Evolving Web

Speaking from Power in an Uncertain World–Collaberwocky Episode 3

Are you a manager trying to get by in a flat or agile company?

Do you find the role of manager repeatedly maligned?

This is more than just “It’s lonely in the middle.” There are significant positive shifts in making the workplace more productive, efficient and effective. However, each of these shifts has been accompanied by changes in roles – and these changes are rarely clearly spelled out.

In Episode 3 of Collaberwocky, Jabe Bloom, Corey Ladas, and I discuss how to speak from power in this new uncertain world.

The Language of Management–Collaberwocky Episode 2

In this episode of Collaberwocky, Jabe Bloom, Corey Ladas and I discuss “The Language of Management.”

It seems that different rungs of the corporate ladder come with different perspectives. None are complete and all have their own biases and areas of focus.

Further, many management theories give rise to a sort of class warfare between the different rungs. “My manager doesn’t understand me.” “The C-Level suite are out of touch.” “The people who work for me are idiots.”

Far too often, this causes the rungs to appear so far apart that people cannot even fathom having productive conversations. Corey, Jabe and I mull over these issues.

We recommend you watch this video full screen.

Introducing Collaberwocky – Collaboration Conversations

For years I have been trying to get myself to do an interview show. There was one problem – interviews are not very collaborative.

After doing Lean Coffees for a few years and hosting Lean Camp Seattle last year, it became clear to me that conversation creates information – and that was compelling.

So we launched Collaberwocky, a series of conversations about collaboration.

This runs exactly like a Lean Coffee. We get together with a few participants, we build a kanban, vote on what we’d like to discuss, then we discuss.

The first five episodes are with Corey Ladas, author of Scrumban, and Jabe Bloom, CTO of the Library Corporation.

This first Episode is “Intentional Cooperation” in which we discuss creating teams and processes that intentionally foster collaboration.

 

Collaberwocky 1–Intentional Cooperation–Corey Ladas, Jabe Bloom, and Jim Benson January 2012

 

Reading is (Still) Fundamental

 

I recently tweeted this after mulling over the differences I’ve seen while working with various clients. Some of them have practically been begging people to slow down, finish less with higher quality, and to take time out to read. Others are so scared that they don’t produce enough, that people are running in every direction trying to get something done, while finishing practically nothing, and learning even less than nothing in the process.

Of course, the first tweet I received in response was from JB Brown, at Nordstrom’s Innovation Lab. Since “Innovation” is well, what they do, they like to read a lot and… apparently…are fond of statistics:

To me, the benefits of giving teams the time to read is self-evident. But I thought I’d let the people actually giving their staff the time time to read speak for themselves.

Simon Marcus: COO of the Library Corporation

I encourage people to read at work for the same reason that I encourage them to write things down. Reading and writing give you time and room to think. Mostly at work people think they are supposed to be DOING ALL THE TIME. But if they aren't thinking, the result of all that doing can be a whole lot of nothing.

I love when I am reading and stumble on a word or a phrase that sends me spinning off into one of my own real world problems or opportunities. I love it even more when it happens to other people, but the long range value of reading at work is that it slows people down and makes them more thoughtful and intentional about their work.

Lastly, a word about why we encourage people to read AT work (instead of just expecting them to read on their own time). If I think that something is important enough to ask people to do it, I owe it to them to give them time to attend to it. This is part of the larger effort we make to respect people's time AT work. Reading is Work in Progress (WIP), just like everything else we ask people to do. We try to avoid making work WIP slip over into people's home life. All of that isn't to say that I don't love it when I find out that people have gotten the reading bug and are reading on their own time too. I find that the reading bug can be contagious. Eventually, about one out of three people who we encourage to read at work seem to start reading more on their own time. When I hear that someone who "never reads" has started reading, it makes me smile from ear to ear.

Jabe Bloom - CTO of the Library Corporation:

I have 2 general concepts for why reading is important at work.

1) Technical Knowledge is more valuable the earlier you can apply it. For many of my developers ensuring that they are constantly retooled is one my most critical tasks. Encouraging them to read helps them to maintain a “landscape” view of the technologies they are using so they have a better chance of “finding” the right tool at the right time. Exposing developers to a wide range of new and interesting thoughts is a good way to inoculate them against complacency and “I have a hammer-and-everything-is-a-nail-itus”.

2) I think.. more critically... Having an open environment at work where individuals can be SEEN reading, activates the social space as a learning environment.

More and more studies of cognitive science support a concept of ritualized changes in thinking patterns... transforming from one way of thinking to another.. I think that having people read at work, helps them to think in a “learning activated” mindset.

3) Encouraging employees to read AT WORK, sends a clear message that we EXPECT and VALUE learning in the work environment. Employees aren’t expected to keep up on changes to the industry on “their own time.”  Our encouragement of reading at work has seen an increase in;

1) Teams’ abilities to communicate internally and with other teams via shared vocabulary

2) Increase in individuals sharing learnings and source materials.

3) Decrease in defect rates, especially escaped defects.

Jason Montague, the Director for Application Development at RW Baird:

As you've stated, a staff that is willing and equipped to read is a staff that understands the need for continuous improvement.  In that regard, reading, reflecting, and learning is crucial.  To understand why, let's simply look at one of the most common reasons given (to me) for why some don't read.

"I learn enough through experience!  Everything I know I've learned through the school of hard knocks.  What could a book *possibly* tell me that I can't get from experience?"

While it's true that experience is likely the most powerful means of learning, the sad truth is that we don't have as much experience as we think we do.  As I've learned (in books no less) most of us rarely have "20 years of experience".  We typically have one year of experience FOR 20 CONSECUTIVE YEARS.  That's right.  If we reflect on our past, occasionally we have brand new experiences that indeed teach us quite a lot.  But for the bulk of our past, we tend to repeat what we know over, and over (and over) again.  In that way, I would argue we need to step outside the boundary of experience-based learning and learn from others collective experiences.  You do that in books, articles, websites, blogs, and yes, tweets.

As you might guess, it's important that your teams are "willing" to read.  Just as important, they need to be "equipped" to read.

As employers, we can help control the second of these two statements.  Our obligation while building learning organizations is to model behavior, challenge assumptions, infuse an attitude of curiosity, and generally create conditions that allow (and encourage) people to read and reflect.  After all, as adults, quiet reflection is critical to our growth.  We are therefore obligated to not only "allow" people to read at work, but to encourage and incentivize them to read at work as well.  In that way, each employee becomes a well spring of "new" ideas, and a potential catalyst for infusing those ideas in our organizations.

 

Just Released: Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your Business.

A few months ago, I wrote a series of posts in this blog about cognitive bias. Those became the pre-writing for this short ebook: Why Plans Fail.

It’s $2.99, or free if you have Amazon Prime.

This is the first in our new MemeMachine Series, which will be little eBooks like this that introduce a topic and begin discussions.

Here’s the writeup for it from Amazon:

Business runs on decisions. Recently, we've discovered that people aren't the great decision makers we thought they were.

Business relies on estimates, plans, and projections - and we all know how accurate they tend to be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on accurate estimation and planning.

But what if the successes and failures of these projects were not based on the prowess of those making the plans? What if success or failure were more often the result of a more complex set of events?
Why Plans Fail directly addresses our ability of to plan, to forecast, and to make decisions.

Written by Jim Benson, an urban planner, software developer, and business owner who has planned and built everything from small software projects, to houses, to urban freeway systems - Why Plans Fail is told by someone with much skin in the estimation and planning game.

This short work is the first in the Modus Cooperandi Mememachine series - which looks specifically at underlying issues that directly impact the success of teams, companies, and individuals. The Mememachine series is meant to start conversations and advance discussion.

Why Systems Thinking is Awesome and a Trap: Quote 5-Nancy: They wouldn’t send us any money! They said we’d spend it on DRUGS! Sid: We would!

Quote 5: Nancy: They wouldn’t send us any money! They said we’d spend it on DRUGS! Sid: We would!

