(2023-05-22) Derby Shaping Patterns

Esther Derby: Shaping Patterns. How do you create an environment for great work? Where healthy self-organization happens? You notice and shape patterns. Patterns are meaningful events that repeat over time—actions and interactions, outcomes and results.

This may be something you do to address a problem or undesirable pattern. However, you can also do it proactively. In fact, whatever is going on in your organization is shaped by these three factors—Clarity, Conditions, and Constraints.

A Team without Clarity. (strategic context)

I got a call from someone concerned that one of their teams wasn’t collaborating well

They needed clarity about their customer and what the customer’s needs were. They needed some constraints around which persona and which workflows had priority.

People know what to work on, what to work on next, and the scope of their work. By this I don’t mean they have a handy task list and a requirements document. I mean they have enough clarity to take initiative and make decisions

contextual knowledge

Conditions

having the means to do the work—budget, facilities, equipment, access to expertise.

Constraints

We often think of Constraints as a bad thing: They inhibit flow and get in the way of work. However, Constraints also reduce flailing and support work. They tell you what should never be done and what should always be done.

But don’t over-constrain

Acting on Clarity, Conditions, and Constraints

So, back to the team I described above… a team that hadn’t delivered anything for over a year.

they utterly lacked clarity about what problem they were trying to solve. They were mutually responsible—but it wasn’t clear for what.

This lack of clarity contributed to conflict. They had nothing to rally around or work toward, nothing to focus on. (convergence)

A Team with Too Few Constraints

Here’s another example of a team that wallowed and bickered. When I was a corporate employee I was on an organizational design project.

We had a goal—redesign the IT department. But was operations in or out of scope?

our goal was under-constrained, We didn’t know what decisions we could and couldn’t make.

On top of the fuzzy goal, we didn’t have a shared approach on how to do the work or even the skills to do the work—generally a necessary condition for teamwork

Finding Options for Action

looking at these projects through this lens provides some immediate ideas on how one could make the pattern a better fit for the desired function of the group.

And of course you don’t have to wait until the situation is in shambles. You can consider all these things when forming a team, starting a project, designing a new department, steering your entire company.