What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Updates

  • 2024-05-10: Minor edits for consistency, in the summary most especially
  • 2023-11-18: Improvements to the Constraints Club wording; Removed a pre-visualisation step of sorting by difficulty before sorting by energy
  • 2023-11-07: Added the question “Out of what does that emerge?” to the Constraints Club exercise

This is a writeup of What Lies Beneath, a new string of exercises that now forms the final session of the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales, and by extension, the 3-day in-person training Leading in a Transforming Organisation. I tested it in that latter form in Melbourne, Australia last week and will be bringing it back to the UK soon (Manchester, November 14-16).

In right to left style, I will describe it backwards:

  • Premise, goals, next steps
  • Visualisation: Estuarine Framework
  • Inquiry: Constraints Club
  • Establishing context: Assessment

I will summarise the process from start to finish at the end of this post.

Premise, goals, next steps

In a complex adaptive system (CAS), lasting change is achieved in two ways:

  1. By shocking the system into finding a new configuration from which regression is unlikely
  2. By changing the constraints under which the system operates

The first has some obvious drawbacks. How can you be sure how the system will respond? Not to rule out that option entirely but coherently with goals of adaptability (more on that later), we’ll be taking the second route. Broadly, we identify constraints that are open to change and prioritise some of those for further work, doing that in such a way that participants are well motivated to find and then act on potential solutions. That “moving into action” aspect – ideation, hypotheses, experiments, and feedback – is a mature part of Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes, and it won’t be developed further here.

Visualisation: Estuarine Framework

Feeding that “moving into action” aspect is this visual organisation of constraints – constraints having been identified in a generative process to be described shortly:

This is Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework, which comprises an Energy/Time “affordance grid” overlaid with boundaries between four groups of constraints:

  1. Those we accept as given
  2. Those we can’t manage on our own but might engage on with others
  3. Those we can manage
  4. Those volatile or flimsy enough that we need do little more than monitor them

The significance of the colours will be explained later, in the Inquiry section.

The Estuarine Framework is the visualisation part of Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Mapping [1]. I have been guilty of confusing the two names, but to disambiguate them: Mapping here is the overall process, and Dave uses Framework consistently with something familiar to most readers of this blog, his Cynefin Framework.

Energy here refers to the amount of energy (or quantities convertible to energy) required to make a constraint no longer applicable; Time similarly. Our inquiry process (which differs from Dave’s) captures them in the form of “true and fair statements”; here we are organising them according to the energy and time required to make those statements no longer true.

Consistent with other mapping techniques in the Agendashift / Leading with Outcome repertoire we build the visualisation in stages. This is not necessarily how Dave does it, but it will feel familiar to many:

  1. Beginning with extreme examples – most and least energy requirement – arrange vertically by energy requirement, using all the available space
  2. Decide where the 0 of the energy axis sits (some constraints may have enough pent-up energy that their net energy requirement is negative)
  3. Keeping vertical positions fixed, organise horizontally by time requirement, again beginning with extreme examples so as to use all the available space
  4. Make adjustments where an energy/time tradeoff may exist
  5. Regarding constraints as affordances (ie things we can interact with in order to effect change), prioritise some for action, marking them visually in some way

In Melbourne, we built our visualisation horizontally on a tabletop, convenient in some ways but not at all conducive to photography. A photo of our work in Melbourne is available on request but it is so awful I do not include it here! That niggle aside, the feedback (linkedin.com) was enthusiastic, most notably:

“Energised by the E/T mapping exercise”

Inquiry: Constraints Club

The first rule of Constraints Club is not to mention constraints

Constraint can be a difficult word, often interpreted as something negative. But without the tendency of constraints to contain or connect, complex systems would not cohere. Although the preceding training / workshop material does deal explicitly with constraints, with that difficulty in mind we are experimenting here with identifying constraints without mentioning the term – a successful experiment, as it turns out.

