Jorge 0:00

We want simple answers. We want to know that we can like press the one button or elect the right person and everything will be okay, right? And things are more complex than that.

Narrator 0:19

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:30

Hey, Jorge, it's great to see you again.

Jorge 0:32

It's great to see you too, Harry.

Harry 0:34

I'm so curious, what is on your mind today?

Jorge 0:38

Oh my goodness. There is a lot on my mind. There's so much going on in the world. The word that keeps coming to my mind, and I keep seeing it in various media, is the word turbulence. And I've been thinking about all the turbulence and thinking about how we're responding to the turbulence, maybe what's causing the turbulence. And that led me to revisit a reading from a book that I've been familiar with for a long time. And I wanted to read you a passage.

Harry 1:16

I love it. All right!

Jorge 1:18

All right, so this is a little long, but we'll get through it. So it says, "Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western Society has benefited from science, logic and reductionism over intuition and holism, psychologically and politically. We would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is 'out there' rather than 'in here.' It's almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away. "Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents: preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our 'solutions' have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away. "Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems, undesirable behaviors, characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it."

Harry 3:28

Wow. That's heavy stuff, dude. Really topical and oddly, there's an affinity between that and what I have been thinking about recently regarding a TEDx talk that I gave back in, gosh, was it 2012? On problem framing and diagnostic thinking. I dunno if you ever had a chance to take a look at it, but it's this simple framework that, the, Oh man, I always get the X and the Y axis mixed up, but the vertical axis, we'll call it that, is the scope of impact, right? So on the bottom it's like very low scope of impact. On the top, it's like epic scope of impact. And then the horizontal, axis is solvability, or what you might characterize as perceived solvability. And so, in the lower left hand corner, what you would have is low scope of impact and highly solvable. And and then in the upper right corner, you would have epic impact in terms of number of living things, the scope of damage costs at every level. And you would have the intractable, would probably be the best word to describe that. So in the upper right hand corner, I call those ELEs, or extinction level events. So in the bottom left you have issues, and in the upper you have extinction level events. And then in between you have a series of distinctions that place problems which are by definition solvable, roughly in the middle, and then to the left of problems you have things that are less than problems and to the right of problems you have things that are bigger than problems or more messy than problems, less solvable than problems. And so that's what I was thinking about. I was thinking of this framework where, there's always people think about Dave Snowden's work, the Cynefin never say it right the Cynefin framework, where you're dealing with dynamic versus static complexity and so on and so forth. But I've never really... I have friends that love that framework, but I was never really able to pinpoint how to use it effectively. That is to say, how to frame a given problem and then pick an intervention strategy to then address the problem. Because for something like a problem, in the category of problem, the, intervention strategy is to look for a solution. But if you move to the right of a problem, which moves it from solvable to unsolvable, the first category you get to is a predicament, which is an unsolvable problem, right? It means it's going to come back to bite you like a whack-a-mole. And so, therefore, what is the intervention strategy? If you're gonna have an intervention strategy for a problem that's gonna keep recurring, but it's seemingly solvable, that intervention strategy probably looks something like managing it. You don't try to solve it, because by definition it's gonna come back to bite you. So, this reading went right to the heart of this framework that I was using at Rackspace, and ultimately led to the book that I wrote, because the folks at Rackspace in San Antonio when I was there asked me to give this TEDx talk on this topic, and that led to a South by Southwest talk that led to a number of discussions at Adobe and, USAA and a NU number of other companies. And I was all excited about this framework and about this powerful problem framing method and about the intervention strategy selection model. And I would give these talks and like, crickets. Nobody said anything, they just sat there. I'm like, "What?" But at some point, I think it was when I gave the talk at Adobe, and maybe the Innovation Game Summit, with Luke Holman, and some questions came up around prioritization, and I was like, "Huh, that's interesting. That's a very weak signal about people being interested in a piece of this. Like, how do you figure out what matters most in order to be able to solve something or address something or to manage something?" And then that led to the whole world of, maybe we ought to be figuring out how to do prioritization better. So, you just put the key in and turned it on when you went for that, that reading with me, 'cause it opened a whole world.

Jorge 8:54

Let me tell you what it's from. But first, I'll say that, the way that I'm hearing your matrix there is that the vertical axis has to do with relevance, somehow. When you say "scope of impact," what that communicates to me is like some things that you're looking to tweak have greater relevance than others. The other dimension has to do with agency. It's, how much can I actually do about this? And the reason I'm bringing this up is that the author of this book has a framework that I think addresses both. So anyway, I'll tell you what it is, this is, Donella Meadows's Thinking in Systems.

