The Four Sisters of Understanding

Looking for better tools, we find four related concepts: Situation Awareness, Sensemaking, Weak Signal Detection and Attention Economy. We them them the four sisters of understanding. Togeher, they provide us with the necessary tools to navigate in complex times.

• Attention Economy is  based on the idea that human attention is a finite resource, and as information becomes increasingly abundant, attention becomes the limiting factor in consuming that information. It reminds us to design situations and processes in which we can focus on the right things and put effort into avoiding obvious errors in our perception.
• Situational awareness is the ability to perceive and comprehend the environment, including elements such as people, objects, and conditions, in order to anticipate and respond to potential threats or opportunities. In essence, it’s about understanding where you are, what’s happening around you, and what might happen next.
• Sensemaking is the cognitive process of interpreting and understanding information, often in complex or ambiguous situations. It’s a vital human skill that allows us to make meaning out of the world around us.
• Weak signal detection is an important prerequisite for situation awareness and sensemaking, and, unassuming it looks like, it takes profound consideration to build the social and technological structures to make it work.

 Sensemaking and situational awareness deal both with understanding complex environments; they are distinct concepts with different focuses and processes. Situational awareness focuses on the ability to act meaningfully, while sensemaking aims to uncover the underlying structures and relationships that govern system behavior and guide us to a deeper understanding.

Key Differences & Relationships include

• Sensemaking & Situation Awareness: Sensemaking often contributes to situation awareness. You can’t understand the situation (awareness) without making sense of the information within it. However, situation awareness is more immediate and focused on the present, while sensemaking can be more retrospective and focused on constructing a coherent narrative.
• Weak Signal Detection & Sensemaking: Weak signals are the raw material for sensemaking. Detecting these signals is the first step, but sensemaking is necessary to understand their meaning and implications.
• Weak Signal Detection & Situation Awareness: Weak signals can enhance situation awareness by providing clues about future changes in the environment. However, they can also be easily missed if individuals are overly focused on the dominant signals and current state.

First, I want to introduce each of the sisters. Then, I will continue with a dicsussions of consequences, conclusions and open questions.

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The Canvas Material

• A standard template of the Viable System Model. VSM practitioners recommend using the standard VSM diagram – it represents a specialized language to talk about information structures in organizations. Using it makes your findings easily accessible in the VSM community. Print it as large as you can (e.g. in A0) or just paint it on a moderation board or flip chart.
• The Canvas itself as a poster contains a VSM diagram and a kind of exploded view for the parts. It allows you to add your observations to the instances of the systems and channels in the unit that you choose to analyze/design. We recommend the use of the Canvas and drawing your findings into the template later, but of course, you are free to use the standard template instead.
• A cheat sheet that guides you through the analysis and design steps. The cheat sheet is essentially identical to the Canvas – it has numbers in its areas which refer to the steps in the analysis respective design steps. Print it in A4 or letter format. In a workshop, you can hand the cheat sheets out to the participants of the workshop.
• A poster with the analysis steps. The poster visualizes the Tasks in the respective steps and relevant observations. The yellow areas at the bottom of the steps are meant to help refer to the involved people and units in the organization chart.
• A poster with the design steps. The layout of this poster is slightly different. The top row denotes some aspects of the organization, the „powers that be“. The second row consists of the design steps. At the bottom, you find „decisions“ and „efforts“. Decisions are obvious, you can implement them immediately. Efforts are more diverse: tasks, projects, backlog items of different sizes, criticality, and difficulty. These efforts are the input for your backlog or project plan.

The Viable System Model template

The Canvas itself as a poster

A cheat sheet that guides you through the analysis and design steps

A poster with the analysis steps

A poster with the Diagnose (orient) Steps

(Under development)

The Design Steps Poster

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A Practical Guide for Designing your Own Transformation Journey

Conducting an Agile Transformation on an organizational level must be an holistic approach. It is quite complex and can seem overwhelming, especially in large companies.

With this practical “Travel Guide for Growing Adaptive Organizations” we want to share our learnings and insights which we have been gathering for years now on varies transformation journeys.

Using the metaphor of a Travel Guide, we want to provide you with

1. A Transformation Map – which shall give orientation but also inspiration on how to design your very own Transformation Journey Route
2. Travel Reports – example stories of different Transformation Journeys, taken from real life, to make such routes more tangible and understandable
3. Travel Guide – patterns, principles, learnings, and failures to better prepare you for your Transformation Journey

Transformation Map

When starting a journey, having a map for orientation is very helpful. It shows what possible areas we could visit. It gives us ideas for our starting point but also provides us with a good understanding of the overall landscape and how areas might relate to others. The Transformation Map   displays continents and areas of interest which can help to grow an adaptive organization.  

