Vignette

What? (Premise, Context)

“Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems.” — John Gall

One of the biggest challenges working in product is getting people to hear you, listen to you, and believe you. To that end, researchers twist themselves into 🥨 trying to serve as credible actors to gain influence in organizations that are often structured to deflect interpretation and understanding. And while it’s important for ICs to recognize they’re not the organization’s top priority, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

With this familiar context, this case describes an initiative to expose veiled warnings at a simulated product flight test, which amounted to a early warning call for my teams to reconsider what they thought they knew about what they thought they were learning. This call needed to not only be openly acknowledged, it also represented a thorny hermeneutic event: a transformative cycle of questioning, understanding, and reinterpretation of meaning within a specific situation or experience. Put more plainly, this is an expository account of how I tackled an organization’s complex responses to gather more information before resolving conflicts of perception, communication, and expectations. I did this:

• In an unorthodox, emergent way

• Without the benefit of consulting a manager / director

• In challenging business environment and information landscape

• To resist a system-level drift toward incoherence — including the self-centeredness that comes with territoriality — in order to bolster organizational decision intelligence

Now what? (Strategy, Actions)

The trained research eye sees things that others don't. While embracing the prefigurative notion that the best defense is a strong offense — and while recognizing that learning in systems with time delays doesn’t come naturally to some — I formed a comprehensive view of the veiled warnings by weaving together elements of:

• Backcasting

• Cybernetics

• Lean Thinking

• Risk mitigation

• Emergent strategy

• Complexity science

• Research democratization

• Non-verbal communication (paralanguage)

• Underutilized rhetorical persuasion techniques

• Cognitive systems engineering concepts — see Figure 1

• Philosophy of science (e.g., non-falsifiability, post-positivism)

• The subtle, yet inescapable presence of biases in research theater

So what? (Value Adds, Impacts)

In the end, I effected a dynamic compromise with the CEO, who helped me actualize a $9,000,000 test laboratory (which represents the positive capability). This, in turn…

• Reduced cycle times by 56%

• Helped me gain cross-functional allies

• Exposed a problem the organization didn’t know it had

• Enhanced product sensibility and trust among flight operators

• Enabled engineers and their managers to develop solutions more reliably

• Improved organizational communication by connecting knowledge across teams

• Successfully launched the company’s first research service and knowledge infrastructure

• Extended my teams’ abilities to mobilize and maneuver when surprises occurred when adaptive behaviors were saturated

• Socialized more rigorous research on recurring bases, thus setting a foundation for more reliable and repeatable learning and, hence, decision-making

This study is also motivated by the service component of this common expression:

• Marketing gets them in ➡️ Product keeps them in ➡️ Service wins their trust