Mashup: Emoji Kombat as Estuarine Doing

<these views my own and may not correlate to those of my employer>

Couple of weeks back I launched my transformational martial art ?? for Teams and Slack-driven workplaces. It's called Emoji Kombat:

This prompted discussion in the chat about the merit/demerit of two approaches to transformation in complex systems:

i) Lead with playful experiments and messing about

ii) Lead with known good approaches to change grounded in known good theory and practice

I start with i). I am an intuit when it comes to transformation—I smell what is needed—and my work is experimental, restless and immediate. In a sense I am a Firestarter ?? an important role in provoking change:

These I carry out alongside a tenured day job (am currently a project manager, used to be an Enterprise architect etc.). This affords me an embedded context within which to practice my transformational art. Think karate instructor working in a busy pizza restaurant provoking discipline and flow.

This contrasts with people coming in from outside and validity in this approach also. Both useful, both have their limits. Main difference: you cannot easily make a business from my approach. It is more like transformation philanthropy, but you can often penetrate deep into where an organisation is at its grassroots.

My blogging alter ego (humour, exageration, satire, esoterica) is a formula for expressing my experimental results while preserving the confidentiality of my employer and colleagues. Boundaries.

Today I stumbled across a transformational metaphor put together called Estuarine Mapping by Dave Snowden :

It's an easy read (the advantages of metaphors—we can already tap on our physical world experience) and there seemed to be many parallels to what I do. So let us explore alignment between Estuarine Mapping and Emoji Kombat.

Synchonistically, the very first estuary picture I pulled up on google was Crantock Bay in Cornwall and I have been there. This is in my cover image mash-up. Friends, this augers well.

So what are the elements of Estuarine Mapping?

I will explore these Blogtalmud style with text from the article in bold and mine normal: Where there is agreement ?? and where there is divergece ??. And my experiments and evidential results denoted ??.

The approach overall is based on three key aspects of working with complex systems:

Initiating and monitoring micro-nudges, lots of small projects rather than one big project so that success and failure are both (non-ironically) opportunities

?? Yes essential to Emoji Kombat, DevOps, Iterative process, Lean, Evolution etc.

?? Teams chat exchanges of thousands of messages over weeks involving 20 or so individuals affords many opportunities for initiating and monitoring micro-nudges—like upping the humour and compassion emojis and seeing who joins in, Over time even stale chats turn into a party. My artist cousin Vanessa (another inheritor of the Hallett/Hart trickster gene) described similar experiment at school, making a low humming noise in class and witnessing the volume rising to cacophony, confirming her hypothesis that any sound made by a teenager elicited a louder sound by another in the peer group ad absurdum. Cf:

Failure being an opportunity is essential to #Antifragility (see Chaos Engineering ). And growth of trust and indeed evolution happens as a result of systemic vulnerabilities and errors. It seems a shame that Dave has to label this explicitly as non-ironic. But he is correct to since intolerance of failure is a common complexity #antipattern reinforced in our education systems, workplaces etc.

Understanding where we are, and starting journeys with a sense of direction rather than abstract goals

?? Yes essential to Emoji Kombat, my direction is towards playful, diversity of interaction (I have a longer-term strategy of compassion, vulnerability, trust-building and play and that is more abstract I suppose but not essential. If was being really finicky we could say this is an ??.

Understanding, and working with propensities and dispositions, managing both so that the things you desire have a lower energy cost than the things you don’t

?? Yes essential to Emoji Kombat. Am going to use Occam's Razor to slice off propensity ??. This statement relates to both Behavioural Economics (telegraphed by "micro-nudges ") and the Ecocycle/Panarchy:

1. I have a large disposition towards creative play and compassion
2. Some people don't, and some are but they have blockages, sometimes related to trauma
3. Most people are in the middle but many jobs do not afford the opportunities to express this. Or do they? (more on this later)

?? Pre-Pandemic we had car parks, water coolers, canteens etc. Spaces where we could mingle and banter. We don't have so many of these spaces in Zoom meetings and Teams chats. Or do we?