Travel Reports

When we see a new territory, we have to decide if it is interesting for us. At best, we have a buddy or someone who has explored the territory recently. We listen to her travel reports, we are fascinated and want some of it too.

Travel Guide

When we decide to start working in the new area, we need a travel guide or a scout to lead us towards the most relevant points, helps us to avoid costly errors and dead ends. This site tries to provide a travel guide with a map, stories or scenarios as an entry point and short descriptions on the most important topics.

By the way: We have also published the Book of Agile with our ideas about Agile Transformation.

Read more about our mission

Stories: Travel Reports

Start here to discover scenarios of other travellers

Everything is important and needs to get done – and that is the reason why nothing really gets done!
An exemplary case study on how to get priorities aligned and make work visible to take educated decisions.

Read more

Don’t panic, keep delivering
… even though strategy has just been turned upside down

This is a story of our Agile Transformation where the environment got a little … challenging when the strategy was changed mid development. We share how we were able to deliver in a changing environment. And how we had set up our organization to enable this feat.

Read more

An Enterprise transformation journey
… lorem ipsum

This is a story of our Agile Transformation where we transformed our enterprise

Read more

The Map

The map is an entry point for our travel proposals

Topics

Short descriptions of the relevant vocabulary we use.

We do not strive for completeness. Instead, we prefer to link to a good source if we can find one.

We want to develop a glossary and an opinionated list of descriptions of the important areas of growing an adaptive organization.

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Stories, Patterns and the Big Picture

We believe that there is no best way to convey information.

• Casual visitors may prefer stories to decide if this is the right place. Here we offer “the map” and real life stories of what went well and what went poorly.
• When things get serious, they may be interested in copying and varying the experiences of others. At this level, we provide patterns and playbooks as resources.
• Advanced practitioners will move more and more to a “pull” mode. For them, we have the Pig Picture and more detail.

The post Before you start appeared first on Grado.

One usage option is a workshop of, let’s day 6 hours.

What you need for a Workshop

Material 1x

• Poster: Canvas
• Poster: Analysis
• Poster: Design Improvements

Per participant

• Canvas Cheat Sheet
• Playbook or excerpt
• Canvas Steps

Agenda

• Purpose & goals of the workshop
• Introduction to VSM and the OODA loop
• Observe: initial analysis
• Orient: make sense of the data
• Decide: design improvements
• Act: plan interventions and experiments

The Canvas Material

Actually, the Canvas consists of several parts.

• A standard template of the Viable System Model. VSM practitioners recommend using the standard VSM diagram – it represents a specialized language to talk about information structures in organizations. Using it makes your findings easily accessible in the VSM community. Print it as large as you can (e.g. in A0) or just paint it on a moderation board or flip chart.
• The Canvas itself as a poster contains a VSM diagram and a kind of exploded view for the parts. It allows you to add your observations to the instances of the systems and channels in the unit that you choose to analyze/design. We recommend the use of the Canvas and drawing your findings into the template later, but of course, you are free to use the standard template instead.
• A cheat sheet that guides you through the analysis and design steps. The cheat sheet is essentially identical to the Canvas – it has numbers in its areas which refer to the steps in the analysis respective design steps. Print it in A4 or letter format. In a workshop, you can hand the cheat sheets out to the participants of the workshop.
• A poster with the analysis steps. The poster visualizes the Tasks in the respective steps and relevant observations. The yellow areas at the bottom of the steps are meant to help refer to the involved people and units in the organization chart.
• A poster with the design steps. The layout of this poster is slightly different. The top row denotes some aspects of the organization, the „powers that be“. The second row consists of the design steps. At the bottom, you find „decisions“ and „efforts“. Decisions are obvious, you can implement them immediately. Efforts are more diverse: tasks, projects, backlog items of different sizes, criticality, and difficulty. These efforts are the input for your backlog or project plan.

The Viable System Model template

The Canvas itself as a poster

A cheat sheet that guides you through the analysis and design steps

A poster with the analysis steps

A poster with the Diagnose (orient) Steps

(Under development)

The Design Steps Poster

The post Preparing a Workshop appeared first on Grado.

OD stands normally for Organization Design.

The acronym OD can however be interpreted freely in several ways. Each of these interpretations represents an option for shaping interventions into an organization.

1. OD: Diagnosing the Organization

 This is the process of carefully examining an organization to identify challenges and problem areas. It’s akin to a doctor making a diagnosis before prescribing a treatment. In organizations, this often involves analyzing workflows, corporate culture, and employee engagement to pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

This would mean using the Observe part: analyzing the organization and going through steps 1 to 7. It makes probably sense to use parts of step 8 for making sense of the learnings and gaining a consistent view.