Before Gary Oldman was an arch villain all the time, he played Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy - a roll where he had to lose so much weight that he was hospitalized. The complexities of life were too much for Sid Vicious, but the simplicities were not lost. The simple model of Sid and Nancy’s lives were not lost on Nancy’s mother, who refused to send her money because they would spend it on drugs.

That was a simple system.

A system that allowed the provision of a best practice.

No money meant they would not spend it on drugs.

The money part of the equation was simple. But Nancy’s mother’s relationship to Sid and Nancy themselves was not.

The Simple solution was immediately useful to Nancy’s mom. Not sending money is instantly successful because it’s only criteria is satisfiable by Nancy’s mother and the only solution is instantly provable. “They did not spend this money on drugs because I never sent them this money.”

If Nancy’s mother was interested in keeping them healthy, she could have sent them things other than money that were not spendable. Things like food, plane tickets to somewhere they could get clean, or new clothes could be sent in lieu of money. Yes, they could be sold, but that would be a little harder than just using the money. That is Sid and Nancy in the complicated domain. Sending food would be a good practice - but it would not be guaranteed of success in the way that a simple solution like not sending money would.

In order to get success, she would need proof beyond the obvious. She would need reporting. Since both Sid and John Lennon were living in New York at the time, she could have had John go and watch Sid and Nancy eat the food she sent instead of the money. John could then tell her something like, “They ate about half the food and spat the other half on the floor.”

Nancy’s mother could then alter her techniques to suit.

But, the system that Sid and Nancy were caught up in involved drug addiction, bad decisions, the music industry, hypocrisy, betrayal, tribal behavior, paranoia, and branding. So we have a very complex system now. Regulating the food intake would likely be better if Nancy’s mom were to get a manager for Sid that really cared about his well being. That might get Sid and Nancy to detox, make them some money, and decrease their paranoia. Who knows, maybe off heroin they might actually even make good decisions.

This, however, is a complex system and one that involves a lot more work to conceptualize, implement and measure success. Indeed, the success of that might also require people to buy Sid’s solo album - which they did - but not until after Sid was dead. So, keeping Sid from dying would also be something to add to the project plan. Since Sid had just finished an album that made the top 40 for albums in the UK and included many big names, his feelings of him against the world made staying alive challenging.

In the complex world there are not best practices or even good practices. There are emergent practices. These are harder to control. For a while, having John Lennon checking up on Sid might work pretty well. (At that point for about a year). But then you lose your Lennon to give you reports. They system then has to change. You cannot hire a new Lennon.

When we start to look into the tortured psyches of Sid and Nancy, we get into the chaotic domain. Nearly every day, we’ll have new processes to deal with paranoid, psychotic, or drug induced episodes. We’d be responding to the seemingly random events that Sid and Nancy would subject us to.

This is all based on the Cynefin model we discussed earlier.

Systems Thinking is Awesome Because It Does Not Tie Us to a Particular Model

Since I was a boy, I have been listening to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. I have listened to it on high-end audiophile vinyl and very expensive systems. I have listened to it on cassette tapes in the car. I have heard it on CD, on iTunes, on Rhapsody. I think that Pharaoh’s Dance is one of the most incredible tracks ever put down.

Every sound system I listen to it on reveals different elements of the work. Heightened attention to high end, low end, mid range, clarity, depth, warmth, brightness - every system reveals a different experience.

Every venue I listen to it in reveals different elements of the work. In a dark room, it surrounds and embraces the listener. At the office, it pulls work along making it part of the music. With others, having a conversation, it invites pauses in conversation and seems to insert its own wisdom.

In systems thinking, we have access to any model of looking at a system we wish. We can using mechanical, humanistic, collaborative, creative, Tayloristic, abstract, punitive, rewarding … whatever fits the situation.

Ideally we understand that whatever model we employ is simply that: a model. As a model it is going to illuminate some things and cast shadows on others. Being tied to no particular model allows us to see the illuminations in one, shift our gaze and then see it in others.

