Monitor’s LeveragePoint solutions are built around enabling effective action. What does this mean?
Enabling – we assume that the individual and team are central. Our solutions help people to work more effectively, make better choices and then to scale the implementation of the choices. They do not pretend to replace people or the need for hard thought and real choices (a ‘real choice’ is a choice that prevents you from making some other choice, or as Pankaj Ghemawat says, strategy means commitment).
Effective – the choices and actions that follow from them have an impact on the organization. The impact is determined by measuring the outcomes of the choices and the outputs of the action (a double loop). Hypotheses are stated clearly and then tested. Effective action is action that changes in response to the outcomes and the environment. It is not static.
Action – as choices are made they have to be acted on. Even the situation where the ‘choice is not to act’ is a kind of action, based on hypotheses, and the outcome needs to be measured and the choice reflected on. In the CAM action is divided into tasks and their outputs which are explicitly linked to outcomes. The outcomes are linked back to the choices.
Our approach to enabling effective action has been captured in what we call our CAM, a formal model of Choice-Action-Measurement. The CAM is being developed together with our clients and users and is grounded in Jonathon Levy’s vision of real-time change management and user-centric learning. Its role in the LeveragePoint solutions is to provide an overall framework to support rapid configuration and evolution of action-focused solutions.
I will write more about the LeveragePoint CAM in future posts, but here I want to look back at some of the work that it is grounded in.
Action Science and Chris Argyris
One of the pleasures of working at Monitor’s Cambridge office is to occasionally meet Chris Argyris in the hall and to have the chance to engage with him, and at times to have one’s motives, assumptions and behaviors questioned at profound and uncomfortable levels. The man is rigorously honest. When we began to look for the foundations of a model of effective action the first place we looked was to the work of Chris Argyris. His notions of ‘Double Loop Learning’, ‘Ladder of Inference,’ ‘Theory Espoused vs. Theory in Use’ are all coded into our work. But more important than any specific tool is his overall approach to learning, to how people work (and fail to work together), and to listening to what is actually said.
Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA Loops) and Col. John Boyd
Another important part of the Monitor family is Chris Myer from Monitor Networks. We went to Chris early on in thinking about our CAM model and he suggested we look at the work of Col. John Boyd of the United States Air Force. Col. Boyd is one of the first thinkers on strategy to realize that in a networked world strategy has to be implemented real time. Being a fighter pilot no doubt drove this. He came up with a model of Observe-Orient-Decide-Act that inspired our own work.
Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) and Gary Klein
About seven years ago business consultant and Japan expert Carl Kay introduced me to Gary Klein’s book Sources of Power. In this book Klein investigates how people and teams make decisions in high stakes situations – fire fighters, pilots, doctors in intensive care units. This work has informed a growing practice of cognitive task analysis (CTA) that researches how people act effectively to get things done.
Embodied Cognition and Ed Hutchins
One of my passions is sailing. "There is nothing- absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." -Ratty said to Mole in Kenneth Grahame's beloved 1908 classic, The Wind in the Willows. So I was delighted when cognition researcher Brian Fisher introduced me to Ed Hutchins classic work Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins work is focused on understanding how teams carry out complex tasks in the real world. The ‘real world’ in Hutchins book is that of coastal navigation by the US Navy and open ocean navigation by the Micronesians. In both cultures cognitive tasks are shared between people, complex methods are reduced to practice, and lives are at stake. There is now a compelling body of work on embodied cognition, and related areas such as the role of metaphor and blends in understanding the world, but it is to Ed Hutchins that I turn when I need to go deeper.
All of these are deep themes and there is much more to explore. I hope to return to each of these ‘points of origin’ over time.
Links
Commitment by Pankaj Ghemawa
When I was deciding whether or not to move from Vancouver and join Monitor, our Chief Content Officer Alan Kantrow gave me a copy of this book. Reading it helped me to think deeper about my own decision to move to Cambridge and what I was committing to at Monitor. Knowing what you are committing to includes thought about what you will not be able to do going forward.
Action Science by Chris Argyris, Robert Putnam and Diana McLain Smith
This is one of many excellent books by Chris Argyris that set out his thoughts on how people and organizations learn.
Blur by Stanley M. Davis and Christopher Myer
Many of our world systems are at inflection points, which is why real-time change management has become such a compelling value proposition. This book captures the drivers of this change better than most. “The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy.”
Observe Orient Decide Act or OODA Loops
Col. John Boyd published only two papers on OODA loops, but they are compelling. The Wikipedia article is an excellent introduction.
Sources of Power by Gary Klein
The best introduction to cognitive task analysis because it shows what motivated the work and describes real people in real situations.
Carl Kay’s blog is here.
Cognition in the Wild by Ed Hutchins
Read this book.
Brian Fisher is one of the most innovative thinkers on the psychology of human computer interaction. Learn more here.
And of course The Wind in the Willows.