2. OD: Debugging the Organization

This involves locating and fixing specific faults or issues within organizational structures and processes. Borrowed from the world of computing, where it refers to identifying and correcting errors in code, in an organizational context it means detecting and rectifying inefficiencies or dysfunctions to enable smoother operations.

This would mean using the Observe and the Orient part of the Canvas: while Observe implies a somewhat detached view of the organization, in Orient, you switch to a more opinionated view, where you think in terms of improvements and deficiencies.

3. OD: Designing the Organization

 In terms of organizational development, design refers to the deliberate shaping of organizational structures, processes, and systems. It’s about creating the organization in a way that allows it to effectively achieve its goals, not just solving problems but architecting an entity that is poised for the future. This mode involves creative thinking and the application of design principles to make an organization future-proof.

The Decide part of OODA is represented in the design steps 9-14 which represent design decisions.

While classic OD leans typically toward a slow process with long cycles (in agile terms: Waterfall process), this might become problematic in a fast-moving environment. We take this fact into account by contrasting the linear transformation model with an iterative, evolutionary approach.

4. OD: Developing the Organization

Development focuses on the growth and continuous improvement of the organization. This includes promoting learning processes, adapting to changing circumstances, and investing in employee skill sets. Develop is a forward-looking approach that aims to advance the organization through training, innovation, and strategic planning.

In the Act chapter, we give a short outline of three different approaches to Change.

Journeys through the Playbook

There are several possible ways in which you can traverse the playbook. They correspond to your current intentions and how deeply you are already involved in the world of the Viable System Model.The chapters in the Playbook are arranged for the typical path. But you might perform only part of the steps or come back multiple times to apply changes iteratively.

The post Working with the Canvas appeared first on Grado.

The final part of the Canvas journey is the implementation of improvement which you identified in the previous steps.

VSM itself does not limit your approach, but in principle, you have the choice

• Transformation: perform one classical change process. This implies you have access to senior management, who can authorize a possibly drastic intervention. Once you start such a transformation you are committed; it causes high transaction costs: communication, expectations, and fear in the organization and you do not want to go through this multiple times.
• Evolution: devise single improvement steps. This iterative approach is better suited when you have a limited sphere of influence or if you want to experiment with one change before committing to the next one.

Hack: Start with some actions, or experiments and see what happens. This can be beneficial if you do not have an official mandate while seeing the urgency to change things.

The post Step D1: Choose your transformation pattern appeared first on Grado.

The final part of the Canvas journey is the implementation of improvement which you identified in the previous steps.

VSM itself does not limit your approach, but in principle, you have the choice

• Transformation: perform one classical change process. This implies you have access to senior management, who can authorize a possibly drastic intervention. Once you start such a transformation you are committed; it causes high transaction costs: communication, expectations, and fear in the organization and you do not want to go through this multiple times.
• Evolution: devise single improvement steps. This iterative approach is better suited when you have a limited sphere of influence or if you want to experiment with one change before committing to the next one.
• Hack: Start with some actions, or experiments and see what happens. This can be beneficial if you do not have an official mandate while seeing the urgency to change things.

The post Act: the Ways of Change appeared first on Grado.

Make identity and purpose explicit

Abstract

The way that policy is made and implemented is without doubt the most important issue for an enterprise. The business must pay its bills and make a profit, but all of the financial issues are constraints: what the company is really about is defined partly by its mission statement, and partly by the working environment it creates for its members.

Central to this issue is the involvement that everyone has in making policy.

In a small startup, this is easy: you have a meeting, and discuss an issue until some sort of consensus emerges, and the policy is made.

In a larger company, the dynamics of large meetings make this difficult, and choices have to be made about the methods of involving everyone in all the important policy decisions, and how to prevent the business from degenerating into endless non-productive meetings.

Tasks

C6.1 Involvement

Look at your systems for defining new policy. Must all members be involved? Are they regular enough? Do all members feel that their opinions are essential in defining new policies?

C6.2 Accountability

Look at you systems for ensuring policy is adhered to. Is everyone accountable? Are there mechanisms to empower any group of members to call a General Meeting?
Copy

Notes

The VSM shows System 5 overseeing the interaction between System 4 (collecting environmental data .. making strategies ..) and System 3 (overseeing the Operational units .. looking for ways of generating synergy … )Assuming all of this runs smoothly, the policy systems have very little to do except to act as a watchdog over this process and to ensure that policy is adhered to.

The post Step C6: Design of Policy Structures appeared first on Grado.

We continue now with developing an opinion, i.e. an orientation where we evaluate tho organizations according to functionality.

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