This begins a sequence of posts which describe Karl Weick’s picture of change. Weick has formulated a theory of social organization that is, I believe, highly informative to the processes, principles and values associated with organizational agility. Hence, I shall unfold Weick’s theory in a series of posts, all the while making every attempt to relate aspects of that theory to the notion of beauty and agility in organizations.

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We begin by distinguishing an evolutionary model of human behavior and change, based on Donald T. Campbell. Very roughly speaking, the evolutionary process requires (a)variations (e.g. mutation, trial, experiment, etc.); (b) a selection process by which certain variations are favored and incorporated, and; (c) a retention system that rigidly retains the selected variations.

It should be noted that every mutation (variation) constitutes a failure in the reproduction of a previously selected form. As Campbell notes, “too high a mutation rate jeopardizes the preservation of already achieved adaptations.” If mutation rate is too high, then the system disintegrates. So, it pays for systems, particular elaborate ones (like human organizations), to snuff out too much variation.

What this means, however, is that what gets preserved are the adaptive traits of an environment long since passed. That is, the organization has retained an adaptation from the past, not from the present. This can be a fatal problem (think of the duck-billed platypus, or of any number of Good-to-Great companies currently in trouble). Hence the phrase: Adaptation is the enemy of adapting.

This suggests that moderate rates of mutation (variation) are necessary for evolutionary advantage and, hence, survival. This can be very hard to do in human organizations, particularly those that have been, or are, successful. Success is a powerful force in the retention part of the process. It is important to see that Retention systems are not merely repositories for the various rules, heuristics, and practices that have been selected. Retention systems affect subsequent actions, both in terms of Variation and of Selection.

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Let’s explore this last point in a bit more depth, since it brings us closer to the core of what we want to see here.

Consider the following picture:

First notice the use of the term ‘Enactment‘ in the place of the previous term ‘Variation.’ The term ‘enactment’ is more appropriate for human social systems since it more accurately depicts what is actually happening: that human beings themselves bring about the ‘variations’, in evolutionary terms, which define the process of organizing.

Enactment occurs, always, with regard to an ecological stream or event. As human beings we almost never deal directly with raw ecological data. By taking this action, or giving that aspect of data our attention, we are effectively filtering it, and chunking it, by which means we discern discrete events and situations.

Now, you may ask, what is the point of all this filtering and chunking? The point is to reduce equivocality. In fact, this is the point of much of what is done in organizations: reducing equivocality. Now, equivocality is not necessarily the same as ‘chaos’ or ‘noise,’ though it might look like that sometimes. Equivocality has more of the feeling of an unresolved ‘pun’ (read more about organizational equivocality here)

Selection brings about further filtration of the enacted information, some subset of whose results are ‘retained‘ by the organization. What is retained comes to form, over time, the technological, operational, and cultural systems by which the organization comes to accomplish its goals and by which it comes to identify itself. Those systems form the foundation upon which further Enactment and Selection are carried out within the organization.

It is by virtue of this feedback that organizational memory (retention) exerts its powerful influence over the processes by which organizations and people learn (or don’t), and hence the capacity for adaptability (or lack of it).

The ‘+’ and ‘-’ signs have a special meaning. ‘+’ indicates a positive force–the more of one thing engenders more of the other. ‘-’ indicates a negative force–the less of the one thing engenders more of the other, and vice versa. So for example, the stronger the Enactment of raw ecological data (i.e. the more narrowly defining the attention given to it, and the chunking applied to it), the stronger and more narrowly defining will be the Selection made. By the same token, the stronger and more narrowly defining the Selection process, stronger and more narrowly constraining will be the Retention process.

Feedback introduces a special property of any system, including this one. Consider the following example:


Two elements are in a feedback relation. The first set defines a positive feedback loop, while the second defines a negative one. In the first case, an increase in A will cause an increase in B, which in turn will cause an increase in A, etc., until the whole thing blows up. In the second case, a decrease in A will reinforce a decrease in B, and so on, resulting eventually in the disappearance of both.

Both of these loops are referred to in Systems Theory as reinforcing loops. In social systems, however, they are referred to as deviance amplification loops, since they amplify any deviance that appears. You can quickly assess whether a given loop is a reinforcing loop, since they will always have an even number of ‘-’ signs (0, 2, 4, etc.). In the loops above, sure enough, there are even numbers of ‘-’s.

