I love Sondheim’s musical “Sunday In The Park With George.”
It opens with the painter George Seurat narrating the staging of his characters in his painting, saying:
White, a blank page or canvas
The challenge, bring order to the whole
Through Design
Composition
Tension
Balance
Light
And Harmony
I think sometimes that this ought to be something all of us keep in mind in the Agile community (in more ways than one!).
The week before last I read (and then reread) Frans Osinga’s overview of the thinking of John Boyd – “Science, Strategy and War: the strategic theory of John Boyd.” And what it changed in my thinking – front and center – are two things: A deepening and enriching of what Orientation means, and a new appreciation of the importance of Harmony.
These are, I believe, deeply consequential for those of us who care about Agile, Agility, or Adaptive Organizations and they can help frame the debate around the role (if any) of frameworks.
Look – what’s our goal? To me, it’s organizations that can thrive in their environment – what I call “organizationally fit” organizations. Agility – or better, Adaptability – is one of the characteristics that an organization needs to be fit. What does it take to be adaptable? Well, you need to respond at an organizational level to new conditions and do it more flexibly and rapidly than centralized command will deliver. So I need to give degrees of freedom to elements of the organization – and I need to be confident that they will respond in both the correct way (with common orientation), and in a way that connects / supports the other elements (with harmony). To react harmoniously, they need to share an orientation.
We tend to see Orientation as understanding where we are on the map and which way we’re pointed. That presumes a ‘fixed’ map – but when Boyd discusses Orientation, he’s talking as much about map creation and map sharing. Boyd says:
Orientation, seen as a result, represents images, views, or impressions of the world shaped by genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experience and unfolding circumstance.
To which Osinga adds:
The narrow interpretation of the OODA loop also de-emphasizes another essential feature of Boyd’s theory: developing, maintaining, and reshaping one’s orientation, the box around which the loop graphically revolves. Speed, brave decisions and heroic actions are pointless if the observation was inaccurate because of our inadequate orientation. Orientation shapes the way we interact with the environment. It is, in a sense, the ‘genetic code’ of an organism or organization.
In order to avoid predictability and ensuring adaptability to a variety of challenges, it is essential to have a repertoire of orientation patters and the ability to select the correct one according to the situation at hand while denying the opponent the latter capability. Moreover, Boyd emphasizes the capability to validate the schemata before and during operations and the capability to devise and incorporate new ones if one is to survive in a rapidly changing environment.
To Boyd, ‘orientation’ is driven by perspective – which in turn is driven by understanding and the creation and adaption of mental models.
It’s interesting to me – because I spent some time studying Herbert Simon and ‘bounded rationality’ (well defined here - Bounded Rationality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Satisficing is the strategy of considering the options available to you for choice until you find one that meets or exceeds a predefined threshold—your aspiration level—for a minimally acceptable outcome. Although Simon originally thought of procedural rationality as a poor approximation of global rationality, and thus viewed the study of bounded rationality to concern “the behavior of human beings who satisfice because they have not the wits to maximize” (Simon 1957a: xxiv), there are a range of applications of satisficing models to sequential choice problems, aggregation problems, and high-dimensional optimization problems, which are increasingly common in machine learning.
Satisficing involves developing ‘low-cost’ models of problems that meet the perceived as adequate level of accuracy / certainty for the capabilities of the problem-solver and the worth of solving the problem.
In Boyd’s explanation of ‘oriented,’ we’ve developed a model of a problem that ‘orients’ our thinking toward a solution. That model, that perspective is what orients us, and having a model is what Boyd considers orientation.
But it’s not enough for me to be oriented – to be effective, I must share my orientation.
To work effectively together – to achieve harmony without central control – agents must share a common grounding, patterns, models, and understanding. Because we all understand the common structures of jazz, we can in turn be free to improvise and still create harmony.
Because part of what we’re seeking is the ability to act in a coordinated and mutually reinforcing way – to act as a swarm, instead of a mob.
This is getting long, and I want to talk more about harmony and the roots of orientation…
To Observe and Orient assumes that we are already at a point of Orientation. That Orientation changes through our Observations. It is important to realize what under girds, stands behind, is the basis of, our Orientation. These are values that we are using to Decide or Discern how to change through Action. If we are not clear about what our values are there are two choices that we face. One is to stay put, never changing. The other is to go wherever the wind blows. I see both as patterns of behavior in organizations today. Should we change because we have been influenced to change, or, seduced to change. Or should we change because, new information affects our current Orientation in such a way that we see how our values to have a greater impact upon what we are doing. It is possible that we find that our core values cannot withstand the challenge of Observation and Orientation. If so, our new Orientation really needs to address the core value question because without them, it is difficult to maintain a unified culture. What I find is that many organizations are at this point, incapable of adapting because they are paralyzed by the loss of Orientation.