surprisingly consistent.
Framings are a bit more specialized. They are an application of one or more lenses to a specific problem space. For example, when I am devising a strategy for a new team, I might employ Tuckman’s stages to describe the challenges the team will face in the first year of its existence. Then, I would invoke Cynefin to outline the kind of problems the team will need to be equipped to solve, rounding up with Goodhart's Law to reflect on how the team will measure its success. When applied effectively, framings turn a vague, messy problem space into a solvable problem. To take me there, framings depend on the richness of the collection of lenses that are available to me. If these are the only three lenses I know, I will quickly find myself out of depth in my framing efforts: everything I come up with will limp with a particular Tuckman-Cynefin-Goodhart gait.
Finally, models are networks of causal relationships that form within my framings. The problem, revealed by my framing exercise, might yet be untenable. While I can start forming hypotheses, I still have little sense in how many miracles each will take. This is where models help. Models allow me to reason about the amount of effort each of my hypotheses will require. Because each of the hypotheses is a causal chain of events, models help uncover links of these chains that are superlinear.
Getting back to our team planning example, the first four Tuckman’s stages are a neat causal sequence and might lead us to conclude that the process we’re dealing with is linear and thus easily scheduled. However, if we study the network of causal relationships closer, we might be able to see that they aren’t. The team’s storming phase can tip the team’s environment into complex Cynefin space and thus extend the duration of the storming phase. Or, the arrival to the norming stage might make the team susceptible to over-relying on its metrics to steer, triggering Goodhart’s law, eventually leading to the slide into chaotic Cynefin space, setting the stages all the way back to forming.
The nonlinearity does not need to be surprising. Once we see it in our models, the conversation elevates from just looking at possible solutions to evaluating their effectiveness. Framings give us a way to see solvable problems. Models provide us with insight on how to realistically solve them.
I really liked the lens/framing/model-thing. I wonder if one could add a fourth - narrative - which is a model in motion in time? The triangles are interesting - I read somewhere that theologians think in threes and philosophers in fours, I think Peirce was a notorious triangulist, however. Maybe there is a thing here about how we understand the world - in dyads, triads, etc etc?