Trond Hjorteland - Seeing the world through a different lens

[00:00:04] Okay, everybody. I think I'm just gonna get going so I don't keep you from lunch, that would be risky. I don't want you hungry afterwards. Uh, I don't know how many went to the previous talk by Andrew, but I'm sort of gonna continue the same sort of space really. He went philosophical and I'm gonna kinda do that too, but not only philosophical, but also meta-philosophical. Because we are gonna look at how we perceive the world and what's an internals, uh, patterns we use when we, uh, look at the world and how we perceive things, because that's gonna affect how we collaborate. Uh, when I saw the keynote and also Andrew's talk, I considered, in a brief moment, I should switch the talk to another one because I have used to talk about social technical system design. Which is how you organize teams, or groups, an organization, not just at the code level or the coding level, but at the whole organization. How you do that, because we're working in a social technical environment, a system that is social technical. And Andrew got a lot into that with the power structures. But I think, nevertheless, I think it's, it's useful for us to understand why a social technical approach, seeing that whole, that system approach, is different from how we normally do it. So this is the thing we're gonna get into. What is, what is sort of, uh, kind of stopping us from going there when we, when two will probably know what's correct, but we still end up going back to the old model that probably doesn't fit anymore. So we'll go through that, this talk. Because I think, uh, the lenses we use, uh, that's why I call, had the title of the talk, is that that affects us in a bigger way than we normally maybe even think. We have different backgrounds, of course, we realize that, right? We have different histories, different experiences, we have been to different companies, uh, I mean, you have worked in different code bases and it could be whatever. But there's more than that, it's where, it's actually more cultural also, than that, and philosophical, which, which line of philosophy are we actually following subconsciously or not? So that's the thing we're gonna look into.
[00:02:09] Say for example, if you want to install, I used the install symbols there. Say you want to implement a new way of doing work, you want to organize your company differently. And you heard about this Spotify thing. That sounds like a cool idea, right? It works perfectly for them, it sounds logical, it makes sense. And everybody can envision where they're gonna be in that new model, like it seems so simple. So we try to implement things, right? Organizations do that all the time. So why do we think we can implement such things?
[00:02:43] I suspect it's because we have a very mechanistic view of the world. We think things are predictable, it's foreseeable, if you just have enough information we can implement it. If, if something fails, it's just we missed some information, we, there was something that we didn't see. If we just had all information, we'd be perfectly predictable. So why do we carry around that, that way of thinking is something I've been really curious about a long time. And also what was brought me into the social technical bit, because that's social sciences. I come from a natural sciences background myself, I assume most of you also have engineering or natural sciences background. Who hasn't? Three. In the audience, or four. Okay. You, you're probably better primed than I was before I discovered this thing. But social science for me was a complete blank, I have no idea what it was. I was so steeped in the mechanical thinking, so much so that you think that the universe is a clock. My, my master thesis was on astrophysics, cosmology specifically. And the whole goal of natural sciences is to get rid of the human, right? If we just had a perfect observation done by a machine, it could be trusted. As long as there's a human interpretation in it, we are less off. So you want to reduce it to the minute part. And that, and that, and that goes back a fair bit. I mean, this is, this is something that Newton believed in strongly. Like super determinism is probably something that you may have heard of. Where somebody believe if you just have enough information of all the things in your environment, you can predict the future. So there's essentially no free will anymore, that's the, that's sort of the philosophical discussion that comes out of that. So that's why I think it would be useful for us to actually go into philosophy a little bit. So what I'm gonna do today specifically is to go into something that's called world hypotheses. It was defined in the 40s by a guy called Stephen Pepper.
[00:04:49] So he was a philosopher, as you might wouldn't be too big of a surprise. But he was an American pragmatist and what he was looking into was, uh, he was a professor at philosophy in America somewhere. But he sort of looked at the history of philosophy and he identified four specific trends, and we're gonna go through these today. Because they, they affect us more than we like to actually even imagine, and two of them are probably something that we don't think about that much. And we have a lot of potential in them if you, if you do. So, and he, he used the world, the world hypothesis as a way to, to sort of describe these different trends or strands in, in philosophy if you like. And he said that a man endeavoring to understand the world looks about for a clue in his comprehension, right, understanding, uh, epistemology, he pitches upon some area of, of common sense, facts, and tries to understand all the areas in term of this one. The original area becomes a basic analogy or root metaphor as he, he calls it. So you can imagine like when I, when I showed the machine thinking earlier with the cogs, that's the machine way of thinking, right, as I said. So the root metaphor there is the machine. So let's look at the other three, I'm gonna go through all, all of four of course, but let's, let's go on and in, in order.
[00:06:09] So the first one he identified is for, is formism.
[00:06:13] What you look at there is the, the root metaphor is similarity.
[00:06:17] What is similar to another thing?
