#4: The parable of the hedge maze
On seeing systems and breaking rules.
I’m Luke Craven; this is another of my weekly explorations of how systems thinking and complexity can be used to drive real, transformative change in the public sector and beyond. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.
Hello there, reader,
tl;dr: Organisations are built of constraints ("rules"), which enable and constrain the emergence of particular behaviours. In the modern organisation many of these rules — team boundaries, KPIs, risk frameworks, project management methodologies — tend to understand the world in non-systemic ways. Systems thinking challenges us to break these established rules and make sense of organisational complexity in new ways.Road trips were a common feature of my childhood. Every Saturday until I was 10, my family drove from our home in Whakatane to see my grandmother in Tauranga. It is not a long trip, by any conventional measure, but I was a restless child. It felt long. Thinking of the journey as chunks between landmarks helped me pass the time. We’d drive from home to the Matata railway bridge, the point at which I was allowed to unwrap my vegemite and chip sandwich, to Kiwi 360, and onward to our destination. On occasional weekends, we’d stop at Kiwi 360, a peak 1990s tourist attraction that—at the time—featured an incredible hedge maze. I was enamoured by that maze. Despite full knowledge of its rules, I quickly discovered more direct and effective paths to the exit by pushing through gaps and weaknesses in the hedge walls. I told myself that those walls were an unnecessary obstruction to me achieving my goals and, while not how the game was meant to be played, no harm, no foul. Yes, I was cheating.
This anecdote probably explains why I still can't play single-player computer games once I know the cheat codes, but it is also a metaphor for how organisations work. On most definitions, an organisation is a group of people acting together in pursuit of common goals or objectives. As organisations formalise, different constraints (“rules”) are created within them to support the achievement of those goals: teams to foster collaboration; performance targets to incentivise particular behaviour; and risk assessments to discourage rash decision-making. These rules are like hedge walls: they constrain particular forms of activity while enabling others. They fix the space within which people have freedom to act in the pursuit of goal achievement. Others (Corrigan, Snowden, Juarrero) have spoken about how there are constraints that limit (“governing constraints”) and constraints that enable (“enabling constraints”), but this seems to me a false distinction—every rule does both. This distinction speaks more to our desires about the outcome of a particular rule than to the nature of the rule itself.
While organisational rules are never impermeable, they are often strictly enforced. In part, this stems from the desire to maintain a linear relationship between planning and execution. We like to tell ourselves that working inside the established constraints will help to achieve a stated goal, and that everything else should be actively discouraged. Add to this that humans are energy-minimising cognitive systems, and probably for good evolutionary reasons. Keeping ourselves and others inside the established rules is less cognitively taxing than the uncertainty that comes with autonomy and self-organisation. But, over time, this can create a dynamic where rule adherence becomes increasingly prioritised over goal achievement, an example of the system trap Donella Meadows referred to as “seeking the wrong goal”. At worst, rule adherence becomes mistaken for goal achievement and people lose sight of their common purpose altogether. As Meadow’s puts it:
“Systems, like the three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. Be careful what you ask them to produce.”
What is particularly dangerous about this particular instance of “seeking the wrong goal” is that it obscures its own solution. The rules that are ubiquitous to the modern organisation—performance targets, risk frameworks, fixed team structures, etc.—have all been shown to erode the conditions that encourage systems thinking. If conforming to these rules becomes the goal of the system, it is unreasonable to assume that people will be willing to think and act in systemic ways to break the cycle. They simply have no incentive to do so. They are far more likely work within existing constraints, entrenching their impact and further eroding the conditions that enable systems thinking. Once they are lost in the maze, there is no escape.
The story I have told here is clearly an extreme case, but many systems thinkers I have spoken to see elements of this plot arc in their own organisations. Before going any further, I want to stress that this metaphor can only be stretched so far. Many organisational constraints serve a purpose and not all of them detract from people achieving a stated goal. Many are also imposed on organisations from the outside, by regulators, and are designed to protect against the harm suffered by a third party as a consequence of their goal seeking behaviour. And, of course, getting grumpy about rules that obstruct a stated goal should not distract from the importance of reframing bad goals. It’s important that the goals of individual organisations are linked to the overall welfare of social, environmental and economic systems.
Caveats aide, not all rules are perfect. Many distract from the achievement of good goals. In these contexts, practice of systems thinking is a “rule breaking” technique, which can be applied to the problem of “seeking the wrong goal” in a number of ways:
To provide “cover” for setting aside or pushing through the rules that limit the achievement of stated goal. It provides a language to articulate why a particular course of action was taken, even if a rule is broken in the process. This tends to work more effectively accompanying requests for forgiveness than those for permission, but I’ve seen it work well in both situations.
To reveal pathways to co-opt the influence of existing rules, with the aim of making it easy to think in systemic ways and hard not to. I’ve seen this executed successfully in a number of different contexts. In one organisation, the risk framework was redesigned to require risk managers to assess the systemic impact of particular risk factors and potential treatments. In another, the purpose of rules was reframed altogether to encourage other goals like reflection, learning, and adaptation, which have been shown to positively contribute to the conditions that enable systems thinking. Working within existing constraints to drive systemic thinking is one of the few remedies available in contexts where rule adherence has become consistently mistaken for goal achievement, but is also an effective preventative strategy. If people are encouraged to see the whole system, it is harder for them to lose sight of the true goal.
As a rationale for why rules should always be seen as permeable. Fixed rules have a finite upside risk but an infinite downside risk. Implemented well, they can help an organisation achieve a stated goal. Implemented poorly, they can result in the organisation “seeking the wrong goal”, which moves them further and further away from their true objective over time. Making rules permeable doesn’t mean everything is a free-for-all. When things are trending in a positive direction, people should be encouraged to follow the lines of a well-designed hedge maze. But if the maze is on fire, you want them to think in creative ways to chart an escape. That escape might not always be to the stated exit, but that’s ok. It’s better than being burnt alive.
And that, dear reader, is the parable of the hedge maze.
Not unrelated miscellany…
Readers might be aware of David Graeber’s theory of bullshit jobs, which develops a typology to explore jobs that are meaningless or don’t have a clear line of sight to societal well-being. I suspect there is a strong correlation between those jobs are bullshit and those focused on rule adherence at the expense of goal achievement.
The strict enforcement of constraints also pulls in the opposite direction to the law of requisite variety As stated by Anthony Hodgson in an essay in this book, the law of requisite variety:
…leads to the somewhat counterintuitive observation that [a system] must have a sufficiently large variety of actions in order to ensure a sufficiently small variety of outcomes in the essential variables E. This principle has important implications for practical situations: since the variety of perturbations a system can potentially be confronted with is unlimited, we should always try maximize its internal variety (or diversity)”.
Requisite variety demands loose and permeable rules, sensibly enforced.
I like metaphors a lot and they are used more broadly as a tool to make sense of complex systems. The ironic thing about metaphors is that one of their general features is they violate hard or soft semantic constraints (they break the rules of our system of language and comprehension…!!).
By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorise and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.
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