Showing play and compassion with Emoji Kombat means I operate at a lower energy level—I am being my #YOUnique #Self . I am also leading by example, breaking the ice (lowering the energy level required to break social convention as I already went first so it is already broken). This is dam-busting : small scale exorcism of a broken interaction dynamic AKA community leadership. It is also playing with energies and flow.

To make this explicit: my sustained intervention is an example of Niels Pflaeging 's. "flipping" to allow people who are naturally (at a lower energy level) more playful and compassionate to be themselves at work:

And my observation mirrors Niels' own: change can actually happen quite quickly, though its implications, particularly in large organisations can take a while to play out. They can also suffer reversals and even defeat due to what I call the Steve Jackson Illuminati New World Order Law, that is:

We are all members of one or more mindset clades fighting for supremacy over ourselves and our environments in a global influence game, often operating below the level of conscious awareness

I am also mining another influence trope, Sympathetic Magic described in Fraser's Golden Bough (the only book I own with a real bookworm hole):

This is essentially how advertising works:

And another Sympathetic Magic analysis here: when I am compassionate and have fun while being good at my job and a leader I am lowering the energy levels associated with seeing these things as complementary while raising the energy levels requried by those who see them as mutually exclusive. This is similar to tropes in the Tesla Anti-Handbook Handbook:

This quote:

Make sure you’re having fun at work - meet new friends, push yourself in new ways, try new things. If you aren’t having fun at some level, you’ll be unhappy. We don’t want that. We want you to work hard, love what you do, and have fun.

Taking stock #1

So far does Emoji Kombat align to estuarine mapping? Or perhaps rephrased as estuarine doing (and BONUS the Tesla Anti-Handbook Handbook)?

Cf: #doit J. Brian Hennessy and Strategic Doing Ed Morrison and Scott Hutcheson

Yes 100% ??

The great thing about Emoji Kombat is related to affordances:

That is to say it is easy for everyone to use emojis as a gateway to expressing compassion and play in Teams chats and don't need permission, training or instructions (well occasionally people need to know how to pull up the emoji menu ). There's even a button for it.

The?affordances?of the environment are what it?offers?the animal, what it?provides?or?furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb?to afford?is found in the dictionary, the noun?affordance?is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.[3] —James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception 1979

(back to the article)

Rewilding is mentioned and Emoji Kombat rewilds more diverse and natural human interaction in Teams chats ??.

Estuarine mapping – outline process

to be clear this is a bare outline, we expect this is a method that will require training and some mentoring for next year or so.?I’m still adding to it and modifying it each time I take it out.

1: map the constraints

Hmm some divergence ?? and ??. Like most facilitators I intuit the social dynamics problems immediately (map the constraints), patching my hypotheses as new information reveals itself. No training required within the context of my group dynamics skillset and practice. That being said, others may require training in this, particularly those experiencing low affordance. And indeed I may require training if I were to apply these skills to other domains where I lack expertise (unless I can recognise and replicate the pattern).

My guess is that most of us do this with social interaction (neurodivergence notwithstanding).

In the Field Guide kit we have Hexi cards for each of these and I normally arrange them in two triangles to facilitate the process.

1. Rigid or fixed, like a sea wall or dyke
2. Elastic or Flexible
3. Tethers – like a climbing rope they snap into place when you need them
4. Permeable – some things can get through
5. Phase shift – like Roe v Wade, there is a process in the system which can produce a sudden significant change
6. Dark constraints – a reference to dark matter, we can see an effect but not what is creating the said effect

Sounds like a great resource will acquire a copy. Again I intuit much of this stuff but in doing so I do forget some aspects so useful to have a reference. Emoji Kombat can:

1. Poke holes in dykes so the water flows
2. Take risks until I go too far like an edgy comedian and get snapped-back
3. Exploit permeability - many people react well to compassion and play even when it is not apparent
4. And with prolonged exposure Emoji Kombat can cause a phase shift from a stiff team to a jamming (cf. Bricolage) team
5. Dark constrains. Yes I am part-Jedi, part-Sith so know about these. Most people are really. To start to get into Dark constraints in the human domain read this and this and this

I am going to chalk this up as a big fat ??.