[00:06:20] I think you do that probably every day when you code, at least when you do data analysis and data modeling. Look, what is the commonality? What's the entity that, that, that similar? Okay, can we, can we join this into one entity, customer entity, product entity, or whatever it is, right? We look for, for, for similarities and we want to create that, you've probably heard of the canonical data model dream, that's very much into formism. We try to find all the similarities and we, and the idea is that you just define enough similarities, then we create, then end up with a God object that everybody can use. So it's the, so the idea is what the form do things take? That's formism. A classic one here is like if you have an orange, what's the characteristic? It's round, it's orange. So then it wouldn't be similar to a basketball? If you only use those characteristics, the roundness and the color, yes, it does. But then certainly somebody comes up with a strange formed ball, and then the model breaks. And then you try to abstract it more and figure out what is the commonality now between these things? So that's what we do when we do entity modeling or data modeling or whatever. And we end up in kind of weird objects in the end. You've probably seen this, actually I've seen it multiple times with different customers, this big master customer object that everybody is dependent on, and it got that's everything that I ever need for a customer. Be it a custom, be it a person or an, or an organization or whatever it is, so you end up that some people are, in some models, they call it party instead. Because they understand that, you know, customer is not valid anymore, it's more than customer, it's employees and the other. So it becomes a party object, see, the abstraction goes all the way.
[00:08:04] So that's formism. And that is probably the oldest trend in, or the oldest strand, sorry, in, in philosophy, goes back to Aristotle and Plato and all those ancient Greeks. But we still use it, it's not gone, it's not ancient in, in that sense.
[00:08:20] Another example is, which I love, this one, I've taken that for from a colleague. So, you know, if you have a tiger. What's similar to a tiger? Oh, the tiger's a cat. You don't want to confuse those two, I think, right? That would be a bad, bad move. Or another one is what's the horseness of a thing? There was another great talk by Anna Hest, which I can recommend for you if you want to look into modeling ideas and domain modeling. Yeah, so what's the essence, what's the essence of a horse? And of course, the zebra pops up, right?
[00:08:54] They're not the same. You can't even ride a zebra, there's a reason why we don't use those as horses. Right.
[00:09:00] Or to go a little bit more into social sciences, let's look to people.
[00:09:06] We also tend to say, at least project managers, which work in projects, you're not a person anymore, you're not, you rarely have a name, you're a resource, a FTE, full-time equivalent, right? So you are reduced to a part, an entity, and, an, an essence of thing, you're, you're a, you're a resource basically, that's what we end up being. So you lose the identifications, really, identity of every person.
[00:09:32] So, that's formism, that's one of four. I'm gonna go through them one by one as I said, and we're gonna come back to the commonalities and the difference, the differences of the while. So the next one, which is, which you probably have already alluded to earlier, is the mechanism thing. And here, of course, the root metaphor is the machine. That is a a lot newer way of thinking that comes, comes in about the industrial revolution. A lot of philosophers went into this space and natural sciences of course. And natural sciences are still in the machine model of the plan. So here is the what do things cause other things? It's the cause effect thinking. So that's the model I have here. Similarity is not so much important anymore, it's the causes that they cause, it's the changes that happens.
[00:10:17] So here we have for example, the the classical, uh, billiard, uh, example. There's the machine, as we discussed earlier.
[00:10:26] Uh, but it's also the whole space of natural sciences, um, I actually love something that Russell Ackoff, a system thinker, said. He said that science has, has, has cheated us or fooled us. Because they reduce everything to cause and effect, if you can't explain anything, then it, it isn't, there isn't anything that isn't, that hasn't been caused by something, that's the idea there.
[00:10:52] And also, we use it. Waterfull thinking, projects, predictability, plans. The illusion of control, as somebody would call it, right? We think we can deliver this massive project at the end of the year. Sure.
[00:11:08] Oh, you're given a date, I'm sure we're going to deliver all the, all the requirements, nothing is going to be left out. And we're going to do, and, luckily, we, we sort of learned that, you know, the waterfall is not the best way, so we try to either adjust it, but we still do many waterfalls, and we still have, have the date, we still have the time to deliver it.
[00:11:26] Most have that, even if they do scrum, right? Because it's just a set of many, many waterfalls, what you end up with. So again, I think we use, we use sort of the mechanism thinking still, very much so, in every company I've been. So, these two are probably familiar. Let's now move into a couple of ones which are maybe less, you've probably heard of the first one. And this is what they call organism. Tricky word. But then the, the root metaphor is, is an organism, it's something that holds integrated, how it hangs together. It's a bit more vague, the other metaphors were quite distinct, right, similarity and a, and a machine is easy to understand. This one is a bit more vague, when you move to the right-hand side of the quadrant, it's a bit more vague. But the idea is that, but we use it in wording, like in a company. You got a head and you got a body. There is somebody that, that calls the shots. I don't know if you have encountered this, but I've seen it in a lot of teams where they say, we need to bring in the grown-ups if there's some, some decision to be made.
[00:12:35] And the grown-ups actually call the other people in the organization, like kids, they behave like kids. So there is this authority thing going on. So, so we use the metaphor still. And we, for the wrong reasons, obviously, in this case, but still. So the idea there is that how do things fit into a totality? And the reason why I'm saying you've probably heard of it is that some of you probably have looked into system thinking, and generally most of system thinking is in this space.
[00:13:04] It's about parts and wholes, seeing the whole to understand the parts, the, the part in a whole, it's the essential idea, and how the parts affect each other and how they affect the whole. And the other way around, how the whole affects the parts.
[00:13:19] So this is, this is system thinking. So, uh, the guy I mentioned earlier, Russell Ackoff, was very much into this space. The whole idea that started with cybernetics and system dynamics and all that, Donella Meadows, you've probably heard these names. That's all in this space mostly, organism. Some are in, in, in mechanism too, but usually just as, as examples. Russell Ackoff used the car as an example a lot. So the car has bits that doesn't know define a car until it gets a whole, but a car doesn't exist just by the parts, sort of the way it on there.
[00:13:56] But it's usually, usually an, as an example often.