Each model, each system, changes how we experience the components of the system.

Systems Thinking is a Trap Because it Builds Nested Dependent Models

In the 1990s, I was working on a large, regional transportation project in Maricopa County, Arizona, I mentioned to the City of Phoenix that we needed to have coordinated signal timing along Indian School Road - a major thoroughfare in the valley. They laughed and said that could never happen because “Those %$#*s in Scottsdale intentionally time their signals to screw us up. Every time we retime to make the roadways flow, they change theirs just to ruin it!”

So I went to Scottsdale and said, “Hi, we need to have coordinated signal timing on Indian School Road. They laughed and said that could never happen because “Those %$#*s in Phoenix intentionally time their signals to screw us up. Every time we retime to make the roadways flow, they change theirs just to ruin it!”

The two cities had gone all Hatfield and McCoy, because they’d developed systems that pre-supposed that the other city was going to mess with their signal timing. In reality, both cities we simply optimizing their networks to internal and not regional traffic.

Their models were at odds. The fun part here is that no model was right, but both models had impacts both on the quality of the product (smooth transportation flow) and of the psychological well-being of the workers at both cities. Both were angry at the other city. Completely unnecessarily.

As we’ve discussed in this series, the trap of systems thinking doesn’t necessarily come from systems thinking but from us … the users. The people. The gray matter that is susceptible to so many biases, short deadlines, client demands, and life goals.

We’re not expecting the complicated to become complex or the simple to become chaotic. We would like to do our job - and job is often seen as finite. We do a thing and then move on to the next thing. So when the processes of a company or a team naturally migrate due to changes in context, they can easily shift from one domain to the next.

Much like in Simon’s Tank Hard Drive story, we build these models inside other models. We assume, more importantly, that the models in which our new models are nested, will remain stable. As we begin working with our models, those in other areas may interfere with them

Photo by Tonianne

Systems Thinking is Awesome and a Trap Quote Series: Quote 4-Well, Clarise, have the lambs stopped screaming?

A good story, especially one that strikes home, can be particularly disarming. You are drawn into it. You feel its inherent truth. A truth that may or may not be real. But we feel it is real and we follow it quickly and with abandon.

We love a good story

Systems Theory is Awesome Because it Gives Us Great Stories

In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lechter controlled conversations by using the power of story and insight. When we combine a good narrative with an innate fear and the glimmer of salvation, we can win arguments, engage teams, and even win elections.

Stories become the groundwork for positive change. Without stories, we would have no work flow diagrams, no value stream mapping, no Personal Kanban, no relevance. Stories are the most accepted, highest value business communication tool there is.

Systems thinking builds powerful process and change on accepted stories about how we work, how we’d like to work, and the challenges of getting from one to the other. It gives us a forum and formats to discuss them and it comes with tools to help us find the subtext and backstories that make the stories work.

Systems Theory is a Trap Because it Can Give Us Easy Stories

In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lechter controlled conversations by using the power of story and insight. When we combine a good narrative with an innate fear and the glimmer of salvation, we can win arguments, engage teams, and even win elections. The problem is, the story doesn’t always need to be relevant, just plausible.

An example of this might be Jim Collins and his team of researchers who wrote the bestseller “Good to Great”. Good to Great is, itself, an excellent book that gives food for thought around willingness to radically change in the face of adversity and how that might lead to corporate success. We highly recommend the book for examples of companies that were willing to use their might and more than a little ingenuity to survive certain economic destruction

However, Good to Great spawned a generation of business owners who took it to be a recipe book - a virtual guarantee for business success.  They didn’t quite understand the nuances that lay underneath the stories. The stories were engaging and plausible, therefore they must have repeatable (copyable) wisdom.

The implications were that if you acted like the companies described in the book, you would become “Great”. What people neglected to realize was that other companies tried the same innovative techniques as the companies in the book, and failed. The companies in the books also have had a hard time weathering the latest economic storm. So, while Collins’ intent was to provide readers with a systems thinking approach to building a great company, the book ends up being interpreted by readers as a how-to manual.

Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow” notes that we as people really like narratives. We love a good story. So, therefore we end up giving incredible weight to a good story. So much so, that we believe the story is likely simply because it is believable. Good to Great is filled with excellent stories that, taken in the aggregate, seem to ensure that engaging in those behaviors will result in assured success. The stories are plausible, so plausible in fact so as to convince millions.

Probable? Not so much.

Systems thinkers can easily get caught on the wrong side of the plausible / probable divide. We describe systems and then begin to act on them as if the systems are real. But we don’t know that for sure. Every system we devise is an hypothesis. It needs to be described, observed, proven and then reproven over and over again. Why? Because not only does business context change, but the systems themselves are part of a nested series of other systems that directly or indirectly influence the system you’ve put in place.

By now, exasperated good systems thinkers are saying that this endless questioning is the very heart of systems thinking and that there are safeguards in place to protect against being overly focused on a narrow or erroneous view. Unfortunately, in the real world our cognitive biases tend to team up to make this purist application of systems thinking little more than an ideal. If we are able to keep these biases in check - that’s wonderful. But it is unlikely. And as good systems thinkers we should at the very least recognize that our own biases influence our systems.

My friend Simon Bennett has a story he likes to tell about working security for the military. In the 90s, they had put new computers in tanks and these computers had hard drives. The hard drives were having some problems, so Simon and his crew pulled them from the tanks and sent them back to the manufacturer to see what they could do.

Mind you, these tanks take some serious jolts which are very hard on hard drives.

The hard drive manufacturer, when they received the hard drives could not believe the amount of damage the drives had taken. They tried a few variations of hard drive design, but kept receiving back horribly damaged drives from Simon’s team.

Now, when you have a storage device that has ever touched classified information, it gets marked with a physical label that reads DIRTY. Dirty equipment needs to be handled and shipped in very specific ways.

After six months of utter confusion, Simon and his team found out that the drives they were sending back to the manufacturer were going through a team that specialized in the shipment of dirty equipment. When this team saw that the drives were going out to an unsecure location, they opened up the drives and took a chisel and destroyed the surface of the hard drive to make it unreadable. Then they put the hard drive back together, packaged it neatly in bubble wrap (so it wouldn’t get hurt) and shipped it on its way.

So, when the manufacturer received it, they’d open the drive and find a completely destroyed hard drive. Then they’d call Simon and his team and say “WOW! This thing is obliterated! What happened?” And Simon would say, “Well, it was just used for a few weeks in the tank.”

Simon and the manufacturer had a system in place that they thought was working for them. They were completely unaware that a second system was actively working against them.

While this is a rather extreme example (and certainly a plausible story), my point here is that when we get comfortable as systems thinkers with the systems we work in, we can overlook additional systems. Indeed, we may well have described a system so plausible as to be defensible for quite some time - until one day it inexplicably fails us.

Photo by Tonianne

Collaboration from Tonianne and Jabe Bloom

Systems Thinking is Awesome and a Trap Series: Quote #3–I Was Thrown Out of NYU

Quote #3 - I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

What? You think that’s big? Basically for this one, I could quote all of Annie Hall. It’d be a 110 page title.

There’s another scene in the film where Woody Allen’s character approaches a happy looking couple and asks them, basically “why are you so happy, what is your secret to success?” The woman says, “I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.” The man says “I’m exactly the same.”

It seems that creativity and innovation require at least some bit of inner turmoil. Systems thinking allows us to make sense of this turmoil and create structures to both harness and liberate our knowledge workers. However, it can have some side-effects.

 

Systems Thinking is Awesome and a Trap Because It Can Smooth Out the Rough Edges

Human beings are chaotic. The more we think, the more we learn. The more we learn, the more we grow. The more we grow, the more we change.

Imagine, if you will, a large company with 30,000 employees. Now imagine a small company with 5 employees. Which one feels the impact of its constantly changing population?

They both do.

