Jorge 0:00

I have been in situations where it's like, "You know, we are constraining our conversation here to these possibilities. Did you realize that there's this whole other range of possibilities that opens up in a direction that's completely tangential to what we're talking about but still relevant?" And when that happens, Eno is right. There's... it's like, "Oh my gosh." Yes, we could go there!" Right? Like, that opens up possibilities that were just not visible before because your solution space did not stretch in that direction.

Narrator 0:34

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

Jorge 0:45

Hey, Harry. It's so good to see you again.

Harry 0:47

Ah, I really appreciate you making time today to do this. I know you're busy, and this is a lot of fun.

Jorge 0:54

Oh, this is a lot of fun. And I've brought a really fun reading today. It's a longer reading than I normally bring, so I'm just gonna jump right into it so that we can devote more time to it.

Harry 1:04

Sounds great. Go for it

Jorge 1:07

"An axis is a name for a continuum of possibilities between two extreme positions: so the axis between black and white is a scale of grays. I can illustrate this idea by applying it to the description of haircuts. Rather than only being able to say of someone's haircut that it is, for example, masculine or feminine, we're as likely to say that it's quite masculine or quite feminine or unisexual somewhere in the middle. When we do this, we acknowledge that the sexual possibilities of haircuts don't just fall squarely at one or another of the polar positions, masculine or feminine, but somewhere on the wide range of hybrids between them. In fact, we would feel constrained if we couldn't make descriptions in these fuzzy, hybrid, terms. If you were trying to describe a particular haircut, however, you'd probably want to say more than, 'It’s quite feminine,' or some other comment about its gender connotations. You might also want to locate its position along other axes. For instance, along the axis neat to shaggy. 'It’s slightly shaggy,' or, 'It’s very neat.' If that then gave you enough descriptive language to say everything you could imagine ever wanting to say about haircuts, you could locate every example you ever met somewhere on a two-dimensional space, like this sheet of paper. So you could make a kind of graph, masculine to feminine on one axis, neat to shaggy on the other. On this graph, which is a simple cross in 2D space, any point represents a particular position in relation to the four polar possibilities, masculine to feminine and neat to shaggy. I call each of these points a cultural address. I could equally well call it a stylistic address. It is the identification of a particular point in stylistic space, a 'possible haircut.' Those four terms still constitute an impoverished language in which to describe most haircuts, and to describe a wide range of possible haircuts, we would need several others: natural to contrived, rebel to conformist, wild to civilized, futuristic to nostalgic, businesslike to bohemian. Each of these polar pairs defines another axis along which any particular haircut could be located, and each of these exists as a dimension in the haircut space, which now becomes multidimensional and no longer easily drawable on a sheet of paper." I'm going to skip ahead a little bit now. "What strikes you as interesting when you begin thinking about stylistic decisions or moral or political decisions as being locatable in a multiaxial space of this kind is the recognition that some axes don't yet exist. For example, with hairstyles, as far as I know, there is no dirty to clean axis. That's to say your hairdresser isn't likely to ask you, 'How dirty would you like it?' It's still assumed that there is no discussion about it. The axis has not been opened up: we would all want it as clean as possible." I'm gonna skip now a little bit to the final section here. "With punk, a brand-new axis opened up: professionally cut to hacked about by a brainless cretin. As often happens, this appeared and was intended to be an anti-style style, and was shocking because we had never previously considered the possibility that the concept 'style' and the concept 'hacked about by a brainless cretin' could overlap one another. But as usual, the effect was not to overthrow and eliminate the idea of style, but to give it new places in which to extend itself. 'Hacked about by a brainless cretin' became not the death of hairstyling, but the furthest outpost of a new continuum of possible choices about how hair could look. This is a transition from polar thinking, the kind of thinking that says it's either this or it's that, or everything that isn't clearly this must be that, to axial thinking. Axial thinking doesn't deny that it could be this or that, but suggests that it's more likely to be somewhere between the two. As soon as that suggestion is in the air, it triggers an imaginative process, an attempt to locate and conceptualize the newly acknowledged grayscale positions. I am interested in these transitions, these moments when a stable duality dissolves into a proliferating and unstable sea of hybrids. What happens at such times is that all sorts of things become possible: there is a tremendous energy release, a great burst of experimentation. Not only do the emerging possible positions on this newborn axis have to be discovered and experienced and articulated, they have to be placed in context with other existing axes to see what new resonances appear."

