I hear some of you saying “So what? This is all theoretical. Tell me how!”
Two things:
Firstly, everyone is on their own journey. What you use and what you get will be unique to you. The state of the organisation at any moment will be unlike any other organisation, and the path to that point will be equally distinctive. There is no defined pathway, no magic formula. Attempts to convince us otherwise are religion.
Secondly, how doesn’t matter. It’s all noise. Why is more important. Vision, values, principles, and aspirations (not what or where we want to be, but who) – these are things we can know, believe, and have in common, as a group and across organisations. For example, the Agile movement was wise in rejecting all formalised methods and sticking to the underlying values and principles of its Manifesto.
How can i say it’s all noise? I am reading yet another systems thinking book, this time it is Seeing the Forest for the Trees by Dennis Sherwood, a book primarily about causal diagrams illustrated from some of the author’s work experiences. I realised as i read it that I don’t care much about the details of creating and analysing such charts. We use them to communicate, but causal diagrams don’t produce The Answer. They don’t Make Work Better. They’re just YAFTT, Yet Another Thinking Tool. They help illustrate, convince, and illuminate. What did turn a light on for me in the book was a reference to “Soft Systems Methodology” by Peter Checkland, where Sherwood says
In almost every real situation, people are intrinsically [or explicitly] part of the system of interest. Since people often have multiple, different, competing, or simply unclear objectives, SSM asserts that the most beneficial approach is one of enriching all the participants’ knowledge and understanding of the situation, rather than a “scientific” search for the “best” answer.
Oh the irony of finding such a concept in a book about causal diagrams as the solution to real-world complexity. (To be fair, Sherwood doesn’t think they produce The Answer, they are his prefered tool to illuminate thinking. But he did say they “tame complexity”. They certainly drive holistic thinking and surface issues for everyone to see. We like them too.)
I love the point SSM is making. All our methods and tools serve only to illuminate our thinking, not to do it for us. Teal Unicorn has determined that the effective way to make work better is for all the stakeholders in the system to think as a group.
The answers lie within the group. Consultants and bosses are midwives, there to provide advice and help deliver it, not to impose their own brain-farts.
The bigger the group the better the answers. There is a game where people arriving at a venue guess how many jellybeans are in a huge jar. It seems an impossible task, and for any one individual they are unlikely to get it right. But the average of a big group shows a spooky ability to trend towards the correct answer as the number of guesses grows. Together our thinking is powerful.
The human brain is the most complicated structure known in the entire universe. Not even the internet or a galactic cluster exceeds it. Now consider that they are all connected by language, and connected with all past brains by accrued culture and knowledge. You can’t model its thinking processes with any tool or method – they are all tiny approximations. The hubris of those who think they can do so, or to replicate it in a machine, is hilarious. Get as many brains together as you can and let them do what they do: think. (Certainly “group-think” in its negative sense is a trap to be wary of, but that shouldn’t put us off the activity in general).
No matter how awesome a thinking force you assemble, the future – and the present – remain unknown and unknowable. You aren’t going to come up with The Answer. At best, you’ll come up with something that a super-majority at least consent to try, and a majority want to try, that is likely to be as close to optimal – for current known conditions and constraints – as anyone else could dream up.
It is counter-intuitive for 20th Century minds, those steeped in the scientific method, to hear that this is in fact the optimal strategy, which will most closely follow the wandering needs of the organisation (which is only apparent in hindsight). All of the plans, strategies, goals, bets, budgets, designs, and architectures are there to comfort us, to make us feel like we know where we are going Their two real contributions are that they provide safety barriers – along with policies and rules – to keep individuals and smaller groups from going too far off the page; and the process of creating them is another tool for illuminating our thinking. So they’re not a waste, until we over-invest.
Open IT doesn’t much care how you make your work better, only that you do. It’s not that Teal Unicorn rejects all methods and tools, like some naked sadhu washing in dust. Peppered throughout, we mention a number that can help.
They’re great, they’re just not the most important building blocks of better ways of doing IT. They’re hammers not carpenters.
We talked about this in our book Open Management
All intellectual frameworks are just planks we use to keep us out of the mud. They’re useful but they don’t need to be polished to a shine. We have a higher purpose than the constructs themselves.
As we have discussed, work is human. It is as much about ethics and aesthetics as it is about science and intellectual abstract models. At Teal Unicorn, I work with the mind and the heart. It is not only about what’s correct, but also what is right and appealing.
As your thinking rises above, the specifics of frameworks and models fall away as operational noise, and we open up to more important things, like humanity and thriving.
I don’t recall where I first read about the three “transcendentals” of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I’m not a religious person so it wasn’t there. They do have religious connotations but that’s not how we are using them here. They are universal aspects of what humanity considers – or should consider – philosophically important, and Open IT is an example, like Agile, of Philosophy of Work, so they should be at the heart. It turned another light on for me to realise how “truthy” my life had been, especially my work. 20th Century business theory systematically eliminated beauty and goodness from work. If the numbers are up, then it’s all good, it’s “just business” if we consequently do bad or ugly work. Greed is good. People are human capital stock. Organisations are not part of society.
Most models and frameworks I’ve seen are heavy on objectivity, logic, and abstraction. Let’s have some subjectivity, empathy, and realism. More beauty and goodness.
Sure Google can take DoD money to develop AI for killing machines, but is that what their staff want to be part of? BP can use GIS and AI to map potential new oilfields, but what do their staff’s kids think about that? Were Snowden and Manning heroes or villains? At what point could Fujitsu have stopped the UK Post Office from destroying the lives of their postmasters? What was more important during COVID, profitability or retaining employees? If somebody is sick or going through a rough time, should the team carry them? Are ESG and DEI bullshit?
Is it a waste of money to make a website cool? Is a messy desk bad? Is it OK to joke around at work? How can we make the workplace a more pleasing place to be? How does our branding and marketing contribute to the urban landscape? How do our buildings and industries affect the visual environment?
And so on.
At Teal Unicorn, we are fans of Laloux’s version of the Spiral Dynamics model – it’s in our name. In fact we tweaked it again ourselves.
Like all models it’s just a tool to illuminate thinking. It shines a light on how to really “make work better: better results, better lives, better society” (That’s our Teal Unicorn motto).
Where is all this leading? To get back to Open IT, it is based on Teal Unicorn’s Open approach, our word for all the ideas we are learning about that make the world better. When we apply it to work, Open Work is summed up as three aspects: Human Systems Adaptability. Last year and this, Rob has been thinking about how those concepts apply to IT work. The first one comes first. it’s a human approach to IT.
(That uses the same colour code as the above Laloux graphic).
Liberate those doing the work. Allow them to get their jobs done as easily, efficiently, and effectively as possible.
Then think holistically, in systems. It is the only way to understand and deal with complexity. Once you truly grasp the implications, you can find the best ways to work. You realise that conventional optimisation is a local effort that is often counterproductive. The primary activity should be adaptation, adjusting constantly to a VUCA world.
Finally, think of flow in those systems. More than many organisational sectors, IT is flow-centric. Flow is more important to us than in e.g. marketing, HR, finance, or data. We make stuff. We work in value streams. Let the work flow free.
These are the three core principles of Open IT: Liberation, Adaptability, and Flow. As you know, none of these are Teal Unicorn’s inventions. We encapsulate what we have learned, experienced, and proven.
So no, there isn’t going to be much method or procedure in Open IT . Just “liberate the people, allow the work to be adaptable, and get out of the way of the flow”. Get the values and the culture right, embrace the principles, and the rest will follow…
Slides of our presentation to the Pink24 conference