Now consider the following contrasting loop:



This loop has one ‘+’ and one ‘-’. Such loops are referred to as ‘Balancing loops’, since the number of ‘+’s and ‘-’s balance each other out. In the above loop, more of A will result in more of B, which in turn will result in less of A, and so on–a ‘balancing’ loop. Balancing loops can be easily discerned by noting that the number of ‘-’s will always be odd. Balancing loops define systems that tend to reach equilibrium and not blow up, as reinforcing loops will do.

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Returning to our depiction of Enactment….

The ‘+/-’ in the feedback from Retention to Enactment and Selection indicates that there can be either positive or negative feedback. In organizing systems, negative feedback between Retention and Enactment/Selection indicate the presence of organizational ‘doubt’ or of organizational ‘forgetting.’ By contrast, positive feedback indicate the presence of strong ‘confidence’ and of organizational ‘remembering.’

Most organizations have bountiful confidence and remembering, and a dirth of doubt. Most managers are ever-concerned about ‘forgetting’ things, and hence manage the design of systems to intensify remembering. These systems not only introduce tremendous waste–the enforced remembering they induce engender entrenchment and organizational inflexibility.

Karl Weick maintains that it is more likely that organizations fail, not because they forget, but precisely because they remember too much for too long, and hence persist in doing the things they have always done, how they have always done them, regardless of how long it has been since the environment actually called for doing things that way (remember the duck-billed platypus).

A balance of confidence and doubt, of remembering and forgetting, engenders a healthy balance of retention and genuine learning, and hence of organizational adaptability.

More on all of this in coming posts.

Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd Edition, 1979.

[The following is adopted from a piece that I wrote on HumansAndComputing.org some years ago. It relates to my ongoing advocacy for the ‘texture’ of work, and the relationship between the presence of such ‘texture’ and the creativity and productive effectiveness of individuals and teams]

Malcolm Gladwell writes in “The Social Life of Paper” that the consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper has risen nearly 15 percent between 1995 and 2000. You might think this is just a matter of our not yet having broken old media habits–of not yet having embraced the digital world. But, according to Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, in their book Myth of the Paperless Office, there is a cognitive reason why people still prefer paper over pixels: paper provides unique affordances that computers cannot provide.

Here’s a story that Gladwell tells about air traffic controllers, who he refers to as the “quintessential knowledge workers.” Each air traffic controller uses three media: a computer radar screen, with little blips representing the planes he is responsible for; audio contact with the pilots and other controllers; little strips of paper they call “flight strips.”

Using these media, the flight controller constructs for himself a 3-D picture of all the planes he is responsible for. The construction and manipulation of artifacts within these media help the controller maintain situation awareness. On the subject of situation awareness, Mica Endsley writes:

“Situation awareness operates on three levels. One is perceiving. Second is understanding what the information means-analogous to reading comprehension. The highest level, though, is projection-the ability to predict which aircraft are coming in and when. You’ve got to be able to look into the future, probably by as much as five minutes.”

Those paper air strips are critical in helping air traffic controllers achieve situation awareness. Air traffic controllers often work in pairs, where each manipulate the strips. Movement of the strips, writing on them, etc., all play a critical part in the real-time activity of the situation awareness needed to safely land planes. Their movement act as cues which helps the controller keep the situation of his planes clear in his head. Moreover, when discussing the situation with their pairs, controllers move the strips around in order to animate various scenarios. As Gladwell observes, “The controller’s flight strips are like the piles of paper on a desk: they are the physical manifestations of what goes on inside his head.”

This, I believe, is a critical point. As human beings, we rely on aspects of our environment that are as much felt as they are thought, in order to trigger embodied memory and effective action–the quality of ‘flow,’ which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi writes so much about, which is important to forms of work requiring creativity and ingenuity.

In fact, the air-traffic-control center probably looks a lot like my office looks when I’m in a particularly creative flurry of activity: papers and piles everywhere. And yet, it is this apparent chaos that allows controllers to keep thousands of people safe each and every day.

There is movement afoot to force controllers to clean up there act-to get everything onto those nightmares of affordances: desktop computers! Expect to see an uptick in accidents and near-accidents.

I wrote elsewhere in this blog about the ‘texture’ of self-organizing teams. There I referred somewhat obliquely to the notion of a project ‘taskboard.’ Here, I want to describe what a ‘taskboard’ is and why I think it is so important to an agile team, particularly a team that is new to each other, or new to the agile way of working.