But large companies can spread the impact of those changing people over a large surface area, if you will. Large companies also excel at instituting dehumanizing processes that devalue individual change.

They hire systems thinkers to help create these dehumanized systems by figuring out what the best methods of production are and enforcing these methods. This Calvanistic approach worked well in the industrial era when people could do to work, execute their mechanistic commands, watch a car, bread or a box-spring mattress pop out the end of the assembly line, and then go home.

There are some in the Agile software community who have dismissed kanban and systems thinking as “Tayloristic”. Taylorism sought to use performance measures to manage, predict, and enforce assumptions about product execution and completion. In its execution, Taylorism became quite dehumanizing.

The kanban for software community has in-turn dismissed this accusation a scurrilous lie. But the aspects of Taylorism that are mentioned are real possibilities, and the kanban community is showing its own bias by not even discussing the possibility of Taylorism.

We have already seen where visual controls like kanban have been used to control groups and enforce process, rather than lead to patterns of continuous improvement. Would we as good systems thinkers like to see such misuse stopped? Yes.  Does that mean it does not happen?

No.

While Taylorism may work well for the creation of a predictable thing like a car or a fork, it is horrible for knowledge work and the modern endeavors that rest upon the labor of knowledge workers. The problem here is, those that control companies and many self-appointed systems thinkers do not understand the difference. Also, artifacts like the PMBOK enforce notions of measurable outcomes over adaptive systems.

For the assembly line wolrd, work-life balance was real, because people had bifurcated their lives. The worked at work and lived at home.

That was a huge trap.

But … this was a horrible (though predictable in hindsight) unintended consequence of systems thinking, which was always supposed to be about the people. There were some systems thinkers who were good at making the drudgery of the assembly line merely suck less - they were not interested in creating systems that actively promoted worker well-being (even if Deming was interested in worker well-being).

One thing though:

We are no longer in the industrial era.

The information age relies on a very different machine – the human brain. We’ve learned that happy knowledge workers create more product, make less mistakes, and innovate more. Here, we have some serious systems thinking potential awesome.

Systems thinking can look into knowledge work with an eye much less focused on productivity, and much more focused on happy workers. This systems thinking is very interested in the change of individuals - in their well being as parts of the overall system. This systems thinking knows that team mood directly impacts the bottom line.

Here, systems thinking also knows that Quotes 1 and 2 are important. We want to know where we are building assumptions about the systems and about ourselves. We want to understand how the individuals involved in our enterprise combine to create wonderful innovation and dangerous dogma. We also want to incorporate Quote 3 and understand that knowledge work is all about relationships and introspection. We know that the realities of our co-workers impact the whole system.

Tomorrow’s Quote: Well, Clarise, have the lambs stopped screaming?

Photo by Tonianne

Post Collaborators: Tonianne and Jabe Bloom

Systems Thinking Is Awesome and a Trap Series: Quote #2–Remember Your Failure In The Cave

(This is part 2 of a 5 part series that starts here)

So, it’s an average day on Dagobah, rainy, hot, humid. Luke Skywalker has just finished some fitness exercises with Yoda and they come across a cave. It creeps Luke out and Yoda says, in essence, “Dude, skip the cave.”

But Luke feels the dark side of the force in the cave and feels compelled to check it out. Yoda is then all, like, “Hey knock yourself out, I’m just hundreds of years old and really smart, you want to ignore my wisdom and go into the cave … by all means.”

So, Luke goes into the cave and runs into Darth Vader, or some Darth Vadery thing, and they have a little light saber duel and Luke cuts Vader’s head off, only to find his own face behind Vader’s mask.

Luke’s own impetuous recklessness is staring him in the face.

This wigs Luke out.

Systems Thinking is Awesome Here Because Most Often We Are Battling Ourselves

When we use systems thinking, we are actively asking ourselves “Why is this working as it does?” If we are good systems thinkers, we open ourselves to all possibilities and expect to be surprised. Systems thinking is all about how to turn normal operations upside-down and see the unexpected reasons for both success and failure.