Harry 6:23

That is mind-blowing. Where in the world? I mean, the only author I can imagine having written something like that would be Rory Sutherland, but I'm guessing it's not Rory. So what was that reading and where did it come from and how did you find it? And oh my God...

Jorge 6:46

And actually I'll have to say this, this is one of the most challenging texts I've read here to excerpt because the entire essay is it's an essay, and it's fabulous, and It's one of those where like every sentence is meaningful and adds to the overall thing. So, I was tempted to read the whole thing, but then that would've used up all of our time. I'll tell you who the author is and this essay which, is available online and I'll link to it from the notes, but it is part of a book. The author is Brian Eno.

Harry 7:26

No way.

Jorge 7:27

Yes, and this appeared in a book that is celebrating its 30th anniversary, I believe. It's called, A Year with Swollen Appendices. The, bulk of the book, "The Year," is Eno's diary for the year 1995, as I recall, and then he appended a bunch of essays at the end, those are the appendices. And the reading today comes from one of the appendices. It's called "Axis Thinking." And I came to this essay because I'm a big fan of Eno's. He's a systems doer, not just like a systems thinker, but he's like a systems doer, right? He's someone who's built a career out of understanding how systems, like cybernetic systems, work. And I saw he had written this book and I was like, "I gotta read it." And it was such a weird and mind-bending book, and I've... It's one of the few books that I've read many, many times over. It's become one of my favorite books. And I always learn something new when I read through it. But this essay in particular stood out to me, and it's been... you know that there are some works that become part of your core mental models?

Harry 8:58

Yes.

Jorge 8:59

Like, if you were to diagram your mental models into a stack diagram, like these would be in the lower layers, right? These are part of the operating system. And I remember when I was a kid, the feedback that I got from other people, particularly my dad, was that two of my kind of overriding attributes were tenacity and what Eno calls polar thinking in that essay, right? This tendency to see things in terms of black and white. Extremes, right? "It's either this or it's that, and I'm like all about this!" And like, "the other thing is just bad, bad, bad!" And I remember my dad having pull me aside several times during my youth and say, "You know there are gray areas in between things." And one of the most important things that I learned from my dad is that the extremes are usually not where the right answers lie. Usually, there are subtleties and there are gray areas. And when I read this essay, it felt, first of all, so validating. It felt, "Oh my gosh, this is what my dad was talking about." But here it is presented, it is framed in such a way where it feels like a tool, like a mental tool that I can use, and I have used it. And I was trying to think prior to this conversation if I had a clear example, and I can't think of any that come up that would make for good stories because they're usually like small things in projects. This essay has given me the ability to be sitting in a meeting, for example, where people are discussing possible directions for a project and thinking, "We've lapsed into polar thinking." And then like questioning the axes. Like, is this the valid axis? Are these the valid endpoints in the axis? Are there other axes that we're not considering, right? Like this notion of multidimensional axis thinking has become really foundational for me. And I have seen this, where people become stuck in the axes that they've defined and have made them somehow like holy writ, when in reality they're just constructs and they're up for questioning, right?

Harry 11:32

I have so many things to say, starting with the fact that kinda mind-blowing to me that you and I had kind of the opposite experience with our fathers, right? 'Cause my dad was hyperpolar in his thinking in some ways, right? He was a theoretical plasma physicist, and everything was like, "Do it my way or you'll die." If you change the oil wrong, you're gonna die, right? If you cut this piece of paper wrong, you're gonna die, right? Everything was like super extreme. And I used to make him crazy because I was super artistic, and everything was some variant, "Oh, you could do it like this," or, "You could do it like that," or, "You could do it this other way." And it used to infuriate him because I was always looking for some other angle. I was looking for some shade of gray in terms of understanding things. So I think it's just interesting that you and I had that. that's just a random interesting fact that you and I grew up with almost polar opposite. The next thing I was gonna comment on was, like, I, don't want my martinis shaggy, but I'll take them dirty. Bringing the haircut to the martini for a minute. Then, I was going to ask you if you've read any of Barry Johnson's work on polarity management. that at all?