[00:14:01] So yes, the body has different parts, there's a whole. Ehm, the parts doesn't really have any purpose without being, without being part of a whole in this sense. The heart has a function, but it hasn't had a purpose. The purpose comes by, by being part of a body, so that becomes the whole. That's the system thinking. And also the evolution of things, the thinking things evolve.
[00:14:27] They self-replicate in an organism.
[00:14:31] Right.
[00:14:34] And also you have this classical, that, that's, this is an example of a system dynamics. way of thinking, you have something that comes in, there is, there is changes, there is feedback loops and, you know, there's levers that you can tune and all that. But system dynamics, which is a quite famous strand of system thinking, which Donella Meadows was a big part of, the idea is that you can model it, you can, you can create computer models to predict things.
[00:14:57] So that's where organism has, for me at least, some limitations that, at least this type of thinking, is that there is, there is a, it's an isolated system, it doesn't have an environment.
[00:15:11] Because you can control all the parameters, then you close the system, right?
[00:15:16] You have, you have pretty, so here you actually wish you have some predictability. And system dynamics was all about that, to figure out how can we predict the future.
[00:15:27] So that's organism.
[00:15:30] How things fit together. And then the really weird one, which was a huge aha moment for me, and I came to this, as I said, via social sciences, when I started reading up on that, that is something they call contextualism.
[00:15:46] Um, yeah. I can go back to where these come from. This is a fairly new thing, um, goes back to the '60s. But I can go back to that later, just to explain it first. So, root metaphor here is a historical event.
[00:16:01] So is that you are defined by what, what you have been through. That's the motive there. All that define you is your experiences. Then you're, you're not an organism anymore, because you're not, you don't care that much about how things integrate, but you integrate what, what sort of, what have you been through, is the thing we're looking at there.
[00:16:20] So what is this event and in what context is it?
[00:16:24] So suddenly, as you, as you probably, as I alluded to earlier, all the other ones are kind of closed. You don't need an environment there to explain anything. Here you have to have an environment, the environment is an, included part because the context is so important. So when I mentioned Spotify, there's a reason I mentioned that.
[00:16:43] It worked at Spotify because it was at Spotify. Yes, you can learn from it, you can, you can probably use the general idea to build it, but you never recreate what happened at Spotify because that was contextual, it was based on their history, you can't recreate that unless you're Spotify. Right. So, contextualism brings a whole new way of looking at things, I think, that's my experience at least. So history is really important here. A diary, what have you been through? What's the experience, what's your thought has been since you, since you were born? So it's extremely complex.
[00:17:18] Uh, you probably, you've all heard of Dave Snowden and his Cynefin model. He used the distinction between complicated and complex. All three, before this one, is complicated. You can argue that organism moves a little bit into complexity, but not really, because you, you actually, ideally, you can model that. Complexity, contextualism, no way.
[00:17:41] You will never ever manage to even in a data model, recreate all your history, for example, right? Never.
[00:17:48] So you, there's no, you don't even try to do it in this, in this way of looking at the world.
[00:17:54] So, for those of you who have been into domain-driven design, you know there's the idea of different models. So in a sense, domain-driven design takes this into account. He says, no, you can't create a canonical data model, it's
[00:18:06] it's an, it's an admirable attempt, but it's impossible. Because you don't, you can't have the same context everywhere, it's contextualized. So the model is contextualized, hence bounded context in domain-driven design. So domain-driven design actually takes this into account, the contextualism. I don't think they're aware of that, let's be honest. But they are, which is what's a huge aha moment for me at least then. So, we have these four metaphors.
[00:18:35] And you can, there is a reason why I put them in this four by four matrix because there is a certain characteristics that, that two of them, contrary to the others, one have and do not have.
[00:18:46] Um, okay, I had this one as well. Yeah, I hope I skipped that one. But because as I said, there is a philosophy strand here, so the formism is played by an Aristotle and Plato primarily, mechanism is Descartes, right, science this bit, Locke, Hume, organism is Schelling and Hegel, while contextualism, and probably why Stephen Pepper wrote about this, he was a pragmatist.
[00:19:09] So his idea was definitely contextualism. So you should give that a little bit of lineage there, that he came from that space, so he's probably had, you know, lifted that a little bit extra.
[00:19:17] Where it's Pierce, James and Dewey, and of course then Pepper, so it's fairly new, 60s, 70s that came about that. But yeah, so the, the way they're grouped. So the ones on the left are very analytical, that means that if you understand the parts, you understand the whole.
[00:19:35] So when you have a new product, then you split it up and you send teams away to, to sort of analyze their little part, you're doing analysis. I mean, that's the thing I've been doing all my life, and it's analysis. I have a problem, I break it down to the parts and I study the parts in isolation. And I don't care about the interaction between parts, no, no, if I understand the part, then I move to the next part and the next part, and then I understand the whole, I think. contextualism. So you should give that a little bit English there that he comes from that space so he's probably have lifted that a little bit extra. Where is Pierce, James and Dewey? And of course, Pepper. So it's fairly in the 60s, 70s, that came about that. But yeah, so the way they're grouped. So the ones on the left are very analytical. That means that you if if you understand the parts, you understand the whole. So when you have a new product, then you split it up and you send teams away to to sort of analyze their little part, you're doing analysis. I mean, that's the thing I've been doing all my life, and it's analysis. I have a problem, I break it down to the parts and I study the parts in isolation. And I don't care about the interaction between the parts. No, no. If I understand the part, then I move to the next part, the next part and then I understand the whole. I think. So that's analytical. You you you start with the whole and you break it down. Well, this one is synthetical. Sorry. That's synthetic. This is also something that Russell Aker talks about a lot, is that because there you move from... You start with the whole and you understand what the whole is, and then you by understanding the whole, you can also understand the reason why the parts are there. So you you start up and then move down. So you don't remove an analysis, but you start with synthetic to go up and understand the whole, the context.
[00:20:31] So I had he used an example of a car. You can understand the parts of the car and the whole, but you won't understand what the car is for unless you understand the context it's great for. Is it for off-road driving or is it for racing driving? Is it for is it sport or is it like commute? So you have to understand all these things to understand the sort of the needs of this thing then. But you also have the another dimension. Oh yeah, yeah, I included that. So the parts are basic in this, the other one the whole is basic, but the parts are derived from the synthetic. And the other dimension that this is something that Pepper brought in. I don't I haven't seen that anywhere else. You said the two upper ones, the formal and contextual are dispersive. They go out. There are there is no end to they can they can evolve. So formalism was close and was kind of lying, but because there is no end to it. There's no you can you can extend that in eternity. Right? It goes out. While this one is the bottom one is integrative. You looked at the integration of things.
[00:21:33] So that's why I think mechanism and organism are something that you find is quite familiar, or also quite similar. So the system think is also when I use when I create simple examples, they do use mechanism because it's easier for us to understand. So that's why the curve uses the car all the time.
[00:21:51] But he is really an organism thinker.
[00:21:55] next
[00:21:58] Yes, so and there is there are of course limitations here, because that's something that Pepper's really clear about. Every of these four are complete. You can use them for everything. If you are formalist, you can you can explain everything in the world using formalism, formalism. So they're not they're different strength to them. So in certain contexts, formalism makes sense. If you if you're going to create a model, that makes sense. Yeah, well, of course you would use formalism. That would make it simpler, right? But in other cases, you would use something else. But they are complete, but they have limitations. So the top ones, they have in in in precision, while the other ones are in scope, because they are closed. They they are closed in their thing. They are ignoring the environment. Well, for example, context will have environment built in and there is no there's no limit to it. Be anything.
[00:22:54] Did I have next?
[00:22:57] So let's I want to focus a little bit on these two, because they are sort of probably new to you. The the right one is sounds familiar, I assume. And the thing is that people often mix these two up. I have done, and I think a lot of people do. Even so much so that there is a Michael Jackson, not the singer, but the philosopher, he's a what you call he's an he's an English guy who has oh my god, he has a title. Well, he's a he's a well-known, well-known philosopher, anyway. But and so he knows these things really well, and he claims that social for example, social technical system is an organistic way of thinking. It's kind of right. Because when you look at a system like a social system and and and you look at the technical bit and the social bit, you are you're looking at the how things are integrated. So he's right about that. But there are strands of social technical system design which looks at the environment, that takes that into account, and then you're into contextualism. So open system theory, which I'm going to explain a little bit later, is straight into contextualism, while organism is not.
[00:24:17] Um, yeah. And he also mentioned about about complexity. I already mentioned that, so it's probably obvious now. But so the bottom one organism is a complicated model, while the top one is a complex model. in Dason's terms.
[00:24:37] Yeah, there's exactly, there's a there's a term, I don't know if you heard about it. But you know emergence? There's some talk of emergence from certain people, yeah? Have you heard the distinction between weak and strong emergence? That's where they try to distinguish between these two. Because scientists can agree on weak emergence. Yes, there are things that can pop up that we didn't see based on the parts alone. But if if if you could model it, you would see it. If you knew enough, you can actually predict what the whole is. You can you can actually so it doesn't just appear like out of magic. science doesn't like magic, right? While in in contextualism, yes, sure. There's no problem with that.
[00:25:21] So the strong emergence is like for some consciousness, something that most people believe in, scientists can agree on is we don't know what that is yet, so maybe that's a strong emergent that we are conscious of something that we can't explain. or why why that comes about. But that is also that already built into contextualism when you look at the at the world that way. And open and closed, I mentioned that. The bottom one is a closed model, while the top one is the open model. So just to explain open, because I want to move in, I want to actually move into a little bit of open system theory, which is what I've spent most of my time in. I said social technical system design, but I also say open in front of it. Really, I'm working in open system theory. But that sounds so academic, and it kind of is, but it's social science academic, so it's not that bad. So it's it's understandable. And I'm just going to show you quickly, say we have a social system. Or a social technical system, say your teams. Often we draw circles or we draw boundaries around them. There's something that they work with and that's their responsibility, and we want to have them work with other people as little as possible. Fast flow, for example, from from team topologies, is a good example of that. So we try to isolate them. And that's an organistic way of thinking. We believe we can do that. But if if you use contextualism, that's impossible. Because the boundary is open, it's permeable. You will always have relationships with somebody outside that team. Just going home to the family will affect this thing. If you have a bad day at at home, come come to work, you you behave very differently from when you have a good morning, stand it up on the right leg. So you can't isolate people from the environment, is the idea in opposition theory. So in an open system, the environment is inherently there. You can't take it away. So you're really into contextualism, right? Because you know, it's dead on. And these two integrate. So they they interact, they are mutually determinant. So the system is defined by the environment it's in the environment it has, and also the environment is defined by the system it's an environment for. Actually, some I think there are some of these open system theory thinkers who say that the environment wouldn't be there if there wasn't for the system and vice versa. So the environment changes the system and the system changes the environment. Here.