2: energy cost of change and time to change

The basic grid for this is shown above – every constraint is placed on a grid between the energy cost of change against the time to change.?In that process, they are also clustered and if the process is manual then impact is indicated by colour coding or overlay. Clusters may be relabelled as needed.

Yes mapping these to grids I might do if I was attempting this at a larger scale. Indeed I used similar when I worked as an enterprise architect. I do this in my head for social dynamics work. So I am going to say ?? and ??.

Setting an example as a playful leader I am reducing the energy cost and time to change for other employees in my social circle to join in based on their dispositions and affordances. I am providing a simple pattern they can choose to copy.

This is also very Boston Matrix/Stacey Matrix-like, Strategic Doing, Confluence etc. I like Cartesian and having a coordinate system is one of the main things that makes this interesting. This is also starting to look like Ecocycle and Panarchy and that is a good thing:

3: the counter-factual border

A line is then negotiated (shown in red above) where everything to the top right of the line is very unlikely to change.?In other words, the energy cost or time horizon of change means that it is out of consideration within the time horizon for strategy or planning.?It has been fascinating watching people at this stage, as the act of drawing the line creates a rich discussion in which things are moved backwards and forwards, and frequently broken up or redefined in the process.

Once this is done monitors are created for the line, and/or indicator or early warning constraints are described.- if unexpectedly things start to change you need to know fast.?I’ve also started to create a set of layers of warning here but I’ll teach that in Berlin.

All of this creates a set of micro-projects.

Modal discourse concerns alternative ways things can be, e.g., what might be true, what isn’t true but could have been, what should be done. This entry focuses on?counterfactual modality?which concerns what is not, but could or would have been. What if Martin Luther King had died when he was stabbed in 1958?(Byrne 2005: 1)? What if the Americas had never been colonized? What if I were to put that box over here and this one over there? These modes of thought and speech have been the subject of extensive study in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, history, and many other allied fields. These diverse investigations are united by the fact that counterfactual modality crops up at the center of foundational questions in these fields.—Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Counterfactuals. Yeah. Stephen King:

#Whatif , #imagine , #askyourself , J. Brian Hennessy , put on your board shorts and join LeTunes Hangin' on LeWave ??.

This is also related to the famous management consulting trope of impact vs. ease of achieving, used to identify Low Hanging Fruit ??.

So far sensible with great derivations from the literature and very much aligns to Emoji Kombat ??

4: vulnerability?border

The line on the bottom?right?left indicates where change could happen quickly and that is where impact matters.?If things in this domain have no impact then we can ignore them.?If there are high-impact ones then we work on containment strategies as a matter of urgency.

This can create another set of micro-projects.

Cf. Flipping/Beta Codex mentioned earlier and mainstream consultancy practice.

Many of us exploit these dynamics, looking for the optimum angle/play. The hammer hitting the diamond at the right spot to cleve. Emoji Kombat and indeed any successful intervention strategy gets a ??.

Note: a really great Permaculture share on importance of edges and marginals from Alex Papworth :

5: acting on constraints and constructors

Now we identify which of the constraint clusters are acting as constructors, that is to say not acting as a barrier but instead creating a replicable outcome (a process, a ritual etc).?There will be some constraints which are neither barriers or constructors and I’m starting to think that there are ordered and complex constructors so expect the language to get more sophisticated here.

For all such clusters, we decide which should be maintained, which amended and which destroyed.?Where we haven’t got anything but we need something then again it’s down to safe-to-fail experiments to create them.?Overall the more we know the more we are able to manage

And another set of micro-projects arises

Hmm ... so this in not immediately understandable so will read and ponder.

[A constraint cluster] not acting as a barrier but instead creating a replicable outcome (a process, a ritual etc).

Ritual allows me introduce Johnson & Scholes Cultural Web.

