Performing Statements

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.

The Components of Vaill’s Learning System

What types of learning are important for people who manage “permanent white water”? Vaill describes seven interrelated modes of learning that comprise his system (an integrated, day-to-day practice). Below I’ve selected representative quotes that capture an important aspect of each type, but I’m not attempting to encapsulate his complete definitions which are more nuanced than the isolated quotes may suggest.

Self-Directed Learning
What it’s like to turn to experts when you are self-directed “We seek help not from a position of dependency but on our own terms, and we are conscious of our self-directed stance. We have questions to ask the experts, questions that grow out of our experience to date with the material, frustrating as it has been. We have reasons, which remain conscious and clear, for wanting to continue to struggle with the learning. Our questions are particular . . . “ (60)

Creative Learning
While managers aren’t generally engaged in the hands on creating of a thing in itself, they must learn how to manage the process of creating things in new ways: “The creativity of the managerial leader is to shape ways of working, ways of structuring human relationships, ways of focusing and budgeting resources, ways of evaluating progress that do not kill it in the process” (65). While not as glamorous as the creativity of an oil painter or musician, those four tasks cover some of the most difficult learning managers are asked to do.

Expressive Learning
If you consider our perception of time’s forward movement as the essence of consciousness, “learning by doing” is key. “. . . we learn the roles and the timing of the various elements in relation to each other . . . we learn the relationship of the activity to the wider setting in which it occurs, and we learn how the activity is spread out in time as well as in space. That is, since most activities of any complexity occur in a time stream, we learn the pacing they require, their rhythms and durations” (67).

Feeling Learning
If you are trying to learn in an environment where the pace, pressure, and complexity leave you distracted, anxious, and breathless, you’d better have a good sense of what it feels like when the learning process is working. “Self-directed learning, creative learning, and expressive learning all involve a whole range of feelings, among which curiosity, patience, courage, and self-esteem are particularly important. Inevitably, negative feelings arise also . . . we need to develop self-acceptance of the feelings that arise during learning because these feelings are part of the learning. They are not, as institutional learning would have it, annoyances which must be put up with in the learning process” (73-74).

On-line Learning
Vaill means something different than you may assume. Writing in 1996, “Thanks to the computer revolution, the term on-line has come into currency to describe a process that occurs simultaneously with all the other processes of the system in which it is imbedded. Thus, on-line learning is a process that occurs in the midst of work and of life rather than in an artificial, sheltered environment” (76).

Continual Learning
Think of an expression like “We’re rebuilding the airplane while we’re flying it.” Because we are constantly having to adapt to new technology and new circumstances, “We do not need competency skills for this life. We need incompetency skills, the skills of being effective beginners” (81).

Reflexive Learning
To the point that these components must work in harmony to be effective, “once we understand the practical function of reflexive learning, we can see that learning about learning is precisely determining the extent to which any learning activity possesses the first six qualities” (87).

The Problem Vaill Describes as “Permanent Whitewater”

Like the Web, companies are people systems. And people systems are shaped by people constantly making changes to the system. Speaking specifically about corporations, Vaill writes

Some of these changes are official, meaning that they go through a careful design review process and are incorporated at least somewhat planfully into the system (although designs and plans are no guarantee that changes will not create major disturbances). But just as many changes are informal—shortcuts, innovations, Band-Aids of one sort or another that individuals and groups apply to the system flow to solve the local problems they experience. These spontaneous innovations create a lot of unanticipated permanent white water for others upstream or downstream in the system. Valuable innovations are the positive result of this age of individual “empowerment” that we live in, but the cost is likely to be continuing system disturbances owing to members’ nonstop tinkering. However, because the tinkering can be seen as members’ way to cope with the stresses and contradictions they experience in the system’s operation, we have to permit as much local innovation as we can. For if members and users of the system do not do well in coping with stress and change, the macrosystem (dependent on their will and judgment) will degrade, even to the point of collapse. (8-9)

Clamping down on the people who manage the chaos is counterproductive. First Vaill explains why attempting to address chaos through process doesn’t work. His description is amusing and readily recognizable to anyone who’s had to endure this response (for example when people have a big idea but later can’t understand the outcomes of the activities they’ve mandated).

Faced with these conditions, it is understandable that some systems designers should introduce more controls on innovation, more reports to fill out, and more committees to clear before a modification can be adopted. Their impulse to control works against innovation at the operational level, of course, and is experienced by those with their hands on the equipment as a proliferation of red tape: in effect, an increase in the permanent white water. Thus, at any moment, the system is drawing out of both its operators and its nominal designers / controllers behavior that increases the complexity and fragility of the system, and just as importantly, frays people’s nerves and punishes their efforts to make the system run smoothly. (9)

Another equally frustrating approach is also described by Vaill: automating the process. Automation cuts human creativity out of the equation. Of course it’s not only a bad idea to jettison the benefits of creativity, it’s rarely even possible since humans are creative enough to identify new channels through which they can inflict their will on a system.

Another strategy system designers and controllers use to defend against degradation is to remove the human component by automating the system. This, however, can never be more than a local and sharply circumscribed solution. There will always be a larger sociotechnical macrosystem containing the automated component, and in this larger system, human will and judgment will continue to be decisive. We cannot escape the consequences of human suffering and ineptitude in the permanent white water of our systems. (9)

So rather than process or automation, Vaill proposes an existential strategy, “learning as a way of being.” On the one hand, it is a “consciousness and skill” (10) that seems to be pretty much the same as the “learning as a way of being” advocated at liberal arts colleges. On the other hand, Vaill is engaging an audience with a pressing need for results.