Emergent processes

What is this?

The most effective way I found to get closer to expert-level status on a topic is to try to develop the best takes I can (mostly by faking it), usually, after a few months, re-reading them gives me a good laugh because they’re very silly.

I’m okay with the silliness. Doing this forces me to flesh out a map, possibly without much exposure to the territory, and to deliberately produce a set of beliefs that I can immediately test and iterate from day one to quickly converge towards a better map than if I had to slowly develop an intuition.

I’ve been trying really hard to improve my management and leadership skills, so it feels only natural to develop the best stupid takes I can related to management.

In a few months, my future self will find what I wrote pretty silly if my present self does his job properly.

Hmm… Implementing processes…

So, emergent processes.

Calling a process ‘emergent’ says that, as an observer, you’ve noticed that there is an informal way of producing something in an organization, and that you recognize that it can be formalized into a prescribe-able process.

When they emerge, these informal processes can seem very inefficient. In fact, the central cause for noticing them is when we wish to enforce or change them after looking at the actual process or the artifact it produced.

It is hard to change them because the people involved converged towards it for a reason, the informal process evolved out of the evolutionary pressures created by an organization’s culture and the constraints imposed by its environment, size, and technology.

This is why authority, especially in change management, is a golf club gun. “What you’re doing is analogous to using a loaded shotgun at a golf club, and what you’re suggesting—prescribing a process-–is that we take the safety off, because it interferes with your golf game.”

The safety here is something like Chesterton’s fence—reforms shouldn’t be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood—, but it is tempting to take the safety off, because informal processes follow the path of least resistance, so they often get stuck in local minima, so a natural instinct is to try and prescribe processes, especially if you have the authority to do it. And then it fixes the problem. And then you can go play golf.

This is one of the strengths of being in a consulting role. You don’t have this massive hammer (authority) that makes every organizational problem look like a nail. The fact that much less than half of transformational organizational change¹ succeeds would be consistent with the belief that the ease with which it is possible to prescribe a process causes a large part of those failures.