Bumpers, Boosts, and Tiltsfive days beforeA discussion late last year about different ways to influence organizations led…Lenses, framings, and models

January 11, 2022 · 3 min read

The Four Needs Framework2020The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world around…The third option2024I facilitated a workshop on systems thinking recently (or “lensical thinking” as…Stages of project forking2023I’ve been thinking recently about how to design an open source project,…At a meeting this week, I realized that I use the terms “lens,” “framing,” and “model” in ways that hold deep meaning to me, but I am not certain that this meaning is clear to others. So here’s my attempt to capture the distinctions between them.

Models and structured reasoning2023 Beyond pros and cons2023

What the heck is strategy work?2022We turn the mastermind toward frameworks. The key objective of this role…Jankless2021As we Orient, examining our prediction error and updating our model of…The way I see these, the lens is the most elemental of the three. A lens is a resonant, easy to remember (or familiar) depiction of some phenomenon that offers a particular way of looking at various situations. Kind of like TV commercial jingles, effective lenses are catchy and brief. They usually have a moniker that makes them easy to recall, like “Goodhart’s Law” or “Tuckman’s stages of group development” or “Cynefin.” Just like their optical namesakes, lenses offer a particular focus, which means that they also necessarily distort. As such, lenses are subject to misuse if used too ardently. With lenses, the more the merrier, and the more lightly held, the better. Nearly everything can be turned into a lens. A prompt “How can this be a lens?” tends to yield highly generative conversations. For fun, think of a fairy tale or a news story and see how it might be used as a lens to highlight some dynamic within your team. Usually, while names and settings change, the movements remain surprisingly consistent.

Settled and “not settled yet” framings2021I was working on decision-making frameworks this week and had a pretty…Solved, solvable, unsolvable2022I have been noodling on a decision-making framework, and I am hoping…Framing2022When encountering an infinity-problem, we may have enough wherewithal to resist the…Framings are a bit more specialized. They are an application of one or more lenses to a specific problem space. For example, when I am devising a strategy for a new team, I might employ Tuckman’s stages to describe the challenges the team will face in the first year of its existence. Then, I would invoke Cynefin to outline the kind of problems the team will need to be equipped to solve, rounding up with Goodhart’s Law to reflect on how the team will measure its success. When applied effectively, framings turn a vague, messy problem space into a solvable problem. To take me there, framings depend on the richness of the collection of lenses that are available to me. If these are the only three lenses I know, I will quickly find myself out of depth in my framing efforts: everything I come up with will limp with a particular Tuckman-Cynefin-Goodhart gait.

Mental models2022I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured…Causal chains2021My experience is that most folks around me (myself included) enjoy employing…The miracle count2021While working on a technical design this week, my colleagues and I…How to make a breakthrough2022The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because I am not actually providing…Finally, models are networks of causal relationships that form within my framings. The problem, revealed by my framing exercise, might yet be untenable. While I can start forming hypotheses, I still have little sense in how many miracles each will take. This is where models help. Models allow me to reason about the amount of effort each of my hypotheses will require. Because each of the hypotheses is a causal chain of events, models help uncover links of these chains that are superlinear.

Organizing and sensing connections2021Tucked away in a couple of paragraphs of the brilliant paper by…Oodles of OODA loops2021Our discovery of the inner OODA loop was cool, but I bet…Getting back to our team planning example, the first four Tuckman’s stages are a neat causal sequence and might lead us to conclude that the process we’re dealing with is linear and thus easily scheduled. However, if we study the network of causal relationships closer, we might be able to see that they aren’t. The team’s storming phase can tip the team’s environment into complex Cynefin space and thus extend the duration of the storming phase. Or, the arrival to the norming stage might make the team susceptible to over-relying on its metrics to steer, triggering Goodhart’s law, eventually leading to the slide into chaotic Cynefin space, setting the stages all the way back to forming.

A Solution2022If we are looking at a problem, and as we learned earlier,…The value triangletwo days afterMy colleagues and I were chatting about the idea of a “good…The nonlinearity does not need to be surprising. Once we see it in our models, the conversation elevates from just looking at possible solutions to evaluating their effectiveness. Framings give us a way to see solvable problems. Models provide us with insight on how to realistically solve them.