In the old days,  people were used to the scuzzy, smelly scouts bringing in
news of how the battle’s frontlines might have shifted. These days,
your best scouts could have unlikely bodypiercings, hypercaffeinated hair and impertinent questions. How easy do you make it to hear the truth?:

1. Do your style and tools communicate an openness to disagreements or even just different ideas?
2. Do the team members think you only want content to fill a predetermined
   structure? Or do they think you expect to pick up something from them
   you might not have even known to ask?
3. At the other extreme, did you abdicate leadership by abandoning them to an amorphous “collaboration” dumping site?
4. How does the organization maintain separate perspectives? Who’s looking at external threats and opportunities; who’s conserving  internal resources? Or are you a perfectly self-sufficient one-man band?

The pair of tools I consistently recommend to clients are (a) a mind mapping tool ; and (b) a database with a tabular outlining interface.

• Mind mapping is a terrific tool when I’m faced with an unfamiliar or a complex situation. It’s simply the best way to explore and parse out the elements. The emerging map captures the natural relationships and logic.
• A database is essentially a multi-dimensional spreadsheet. Anyone who, in the early spreadsheet days, laid out a three-year financial projection on a single sheet should quickly appreciate what life could have been to have a “box” where you could dump data any which way in any whatever order – and then have customized interfaces with those data filtered and sorted just so they match exactly the user’s perspective at that time.
  

Edward Tufte, widely regarded as the dean of graphical representation of quantitative data, believes that a table ( x rows, y columns) is the most effective way to present relationships for up to 500 data points.

I have found Tufte’s recommendation to hold true in client situations ranging from a small start-up, to a mature $25Bn multi-timezone organization. In brief, mind mapping is good for exploratory discussions, like getting to fly overhead and gaining a 500ft, 10,000ft, etc. vantage point.

Once we pick the best logical fit from that mapping, we move the data into a table that “linearizes” (shows the sequential relationship). The rows and their subrows, with progressive levels of indentation, would still quickly show the logical relationships. The columns could show the time-sequential data. Another page might use the columns to display current values, or alerts instead.

Picking the right form does enhance the communication function .

A quick segue here. (OK, a WIDE lateral here…) I would often remark how the practical American sensibility is reflected in the plain orange-brick box forms of the last several decades’ shools and government buildings. Quite consistent with the direct, plain spoken American style, compared to, say, the French who always round out their corners and syllables. Look at the typical trailers hauled by our landscapers, with angle bars just butt-welded and left exposed.

I have wondered how we affect the sensibility of younger people when we are all on a first-name basis: an informality that I am sure gives younger people a sense of being on equal footing with the older authority – not a bad thing for encouraging a vigorously innovative sensibility.

I wonder, too,  what’s lost when schools are simply an orange brick saltbox, windowless for security purposes, displacing the earlier culture when you looked up to the schools and schoolteachers, as you ascend up broad steps to ornate twelve-foot double doors that open to a tall foyer and sweeping staircases going up to the balcony and its mural backdrop?

Doug Johnson’s blog talks about school designs. His emphasis is on the human factors and their probable impact on the students and faculty’s sensibilities. Doug ponders the closed brick boxes and asks, “Might one not expect graduates of this school to think in straight lines and exhibit one-right-answer mentalities?”

In 1987, the “system accident” came from not realizing how computerized trading,  scaling up into programmed trading, would vibrate into a collapse.  In 2008, we were all surprised at the extent and speed of the financial collapse;  again we failed to see the next larger scale of complexity, underestimating the downside of tightly intertwined global systems.

So,  how do you know when you don’t know?

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This entry was posted Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under Strategic Execution. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.