[00:27:50] But also some of them also goes further say there is there is different types of environment. And this is where probably they call the first set of environment, you can vision this as what they call the task environment, where you can imagine this to be the industry that you work in. Say if you're in a company and the industry, the the competition could be there. And most like companies that look at that actually treat the competition, look at this part of environment, but ignores the global one very often. So what sort of trends are happening in the world in general? What can affect us that that we couldn't foresee? So that's when you when you go full full on the environment.
[00:28:32] So in order to survive in in this kind of context, because then you're contextualist. How can you I mean, when if you if you like the illusion of control, for example, if you're a mechanistic thinker, sure you can believe that and hope for that and maybe some once in a while it actually works, but most we know most projects doesn't go that well. Because the world isn't as predictable as they assume it to be. So we need to be adaptively planning, is the term that they use in open system theory. Which means that you as long as you affect the environment, you are actually also in control of what's going to happen in the environment. So you can in a in a way actually have some prediction of what the environment is going to be, or at least you can affect it. To the better. So you can affect it in a way that either it's better for the world in general or better for you as a company. But also when when you when you learn from the environment, you can't just assume have forecasts or predictions long way in the future. You need to be able to puzzle, they call it puzzle learning. That means that you have to you can understand the first puzzle piece you put together, but you wouldn't understand the next. So you have to do one thing first and then learn. That's what we are good at at agile, at least we try to be good at at agile. So this is what they often refer to as Emery's open system theory. And this is where Mike Mike Jackson, Michael Jackson, I always call him Mike, he's he sort of confused the thing a little bit, I think. Because in a in a social social technical system, which is the teams, they can be isolated. But in open system theory, you would include the environment, which means that you would be contextualist. So you move from being an organism to to to open system theory. This is a little bit tricky, but it's just to illustrate that some people are actually working in the context contextualist space. It's not like something that we can't deal with. There's a lot of people saying that the complexity, well, I'm just going to give up then. If everything is so unpredictable, no. There are techniques we can use for this.
[00:30:30] Yeah, and I just want to follow up a little bit because social technical again, the teams. Because this whole thing is layered. When you're working in a team, you also need to relate with the people that you're working with. Right? So you need to relate with those and you need to relate with the environment and everything hangs together. Which means that when you put a team together, and that's the that's sort of the biggest conclusion from open system of open social technical, open social technical system design, is that the team must design themselves.
[00:31:02] They can't be designed by anybody else.
[00:31:05] So the people doing the work need to just design the work they want to do. It's only then that you get the commitment and engagement and control and accountability and all this stuff we need. It's only when people do it themselves. So you can't be put to them over enforced to them, imposed on them. So that's the biggest learning, participative learning. I I don't know if you went to Andrew's talk earlier, but he got a question and I was I wanted to answer that. So how can you deal with this power structures? And when when you so give team space. That's what Agile do often, right? You give them the space and you let them self-organize or be autonomous. But you just move away, the leader just moves away from them and gives them space and hold the space, is often a term used. But how on earth are they going to do know what to do? They haven't been part of that whole process, what's happening, what's been done before. So they need to participatively figure out how to do it themselves. So you so you can't just remove structure and hope that things are going to work out. You need to they must be given the opportunity to create their own structure, participative design.
[00:32:16] And I want to conclude with a couple of things. Because I think these approaches, as I said, they're relevant, they're not like one is better than the other. I still am a big fan of contextualism. Because I think that's solve a bit more of the problems that we have. But there are certain things that so you can use mechanism for a lot of things, you can use organism for a lot of things, I said formalism also. But you shouldn't mix them. That's the danger.
[00:32:41] Say if you have an organization that we're always end up with that, you are something in what they call in open system theory, mixed mode. You say, yes, we have some agile teams and we let them do what they want, but damn well, we're not going to change the other power power structure in the organization. We can have a have a line organization, we can have managers and we can, yeah, we're going to have the whole thing. So you change some bits into organism or maybe even contextualism, but you keep the rest of the organization to be very mechanic, a power structure. And when you do that, you the mixed mode is terrible. Because then there's you have all the power structure that you did before, but you also have the confusion. The teams think they are in control, and they are in control as long as they are allowed to.
[00:33:28] So that's the space that Andrew was talking about. He said, given a space, yes, you're given a space, but they do really know that they're only temporarily given that space. That's why I hate the word empowerment. Empowerment is something that you give away to somebody. It just means you can take it back whenever you want to. So then you have mixed two very different way of looking at the world when you do that. Scary. Should you really should stop doing that. Uh, we have also there, like they said, the entities. How many minutes do I left? Yeah, just a couple of more examples. Say if you do the canonical model, as I mentioned earlier. It's a simple example. You're stuck in formalism. And you believe in that. But then suddenly you decided, okay, this entity that I created, the customer entity, we can use that different places. They can be reused, is there a idea, right? Reuse of code, same model as, same idea. So then you believe you can do mechanism. Because this this bit is just it's just a cog wheel. Why can't they use the same, it's just a library, right? Why can't they just use it? So then you moved from formalism, which you started in, and you're moving into mechanism, and they they do not, they conflict. Is the idea.
[00:34:41] So be careful when you mix them. Another example. Say if you want to, if you have a team, and you see that the team is lacking some expertise. What do you want to do? Any suggestions how you would do that? Just to bring it in a little. Yes. Train them, yes. Other examples.
