Complexity, nudging and the simple power of visualization…

In my last issue, I reflected on what I appreciate about my training as an Environmental Engineer, and how that affected how I see the world and some of the sort of advantages that brought me on a practical level. I spoke about 3 key ones, being a deep regard for complexity, understanding of the power of feedback loops and seeing systems as bigger than the sum of their parts.

By the way, I have already written a few issues before on the overarching theme of feedback loops, the possible risks on how you change and to nudge systems at the right granularity. So, for convenience, but also to avoid making this too long by having to articulate some of the basics, I will leave this summary overview:

• In "Feedback loops: how nature gets its rhythm and so should we", I made a humble case for using more of an ecological metaphor for a digital era, with some of the practical implications for the way I operate to build up on the concept of feedback loop to learn & adapt incrementally and regularly. I also presented a simple example of a feedback loop with a mechanism that acts in an oblique (indirect) fashion here.

• And in "The granularity in changing", I have explored "nudging" as a concept, that emerging properties like "culture" are the result of other things like "practices" and "processes", and those are the things you can directly change and can have consequences, often ones you couldn't predict. But also that we shouldn't bother trying to change what requires far too much energy, and focus on what is more on our control, and we know can be adapted fairly easily (not requiring too much energy).

I would claim one of my masterpieces of sorts of where all that journey and my understanding along it took me culminated with the post by which I closed last year's issues with:

What’s wrong with the world - and the answer is always "I am"- in the sense of what can I do about changing the things I can change, or influencing others I can take a swag at, and that is what it (our role in the world, for those closest to us, and to a large extent even this blog/newsletter, as far as I can tell) is all about…

But enough (said) with this kind of retrospective! Let's move on to the topic du jour… As I would like to present a very simple example of visualization as a means to nudge and often provide clarity that helps us to deal with ambiguity and some level of complexity.

Imagine you are managing some kind of initiative, or even a product development, and we have a bunch of features that are in different stages. You are regularly sent an update on progress, but to keep things simple, all you get is a kind of flat list, that could look something like this…

You got to stick with me here and make an effort to imagine the list is pretty long, although my sketch cut a corner to only illustrate the concept.

How much can you actually make sense of that flat list?

I guess we can try to make the visuals a bit better by at least putting some color-coding depending on which stage the feature is at…

That is better, right? At least you can spot some visual patterns there. But how much does it enrich and enable us in terms of making sense?

I guess you would agree with me that not that much!

Now, what about if we visualize the stages as what they are, although implicit as in knowledge work, but we can make that visible, with something like this…

How much more can you make sense of things like that flow-like, making work visible approach?

At a glance, here are some things I can think of this could aid in terms potentially turning into actions:

• How to sequence. Prioritize finishing first items more to the right.

• Where there is an apparent bottleneck. That could trigger us to either pace things by the capacity of the Test stage, or maybe we can try to do something about it, and elevate that stage somehow (e.g., put more capacity, automate testing…).

• Keep my options open longer. In other words, defer starting until the last responsible moment, as it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to start development in more features with so much piled up in the two following stages (test and ship/deploy).

See what I mean there? Can you extrapolate how much clarity and help to deal with ambiguity, something quite simple like that has the potential to unleash?!...

Imagine this being a kind of portfolio-like level of visualization. So, underneath each of those Feature cards, imagine possibly there are several, many teams contributing to each of those. Lots of dependencies to be dealt with, priorities that need to be aligned, or whatnot…

That's precisely where I was coming from with this issue I wrote quite recently: Is it a prioritization issue? Or more like lack of transparency?

That's how you can nudge scaling… With everyone seeing the same thing, decision-making can more easily be distributed, and true empowerment comes in the picture by following fairly simple principles which can be agreed upon (as quite reasonable) like - prioritize what contributes to what is closest to finished.

Simple, explicit and, more importantly, enabling rules or policies. Dealing with complexity is often simple - although in this context not as a synonym of easy to do, it can be quite the contrary in fact, but worth doing.

By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact