What Do You Mean "We"?

Originally published on Substack

One of the most powerful sequences of moves that we can make, in many contexts and domains, is drawing a circle, calling it "We", and deliberately placing others inside it.

As a simple example, what happens when we bring an obstructing stakeholder inside the circle? Or a potentially powerful enabler whose interests we are or are not currently aligned to?

By?not?including certain others, we might be committing a type of?epistemic injustice. Besides being an injustice, making the choice to not include others in our determinations of what’s real, what’s happening, what matters, and therefore what we ought to do is often a losing strategy.

I’m a big fan of this simple little framework called the?Innovator’s Compass.

As someone who’s also a fan of far more fancy, inaccessible models and frameworks (*adjusts monocle*), I get the impression I’m not?supposed to?like something this simplistic and accessible (can you truly be an expert without being some kind of gatekeeper?) but I do genuinely love it. It captures a lot of useful considerations, steps, and practices for people trying to navigate some kind of problem. It aligns with just about every other design and problem-solving framework I’m familiar with, and it doesn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough (what good after all is a tool that’s too heavy for a person to lift):

• Start with who (eat my shorts, Sinek)
• Engage in ethnographic inquiry prior to finalizing problem-framing
• Come up with lots of ideas
• Do some experiments
• Iterate (building on everything you’ve learned)

In my view, the most powerful question on the Innovators’ Compass is the first one:

“Who is involved?”

I have had this experience a number of times, where people ask me for assistance with some kind of design or problem-solving effort, and after a brief exploration, I end up telling them their next step is?stakeholder mapping. Often they’ve skipped happily by the question of “who” under the assumption it’s an easy one. But it is extremely?not?an easy one, and how you answer it ought to have strong implications for what happens next. When we draw a circle and title it “who is involved”, adding people to that circle means something far more profound than just an acknowledgment of their presence.

It means that we’re?involving?them.

It means that when we ask and answer the subsequent questions of “what’s happening?” and “what matters most?”, we’re obliged to cede ontological, epistemological, and hermeneutical ground to those individuals that we are bringing within the circle.

real quick:

Ontology - What exists

Epistemology - How we know about what exists

Hermeneutics - How we interpret things

When we answer these questions, we allow these involved/included others to contribute to considerations of what exists, to bring in their own methods of knowing about those things, and to offer their own interpretations of the information in front of us.

This is actually a way bigger commitment than I think a lot of people understand,?easily illustrated by the frequency with which we encounter epistemic and hermeneutical conflict. Just look at how often we impose our own interpretations on one another, or deny the interpretations of others.

What’s happening? Depends who you ask…

What matters most? We generally opt for advocating rather than inquiring on such things…

If they are involved—if we are involving them—we are constructing a bigger “we”, and as that larger identity changes, the kinds of stories, goals, considerations, and interventions we engage in must change.

Simon Wardley and others within the?Wardley Mapping community?often reference the idea of?Power With?and?Power Over. In a?blog post from 2021, Simon puts it beautifully while describing a Wardley map of culture:

When we focus on the "We", we're focused on our collectives ability to control our environment (see figure 2 below). It's all about?power with others?i.e. we can defend or build a new land, we can create freedoms for everyone. Often this is represented through concepts like co-operation, labour unions and in our social contract to each other. As MLK pointed out "the freedom of collective bargaining” has been critical to many of our most cherished rights.

When we focus on the "Me", we're focused on our individuality and our agency i.e. our ability to make choices, to change things and to exploit the environment to suit ourselves. Not everyone has the same agency. In the West, the wealthy have more agency than the poor. As the Adventures of Stevie V would say "money talks". That agency requires us to have some power over the collectives that we belong to and hence?power over?others. Often this is represented through concepts like hierachy, ownership and exclusion. I've show this in figure 3.

Sue Borchardt, who I discovered through the Wardley Mapping community, puts it this way in a?blog post from 2021?referencing Hahrie Han:

Han frames power as: I have?power?over?you if I have resources that act on your interests. She says I have?power?with?you if I commit my resources to your interests. (Note:?power over?and?power with?are ideas first introduced in the early 1924 (!!) by social worker and early organizational management thinker?Mary Parker Follett?in her book?Creative Experience)

In recent months, I’ve learned a different way of understanding the power of inclusive, constructed collectives, through the lens of evolutionary theory.