Here’s a picture of a taskboard (taken from Mike Cohn’s website):

Here’s a snapshot of an actual taskboard from a team I worked with some years ago:

In short, the taskboard shows progress for a given iteration or ’sprint’. At the beginning of an iteration, the team plans the work for that iteration, writing down tasks on index cards or PostIt notes, and pins or tapes them in the ‘To Do’ column. During the course of the iteration, the team meets each day to plan that day’s work. With a taskboard, team members can move tasks from the ‘To Do’ column into the ‘In Process’ column, or from the ‘In Process’ column into the ‘Verify’ column and so on. As the iteration unfolds, the team can readily see their progress as those cards move (or don’t move) across the board.

See Mike Cohn’s discussion of taskboards for more information on taskboards.

Yes, But … Why Taskboards Rather Than Software Tools?

Some organizations love to use software tools for managing iterations and sprints. I prefer taskboards for the following reasons:

1. They make things more visible in ways that make the most immediate and best sense to the team. Teams almost always find ways to customize their taskboard, through color coding of cards, adding stick-ons, etc. This makes it easy for a team member to, at any moment, look up at the board and see where things stand.

2. Taskboards facilitate more active and interactive iteration and sprint planning meetings. I find that when team members can plan together, informally, around a wall–taping and pinning work items up as they discover them and while they discuss the work they intend to do–with lots of chaos and talking and scheming, there is more aliveness and hence more alertness. Planning meetings go more quickly; they become an occasion for subtle forms of ‘team-building’ and bonding; and team members come to be more invested in the work since they so actively participating in defining it.

3. Taskboards facilitate more active and effective daily stand-up meetings. When teams can have their daily meetings around the taskboard, moving task cards as they discus their progress and what they commit to do for the day, everybody can see everything and, thus, have a clearer sense of what is happening. This builds confidence for team members. Also, it is another one of those ‘texture’ things which come together and support greater team collaboration, cross-functionality, and self-organization.

4. Gives managers a good reason to visit the room. With software tools its very easy to simply send management a report of the team’s progress. However, if there is a taskboard (along with burndown charts), a manager can walk into the team workroom and see in a matter of seconds what the team’s progress is. Meanwhile, they can get a sense of how the team is doing in other ways since, presumably, they will be working right there in the room.

5. Taskboards give teams yet another opportunity to put their personal stamp on their physical environment. When teams and groups can make their physical space their own it helps them in the important process of self-organizing since it allows them to define, together, aspects of their ‘identity’ as a team.

While software tools certainly help a team ‘manage’ their project, the loss of these subtler qualities is extremely expensive.

Often ignored in our reductionist quest for quicker access, organizational texture is the stuff of the everyday, the mundane, the material. And yet, it may be in those small, infinitesimal moments, where what’s most real occurs.

I once worked with a team that was struggling to come together as a team. Observing, for the first time, one of their project planning meetings, I saw that their work was stored in an Excel spreadsheet and that planning was conducted using a projection of that spreadsheet. Team members assumed the roles of spectators while the project manager and business analyst described the work items. The room was effectively a movie theatre of corpses.

For the next planning meeting (since this was an agile project, meetings were being held every two weeks), I invited the team to use index cards and for they themselves to assemble themselves during the meeting and write up their own work tasks. They agreed to try it. During that next planning meeting, chaos ensued: people were talking at the same time, scribbling indecipherable items down on notecards. By the end of the meeting, the team had covered the white board with hand-written tasks. They were fully engaged and ready to get started on their next iteration.

The low-tech index cards, with nearly indecipherable handwritten tasks, provided for those small, almost unnoticeable, infinitesimal, moments by which people most naturally come together.

The subsequent presence of those cards on the team’s taskboard–with idiosyncratic (and, again, often illegible) handwriting–reminded the team of who they are for themselves and each other. This was the beginning of that team self-organizing and coming together as a team.

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In denying or otherwise ignoring the qualitative dimension of human activity and interaction, modern management arrests the capacity for teams to emerge within their own coherence, to find their own humanity. Once this capacity is freed, however, it becomes an organization’s most vital strength.

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Commenting philosophically on matters related to this, Theodore Adorno writes:

“To yield to the object means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments. Scientific objectification, in line with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, tends to eliminate qualities and to transform them into measurable definitions. Increasingly, rationality itself is equated more mathematico with the faculty of quantification. While perfectly corresponding to the primacy of a triumphant natural science, this faculty is by no means inherent in the concept of the ratio itself, which is blinded mainly when it balks at the idea that qualitative moments on their part are susceptible of rational conception. (Adorno, 1995:43, emphasis added).

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Adorno, T. W. (1995). Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.