Harry 9:36

Oh wow.

Jorge 9:37

Which is the textbook that we use in a course I teach on systems thinking. I think that it's a lot of people's first contact with systems thinking. It's a primer and it's explicitly written to be accessible. The reason I wanted to bring it to our conversation is that my sense is that a lot of the turbulence and instability that we're seeing in the world is being caused by a lack of systems literacy. Maybe our almost inherent inability in grokking the degree to which the things that we experience are actually outcomes of really complex sets of things that are interoperating. It's like we want simple answers. We want to know that we can like press the one button or elect the right person and everything will be okay, right? And things are more complex than that.

Harry 10:50

Let me share with you the next category. So I told you one category was problem, that's solvable. The next category to the right of that is predicament. That's a problem that keeps reoccurring. The next category is the one I wanna focus on, which is quagmire. And a quagmire is one where you're implicated. That's one where any attempts to address the problem, and in fact, even to understand the problem, may in fact affect the problem. And I agree with you, I think this is a systems issue. I also think it's a psychological issue, because we still wanna look at systems issues as out there. And, "It was not me. I did not press the button." And when I learned about systems thinking back in the, like late nineties, that's scary; that's a long-ass time ago! It was so cool, right? You get these charts and you get these bubbles and you get these arrows and all this stuff. But I'm still here looking at that. And it wasn't until many years later, that I realized that you have to be inside and outside that system at the same time in order to understand how that system may in fact be functioning. So the intervention strategy for a quagmire is mindfulness, because it is the place where you need to accept the possibility that your involvement in any way is going to affect how that system is functioning. So I'm not sure how to resolve this tension between systems thinking and "it's out there and I'm in here," yet for the first time I realized that I've been thinking about this for a long time, and in fact, it's built in to the problem framing diagnostic model that I've been using.

Jorge 12:53

it's Schrodinger's quagmire, right? One of the sentences I read there I think speaks to what you're saying here. and I'm gonna reread it because I think it's important. And I don't know if I paused long enough to communicate the quotes, and I think the quotes are important. Meadow says, "psychologically and politically, we would much rather assume that the cause of the problem is 'out there,' rather than 'in here.'" End quote.

Harry 13:24

Yeah, I'm glad you re-read that, because I did hear it and then I myself fixated on the "out there" part of it. This gets to the heart of cognitive dissonance and starting to look at how do we maintain our sense of self when we are, in fact, part of the problem? We are implicated. And the questions start to percolate up. Okay, if we start with that as an assumption, what do we then do with it? So I haven't... I read that book a long time ago and I don't remember how it addresses this notion that we're implicated, we're part of the system, can you refresh my memory? Do you have access to that?

Jorge 14:12

I don't remember right off the top here whether there's a portion that addresses that. And I think that part of the reason might be that one of the purposes of this book is precisely to break you out of this situation where you are unaware of the degree to which you are a participant in the situation. This book invites you to step back and see the situation as a holistic mess rather than something that can be easily tweaked.

Harry 14:50

One of my favorite books ever and we may have talked about this at some point is Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris's book Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me. And it's the book that really sheds such a bright light on the idea that we'll go through extraordinary efforts, psychological efforts, to maintain our sense of identity and self in the face of any cognitive dissonance that we have. That is to say that our own observation of the way that we're acting is out of phase with who we think we are, and therefore, when we get to that level of discomfort, our first response is to disavow ourselves of what's happened, or of our role in it. And, I'm wondering whether some of these ideas need to get brought together and simplified in a way that takes the system's effect and takes the psychological and bolts them together so that there's a more explicit dialectical or interaction model for problem framing, diagnostic thinking, and intervention identification, prioritization, and selection.

Jorge 16:18

You talked about giving a presentation and the responses being crickets, and when you said that, I thought, "That sounds familiar." Because when I talk about these things, oftentimes, I'm met with puzzled looks.

Harry 16:41

Mm.

Jorge 16:42

And I think partly it has to do with the fact that this is a subject that requires thinking a little bit abstract. Or a lot abstract, right? When you're talking about trying to take in the idea that things are more complex and they seem, and that you're dealing with a very complex system, there's this scale problem. Like, our sensory apparatus and our minds and stuff, they're not... We're not well equipped to understand problems at large scales like that. Or problems whose outcomes have a long duration. Like climate change, I think, is is an example of this, where like the scale and the time that it takes for effects to be felt are so detached from our lived experiences, that it's hard for us to assign cause and effect, causal relationships, there and to get a sense of the degree to which our actions influence what we are observing, the outcomes that we're observing. I do agree with you that I think that finding ways of talking about this stuff that help people understand it and internalize it is important. I recently posted this thing in social media where I said, that it's becoming increasingly evident to me that some degree of systems literacy is essential to the commonweal, the wellbeing of a society. Now, this sounds a little kind of like highfalutin and maybe a little outside the scope of what we usually talk about, but I think it's relevant because this also plays out in organizations. Organizations are complex systems as well, and knowing the degree to which have agency and maybe working explicitly on like the matrix that you highlighted, where you try to like somehow locate yourself with regards to the degree of agency that you can have at any given time, can make you more skillful in gaining traction.

