A Cynefin Delegation Decision Framework

February 11, 2012 by 6 Comments

I’ve had people ask me, how do I make the Cynefin Framework useful? How do I apply it? I am going to walk through one way I use the framework, I’m not going to spend much time explaining technical terms here. 


To be clear this is a personal evolving model, it may or may not work for other people in other companies.


As a CTO I am required to manage a volume of problems presented to me.  As an executive my time is often too fragmented by non-negotiable commitments. I like to personally lead the efforts to resolve problems, however often times I am unable to . When this occurs I need to be able to delegate the resolution of the problem effectively. This post will show my framework for delegating work. 


Order or Un-Order


Let me start by the “triage” level of problem solving. First things first, Ordered or UnOrdered? 


Order and Un-Order look to the future in different ways. Order views the world in a traditional mechanistic, cause and effect way, making plans works. Un-Order on the other hand assumes that the future is unpredictable, cause and effect doesn’t hold, and previously observed patterns may not hold. Determining order vs un-order can quickly give me a sense of the potential responses.

Ordered


Heuristic: 

  • Defined outcome. 
  • Inspection reveals quality of work.
  • Exploitation 

Examples:

  • Complete an Invoice
  • Create HTML for an approved Design
  • Determine why a server isn’t running correctly
  • Load Test a system
  • Implement a intricate financial algorithm

Un-Ordered


Heuristic:

  • Definable desirable traits / Multiple possible good results
  • Novel domains or concepts
  • Inspection reveals “fitness” for use.
  • Exploration

Examples

  • Create a new product
  • Find a new market
  • Create a valuable social presence
  • Train employees

If I have no more time to investigate the problem further, I’ll treat anything that falls in the Ordered side as Complicated and anything that falls in the un-ordered side as Chaotic.


Delegating and Managing the Problem

Simple 

Heuristic:

  • I know the Answer
  • Most people should be able to know the answer 
  • I can inspect and determine the quality of the work at any point. 

Action:

  • Delegate resolution to individual or team with appropriate knowledge of process
  • Investigate why Simple problem surfaced to Executive level
  • Determine if enough individuals are trained in appropriate solution


Complicated


Heuristic:

  • I know someone has a solution
  • I may not personally understand how to complete the detailed solution
  • I can inspect the results of the work and validate that it meets my needs
  • I may not be able to inspect the intermediate results to validate fitness

Action:

  • Assemble group of Experts with previous experience solving simular issues.
  • Define clear unambiguous resolution state
  • Initiate Discussion about possible solutions to resolve problem
  • Focus experts on resolution state not details
  • Assign an expert to own “goodest”/satisficing suggested solution
  • Frequent follow up with expert until problem is resolved


Complex

Heuristic: 

  • I know a group of people who would be interested in this problem
  • I have multiple possible good results in mind
  • I can’t define how I would validate the results ahead of time

Action:

  • Work with a group of teams to describe problem
  • Attempt to inspire a team to self engage the problem
  • Delegate to team that creates the most coherent explanation of forward movement
  • Frequent follow up to determine response remains coherent
  • Ensure appropriate access to new information and resources
  • Work with team to begin to explain novel solution to internal resources
Chaos 



Heuristic:

  • I know individuals who would be interested in this problem
  • I’m unsure how to describe the problem or the solution clearly
Action:

  • Assemble a heterogeneous group of individuals with divergent skill-sets, view points and responsibilities
  • Present problem
  • Work to create a network of individuals with a shared vocabulary to minimally describe problem
  • Define multiple possible experiments to “find our way”
  • Delegate experiments to teams (ideally not from this group of individuals)
  • Periodically reform network to evaluate results and new suggestions (ritual dissent)
This assumes a chaotic problem that doesn’t require IMMEDIATE response. Emergencies should be immediately delegated or handled personally by attempting to find the “closest best practice” to temporarily stabilize the problem.

Dis-Order

You may be thinking, what about the Disordered domain. My disordered heuristic is that I don’t know anyone who would know anything about the problem and I need to gather more information.


The first thing I do when I find myself unable to figure out which domain a problem is in is to seek peer advice. Peers include the other executives and personal contacts that can potentially add enough information to the problem to clarify it for me. 


If the problem remains disordered I treat it as chaotic, with an expectation that it will resolve itself into one of the domains quickly. The important difference I think is a heightened awareness of the likelihood of a rapid potentially disruptive transition.

Filed Under: complexity, cynefin, Featured

The Management Interaction Gap

February 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

this model never makes me particularly popular with other managers or executives… 

Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s day to day living that wears you out.