In place of Estuarine Mapping’s constraint typology, a generative process:

  1. Why is that important? – of a prompt, story, obstacle or outcome we have prioritised or captured
  2. How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?
    • Short sentences, true and fair observations
    • No blaming, theorising, or selling (solutions or theories)
    • If you struggle to write something that most people would easily agree with, scope it down – independent sentences, as few as needed
  3. What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?
    • More true and fair observations, kept separately (or different colour)
  4. Drilling down or expanding, rinse & repeat from 3, 2, or 1

For two aspects of that process, I’m grateful to Mushon Zer-Aviv, who is also doing some Estuarine-adjacent experimentation. The first is the idea of answering with short sentences that are (in my words) “true and fair observations”. The second is the drilling down aspect, which Mushon does with multiple mapping exercises. “No blaming, theorising, or selling a solution” references the Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle [2] that participants will by this time be familiar with; Mushon deals with those issues in his own way.

The idea (if not the wording) behind “scope it down” in cases of disagreement is Dave’s.

Mainly with visualisation in mind, answers to questions 2 and 3 are kept separate – in separate lists on paper or by using differently coloured stickies. This explains the two-tone colouring in the visualisation slide in the preceding section.

Establishing context: Assessment

The string of exercises we call What Lies Beneath begins with a twist or two on the long-established Agendashift Assessment Debrief. The first twist is that we’re debriefing the assessment as a whole not at the beginning of the event, but towards its end. We have however been interacting with it section by section for some time, developing all the while a model of organisation that is both relational and constraint-based, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [3]. This is an innovative “re-presentation” of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), making it more accessible and (in the modern sense) complexity-friendly.

In contrast with typical systems practice, at no point do we seek to establish system boundaries. Instead, we take a “start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach, and this is reflected in the invitation to the assessment [4]. Participants each bring their perspectives on all the organisational scopes with which they individually identify, likely at multiple scales of organisation, ranging from sub-team to whole organisation and sometimes (as was the case last week) beyond.

The full Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment template has 35 prompts in the following 5 sections:

  1. Delivery, Discovery, Renewal
  2. Adaptive Strategising
  3. Mutual Trust Building
  4. Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales
  5. Organising at Human Scale

A free, 12-prompt mini template is available at [5].

Each participant scores each prompt on a four-point scale, then “stars” (ie multi-votes) prompts they would prioritise for further development. Participants may also compose their own prompts, for which purpose a style guide is provided.

The typical survey debrief proceeds as follows:

  1. Score distributions overall
  2. Areas of closest agreement
  3. Strongest
  4. Weakest
  5. Most starred (ie most votes)

The second twist is to return at the end of the debrief to step 2, Areas of closest agreement, reviewing prompts that have the strongest consensus on scores. In the first pass, we have used this page of the debrief report to build confidence in the results, spending little time on what seems uncontroversial. Second time through though, we are wondering whether something interesting might be going on. Given the range of scopes and scales considered, might this level of consensus be seen as remarkable? What might explain that? The Constraints Club exercise isn’t limited to areas of high consensus on scores (rather on the strength of desire for change), but the thought certainly carries across.

Summary: What Lies Beneath

To finish, a summary of the process, this time forwards:

  1. Assessment Debrief
    • Unconventionally, this finishes with revisiting areas of closest agreement, ie strongest consensus on scores
    • After the debrief, prioritise prompts that identify areas in which there is the strongest desire for change
  2. Constraints Club
    • Initially to those prioritised prompts, in answer to the questions “How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?“ and “What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?“, generate constraints in two lists (or colours)
    • Drill down and/or expand until a suitable number have been generated
  3. Estuarine Framework
    • Arrange by energy and time
    • Draw boundaries
  4. Moving Into Action
    • Prioritise constraints
    • Ideation, experimentation, feedback, etc

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my thanks to the following:

  • Dave Snowden, for the Estuarine Framework
  • Mushon Zer-Aviv, as mentioned in the Constraints Club section
  • Participants at the Melbourne Leading in a Transforming Organisation, October 2023, where the What Lies Beneath string was first tested

References

[1] Dave Snowden, Estuarine Framework (cynefin.io)
[2] Mike Burrows Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (agendashift.com)
[3] Mike Burrows, Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (docs.gogle.com)
[4] Mike Burrows, An invitation to a more thoughtful assessment, September 2023, (blog.agendashift.com)
[5] Global survey: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, mini edition (agendashift.com)

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