Navigating asymmetry, power relationships, and AI to embrace paradox and difference
Measure thrice, cut once: Leveraging human factors and social science to reflect on how — and how not — to lead a high visibility strategy kickoff for ATS work systems
Work Features
Organizational systems • Macroergonomics • Applied social science
Service design • Conflict resolution • Persuasion & Influence
Research: discovery, desk, empirical
Duration
3 weeks
Vignette
George Bernard Shaw might’ve put it best: The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
And, I would add, it takes a certain forbearance to unriddle, then make sense of, what did and didn’t transpire.
What? (Premise, Context)
In technology organizations small and large, it’s not unusual to spend at least 50% of one’s time in meetings. While this aspect is popularly lamented, such rituals often are the work. They’re inherently social and even political in nature, from frequent stakeholder engagements to performance reviews.
This case concerns a related construct: leading a project strategy kickoff, specifically concerning the dimensions of knowledge visibility, organizational processes, related projects, power relationships, and social learning surrounding them. Such flows are often the vectors that drive invention and innovation (versus “organizational culture,” a catch-all term that’s typically ill-defined, which tends to represent culture as deterministic). Here, a misinformed study brief about designing for different types of ATS partner integrations resulted in an unexpectedly knotty, misaligned, and failed kickoff due to:
Many influential cooks being in the kitchen, each of whom had their own agendas and understandings of the information landscape
The kickoff happening soon after:
A large scale re-org, which came on the heels of another re-org several months prior
My arrival at the company, which, moreover, offered no onboarding
Misalignment occurring despite my best laid plans. For instance:
Studying the problem space, or so I thought
Being unaware that key players were missing
Enhancing OKRs to POKRs (where P = “perspectives”)
Strategy never really being “just strategy”
The notion that control exists in complex adaptive systems, like organizations. It doesn’t. Full control is a fantasy.
Now what? (Strategy, Actions)
The show must go on, as research strategists functionally serve (1) as the glue on a team or project, and (2) as business therapists. Undeterred, I borrowed from the concepts below to identify, confront, direct, and re-align the communication and ownership issues that are prone to arise when designing enterprise systems, especially amidst re-orgs, which have become the new black.
A type of three-body problem: Figures 1 and 2
Incident response: Figure 3
Systems Convening: Figure 4
Boundary objects: Figure 5
Macroergonomics: Figure 6
Group cognition: e.g., macro, situated, distributed, team, social
Law of Stretched Systems: New technologies are invariably exploited to achieve new intensities and tempos of activity, with development competing to outpace, and take precedence over, nature. But nature cannot be fooled. When you fail to accept the reality of cumulative debts — which includes debts of morale — organizations set themselves up to be taken advantage of by:
Newfound complexities
Leading their systems (technological, informational, communications, workload) to lose the ability to conduct even their most foundational tasks, which degrades basic coherence
So what? (Value Adds, Impacts)
By triangulating the above, and being motivated by impact over recognition — since, after all, strategy and research typically happens backstage anyway — I accomplished the following:
Surfaced latent blockers related to organizational constraints, territoriality, and information asymmetry. In so doing, I successfully:
Navigated discordant power relationships, learned different teams’ playbooks, and gained allies
Linked several teams that didn’t customarily communicate with each other
Identified a generative AI fly in the ointment, which was sacrificing realism for scale and efficiency
Cleared enough air to allow key owners to collaborate
Re-scoped and rewrote the study brief, which meant identifying enough enabling constraints to proceed
Launched the study
Acknowledged the kickoff’s shortcomings, including persnickety political questions I usually dig into on the front end, but didn’t
Socialized the lessons learned to leadership and product peers: e.g., the flow and recombination of ideas, practices, lucky errors, and chance insights
Click images below to enlarge
Figure 1: The famous 3-body problem from classical mechanics happens to apply to workplace behavior, which emerges from the interaction of 3 components: someone (the person), somewhere (the environment), and something (the task). When they interact, as with gravitational bodies, the system becomes non-linear and complex in ways that resist traditional cause-and-effect thinking — and, more broadly, equilibrium — as prediction has inherent limits in complex systems. This is why best laid plans still invariably lead to unpredictable, emergent events.
How do teams navigate chaos dynamics in open systems? By monitoring and identifying the affordances that emerge from the interactions of feedback loops of perception (of information) and action. Traditional change management tends to fall short here because its reductiveness favors linear closed-loop systems (like a manufacturing floor), where root-cause analysis works.
Figure 2: A few common “triads” that trip up cross-functional teams.
In the context of this case, latent blockers emerged from numerous destabilizing bodies, such as:
Acceptable API types
The use of AI
Successive re-orgs
Shifting roles
Unclear norms
Territoriality, siloed thinking
Vacuums also exert generative forces, without which intelligence loses tensile strength. For instance:
Missing people & context
Power & knowledge vacuums
Figure 3: The overall function of incident response is to detect, assess, contain, and resolve disruptions — quickly and effectively — while minimizing harm and learning from the event. It’s the organizational immune system for unexpected failures, whether technical, security-related, or operational.
Figure 4: Systems Convening is a distinct leadership stance that holds space across boundaries to align unlikely partners and nurture long-term social learning in complex environments. Relational and contextual in nature, “conveners” create conditions for change by weaving together people and ideas across silos, often without formal authority.
Figure 5: A Gantt chart is a classic example of a boundary object. It can mean “timeline” to a PM, “resource allocation” to HR, and “deadline pressure” to developers. Its impact is that it bridges gaps by helping teams communicate through the object, even if they don’t share the same jargon or mental models.
In this case, API specifications, technical documentation, and product roadmaps served as boundary objects across the 7 cross-disciplinary teams represented in the kickoff meeting. As well as 3 teams that weren’t initially present, which I individually consulted with one by one afterward.
The social equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife within an infrastructure (e.g., adaptable, multipurpose), boundary objects bridge different stakeholder groups without requiring full consensus. They facilitate coordination across communities with different perspectives, goals, and practices.
These objects contain a managerial bias, but the many-to-many mapping supports situated actions in individual-site uses by offering flexible scaffolding (robust structure yet without rigidity), where several obligatory points of passage are negotiated with several kinds of allies, including manager-to-manager types.
This concept has been widely adopted in organizational theory, information systems, science & technology studies, and computer-supported cooperative work.
Figure 6: Assessing work systems processes in macroergonomics
Alternative are evaluated by measuring each alternative set of activities and then comparing them against each other. For this process we refer to the major decision criteria and the preliminary decision table shown here.