-Anton Chekhov


There are many explanations of what is “wrong” with management these days… many of them may be right, but I think my model of the problem has a pretty good chance of explaining a huge amount of waste (and general unhappiness) in today’s businesses. I’d like to be clear up front, this post is less intended to bash on management than it is intended to illuminate the logic behind the management decision process, a description from the pointy haired side of the house.

The Management Interaction Gap Model


Let’s start with some definitions:
The Management Interaction Gap
The period of time during which management trusts the team to complete a task or set of tasks, which the team has committed to.
Zone of Planning
The period of time where management attempts to explain an envisioned Ideal Future state. Management will be intimately involved creating a plan that explains the steps required to achieve the Ideal Future State
Zone of Surprise
Management starts hearing “bad things” comes to investigate… You are all IDIOTS. Clearly this isn’t what I asked for. Team meanwhile has been working on system and understands WHY it is the way it is… Manager doesn’t want to hear it.
Ideal Future State
Usually the Manager BELIEVES he understands what he wants done. If you actually ASK the manager they will have a harder time explaining it.
Interval of Expectation
Amount of time between the Official Start of the Project and the expected delivery of the Ideal Future State.

Let Me Tell You A Story


This story is very much a draft… it is too snarky and management bashing, which is how it came out of my head. I plan to rewrite it to better reflect a manager’s point of view

In the beginning of my projects there is a Vision. I BELIEVE I understand what needs to be done (If you actually ASK me right now I would have a harder time explaining the details). I have produced a Power Point deck or some form of a Vision Statement. This document is a rough outline, a vision, of what should be built based on rigorous analysis of the market place, projections, and assertions about the how the future is going to be! 


I know that projects that are unclear or have any ambiguity, either get hijacked OR never get approved so it is important that the Ideal Future State be CLEAR and UNAMBIGUOUS. I have presented the vision statement to my peers to secure funding and resources.

Once I gained the approval of his peers and therefor committed to them to achieve the Ideal Future State, it is off to the Zone of Planning. This is what I am GOOD at… PLANNING. Planning IS Management. Always pay A LOT of attention during the Zone of Planning… because I KNOW, based on previous experience, that the team is going to bollocks up the whole project eventually. This time though, I’m going to make sure the plan is more detailed, this time the team will understand. 


Towards the end of the planning phase the my attention starts to drop precipitously. I am actually starting to trust the team, they seem to understand the vision and are helping to define a plan. After weeks of repeating the same things over and over in meetings, they appear to be able to parrot back the appropriate responses. Now it is time to ask the team to make a ritualized commitment to achieve the Ideal Future state… I love this moment of commitment! Finally I’ve clearly explained the Vision and the Plan, so clearly that the awesome team I’ve assembled, understands. It is so good to be understood.

Now, like everyone else I can only do so many things at once, fortunately I am an expert multi-tasker. Teams and individuals need to manage WIP, managers and companies need to PRODUCE as much as possible. So… during The Management Interaction Gap, I am off helping the next team commit to another related ideal future. Usually that plan and my previous plan… are going to have dependencies.

Towards the end of the project, I start hearing “bad things.” Time to investigate…


You are all IDIOTS.

Clearly this isn’t what I asked for! 


The larger the Interval of Expectation, the more trust I put in the team and the louder yelling is going to be. Now, I only have 15% of the time and budget left and I have to get this project back on the rails. Things are going to have to change, and I am going to have to be HEAVILY involved if this project is going to be saved. The team can earn the trust back, by following instructions NOW, because trust is based on the ability to follow the plan, which clearly the team HAS NOT BEEN DOING.

Fire fighting isn’t fun, but someone has to do it. Thank god I have a ton of experience saving teams from failure.

The team of course has been working on system and understands WHY it is the way it is, they’ve discovered that there were details about the vision that did not make sense.

To tell you the truth I don’t want to hear it, I have got a commitment to my peers and the teams has committed to me to fulfill the plan we defined together. All that hard work planning, it can’t go to waste…

Observations


The MIG is a failure state that is seen repeatedly in situations where teams are left to achieve an Ideal Future state, even self organizing teams.

The Management Interaction Gap (The MIG) is scale invariant.

Agile, which encourages managers to trust their teams to self organize, may exacerbate the amount of surprise teams produce for their managers. Managers may confuse trust, self-organization and self-management, leading to an insufficient amount of effective leadership.

