Patterns & pragmatism 1 of 3

Too many moons ago I came up with the Children’s Party Story as a means to understand the core Cynefin domains of Chaos, Complex & Order and it is still the best teaching story I have created. There is a professional video recorded in a studio in Adelaide, in which I was 35kg heavier and it’s in my TEDx talk. One of the best versions is in this extended lecture to the Welsh Government. The story is a picture of irony and satire but it makes the very basic point that we never manage our family and social relationships in the way we manage at work. We become adept at spotting patterns of behaviour which give us weak signals that allow early intervention. We tell stories that mainly share possibilities for failure, but which also create values to guide future action without prescription: what Aristotle termed virtue ethics.

We also tend to attribute what happens to general dispositional aspects of people’s interactions and our expectations change accordingly. How you behave at your Aunt’s 90th birthday is very different from a night out with friends. As humans, we are adept at changing our identity and interaction style to match context. We know that different people have different abilities and experiences and that changes our expectations. We also understand that in different contexts some individuals or groups are better than others. We don’t reduce that into five or eight context-free linear stages that people have to go through. We recognise the diversity that exists within out networks. We know people not just as individuals but we understand that they are different people in different contexts. Fluidity of identity is a key aspect of humans, and one which differentiates us as a species.

We are also pretty good, in a local physical context of detecting bullshit and disembling. When we get into crowds, and especially if there is a social media context, we start to lose that ability. We fit in, we conform, and we go with the flow. We ascribe less responsibility to people in large groups than we do small, we have basic ideas around fairness which, while not universal, have sufficient presence to make a difference. The more familiar we are, the more able we are to see the wood for the trees and vice versa. We can use visual as well as verbal and written responses to influence what happens. The more intimate our knowledge, the more we can take things for granted (in a good way) and the more effective our communication. Keywords and phrases have meaning within tight social groups but make no sense in a wider context. We know the difference between playing games and dealing with serious things. Things that appear to matter deeply can suddenly become irrelevant when the context shifts. We are curious about, and pay attention to anomalies, if our attention is drawn to them. There are social patterns and contexts of trust that go beyond the individuals involved. Art plays a large part in our individual and collective sensemaking, in part because it is not precise, it carries what I call (with a hat tip to Ashby) requisite ambiguity.

So why do we pretend this isn’t the case in organisations? Suppose we want to understand and influence culture. In that case, we will be better occupied reflecting on our natural abilities and native understanding of interactions than another set of categories, primarily defined by platitudes and the wrong type of abstraction. There are too many spider diagrams and lists of generalised qualities which we are told have a causal function in leadership or team interaction. If I see one more questionnaire structured to reveal some quality or qualities that can be invested with magical qualities by the recipient, I will scream. Qualities and behaviours are emergent properties of interactions, including the path dependency of history. If you change the interactions, those qualities, competencies, behaviours or whatever will evolve and can be modified or influenced as patterns emerge. Beliefs. values, sense-making in general is never a static process; it is always being as becoming..

There has to be a better way, and I will come to that in my final post, but there is a little more work to do on the theory side first and that will be the subject of the second post.

The banner picture is cropped from an original by Ivan Bandura and the opening picture is a photo by Maria Budanova again on Unsplash