Jorge 12:44

No, I have not. What's the name of the author?

Harry 13:02

Barry Johnson, and he wrote a book, and I know there's a number of books out there both by him and by some other folks. The topic is polarity management. And I encountered polarity management because, as you're probably aware, I did this TEDx talk years and years ago called The Problem Is Not The Problem, right? And the idea was it was a diagnostic framework for thinking about problems and opportunities. And I'm not gonna get into the details of it, but one of the waypoints in that framework was a dilemma, where you have a polar situation. And in that early thinking of mine where I put that TEDx talk together, I introduced the idea that the intervention strategy for a dilemma is to make a decision because you have a polar situation. And a fellow who I just have an extraordinary amount of respect for and am fortunate to call him a friend, don't see him everywhere near as much as I'd like to, Hoyt Ng, who I worked with at DreamWorks, introduced me to polarity management because he was looking at that problem framing and diagnostic thinking model that I did in the in The Problem Is Not The Problem, and he said, "You know, there's a more effective way to think about dilemmas than through this polar frame, and that's to actually to use polarity management, is to think about it in terms of polarities and where they can continue off the ends," in a sense. And if you're trying to manage for one side or the other, for each pole there are upsides and downsides, and if you aim in one direction for the purposes of gaining the upsides, you need to stay alert to the downsides starting to surface so that you can shift back to the other strategy, if you will, which might allow you to start decreasing the downsides and increasing the upsides of the other pole. And so that topic, polarity management, is applied in a number of different domains. It's certainly used in problem-solving, it's used in management, it's used in all sorts of interesting places. But I wasn't sure if you'd run into that because, it was a revelation for me in... I had this overly simplistic view of what a dilemma is. "Oh, you just need to make a decision and go. You just need to lean into one side or the other and choose." And Hoyt, basically said, "You know, that's lovely and incomplete. And a more complete way is to think about leaning toward one with a recognition that there are pluses and minuses on that end of a pole, and that you want a more dynamic, fluid way of relating to the dimension and to the points on that pole in order to be able to manage it more effectively." And I wish I could come up with a good story, but I can't right now, but I did wanna bring that up. The other thing too, gosh, you and I have talked about Brian Eno before. I think we stumbled on the fact that both of us love "Spinning Away," the song, which is probably one of my favorites of all time. And I crank that one up and go crazy. But what I am curious about from you... So it sounds like this was polar versus axial. Can you maybe simply describe the axial side of the equation again? Like, how to think about an axial thought or axial dimension?