Implications


Building a tree house and hanging a “No Managers Sign” is not a reasonable reaction to the real problem of micromanagement. The Management Interaction Gap is NOT an invitation to engage in the micromanagement of HOW to do work. It is however a call for management and teams to engage each other more authentically. Management by more consistant attention and teams by an active attempt to be more transparent. Kanban is my preferred route to establishing both these goals.


This all need more exploration that I (or you dear reader) have time for right now… but some specific thoughts in conclusion.


For Ordered Work


Even when appropriate Ideal Futures can done better.

If what you are trying to achieve is predictably inspect-able, if you can explicitly define the qualities of the system that you will value in the future, then The Management Interaction Gap isn’t actually that bad. You may benefit from “going to the gemba” to help make the process more efficient or helping teams become more effective at producing the values you have defined. You may also benefit from inspecting the progress of production more frequently to ensure that the value you expect is being produced. Projects such as, implementing a widely used specifications, building a car and developing film all fall in this area.

When executing processes that repeat, avoid the Banana Principle, know when to stop. The weak signals in Ordered work ARE NOT in the complex domain, weak signals are in the SIMPLE domain. As a manager, carefully observe and test work processes that haven’t changed in awhile. Cautious inspection of highly proscriptive work to ensure that the environment hasn’t changed is critical. When designing training, make sure, as much as possible, to embed information about the appropriate context for the processes. Students will benefit greatly from instruction indicating how to determine processes have entered failure states. Attempt to create a “stop the line” mechanism that allows those closest to the process/environment interaction to notify managers of a mismatch between expectations and reality.

For Un-ordered Work

Often we find ourselves unable to define the values we wish a system to have in relation to an uncertain future. In these cases, producing a clear and unambiguous ideal future is illogical. In these cases the Management Gap is very dangerous. Managers in these cases need to avoid grand visions statements and favor distributed social narrative generation and execute small safe-fail experiments. Close the management gap by; shortening cycle times and increasing transparency.

When executing a safe-to-fail experiment understand when the “story” is becoming dis-coherent. This doesn’t mean that the project is failing, but it is important to re-establish a new coherence based on the new information available. This is where surprises come from, teams working on their own find new information and adjust their narratives to match, managers unaware of the new information AND the gradual change in narrative, are surprised that the story has changed. Of course there is a worse version of the story… one where teams have been so brow beaten that they’ll continue working on dis-coherent work that everyone knows won’t work. Not only is this demoralizing and foolish from a profit perspective, it is impossible to measure progress against a dis-coherent goal.


You know that saying about learning from mistakes? The Management Interaction Gap is a model of a failure state for a management style I once used…

Filed Under: complexity, Featured

The Golden Birmingham Screwdriver

February 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about where to go next, I think that exploring Boundedness is critical before I can procede to some of the other topics on my list.

Originally I set out to understand the origin of David Snowden’s term “Bounded Applicabability.” I can’t say that I have found the origin of the concept (David could probably fill that part in best), but I thought it maybe interesting to write about what I found while looking. Having now spent some time thinking reading and writing about it, I realize that the topic of Boundedness is rather large and I can’t hope to capture it completely in a post.

So… In this post I am going to try to create some links between ideas, instead of attempting to encompass the subject. My hope is to create some entry ways into the concept that will encourage you to explore it more deeply. Creating a web of ideas is useful for catching people. I don’t wish to dilute the concepts themselves, only to make them more approachable.

It is important that we learn to cross boundaries, but vitally important that we do not place ourselves in boxes.


Bounded Perception


The bounding of our perception is, upon brief reflection, obvious. For instance we are limited to “seeing” what is in the visible spectrum. Humans have a limited audible range of frequencies. Both which point towards a limitation of our ability to perceive reality fully. It is worth pointing out, and I will return to at some point, the idea that we can (and have) developed the capability to see beyond the visible spectrum.

There are other ways in which our perception is limited, we may only have a limited time to observe, we may only have a limited ability to understand the information we perceive (the Unmodelled Area).

Homo Economicus

Homo economicus, the self-interested agent, is imagined by economist, to have hyper-rationality, be driven to gain wealth by narrow self-interest and have instant universal free access to nearly perfect knowledge.

Homo Economicus… “can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi”

-Thaler and Sunstein 

Rationality is not moral here, it is narrowly limited to the idea that you can make useful predictions about the results of actions in your environment to your own benefit, otherwise known as rational egoism.

Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire.