[00:35:06] Hire someone. That's another one. I expected these two to come up. Thank you. What do you think hiring someone? What sort of mental model do you probably have then?
[00:35:19] Yes.
[00:35:21] Or even mechanism even. Because you think that the expert knows everything and they could just fit in. But yes, it's in the bottom. While training. What's that?
[00:35:34] Sorry? Organism? No. Sorry? Contextualism? Yes. It's definitely on the right hand side. Because you you increase the capacity and knowledge of the team. So they grow. Right? So you're into organism. Now what about let them fail? Interesting question. Let them fail. Uh, I would claim that then you're into contextualism. Because in organism, you you expect things to hang together, there's a causality and there's there's a relation between things. If you expect them to fail, if you give them the opportunity to fail, you are actually acknowledging the contextualism, I think.
[00:36:22] So if you have leaders that are stuck in the left hand side, good luck getting the rest of the organization to move into the right hand side. Because they have very different views of of the world.
[00:36:35] Another one.
[00:36:38] Oh yeah, since I mentioned team topologies. This is not a rant in any, but I have some issues with team topologies, I always have issues with something.
[00:36:48] But what do you think is an issue with fast flow?
[00:36:53] They have modified it a little bit. First I thought it was like just get stuff out the door. Thank God, that was not the intention. They want stuff fast into the hands of the customer. But what do you what do you assume that you can do that fast?
[00:37:08] And you also heard use of lean in Agile a lot.
[00:37:14] Yes. It's predictable. It's mechanistic thinking. Yes.
[00:37:21] So just to give team to play a credit, they they are thinking team first, which saves the day for them.
[00:37:28] But don't forget the team to pull the Christ team first. If you ignore that, you're stuck, as you said, in what you think is predictability, organicism. So give the teams full authority to do whatever you like and control their own work, design their own work. Then you're into contextualism. Then you allow them to fail.
[00:37:51] Yeah, what? I have another example. minutes now, well maybe should I had noted some more examples here.
[00:38:06] Yeah, I had the predictability versus adaptability, but I guess that's kind of obvious now. At the bottom one. You assume that things are predictable.
[00:38:16] Well, in the top ones, especially the top right one, it's highly unpredictable. It's really complex. There is no you can't predict any events. And you can't record every event that happened, there's no way. So you you you can just give up at the attempts to think there is predictability. So you need to be active, adaptive. Actually, there was a funny thing I heard the other day is that you know, Agile was coined in 2001 when they did the manifesto. And there was actually a a a voting process, which name they should should use. Do you know which word that came in second? Adaptability. But it was not chosen because somebody had a company of that the middle-aged red guys that defined it. One of them had a company called adaptability, so they didn't they couldn't use it. So they went for Agile, yeah. I mean, think of what would Agile have been if it was called adaptability? attempts to think there is predictability. So you needed to be adaptive, adaptive. Actually there was a funny thing I heard the other day is that you know Agile, it was coined in 2001 when they did the manifesto. And there was actually a boarding process for which name they should use. Do you know which word that came in second? Adaptability. But it was not chosen because somebody had a company of the middle-aged white guys that defined it. One of them had a company called adaptability, so they didn't they couldn't use it. So they went for Agile, yeah. I mean, think of what would Agile have been if it was called adaptability.
[00:39:18] I think it would have fit way better into contextualism, because then it inherently would mean that they have to be adaptable to changes. And no organism, you're not, you have to be that.
[00:39:30] So just to finish up. I think by understanding these perspectives, not only is it insightful, like philosophy normally is, but it also can help us to understand why other people believe something so strongly different than us. Right. So you don't then get into this horrible argument where nobody is going to win because everybody's right in their own sense. Of course they look at the world very differently. So you can argue to the end of the world, they would never see it if they are stuck in another way of looking at the world. If they believe in mechanism and I say but everything is unpredictable. They're just going to laugh at you and, you know, tell you to go away. Like Newton probably did if somebody said something else. Because they when you strongly believe in that everything is predictable, everything else is just, you know, even hearsay or heretic. Right. So I think we can avoid a lot of this and just keep keep in mind and trying to understand what the other person was sort of where they come from and what sort of what sort of mental model they may have, can actually help you not only understand them, but actually get into a commonality. So I I use that a lot now. I try to figure out where people come from. So if we disagree if the disagreement is dysfunctional at least. All right. That was it. Thank you. Uh, you uh, we're gonna have time for some questions now, right? Okay, if there is any. But if not, you can contact me on social media. I'm fairly active on these and usually as Thor Nort at different platforms. And also if you if you found just a brief little intro to open system theory here, there's a lot of practices that comes with that. Because as Kant said, theory without practice is intellectual play, but practice without theory is blind, so I try to combine them. I don't know if if he actually said that, you don't know any quotes anymore, but. But the so opensystemtheory.org is a community's website where we go in terms of some of this this social sciences that have been going on for decades, so just a modern version of it. Yes.
[00:41:33] So thank you very much.
[00:41:39] Who has a question? I know that people.
[00:41:42] What or ideas? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a space I still I'm still exploring.
[00:41:51] Thank you very much. Um, um, my question is
[00:41:56] No, uh, organizations direct direct, uh, the way teams are organized and things like that. And this is very enlightening, but the question is how do you implement that when you're in a kind of, um, strong, you know, old school organization, top-down organization? Yeah.