And from there ... Mornington Crescent:

I am on familiar territory here, having coded constraint satisfaction and optimisation problems as part of my AI degree back in the 80's and learning about them again in the 2000's while working for Sky Media (scheduling ads is constraint satisfaction and optimisation).

Up until now everything has been in alignment. And indeed this is true of 5. Here is my analysis:

This is scrappy agreed and given more time I would explore more nuances. There were three main clusters in my mind: those that needed a catalyst and encouragement (green), those that just didn't get it (black) and those that were important group influencers that did not yet get it but were likely to in my estimation (conterfactuals), once given exposure (not a lot of effort on my part but requiring time—I used a well-run Agile Stand Up to reinforce a flat turn-taking social contract) and help clearing some blockages as I perceived them (requiring intervention and effort for me and individuals concerned). Another ??

6: set a?direction?of travel

Here we use the?more like this, fewer like those?change approach which includes vector measurement and targeting along with more conventional approaches,?Less of a North Star (I’m not wild about that term) more something that recognises the direction of the wind and the currents as well as the fitness of the crews.?The following of stars is for Magi and the gifts you have to carry are costly …

Nice line but in the middle of the ocean with no radar I will use a sextant:

My own North Star is the following:

Yes to recognising wind and currents. Essential to Emoji Kombat: ??

?? An example is spotting when someone in my love-bombed community is taking a risk or doing something new. This is a huge opportunity, an edge, a marginal, an inflection point.

7: combine the micro-projects into portfolios

Finally, all the projects are mapped onto Cynefin, clustered and developed as action plans – lots in common with the knowledge mapping approach in the Cynefin wiki.

No I don't do this ??. Would like to understand more about the purpose here to determine whether it is something i should start doing.

Key to all of this

The domain between the lines is the effective area in which you can act. The domain of strategic and operational possibilities.?And the philosophy is simple: find out where you are and what is possible before you leap into the whole vision and goals thing.

So what I got from here is clustering cf. unsupervised learning is a good thing. Agree and this has been deal with above so ??.

Why estuarine?

Well, it was partly to counter?constructional law?to be honest with its threaded and overall (from my perspective) linear approach. I’m also tackling many of the more na?ve aspects of ‘flow’ value or otherwise at the moment as its inherently linear and assumed to be progressive.?I’ll be thinking and talking about CAS and Lean in Florence this coming week by the way as one element of that

It is a useful metaphor. ??

In an estuary (but not a delta)?the water flows in and flows out.?There are things you can do only at the turn of the tide.?There may be granite cliffs which you only have to check every decade or so, sandbanks that are checked daily and so on.?An Estuary is a rich metaphor, there are four types of estuaries, and debates about if or when a Fiord is an estuary or not – so lots to play with as we develop this

Absolutely. ??

So I’m getting this out into the public domain so that authorship is clear and to get feedback – we are now running this for organisations in beta as well as starting public training so feel free to get in touch.

Yes a good collection of techniques clustered round an evocative metaphor.

Conclusions

1. Does Emoji Kombat align closely to Estuarine Doing? Yes since Estuarine Mapping is a great collection of widely-used analysis tools
2. Does this blog shed any light onto preferences around validity of approach to working with complex systems?

E.g.

i) Lead with playful experiments and messing about

ii) Lead with known good approaches to change grounded in known good theory and practice

The answer I would give is this: wrong question - successful approaches are iterative in nature and switching from one to the other is the Zebratree technique I learnt from the late Professor Harry Barrow in 1988 when using Waltz Filtering and Relational Joining to do edge detection and image recognition (written in Pop-11). Cf. Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation. The similar technique can be employed to solve Einstein's 5-Smokers Problem :

Because working with complex systems is iterative we can flip between theory and practice and theory and practice and ... however we see fit.

It's like the OODA loop, Lou Hayes, Jr , Ben Ford : it doesn't really matter where we start.

QED.

Chaos, kindness, flow.

RIP Harry, you made me a better problem-solver. ??

??