-Marshall 

Rational Choice theory examines the concept of Homo Economicus. Interestingly like a form of a Turing Test, rational choice theory only focuses on the effects of external stimuli, ignoring the concept of internal motivation all together. The extrinsic vs intrinsic motivations Agile and Lean practitioners 

may are concern with is potentially interesting to explore.
As a model I imagine the Homo Economicus to be a “universal” model, one that is intended to be applied without regard to the environment or individual.

Bounded Rationality

Boundedly rational agents experience limits in formulating and solving complex problems and in processing (receiving, storing, retrieving, transmitting) information

-Herbert Simon 

As a reaction to the idealistic Homo Economicus we get Bounded Rationality. Here agents are seen to have limited or costly access to information, cognitive limitations and limited resources or time available to make decisions. Herbert Simon develops this idea into a concept of satisficing, where agents, unable to fully perceive their environment and make perfectly rational predictions about the performance of actions in that environment, attempt to simplify the decisions to understandable “proxies” for the environment, then make a decision from these simplifications. This results in satisfactory as opposed to optimal decision.

Daniel Kahneman’s work explores the implications of bounded rationality, including extensive examples of bias that limit our cognitive abilities to make rational decisions.

Bounded Applicability

Bounded Rationality mediates our decisions, limited by our resources, time and perceptions, to reality. Bounded Applicability mediates our decisions about which TOOLS to use in relation to the environment we find ourselves in. Different tools (and our capabilities with those tools) are more economically viable for solving problems based on the resources, time and perceptions we have available to us.

The Golden Birmingham Screwdriver

I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

-Abraham Kaplan


Failure to recognize the Bounded Applicability of our tools results in less effective utilization of those tools. Teams using the wrong process for the wrong problem may lose confidence in the tool, a tool that is very useful in other domains, but which they will now avoid.

Things to Consider

Just as no one has unbounded access to information, no tool, process, practice or method is universally applicable.

Develop not only the CAPABILITY for teams to sense which domains their work falls in, but also the CAPABILITY to operate in, and an understanding of which practices and guiding principles work in, that domain.

btw… there are of course also 50 ways to leave your lover… I might suggest however that if you make a new plan, Stan you approach it as a guide not a fixed decision.
We can now start thinking about boundaries themselves, gradients and edges… in another post.
Filed Under: complexity, Featured

Cooking Up Super Sunday Chili

February 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

-H.L. Mencken


One of the things that I enjoy about good metaphors, they activate a sense of synchronicity in life. When someone tells you a resonate metaphor, and activates it in your mind, you start hearing variations on that theme, which seem to appear serendipitously. The variations fill out the metaphor and make it personal and local, richer and more meaningful.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation– experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.

-Paul Theroux


So, I smiled today as my mother told me a story about a friend asking for a recipe for chili. I’ve returned home to Drowned Valley Farm to enjoy a day of football with my family and chili is a traditional dish. My mother, quite unprovoked, proclaimed:

“I’ve been trying to resist giving him a recipe for years, I keep telling him, you don’t make chili from a recipe, you just make chili. I think I’ve found a solution though, I’m going to give him 3 recipes and tell him to pick his favorite parts of each, then maybe he’ll begin to learn.”


Cooking Metaphors

Cooking is not about convenience and it’s not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention.

-Thomas Keller 


This reminded me immediately of David Snowden’s Chef and Recipe Book User metaphor. Snowden uses this metaphor to highlight (among other things) the tendency of novice practitioners to lean heavily on prescriptive practice, in an effort to fail-safe attempts to reproduce previous outcomes. Overreliance on predefined process often fails to appropriately balance practices and tools with context.

In the worst case scenarios, instead of taking local context into account, practitioners reengineer the environment itself to resemble environments where they have previously been successful. This reduces variation and limits the resilience of businesses and the ecosystem in general.


Karl Scotland had another amusing tweetable metaphor for this last week:


kjscotland
@alshalloway if you have a sports car and need to go over rugged terrain, you could smooth the terrain, or switch to a 4×4.
2/1/12 1:46 PM
*there is a bit of bounded applicability in here too, but that is another post

Agile practitioners will hear echoes of the “doing Agile vs. being Agile” argument, as well as the more and more prevalent “practices vs. principles” discussions. Lean/Kanban practitioners will be reminded of “hipster kanban” and formulaic implementations focused on the Kanban board. 


Cooking, that gives rise to “home cooked meals,” is something your senses and experiences engage in.  It is not a check list to be completed.

Chili

I suppose now is as good a time as any to fess up to being born in San Antonio, TX.

