Author: Admin

You can’t reduce complexity. All you can do is choose where to manage it.

Amazon makes buying online easier for the customers, but they haven’t removed the complexity of doing so, they’ve just hidden it from the customer. Buying online is more complex today than its ever been, and it’ll never be this simple again.

All systems tend toward chaos. As systems evolve they become increasingly complex. We’d do well to remember this when we talk of making easier in one part of a system and what effect it has on other parts of the system.

The argument against Myers-Briggs personality tests is that they aren’t based on scientific evidence and so shouldn’t be used for any kind of decision-making that requires a rational basis. Deciding someone’s suitability for a job, for example, based on their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator isn’t rational and so isn’t fair to all candidates.

The same applies to ideas like creative people are right brain dominant and analytical people use their left brain more, or that people have different learning styles. They have no scientific basis and if used as if they did, could be misleading and unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.

But the point isn’t whether these things are empirically verifiable, the point is whether they have anything interesting to contribute to how we understand ourselves and relate to each other. To suggest that personality tests have nothing to contribute to discussions about people and their preferences would be like saying that poetry has nothing to contribute to our understanding about love. As with many things, it isn’t the thing itself that is at fault but how we misuse the thing.

Should we actually want to understand personality better, we could look at the current scientific thinking around the ‘big five traits‘ and the two meta-traits of stability and plasticity. This research essentially shows that personalities change over time and are due to genetic and environmental factors, and that stability is associated with protective behaviours and plasticity is connected with exploratory behaviours. Put simply, we can say that our personalities at any given time are the result of the interplay of those two motivations; to feel safe and to explore.

So what should we do with personality tests? Consider them fun conversation starters, by all means, use them as team-building exercises, like building spaghetti towers, to prompt discussion about our preferences, but not descriptive of anyone’s fixed personality.

The roadmap isn’t the roadmap. The roadmap is the thinking behind the roadmap.

The artifact that we call ‘the roadmap’ has limited value. It can serve as a confidence-building and communication tool within organisations that recognise the usefulness of a roadmap, but in those that don’t it isn’t worth the PowerPoint it’s pasted into.

The thinking that creates the roadmap, however, that’s very valuable.

Lots of roadmaps don’t contain much thinking. They contain a diagram with boxes that aim to show a relationship between items, but not much rationale for those relationships. These roadmaps are best avoided.

The best roadmaps are those that encapsulate lots of thinking from lots of people.

The thinking is cross-functional, robustly rational, systemised and repeatable, asks and answers specific, relevant questions and format independent.

So, if you want to create good roadmaps, focus on the thinking. Get the system of thinking right, and a good roadmap will follow.

I’m not interested in strategy. Strategy is boring. There are decades worth of thinking from some of the best minds and still we don’t know how to achieve things in a coordinated fashion through top-down command and control.

Stigmergy. Now that’s interesting. Stigmergy is how ant’s nest coordinate collecting food without any means of hierarchical communication. It’s how flocks of starlings fly fast and close without crashing into each other. Stigmergy relies on few simple patterns of behaviour with changes in those behaviours communicated through signals from and to everyone.

If one starling spots a hawk and thinks the flock should fly away from it, that starling doesn’t send a message to a single leader starling who then makes a decision which is communicated through defined chains of command and communication channels. If that was how starlings did it, the one that spotted the hawk would be the hawk’s lunch while waiting for that instruction to change direction. Instead, the starling turns to fly away from the hawk but still follows the rule of not crashing into any other starling. Other nearby starlings see that starling getting too close and so change direction also. And so the change ripples through the flock and they all avoid the hawk. They each detected the signal and followed simple rules in deciding how to respond to it.

Perhaps social media provides an example of how we humans detect signals from across our complex and interconnected ecosystem. But there are three problems with using social media in this way. Firstly, signals are not treated equally. The algorithms that drive these systems are designed to maximise engagement which almost always means showcasing negative signals and downplaying positive signals. Secondly, human behaviour, although predictable, doesn’t follow simple patterns. And thirdly, because of our history of relying on the idea of strategy, the typical human response is to look to the centralised leadership for solutions and directions. So maybe that’s too big an arena for thinking about how people might use stigmergy effectively.

But I struggle to find an example of where humans have come even close to implementing stigmergy within a smaller defined group such as a business or community organisation. Even in small groups, the implicit agreement about how the group decides on actions for everyone is for someone in the group to detect the signal that prompts the need for change, communicate that to the group, the group decides as a whole on what action should be taken, and then the action is implemented. Even the smallest, and so presumably most able to communicate quickly and respond to change, groups of people would be hawk food.

We might just have to accept that when it comes to responding quickly to change, the starlings have us beat.

Working asynchronously via documents and diagrams is great for enabling people to read and input at a time that suits them but for ensuring the document communicates what it needs to often takes more than what is in the document itself.

To help get the document right I sometimes write a meta-document, a document about the document, a plan for what the document needs to achieve. It’s a bit like an agenda for a meeting. It helps keep you on track and ensure you consider more than just the contents of the document or diagram.

The meta-document might include:

• What is the purpose of the document or diagram? Is it inform, discuss, present?
• Who is it for? Is the
• What are they expecting? Is it document, diagram, presentation, video?
• What assumptions do I have about what they know?
• What visual language or tone of voice will work best?
• How much explanation or contextual information do the audience need to make sense of the document?
• And anything else that sets up the document for success.

Lots of organisations of all sizes and sectors use Customer Relationship Management and Project Management software when they don’t really need to.

There is a tipping point for every organisation where the level of complexity of managing these systems is less than that of managing customer relationships and projects using other systems (which almost always means spreadsheets). When that tipping point is reached, then it’s worth the investment of implementing these complicated systems, but that tipping point is much higher than most organisations think it is.

If they undertook some process design work and sought to reduce the complexity in their current processes, and clarify the processes that everyone across the organisation uses within their workflows, they would achieve much better customer relationship and project management . But instead, they turn to technology systems to solve the problems that are created by poor process, and expecting the technology to enforce the process and solve the problem.

If you’re thinking of introducing a CRM or Project Management system do yourself a favour and focus on understanding and improving your processes first. You might find that the problem you’re actually trying to solve is to reduce complexity and that introducing a new system isn’t going to achieve that. Even if you still go ahead with a new system, at least you’ll be able to implement it more effectively because you’ll know how things work.

In animation, ‘inbetweening’ is the process of creating frames to go in between other frames that purposely look blurred to make the transition between two frames look smoother.

When thinking about change from one state to another we often think more about the two fixed states of before and after and not enough about what the transitional state in between look like and how they can smooth the change. Perhaps it’s a limit in our language that makes it easier to describe fixed states but almost impossible to explain what things in flux might be like. Perhaps purposely communicating things in blurry ways, and being comfortable with the uncertainty that shows, might help us appreciate the transitions in between.