[00:42:27] Uh, it's such a good question and so hard to answer. Uh, I have to go into the open social techno system space now because this is this is goes beyond the world models, but. Uh, in in in that social sciences space, uh, somebody said that they quoted Max Max Planck saying that science is moving ahead, one funeral at a time. There's something to that. Uh, it's very hard to change an set organization. Uh, and experiences that the the scientists had and also the consultants has done this in the 70s especially is that the company has to be on the brink of of of of going under before they actually consider something else. When when there's nothing else to try. Like, okay, let's try this team thing. Uh because okay, there are some experience that have been done that look good, let's let's at least try it. So it's really, really hard. But if you the the examples I've seen in sort of modern time is like so go higher or somebody else is that you need some a visionary leader actually in place. Um, they also when they said I haven't went into this today, but there's a two distinct differences between organizational form. There's one called DP1, which is design principle one, it's just a term. And design principle two. Design principle one is the bureaucracy as you describe, the old set organizations. While DP2 is more of a flatter organization, more team-based. Like for some Bures or Spotify tried a little bit, but yeah. Then there was at least they tried to move into that space. So it's a very it's a distinct difference. It's so they call it a genotypical design principle because it's a DNA change.
[00:44:06] Because all the power hierarchy has to go and moved into the groups. So it's such an amazing change that it doesn't happen unless it's anchored way at the top. Sorry to say. So they yes, the the leader has to have a contextual view of the world. I think, unfortunately.
[00:44:26] My take. Hmm, anyone else?
[00:44:29] Yeah.
[00:44:35] So it's it's mostly following the the question. So we are in a typical company, typical Western company. It's not bad, it's not good. And and it is real because one of my colleagues is a fan of open system theory. He keeps talking on me. Oh, it should work. And say, no, maybe it's not.
[00:44:56] My question is, you are you are a manager of a team or maybe a bigger team, and you want to try it. Is it possible, is it fully integrative to to take your word open system theory or could we take some part like Spotify? and try something, give more not oppoement, but more liberty. And still because as as a manager, I'm very fun of everything. I love Fabien and and all this type of company. Still when I see the world I see the world in some context, I feel it like really hard like do whatever you want and let it do, it will work. And I feel it will like some it's a bad word but I will use it some control at some point to navigate to to to lead the system in some way. So I will stop there.
[00:45:52] No, no. But it's it's also a good discussion I've had with many people. It's like Agile has that approach, right? They said you have to be agile to become agile, which makes a lot of sense, right? You have to you have to be there. The process, the way there has to be the same that as the goal is, right? So you try it out a little bit.
[00:46:13] Um, I have some research done in so in social tech space, even in Norway, where I come from. Uh, where they did a lot of companies where they tried this, and they had wonderful results, they great numbers, but they did parts of it. Sections like Agile usually does, right? You try it in certain sections, you try it in IT organization, for example, which always starts there. Uh, and it's a great results, but it doesn't diffuse. It doesn't change and and the whole universe. Happened in Norway as well, when the researchers left and the papers were published and everyone went back to normal, room. It went back to the old way of working.
[00:46:51] Because the power structure is still there.
[00:46:55] So the only place I've seen where they have managed to do parts of it is an Australian Telco called Telstra. They managed to take a division out and designed it in a new way, like just like in a DP2 type of organization. The rest of the organization stayed as was. But they managed to, they were really conscious about making that interface between the organization and the new one so thin that the old one couldn't affect the new one. So that's when you can make it happen, I think. That's what I've seen. Just small pockets. Wow. Unless top management are pushing it, no, it's not going to happen.
[00:47:31] Sorry, it's a dysfunctional way of, dystopian even, but yeah.
[00:47:38] Anyone else? I don't know how we on time.
[00:47:40] Yeah, sure, we have 10 minutes left before the lunch, so we have the capability to have a discussion with Thor. Maybe I have one question. Um, is isn't the fourth the the contextual organization type like something not at the same level than the other one, maybe he can include the other ones? It's maybe a bit like a broke question.
[00:48:02] Something like a meta organization.
[00:48:07] Uh, sorry. I'm I'm I'm just asking to understand. So you're saying that the organization itself is contextualist or? No.
[00:48:17] No, saying that the the the mental model of contextualist can include the other ones.
[00:48:22] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah. But also a good question. Um, yes, I think it can. And also we they have seen good examples of that. Uh, for example, when teams are allowed to self-organize, then you're starting out with a contextual view. You assume that people who do the work actually know how to design it, so it's not predictable, it's not foreseeable, it's not mechanistic, right? So but they can decide to organize themselves however they want. So if they want to be hierarchical or bureaucratic even within the team, that's fine. No problem with that. So you can have the contextual with bits of the other ones in it, no no problem. But the whole needs to be contextualist in order to be able to be able to work. Just to give you an example, um, representative democracy. What do you think that is? I could have used that as an example. Come to think of it. Like the democracy we are used to when you vote on people and you know, they rise to the power.
[00:49:22] Uh, mechanistic.
[00:49:24] Hi, contextualist or?
[00:49:25] Mechanistic. Yes.
[00:49:28] We believe there is somebody who can call the shots for us and we actually trust them to do it for us. So we give power to somebody else. In a DP1, the DP1 DP2 is still very much DP1, even though we call it democratic, it's still an autocratic model actually. Because we can't if they do something wrong, we can't, well, some countries actually manage to to hold them to account, but usually know. They are left to do whatever they want as long as they got the votes and make sure that they don't get the votes next time they're going to be forwards. So it's a very autocratic way of thinking, so it's a, as you said, it's an organistic way of thinking.