During the 2 years that my parents lived there, at Lackland AFB, they were inundated with recipes and advice on how to make the appropriate chili.

San Antonio, for those who aren’t in the know, is a bit like the historical capital of chili con carne.



“The chili stand and chili queens are peculiarities, or unique institutions, of the Alamo City. They started away back there when the Spanish army camped on the plaza. They were started to feed the soldiers. Every class of people in every station of life patronized them in the old days. Some were attracted by the novelty of it, some by the cheapness. A big plate of chili and beans, with a tortilla on the side, cost a dime.” 

-San Antonio Commissioner Frank H. Bushick Frontier Times Magazine July 1927


So I was brought up eating and cooking chili. Some of my fondest memories of cooking with my father revolve around learning what was reasonable to try in chili, and what was unlikely to work. As a child the temptation to throw anything and everything in the pot was strong, and that is what Dad was apparently doing. Over time and with lots of questions Dad taught me rules of thumb… what was reasonable. I never saw him use a recipe– not  once.

How to make Chili

The most basic recipes for chili call for meat, onions, tomatoes, and chile peppers. From there anything is possible: sausage, garlic, kidney beans, pulled pork, beef broth, cumin, cloves, oregano, brown sugar, bell peppers, cannellini bean, pinto beans, venison…

The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.

-Julia Child


My personal chili (which has won chili cook offs (double blind even)) has regular appearances from; chocolate, liquid smoke, Boston Baked Beans, fresh chili peppers roasted on an oven till the skins are blackened, hot red curry, and beer.

Then again I like ketchup on green beans… There is no accounting for taste.

This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook–try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!

-Julia Child


So… here are the three recipes my mother gave her friend… and one from Lady Bird Johnson thrown in for good measure. I suggest you scan the recipes. Aim for a chili that is “in between” the ones listed here. See which ingredients you have on hand, resist the urge to take one recipe to the store and full fill a check list. Throw what you have in a pot… taste it often… and enjoy!



I don’t like gourmet cooking or “this” cooking or “that” cooking. I like good cooking. 
-James Beard


Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

-P.J. O’ROURKE





Your idea of that dish has evolved, and if you’re a cook, you can start thinking in different ways about it, maybe even a different way than I think about it.

-Thomas Keller


Lady Bird Johnson’s Chili Recipe


One last piece of advice… when baking… FOLLOW THE RECIPE (even better find a local baker to help you with local recipes that work, then FOLLOW THAT RECIPE, altitude and local cultures (sourdough, for instance) massively impact the success of baked goods).

“The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken. Bon appétit. ”

-Julia Child




Filed Under: complexity, Featured

Graphic Descriptions of Scientific Theory

January 30, 2012 by 1 Comment

Three of my favorite books this year just happen to be comic books… I mean Graphic Novels. Each of these is a lovely way to spend an afternoon pondering…

LOGICCOMIX       Suspended In Language           FEYNMAN

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. 

-Richard Feynman

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. 

-Niel Bohr

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. 

-Bertrand Russell



In case you have any reason to doubt the wisdom of these fine fellows… I leave you with this:

“I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.” 

― Bertrand Russell

Filed Under: Featured

Death Rests Within

January 29, 2012 by 2 Comments

We create monsters and then we can’t control them. -Joel Coen

Remixed Photo Credit: croweb 

 Complexity minded people spend a lot of time talking/thinking about detecting weak signals, but sometimes big scary company killing problems are obvious to some, but unseen by others. The signal isn’t weak, but it isn’t traversing the social network well enough to get addressed.


Individuals in the Kanban community have taken to referring to problems like these as “Intangibles.”

Weak signal problems require attuning our senses to the present to “feel” subtle changes in what is happening. Intangible problems are caused by a disconnect between those who understand that addressing what is most painful today, may leave us exposed to what may be VERY painful in the future.

“Intangible class items may be important and valuable, but there is no tangible cost of delay associated with them in the near future….

-David Anderson Kanban“

Intangibles have a power law curve for future costs 

“Company Killers” as I like to call them are a special subset of Intangibles. They are large, monolithic, complex problems that hang around the company. These problems are elephantine, apparently docile if unprovoked, but prone to rampages once awakened. Company Killers are too frightening to approach and are shunted off never to be spoken of again.

Defusing Company Killers

Remixed Photo Credit: donsolo 



Defusing Company Killers is a two step process.

First, expose the Killers to management by “drawing them a picture”, so the Killers can be seen clearly.