Therefore, systems thinking is often about our own self-exploration. How was the system I created yesterday wrong? What is my impetuous recklessness?

Systems Thinking is a Trap Here Because We Still Expect to “Win” at Continuous Improvement

As mentioned in the previous Quote, our world-views get in our way all the time. We unconsciously constantly build systems in our heads to explain why things happened. Unfortunately, for us, we build these models at such a rate that we rarely have them disproved. So we feel we are most always right in our decisions and beliefs. Psychologists call this “subjective validation”.

In systems thinking, we have to operate in the real-world. This means we are often asked to work towards some set of end-goals. While we would like to be ideological purists, those who hire systems thinkers would like to actually do something. So they need actionable items that they can understand.

The trap here lies in describing an end-state for the systems thinking effort that is somehow permanent. If people want a set of processes that will not change in the future, that is a trap. If they want a group of people “fixed”, so they will do their jobs better, that is a trap.

I have been to many web sites of many people who claim to be systems thinkers who specifically promise explicitly to map out the real processes of a company and then create new processes that will remain permanent. This limits systems thinking to what Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Model calls the complicated domain. (I will go into detail about Cynefin at Quote #5, until then, check out the wikipedia page).

In most human endeavor today, certainly in knowledge work, but increasingly in manufacturing, we do not operate in the complicated domain, we operate in the complex domain. This is a domain where business process or team process can change from moment to moment. The speed at which new products can come to market, the decoupling of the production of an object from its design and sales, and the rate at which the markets and technologies change make any stolid process unsustainable and dangerous.

Continuous improvement, therefore, becomes a constant effort to be the best that you can be at the design, creation, sales, and re-creation of your product. You don’t “win” at it by completing a final process. You “win” by remaining vigilant.

 

Tomorrow’s Quote is a long one from Annie Hall

Photo by Tonianne

Post collaborators: Jabe Bloom and Tonianne

Why Systems Thinking is Awesome and a Trap in Five Quotes: Post 1: There Is No Spoon

A few weeks ago, I awoke to a string of tweets by people on the other side of the world discussing what I would say about Systems Thinking’s limitations. Systems thinking is a major tool in my toolkit when working with teams and organizations. If you are using Personal Kanban or other visualization tools, you should be using it as well.

Systems thinking, like all tools, involves the tool itself (an amoral object) and human nature (a moral object). Human nature can, from time to time, lead us down some unsavory paths. Now, as with most tools, the tool isn’t necessarily to blame. However, the tool and human nature combine to create predictable patterns of dysfunction.

So, today I am writing about how something I use nearly every day and love. I am writing about how it can be misapplied by even the most skillful practitioners.

Systems thinking encourages that one look at an entire system and appreciate the impacts on that systems on its parts. To illustrate in a simple way, let’s say that Raymond works for MalCo. All his coworkers hate him. “Raymond is a jerk, a buzz-kill, a mean man.” But when he goes home, Raymond’s kids love him. He’s not a mean man. At work, Raymond’s job is to make sure that expense forms are filled out properly. It’s a thankless job. But the job is not Raymond and Raymond is not his job. The system has given Raymond unpopular tasks and he is fulfilling them.

We then tease out elements of that system that could be improved to better achieve the goals of the system or those who interact with it.

In Raymond’s case, having him go around nitpicking about whether the $5 parking fee was before or after work hours is counter-productive and annoying. It even annoys Raymond, so when he shows up, he really isn’t looking for a fight but he is agitated. The goal of the company was never to annoy people, it was to make sure that the company handled expenses in a way that let the company do its bookkeeping and kept things neat. So, what if we came up with a submission process that checked expense forms as they were written and gave people Raymond as an expert that could help them when they ran into troubles with the form?

Suddenly, Raymond transforms from the jerk that says no to the guy who could help you find yes.

So, my first bout with systems thinking was while I was an urban planner. For years there were two wings of urban planning. Transportation and Land Use. They tended to be quite siloed. Then one day, someone got the bright idea that transportation and land use actually were a system and influenced each other rather heavily. In 1994, I was hired to be the “transportation-land use link” by METRO, the regional government in Portland, Oregon. After that, I spent years of my career working directly to promote systems thinking throughout urban planning.

