John Hagel’s vision makes a good subject for Vaill’s methods

Although Vaill’s book was published a decade ago, it’s still quite relevant and seems particularly to resonate with issues that arise around web services. In his book Out of the Box, John Hagel describes web services in the context of trends that should scare any manager not comfortable leading through white water. He also has ideas about learning that mesh nicely with Vaill’s approach to managing process in complex systems. To get an overview of these ideas listen to this podcast about the new book Hagel coauthored with John Seely Brown, The Only Sustainable Edge.

One aspect of that title’s meaning is the idea that key learning takes place at the organizational edges where enterprises collaborate. Managing that learning is the key to strategic advantage. As companies shed business types in order to focus where they have world class capabilities, they will need to collaborate effectively with organizations that can deliver the business functions that get outsourced. (A simple example would be a firm that specializes in product innovation and commercialization using a vendor for customer relationship management.) It’s a web services world because such arrangements require flexible and low cost connections to integrate partners into a smoothly functioning system. As multiple companies with complementary business specialties come together, each member is driven to accelerate their own performance and deepen their particular expertise in order to deliver business value.

Within an interconnected business ecosystem, leadership becomes a function of directing your organization’s learning to develop the increased specialization that will drive business value across the system. But when you are asking managers to bet their success on a system that extends beyond the enterprise itself, you are asking them to jump into a continual white water situation, and here Vaill’s ideas can be usefully brought into play.

Vaill identifies three special learning challenges that apply where people are grappling with the inter-subjectivities of a continual learning situation. When managers are balking and feeling a loss of control, these are key points to bear in mind about their anxiety:

1. You can never know everything there is to know about a system, so be aware that you are asking your audience to abandon the comfort of their autonomous boundaries “because a system is open to its environment . . . and because all its internal elements influence each other and the whole in complex and often unpredictable ways” (109)
2. Managerial leaders are deeply involved members of the organizations they are trying to understand as systems, so remember that the observation affects the observer, “inquiry into a social system alters its dynamics and has an impact back on the inquirer” (110).
3. “Systems thinking is content-free in its essentials” so remember that people don’t like to think in abstractions, and you if you force them to, then in a literal sense they “may feel they do not know what they are talking about” (110) Give them something concrete to hang onto.

Later in his book, Vaill presents Keen’s approach to filtering out subjective noise like the challenges above. There are three sequential elements: phenomenological reduction, imaginative variation, and the interpretation. Moving through these modes creates content that can usefully flesh out amorphous abstractions.

1. Phenomenological reduction is “a decision to try to let the thing we encounter be what it is, separate from our perception of it” (161). This step helps you remove yourself from the equation and look at the thing qua thing. Vaill uses the example of visitors from one culture traveling to meet with business partners from another. If you want to figure out the right way to structure the visit don’t start by focusing on your role, but by mapping out what it is that makes up a “visit” so you understand all the components of the dynamic before assigning roles.
2. “Imaginative variation is the almost playful combining and recombining of the various modes of the situation’s being” (161-162) This type of brainstorming starts to put us back in control as we rearrange the composite elements of a situation or project.
3. Imaginative play then frees us by introducing new possibilities that lead to actionable interpretations. “The act of imaginative variation actively releases the phenomenon from the control of our values and perceptual categories. We begin to see what a profusion any situation actually is. Out of this process, we could begin to form interpretations of the likelihood and the desirability of the various scenarios.” (162)

As a tool in your bag of tricks, Learning as a Way of Being offers a way to approach the types of knowledge problems generated by information solutions. In the case of business strategy for a networked economy, it even offers some practical advice which could be extended out much more rigorously than I have with the simple juxtaposition above. If you take Hagel's ideas seriously, then Vaill offers a very important approach to managing learning.