Second, illustrate the amount of WIP vs Slack, so management can understand how their focus on the near term is effecting their risks in the long term.

In this post I would like to explain an exercise I have successfully used in engineering departments for “drawing management a picture”, in order to flush out Company Killers. This exercise has been particularly helpful for me when “launching” Kanban (or other WIP Limiting frameworks) efforts as it illustrates risk, WIP and their relationship.

Exposing the problems visually to management can help them “see” risk and then actively manage the reduction in risk, without invoking the Ostrich Algorithm.

The Exercise

Ingredients


Like any good visualization exercise you are going to need: 

  • Sharpies 
  • 3 Colors of Stickie (Yellow, Pink and Green work well) 
  • A White Board 
  • Team members 
  • Managers 

Step 1. Get It All Out



Setup:
Begin getting the Team Members together. You will need the managers later, but not now. Place one yellow sticky and one blue sticky on the white board to create a legend, label them “Work in Progress” and “Work Someone Expects Me to Do.”

Distribute the yellow and blue stickies to each of the participants.

The instructions for the participants:

“We are going to build a picture so that we can show managers how their expectations are effecting our work.
On the yellow stickies, write any work that you are currently working on, or have started but not finished. On the blue stickies, please write any work that you are aware of and that you believe someone expects you to do. Please spend 5-10 minutes writing down EVERYTHING you can think of for each of these to colors.”

Step 2. See the WIP

Setup:
When the team member are done at the board, draw an X & Y axis, using the full height and width of the white board. Label the X axis “Complexity” and the Y axis “SIZE”. Put a red dot or an X mark in the top right hand corner. Write “Fix a Typo” at the origin of the graph. 

The instructions for the participants:

“We are going to do an Affinity Diagram that clusters relatively similar items together across this space. Please cluster the items by size and complexity. We aren’t looking for an exact location for each sticky, just place each in relative size and complexity to it’s neighbors.  

Down here at the origin of the graph is where you put the simplest task possible, like fixing a typo. Hopefully, none of you have anything that small on your plate. 
Up here in the top right [point to red dot or X] is something as huge and complex as creating a replacement space craft for the decommissioned Space Shuttle.
Please go to the board one at a time and briefly explain each task as you place them on the graph.”

Anonymized Result

In my experience, when giving extreme examples like “fixing a typo” and “replacing the Space Shuttle”, it has not been necessary to explain Simple Complicated and Complex. The extreme examples –something way too small and something far too large –give the team “space”. By making the extremes outside of the team’s normal expectations they are less likely to place their stickies on those ends of the graph. They are more likely to use a wider area between the axis.

Step 3. Find the Killers

Setup:
Place one pink sticky on the white board to finalize the legend, label it “Company Killer”

Distribute pink stickies to each of the participants.

The instructions for the participants:

“We need to find the projects or ideas that are going to kill the company. Spend five minutes thinking of projects or tasks that, if not completed in the next 6-12 months, would kill the company.”

After 5 mins.

“If there are any tasks already on the board that you know of that would kill the company, please write those on a pink sticky, as well. Then put the new stickies on the board relative to the other tasks we’ve identified. If you have a pink sticky for a task already on the board, please remove the old one and replace it with the pink one.”

Anonymized Result

Step 4. Explain Yourself

Step 4.1 Help the Team See

The Churn Zone

The Churn Zone

Nobody likes fixing typos over and over –this is “the churn zone”. Work here is busy work. It’s small, simple work. Large amounts of work items here indicate a high likelihood of multitasking. The team could be fragmenting the work too much if they identify too many items that fit here. Questions to ask: Who is assigning this work? What tasks are highly repetitive? Can we automate any of them?

The Strange Nature of Company Killers

The Kill Zone


The tasks in the “Kill Zone” area –large, complex Company Killers, have an odd nature. Team members can identify them, but the risk is that they APPEAR well understood and encapsulated. One of the ways that Company Killers hide is in Cognitive Ease. They are large and unfragmented and everyone agrees on them even if they ignore them. The problem is, that when they are actually examined, Company Killers tend to take a “quantum leap” into the Unmodelled area skipping right over Ordered and Complex and hurtling into the chaotic. As the team unpacks the problem, they realize that they don’t really understand it as well as they thought they did.

Company Killers’ Quantum Leap

Company Killers need to be decomposed carefully and early. Identifying test projects, agile “spikes”, and safe-fail experiments are critical to helping the teams and management truly understand the scope of these issues.