[00:50:09] So teams can decide to do that. But when teams do it, there's nobody outside deciding who's in charge. They decide, and if the team is small enough, they can, you know, dethrone the autocrat. If he or she becomes, you know, bad mover or whatever. But we can't do that in a big democracy, usually. Actually, in Norway they try. And it works sometimes that people are actually the public opinion are so strong that some people have to leave their offices and stuff. So it works sometimes, but rarely that it's going to work.
[00:50:39] Yeah.
[00:50:46] Thank you. That was quite mind opening and uh, I really like the way you presented the the model in a simple way for that you for you to understand which mind model you might be navigating in. And um, I usually work as a coach and I'm meeting with team organizations.
[00:51:03] And I often face a situation where you don't see, um, where you might see actually a team, a system falling into a specific, uh, zone.
[00:51:19] Um, but it's not necessarily something that you might be able to change by your own. So I was wondering whether you would use this model to bring awareness to the system to where they might be doing? Would you organize some workshop around bringing some awareness of that?
[00:51:39] Uh you give me ideas now. Now I haven't thought of it actually because this is a fairly new space for me actually looking into the whole the philosophy behind it. I mean as I said, I'm really stuck in that open system theory thing and that's contextualist, that's where it belongs. Uh but I haven't used it actively at clients to see to to figure out where they are and what the issue is. But I have used it mentally to figure when I'm when I'm at a client, I try to understand when the IT director says, now we want to we want to be agile now. So we're going to have self-governing teams. I don't necessarily assume immediately what they mean, they understand what self-organization actually is. They rarely do. It's a fancy word, it's a cool thing to say, it's it's sort of expected. They wouldn't get hires unless they were agile, for example. So they say they do it and they try to create teams, but it's it's as little as possible. So then you understand that they're really stuck in mechanism, maybe organizing, they don't have a taken in their whole contextual world thing. So I use it as a mental model to understand things. Uh, makes you a bit skeptical all the time, of course. But it's it's it's it's not uncommon, I think.
[00:52:48] But I was thinking what if we could help people or a system to get
[00:52:56] a broader eye on the options that they may have. So usually people or group of people, system will jump into the first solution that comes to their hand. And they also end they jump into things they know that probably on the right side.
[00:53:10] Yes, that's where they are.
[00:53:11] Um, yeah, that that maybe that's an ID for you. I don't know for my question. I wonder what if we could open the eyes.
[00:53:18] Yeah, maybe I should contact you afterwards to do this. Now actually one one of the talks I literally considered after having a chat with you to replace this one with. Is one that I did last week at Fastflow conf, which is annoying, same name on the conference. Fastflowconf.org in the Netherlands called on team to pull this. I had a talk they called self-organization, you keep using that word. I suspect you don't know what that means. It's the quote from I don't probably phrase a little bit but it's a quote from Princess Bride movie. I have to have her. So but because I think a lot of back to what you asked, a lot of times they think they know what that means, but they don't know the consequences of what that actually means. So they're still stuck in the often the left hand side, they may have moved into organisms, they do understand that integration is important, then teams do integrate and coordinate and all that stuff, but they never they haven't got a clue about the top right contextualist. So I tried to, you know, encourage it, but I haven't actively done it.
[00:54:16] I think that we have our last question before lunch.
[00:54:24] Thank you for all the the insights. Um, would would you
[00:54:31] recommend when we're hiring people or building a team, uh, to try to have different uh to group people who have different word hypotheses.
[00:54:40] Yeah.
[00:54:42] I would, you probably expect now you should hire just contextualists. No, I wouldn't. Definitely not. Diversity is still really important. Uh, and and just so the whole idea with this this this lecture was just to make people aware of the differences, not necessarily that one is good and one one is bad. They're all, as I said, they're all complete. papers Edmund about that there's no there's no weaknesses in any of them, they're just a different perspective on the world. And I think you need those different perspectives when you have teams as well. So I don't think you should hire specifically for for something similar, try for diversity if anything. Hmm. But let themselves design. Yeah.
[00:55:31] Because then you're then you're at realize that things are contextualist, they know best. They are closer to the metal.
[00:55:38] If you if if you believe in experts, which by the way, social technical scientists often are, they they have a self-reflection there which they struggle with. They see themselves as as experts. So they come in and design organizations, or did at least in the 60s and 70s. So they they hand over a design to the organization. And they did long analysis for years and years and given perfect design, and it could be a perfect design, but it would be owned by the organization. It would be somebody else built this but we don't believe in it and then. So that's an insight from from from open system theory, you can't do that. Get rid of the expert.
[00:56:14] But I think to say as a consultant, I was in there. So but but that has actually changed the way I approach back to you the question at the back earlier, it changed the way I approach being a consultant. So I'm way more a facilitator and an enabler now than an expert that comes in. I can and like Andrew's the advice, of course, perfect. I would just wish he called that book the decision-making in general, because it's not just architecture. You can use it for anything. As long as you involve people, then you get the the commitment that you need from people, you don't tell them anything.
[00:56:48] So that's probably how I changed my approach to you. So I'm a reluctant architect if anything if I'm hired as that. I try not to be an architect.
[00:56:57] All right. Well, thank you very much again. Thank you.

Transcript