More recently, in 2010, I helped manage the creation of the Human Development Report for Vietnam. Usually HDRs are also very siloed. They have sections on women’s issues, water quality, early childhood nutrition, transportation, economic development, etc. These reports were erroneously seen as “systems thinking” by the United Nations because they contained all the elements of the system. However, the reports rarely highlighted the relationships. So, what we did was get the 24 researchers all working in Google Docs. The researchers could then see, in real time if they chose, what all the other authors were writing.

We then encouraged them to not only write their own sections, but also comment on each other’s sections. The goal being to insert the impacts of, say, a good water supply on early childhood nutrition, or of a good transportation system on access to hospitals. This little change allowed us to create a much more systemic view of each of these previously siloed sections and, therefore, build more holistic and sustainable programs in the future.

So, suffice it to say, I’ve been thinking about systems for quite some time.

The five quotes below are from popular culture and I’ve been really busy lately so my references may be a bit dated. So, sorry about that, it is what it is. If you haven’t seen the films, get them on Netflix or Amazon. I will be doing one quote a day over the next five business days.

Quote #1 THERE IS NO SPOON

I personally believe that The Matrix is a classic film that succeeds in spite of itself. It really should be awful, but it works. Like Lewis Carroll with guns (lots of), it takes us through the looking glass into another world that is actually the real world. It takes many systems we take for granted and invalidates them. The Matrix shows Neo and his rag-tag band of rebels actively operating inside the system (our daily reality), and then transcending that system to the meta-system that surrounds it (aliens who have imprisoned us in our own minds). In the matrix, reality is impermanent, imposed, and false.

Systems Thinking Is Awesome Here Because New Realizations Break Assumptions

This is key in systems thinking. We keep rotating our view of reality to find systems within systems. To find ways that business builds pockets of dysfunction that gnaw away at the ability of the company to succeed. To find ways that a culture gathers dogma that becomes accepted truth long after it is relevant.

We actively question why things happen and try our best not to rest on dogma as answers. (Always trying…) When we do have epiphanies about actual causes for problems, they generally break one or more assumptions people have about their work, their life, or the structure of society.

Systems Thinking is a Trap Here Because New Realizations are Still Based on Assumptions

As human beings, we operate based on a world-view, our own internal system that is based on assumptions and emotional reactions. The trap here is when we believe that the system we are working with can ever be the one-true system. There are always red pills to take to open our doors of perception. There are always other angles to look from.

Systems thinking itself is in no way to blame here. But as human beings, we have a certain tendency to want to view the world from a certain point-of-view. We call these fixed points-of-view “best practices.” They engender static checklists, rule sets and associated punishments. They assume the world is simplistic.

When we build a system in systems thinking we start to fall prey to a variety of cognitive biases that cause us to fixate on certain systems. We find systems based on systems, which can pull us down logical chains of discovery that seem true … but only seem. The patterns feel comfortable. (I come back to this in Quote 4).

The trick here is that even if we realize this to be the case, we still are subject to these biases. So we need to build meta-systems to guard against this. We need to take a regular regimen of red pills to remove ourselves from the system we are actively studying and change our perceptions.

Unfortunately, the appropriate dosage is likely lethal.

We simply must be comfortable, as people using systems thinking as a tool, to understand that, at any given time, our current view of the system is incomplete. Perspective, by its very nature, is looking at something from a vantage point - a point-of-view. There are things behind or inside what we are viewing of which we are unaware.

Ask yourself, what is your point-of-view? Where are the blind-spots?

It is simply human nature to assume that our world-view is correct, however. Therefore most people who actively work in systems thinking routinely fall into the trap of believing the beautiful systems diagrams they have created are anything other than a very useful, temporary fiction.

Tomorrow’s quote “Remember Your Failure In the Cave”....

Photo by Tonianne

This post was with a little collaboration with Tonianne and Jabe Bloom