Step 4.2 Show Management

It is critical to have all the managers who are responsible for assigning work to the team members come in and examine the visual aid the team has created. Ideally, a team member (or two) can explain the image, how it was made and the implications. Show the balance between The Churn Zone and The Kill Zone. Make sure that managers leave with an understanding of:

  • WIP 
  • Intangible Class Items (and how to manage them) 
  • The relationship between WIP, Slack and Intangibles 

Finally, this is the time to explain to management how a Kanban system can help limit WIP and focus teams on balancing near term and long term efforts.


I’ll need to unpack those ideas in relation to this exercise in another post…


if you made it this far you are a trooper, thanks! Maybe you want to click a +1 or tweet about this post?
Filed Under: complexity, Featured

CALM Alpha BookBan

January 27, 2012 by 4 Comments

this post is a bit less “serious” than the last one… enjoy


If you are like me, juggling half-read books is a big problem. I love reading multiple books at once and making serendipitous connections between them, but when I have specific reading to accomplish, juggling just doesn’t work.

I forget which books I’ve started, I go down rabbit holes of references and wikipedia articles. My curiosity gets the best of me and the next thing I know I’ve blown 8 hours of reading time without finishing the articles or book I set out to consume.

To help me focus on specific reading for upcoming conferences and papers I am working on, I’ve started using BookBans to limit my RIP. As a prime example, while Joseph Pelrine’s “Reading up for CALM-Alpha” list is very welcome, I need some structure in my consumption. February is almost on top of us already.

Time to limit my RIP (Reading In Progress).

I’ve set up a BookBan for the “Reading up for CALM Alpha” list… I thought I’d share.

Introducing… Jabe’s CALM Alpha BookBan 

Personal Kanban is a great way to manage media consumption and it is very simple to use a BookBan.

I even put together a little how-to video:

Play Along at Home

I’ve done most of the work for you here if you’d like to play along. I’ll be glad to share my BookBan as a starting point for yours. The books are all linked and the papers too.

You might want to consider how you read — maybe your columns are different or maybe after you use mine for a little while you’ll realize you like reading in a different way.. and that would be lovely.

Ping me on twitter @cyetain or send me an email (BookBan at calmbetawave dot com) and I’ll be glad to send you a copy of the GoogleDoc based CALM Alpha Bookban. 


Have fun! (and Keep Kanban Weird!)

Filed Under: Featured

Exploring “A work in progress”

January 24, 2012 by 5 Comments

Let’s start by seeing if I can get in trouble…

I’ve spent some time thinking about David Snowden’s “A work in progress” model for the complex domain. It took me awhile to get my head around it… I’m not convinced that I haven’t actually missed some significant bits of it.  In fact when David (and Steve Holt) start talking about a 3D dimension, I am sure I am missing something.

As a visual person after I pondered the graph for a little while I decided to redraw the graph, so that I could see it “my way”, I think I may have gained a couple insights for myself on the way (your milage may vary).

In this post I’ll do my best to explain what I “see”.

Coherence, Convergence and Coalescence

The “WIP” model refines Cynefin’s domain of complexity by adding 3 dimensions, 4 “danger areas” which are contrasted against a “valid range”.

David Snowden’s “WIP” Model – Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge

Here is where my confusion started, the post containing the “A work in progress” model (referred to as the “WIP model” in the remainder of this post) defines Coherence and Convergence but skips Coalescence. I vaguely remembered the terms being defined before and sure enough they are, on the previous post. I’ve reposted David’s definitions here, they are critical to understanding the WIP model.

  • Coherence: the degree to which any need or requirement is structured/defined/understood
  • Coalescence: the level of fragmentation of the requirement and connectivity between fragments.
  • Convergence: the degree to which different interest groups agree on the needs and nature of what is needed

The Cynefin Framework’s dissection of the difference between complexity and complicated was rewarding, similarly this model enriches my understanding by illuminating the subtle difference between terms that at first blush seem so close as to be colloquially synonymous.

Until seeing this model, Coherence has been, for me, the main measure of “valid” structure in narrative. Here the model yields it’s first insight for me, “full” coherence by itself is not only not “enough”, it is outside of the “valid range”. We need to have an additional measure of validity on our pursuit of actionable knowledge, Convergence. Convergence by itself, leads to Pattern Entrainment, where we agree on the way to do things without understanding the structure of the problems we are solving. An additional final validity measure is added by coalescence. Here information becomes more interconnected and pieces start to “fit together” defragementing into a whole.