I’m just finishing up David Sloan Wilson’s book ‘This View of Life’. It is an accessible introduction to how evolutionary theory and its processes and dynamics of heritability, variance, fitness, and selection can be extended well beyond the realm of biology and into the social sciences, informing how we think of behavior and the design, strategies, and intentional evolution of social systems, even into the domain of policy-making.

I had previously read Nichola Raihani’s excellent book?‘The Social Instinct’, a sort of grand history of biological and social cooperation in evolving creatures and social groups. One of the insights that really stuck in my brain from this was the role that identity boundaries have on evolution. Beginning with the very origins of advanced metabolic life, the capture of biological components into a collective organism has played a critical role in the?complexification?of organic systems.

Raihani opens chapter 2 of her book with a quote from Rudolf Virchow (1859):

The individual is, accordingly, a unified commonwealth in which all parts work together for a common end.

Even the cells of our body have organelles such as mitochondria, which play specific functions (e.g. metabolism), a phenomenon only possible because they are “captured” as parts of those unified wholes and provided for within the system. Raihani refers to organisms as “Russian nesting dolls, with inner dolls representing genes, genomes and cells”. The relationship between parts and wholes in organic life must be mutualistic, because if they compete rather than cooperate between levels, they will dysfunction, for example with the relationship becoming parasitic rather than mutualistic. The capture/unification of these components into the individuals that make up the animal kingdom is what made evolution at the individual level possible, because “the inner dolls have only one route to the next generation. They must travel inside the outer doll, the individual”. In ‘This View of Life’,?Wilson makes the case for evolutionary processes acting on higher levels of organization based on those individuals forming into unified wholes themselves, though I should note that Raihani is explicit in her aversion to calling these “superorganisms” as one would an ant or bee colony—specifically because goal-alignment in the case of unified humans is often fleeting, and humans act in?both?self-interest and collective interest, with the latter occurring only under certain circumstances (whereas insect colonies cohere much more consistently, as a core design feature). She says that “we can identify individuals by spotting the level at which the design features seem to cohere, and to pull in the same direction.” Systematic coherence and consistency from generation to generation, facilitated by genetic heritability in the physiological case and cultural remembering in the cultural case, is what enables evolution, a type of learning at the level of the larger system. Variation, through mutation and exploration, becomes a type of learning that enables the individual or the group to increase fitness within a context (adaptation). These dynamics of evolution occur at the point that a thing becomes an “individual” - an organism or superorganism, and selection causes this “learning” to spread across a population of individuals. Wilson’s point is that when human cohere and become unified in their goals, when they “pull in the same direction” as a coherent unit, then selection can now occur at the level of groups. The research seems to show that groups with certain “core design principles”, for example that are pro-social in nature and prevent selfish individuals from

Biologically, the complexification of life has been enabled by nature drawing larger circles to incorporate functional components into a “me”, with all of them pulling in the same direction. Culturally, the advancement of groups can be facilitated by drawing larger circles to incorporate individuals into a “we”, replacing protocols of selfishness among competing individuals with cooperative, pro-social design principles that keep them all pulling in the same direction (balanced against meeting their needs and respecting their autonomy).

I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept of identity boundaries within the domain of social systems. How we draw the circle and define the “individual” has a direct impact on how the system evolves.

Bringing this back to the example of stakeholder mapping in a problem-solving scenario, I want to re-emphasize that a failure to bring particularly powerful others inside the circle has been a primary failure-mode that I have witnessed. Many problem-solvers seem to opt for a perspective which views other organizations and offices as aspects of the environment within which they are seeking to evolve. They are perceived as obstacles or constraints on the environment, and from what I’ve seen this is frequently a losing strategy. By placing them outside the circle, we are priming ourselves to attempt to exert?power over?them—to influence or manipulate them to serve?our?ends. The winning strategy, in many cases that I’ve seen, would be to opt for?power with—to align our resources to?their?interests by incorporating them into a shared definition of?what matters most.

These concepts align well with a systems-thinking approach, as seen in Russell Ackoff’s?rules of system interdependency:

Rule One: If you optimize a system, you will sub-optimize one or more components

Rule Two: If you optimize the components of a system, you will sub-optimize the system

Rule Three: The components of a system form subgroups that obey Rules One and Two

When we seek to innovate/evolve separately, in ways that will inevitably impose a cost on other component individuals/entities, despite being parts of the same over-arching system, we run the risk of not only being perceived as parasitic entities by others, but of actually becoming tumorous growths ourselves, blind to the costs imposed on the systems we occupy by failing to incorporate the interests and goals of parts and wholes outside the scope of our narrow perspective.