Harry 19:01

I super appreciate what you just said for a whole bunch of reasons, but partly because it gave me the space to reflect on where I have been hearing about this out in the field. And I'm a big fan of, of Rich Diviney's work and I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and Leif Babin's work with Extreme Ownership. They wrote the book Extreme Ownership, and I've been to one of their major events. One of the most fundamental ideas that Extreme Ownership promotes, put bluntly and perhaps wrong, is "How am I at fault?" And they'll tell you those are the wrong words, there are probably better words so that it doesn't come off as judgmental as it seems, but I like the term, "How am I implicated?" But then implicated is to erudite, right? So I'll stick with what the Extreme Ownership folks, which come out of the US military, love them or hate 'em, and the Navy Seals, they're just the most effective teams in the world at doing what they do. They know a lot of stuff and one of the core ideas that they put forward is you have to start with self. And starting with self is the simplest, best, most effective, most pragmatic way of getting to the heart of change. And perhaps the way back through this is to start with self and not to start with what's the problem. But you can look at the symptomology, you can look at what's happening right now and how am I at fault? What is my role in it? How am I implicated and the power of doing that in the context of what's going on in your home, with your partner, with your kids. It's astonishing, right? Because I have been practicing this now for a couple of years, like driving home first, what's my role in it? How am I implicated? How am I at fault? Rather than, what did they do? You did this. It's your fault. You're bad. Like, turning it all around. If I want something different to happen, I have to start by looking at my role in it first, and maybe it's that simple.

Jorge 21:34

You know, part of the reason that I said that there was something in Meadows's work that kind of echoed the matrix that you were talking about, is that she has a list of what she called "leverage points" to intervene in a system. And there's one of the chapters in the book that covers them. There are twelve points, and they're ranked so like number 12 is the least impactful in some ways, and then they work themselves up to the most impactful.

Harry 22:05

Oh, you mean they're prioritized?

Jorge 22:07

They are prioritized. Yeah. And I have to say, I think that some of the rankings might be arguable. But broadly, I think that this maps to what you were talking about, in, saying that there's a way of thinking about solvability, right? What can I do in this situation? Anyway, the reason I'm bringing it up now is that the two most impactful leverage points in her list, number two, she says it's the mindset, or, paradigm that is causing the system to arise. So there's this kind of shared mental model that is making this happen. And then, number one is the power to transcend paradigms. To understand we're not set with this mental model. We could adopt different mental models. And, to your point, it's one thing to talk about doing it out there, but this is something that we can do for ourselves. And we can take a step back and say, "I've been thinking about it this way, but what if there were other ways that I could think about this? What if there were other framings I could bring to this situation?"

Harry 23:25

And as nuanced as this might sound, a minute ago, I think you said, "How can I fix this?" But the echelon front Extreme Ownership is how did I cause this? It's, start with that it's your fault, leaving the judginess aside of the word fault, and then use the window of how is this unfolding in this particular way in where there's a gap between the state that I want and the state that I have, and pinpointing my role in it so that I can own it, so that I can take responsibility for it, so that I can then take somebody else off the hook of them thinking that I'm looking at them as the source of the problem. So it creates a dynamic. It's a paradigm shift to allow a different psychological frame to exist around this. The echelon fronts folks talk about this in the context of subjugating your ego and letting your ego step back from needing to be right and being on the brink of being forceful about being the agent of change and asserting that by starting with the place that that person, as they've shown up, is actually potentially the cause of the thing that's unwanted to begin with.

Jorge 25:09

And interestingly, I would assume that by doing that, by restraining the ego in the way that you're describing, and accepting responsibility for the situation, you are also gaining some degree of agency and no longer being buffeted by forces that are seemingly outside your control.

Harry 25:33

It's weirdly counterintuitive in that way.

Jorge 25:37

Wow. That's something to ponder. I'm gonna be sitting with that one for a while. Thank you for bringing that, Harry. As always, I've gone a lot out our conversation today. Thank you.

Harry 25:50

Yeah. Thank you, Jorge.

Narrator 25:56

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes@tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.