Valid knowledge in this model emerges as teams bring fragmented “pieces” of knowledge, from disprit viewpoints, together and agree on ways of making that knowledge actionable.

As I examined the model, I realized that “to complicated” hinted that the “Ordered” area in this graph contains both Complicated and Simple areas of the Cynefin model. Which makes sense and is probably obvious to Cynefinites but maybe hidden from the uninitiated. The Cynefin model is often broken down into two domains; Ordered (Cynefin; Complicated and Simple (Labeled ORDERED in the top right here)) and Un-Ordered (Cynefin; Complex and Chaotic, (Both labeled in the mid to lower left here)).

Continuing to carefully review the diagram, in my case by recreating it, left me with some questions.

“complexity and its three boundaries (to chaos, to complicated and to disorder)”

I see two clearly defined boundaries… to chaos (lower left, towards LOW Convergence, Coalescence, and Coherence) and to complicated (upper right, moving FROM High Convergence, Coalescence, and Coherence). I’m unsure of where Disorder lies on this diagram?

Jabe’s Inverted WIP Model

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.   

-Albert Einstein

Jabe’s Inverted WIP model

So… here is my attempt to make some sense of David’s WIP model for myself. As Einstein notes above, I ain’t exactly a genius for making it more complex, but I hope to elicit some conversation that will clarify the model further.

The first major difference between David’s WIP Model and mine… I’ve placed Lows (and added ∞) at the extremes of the graph and HIGHs (with a limit of 1 not 0) at the origin. This shifts the perspective of the graph, as constraints on the system increase, a (theoretically) perfectly Coherent, Convergent, Coalesced problem moves towards a singularity. As constraints (as well as knowledge and connections) are removed from the system the possible answer space broadens and expands. This feels more like my experience of problem solving, where Order moves towards a limit but Disorder is nearly infinite. In the past I’ve thought of this movement of information from Chaotic through Complex, toward an Ordered state as a “Cone of Certainty.” The trade off here is that as we move towards Order the decisions we have made constrain our system more and more, forcing us toward potentially suboptimal solutions. Complexity theorist will recognize this as a form of bifurcation, where previous decisions alter the possible solution space.

I’ve added two “danger areas”:

  • CE: Cognitive Ease; Lower Left: As Coalescence, Coherence and Convergence move towards 1, teams risk the chance of believing they understand the problem so completely they don’t need to think about it anymore. This is the realm of oversimplification and myth. Concepts that make their way here can be VERY DIFFICULT to dislodge. With a complete lack of conflict, teams will all agree that they are talking about the same thing, they will claim they all “understand” it and will all agree there is a clear process to solve the problem. Delegation will work well, until the context of the problem changes, leaving teams hurtling towards chaos with little understanding of the “why” of the original solution. This is the domain of “The Bananananananana Principle”. This danger area is in some contention with David’s Pattern Entrainment. I’m somewhat confident that my “danger area” is worth differentiating. 
  • UM: Unmodeled; Upper Right: Moving towards disorder we find ourselves beyond the realm of probability, where teams have no language or models to begin to describe the problems they are attempting to solve. Lacking models to describe the problems, teams maybe either, unable to clearly identify a route towards order OR be completely unaware that parts of their systems are in a state of disorder. This is the domain of being blindsided. This is the domain of Zombie computers, and PEBKAC, where experienced users have difficulty helping inexperienced users, due to a complete lack of a reasonable shared model. 

I’ve labelled the two borders that (I think) are shared by David’s and my inverted model. I’ve indicated with arrows the direction of movement across domains. Again it is important to note that the WIP Model’s ORDERED area contains both of the Complicated and Simple domains of the Cynefin model. In the top right I have added a border “to disorder”, I am pretty unsure… does it belong there? Is the shape correct?

Finally I’ve added a new “valid area”, in yellow just beyond the border of “to chaotic.” This area is valid in a different way than the green area. Probability is valid in this area. We have effective models for describing and examining the performance of a system in this area. Given a large enough amount of input statistical models can be very effective in this area, in order to probe the chaos and “find” interesting patterns. This area is the area of Experimental Mathematics and “The Lean Startup.” Economies change here… many small measurable safe-fail probes become significantly more cost efficient than attempt to bring order to the domain before taking action. Action can be taken quickly with expectation of high rates of failure. Team’s focus on recoverability instead of continuity and stability.

As usual, creating this model and writing this post has given me more clarity around my thoughts… I look forward to hearing yours.

Filed Under: complexity, cynefin, Featured
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