Jorge 17:15

I think what he's saying, and I think this is slightly different from polarity management. They're obviously related. I mean, I obviously haven't read that work, but just from based on your description, it does sound like it's highly related. I think the point that Eno is making with this essay is that you can act... first of all, he's saying things are not black and white, right? Like, he's saying oftentimes the answers lie somewhere in the middle. I've come to understand that in most cases, the answer lies somewhere in the And "somewhere in the middle" depends on a lot of things. I didn't read a lot of things from the essay, like I was saying earlier. He talks about, for example, the fact that the location of some of these things is relative based on your culture, for example, right? What one culture considers to be masculine might be different than what another culture considers to be masculine. And, he doesn't say this explicitly, but that's the gist, right? Like these things are contextually dependent. But the other thing that I think is important and here's where I see a slight difference with polarity management is that he's saying that even if we understand that we are working within these matrices, in the case of the two-dimensional thing or these multidimensional constructs, and we locate the solution that we're working on as a point in that space, what he calls a cultural address, that's one way of working. Like you're working within an accepted set of axes. But he's also saying another way to work is to question the axes altogether, right? That's why I wanted to include that section about the punk rock thing, because he's saying one of the innovations of that aesthetic is that all of a sudden these unstyled styles became one of the possible ends in one of these axes. That hadn't been the case before. And his point is when something like that happens, there's a release of energy, there's a release of creativity. And that's one of the things that's become so important to me. And I'm trying to verbalize it as a difference I see with polarity management because the way that you describe polarity management, it's about knowing which side of the spectrum you're leaning towards, whether there are tendencies as opposed to like firm answers on one side or the other, that kind of thing. Maybe, and now I'm reading into it, maybe that also includes like knowing if there are any particular measurements you can make to tell where you lie on that spectrum. There's all these things that we can do to locate ourselves in that space, right? But what he's saying here is you can also open new dimensions to the space. That is also a possibility for an intervention. And that's what's been so useful to me, because I've been in situations and again, I can't cite any right off the top, but I have been in situations where it's like, "You know, we are constraining our conversation here to these possibilities. Did you realize that there's this whole other range of possibilities that opens up in a direction that's completely tangential to what we're talking about but still relevant?" And when that happens, Eno is right. There's... it's like, "Oh my gosh." Yes, we could go there!" Right? Like, that opens up possibilities that were just not visible before because your solution space did not stretch in that direction. I think that's the main thing. That's the point.

Harry 21:10

So, I love that. And that's helpful, because I was trying to operationalize this for myself, and I realized that I think one of the things that people value about... At least for the folks that have worked with me, one of the things that people value is my "creativity," right? But I think that sense of creativity is just having a propensity toward moving away from polar thinking with flexibility and alacrity, right? And I think one of the techniques that I use for doing that is to shift from dimensional thinking and working within a cultural address book, if you will, to shifting to what questions could we be asking? I wanted to open the sort of the conversation with you about, what are the techniques that you use for expanding that space? For me, it's like, "Okay, I'm stuck. Let's just lay all the questions out we can think about. And then, let's compare them against each other and see which ones win so that then we can look at why the ones that are winning are winning. What is it about the winning questions that adds something to the conversation or the dimensional space that we're trying to work our way through?" So that's a technique that I use for "being creative," and that seems to work for me. Do you have any go-to techniques?

Jorge 22:39

Yeah, one of my favorites is splashing bright neon pink paint on the invisible elephant in the room, which is a luxury that you can have when you are an external consultant, right? And in particular, I like naming emerging tensions. So when I'm working in a project, oftentimes in the opening moves of the project, right? Like, when you're first having sessions and getting to understand the problem space and all that, one of the things that I'm on the lookout for are critical tensions that are emerging. So let's use one that came up in one of our previous conversations. Remember we talked about this project where the design team wanted an experience that was friction-free, and the compliance team wanted an experience that checked all the legal boxes. Those two things are in tension, and if you've noted that there is this tension inherent to this project, then you can start reverse engineering the axial space that leads to the emergence of that tension. For example, in that case, there is an axial space that is implied by the tension, which is there are experiences that are either very onerous, like they take a lot of effort, and on the opposite extreme are experiences that are completely friction-free, right? And then there's another dimension, there's another axis, which is there are experiences that are gonna get us in trouble with the SEC, and then there are experiences that are going to make all the lawyers very, very happy, right? And I can't give you a shortcut for what that would be right now, but I'm saying that would be an axis, right? And when you start naming it and painting the possible space, then the point is solutions might open up. But the point that Eno makes here is that that's like the natural solution space for that particular tension. The question then becomes what other axis might you open up that might help alleviate the pressure felt maybe in the extremes of that solution space?

Harry 25:00

This has been a great conversation, and I super appreciate it. I know we're coming up on our time here, but it just feels like a rich opportunity to give people more tools for thinking more effectively when they're either lacking clarity or struggling to get traction in a particular direction.

Jorge 25:23

Well, it's certainly helped me. And I'm going to link to the essay in the show notes, so do check it out. Thank you, Harry. It's been awesome, sharing this with you.

Harry 25:33

All right, I'll talk to you soon, Jorge.

Narrator 25:37

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