Debt and Time
After sharing Dancing with Pace Layers with the folks in !&, Tom Critchlow pointed me to Clay Parker Jones’ post “Onward!” In the post, Jones shares about leaving August and heading to R/GA, and in doing so talks about the pace layers at which organizations learn, sharing this wonderful image and snippet:
We landed on "August helps clients win on teaming" – which, while important, isn't what I wanted to do anymore as the thing I sell to people. I'm much happier today finishing that sentence with words like strategy, innovation, and design. Now, in a self-organizing context, it would have been possible and plausible for me to pull August toward that evolution in purpose, but at least in my mind, at the cost of a lack of focus.
Another way of thinking about this is in terms of the pace layers describing how organizations learn. At Undercurrent, we frequently played at the Annual Operating Plan layer, and occasionally at the Functional Advantage layer. At August, we were mostly in Role Management and Training. Consulting at that layer requires significant (maybe even software-driven) scale, because fees can't ever be that high – the leverage is too low. Now, today R/GA is known for its marketing work. But more and more, particularly but not only in the Innovation Consulting department, we're impacting the deepest, highest-leverage layers of our clients. This deep work isn't always easy to point to in the moment, but it's exciting for me, and for the team.
FWIW, I’m with Clay - I love the deep work that is hard to point to and is also high leverage.
The diagram was both interesting and unfamiliar, and I hadn’t heard of either Drotter or Jacques. Thanks to the Internet, I learned that they both have thought and written a lot about organizations - some of which looks very interesting (if you have strong feelings about what to read or not to read, please let me know).
Something I have been thinking about - thanks to Brand and Meadows - is “What kinds of debt do organizations have?” Specifically, what does debt look like at each layer?
I started scribbling notes on what these may be on top of the Organizational Pace Layers I shared previously. Some things that came up (certainly a starting point that needs some work) for each layer:
Work: Debt at this layer is about a lack of work - a gap between what you should have done and what you did. In tech companies we often call this “technical debt” because it’s work that the current teams need to pay down that’s been incurred along the way.
Communication: Debt here seems to come in two forms - there’s insufficient communication pathways/channels and insufficient communication outcomes/artifacts. The former is about siloing or directions of communication - the inability for people to communicate, whether that’s a result of tools, process, culture, or otherwise - and the latter is about the organization’s record keeping and knowledge. How communication is captured, stored, and retrieved.
Tools: Debt at this layer seemed… the least interesting to me as I initially thought about it. The optimist in me said “constraints breed creativity” but the pragmatist in me said “when you only have hammers, everything looks like a nail.” Infrastructural debt (tools, tool bets, working benches, etc) probably manifest in a lot of different ways from creating friction to truly limiting an organization from being able to communicate or do certain kinds of work. I don’t have a good name for what this is, but I recognize that it matters.
As I got to this point in my notes, I revisited Jones’ image to stop and think about the kinds of debt that build up over time and only become visible on those time scales. Instead of simply asking what does it mean to “lack process” I asked myself a different set of questions:
What kinds of “work debt” are visible within 90 days?
What kinds of “communication debt” are only visible after a period of months?
What kinds of “tool debt” are only visible after a year or so?
What kinds of “process debt” are only visible after a few years?
What kinds of “cultural debt” are only visible after 5+ years?
What kinds of “orientation debt” are only visible after a decade?
While I recognize that in doing this I am force-fitting Jones’ image and my own layers together, I also feel like these questions are MUCH more interesting to me than simply “what debt existed at each layer?” (Though maybe I should/need to answer that too.) The upside about this pairing is that Jones also provided me with a head start on some answers (or at least interesting places to look) by matching time periods and levels of work. For example:
A lack of vision is “orientation debt” that is visible after a decade.
I’m happy to agree that you can see signs of a lack of vision at points that are much closer than a decade out, but distinguishing between outcome A versus outcome B is much harder to the untrained eye.
From there we go. I’ll be sitting with these questions about debt and time as I continue this journey. As always, if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them!
References:
5. Onward! by Clay Parker Jones