Revising system parameters

What are "system parameters"?
The parameters of a system determine what problems get identified, how they are diagnosed and what solutions are provided. A fast food system cannot recognize a need for winter coats or solve a clothing problem with anything on it's menu. A fast food system does recognize a need for food in a hurry and responds with more fast food. It can solve problems to get more feed to the cattle it slaughters to create the burgers on the menu. It cannot solve problems that require cutbacks in cattle breeding. System parameters call for more of the same thing to get its job done.

What are the parameters of a typical education system?
An education system delivers seats, classrooms and school buildings and solves apparent problems with those alternatives. It will diagnose familiar problems as a lack of seats, classrooms or buildings and solve them swiftly. The system may also deliver additional course offerings, subjects to study and course materials. It will automatically solve problems with those responses and assume more courses are what's required. The system will also provide objective measures of task completion and content retention for measuring progress, advancing students to the next grade level and rewarding teachers. Some of these systems may also provide counselors, social workers and staff meetings to resolve troublesome issues. All these systems operate within their parameters when they seek additional funds through property tax increases or bond issues. The system will then diagnose every problem that erupts within these system parameters.

What's wrong with relying on system parameters?
School systems act incapable of solving problems like student dropout rates or new teacher burnout rates. Those problems cannot be solved with additional seats, tests, courses, counseling or budget increases. The problems exist outside the confines of system parameters. The problems appear impossible to solve and must be "swept under the rug". Otherwise the problems get diagnosed as a need for the solutions the system does deliver. The system will try to fix the problem with additional courses, testing, counseling or funding.

Why don't school systems revise their parameters to become more responsive and effective?
A system cannot revise it's own parameters. It takes something or someone outside the system. We cannot lift a table we are standing on top of, until we get off the table and stand on different ground. We stand on and stand for the system parameters when we are functioning inside a system. We do what the system does and cannot do otherwise without causing a system malfunction. We join in it's purposes, perceptions and premises to fit in, get our job done and meet others expectations.

Why don't systems seek outsiders who are standing on different ground to revise their parameters?
System parameters justify their own existence, make themselves right and refute contrary premises. Proponents of the parameters say things like:

• It won't work with our unique situation -- it has not been invented here.
• It's been tried before and fails to produce lasting change in our kind of system.
• It's not our responsibility to be concerned with that -- it's none of our business.
• It's not something we can afford under our current financial constraints -- it's too costly.

How do system parameters get revised?
Usually by a crisis where the system cannot reboot itself after a high profile failure. The parameters are exposed by the system crash to be dysfunctional, toxic or ill-conceived. People lose faith in the system. The spell is broken and it's suddenly obvious what has been previously assumed without question. The chronic misdiagnoses, neglected problems and obsessive solutions are put into a new light. There is nothing to stand on or for until new ground is established with revised system parameters.

Experiencing total solutions

Talent development systems - Part five
The final episode in the cultivation of hidden talents - imagined as a responsive system

When a belief system incorporates numerous ways to "hold it's horses", the runaway closed circuit becomes a total solution. The system works for the people inside and outside of the boundaries. The system "makes it our business" to serve everyone in some way instead of insisting "it's none of our business". It responds to requests and complaints in ways that enrich everyone involved. It has uses for every experience within the context of the system and becomes more useful as it evolves.

When talent development is served by a total solution, people with hidden talents experience getting validated, supported, understood and challenged. Those working for the system as mentors, managers and HR staff also gain self respect, significant value and expanded horizons to explore. The system itself becomes more responsive to breakdowns and its own excesses.

Any total solution is designed to give the user a valuable experience at every turn. Rather than congratulate itself for it's consistency, the system validates the user for providing some deviance. The users' resistance is taken as a form of cooperation. Their defiance is a welcome sight and taken constructively. The users' problems are "no problem" for the total solution. The stability of the system depends on the negative feedback from users to become responsive to changing situations.

Total solutions function as discovery systems. They learn as they go from what happens to the system in its context. The system becomes more responsive and resilient as it becomes more capable of providing solutions to new deviance. The system is inherently curious about what is changing and formulating better questions as it explores new possibilities. The system outgrows reflexive thinking as it reflects more on what it has discovered.

Total solutions support acts of generosity. The practice of "gift economies", "giver's gain" and "pay it forward" principles get rewarded. The system can value outsider contributions because it is self-regulating and open to contrary inputs. The system benefits from what it gives to others because it's set up for it to come back around. Processes are reciprocal like mentoring on the take. The system guards against "abusing the user", "exploiting volunteers" or "punishing initiative". Contributions from everyone involved flourish like they do in democratized, long tail markets.

Total solutions deploy "non-dual awareness" of people and processes. Employees are seen as internal customers to be well-served, as well as essential components to the delivery of reliable services. Customers are perceived as external employees who sell the system to others, as well as users of what the system delivers. The system is both stable and evolving. The value provided, learning realized and motivations engaged are both extrinsic and intrinsic. The meaning of the experiences in the system are both explicit and inferred.

Total solutions evolve from partial solutions. Belief systems become total solutions as they incorporate more logic switches and negative feedback subroutines. The system becomes more complex by responding to deviance with the intention better serve itself and others. As people become more talented in their lives, the system becomes more talented in cultivating hidden talents in everyone involved.

Hold your horses

Talent development systems - Part four
A continuing series on how the cultivation of hidden talents can be imagined as a responsive system

Closed systems are runaway circuits with no capability to slow down or stop themselves. They are totally sold on what they do. They don't listen to reason, moderation or feedback. When subroutines are added to a runaway circuit, all that changes. The closed system is now an open system. The double-loop circuitry questions the ongoing continuity, consistency and commitment. By considering "how much is too much" and "when is it time for counter-balancing this?" the system can slow down and switch itself off into a subroutine. A" logic switch" is introduced into the "over-determined strategic loop". The system now has a choice to do more or less of it's reliable service.

Closed systems are called "positive feedback systems" because every node calls for more of the next thing. The mathematical formula to equate the two nodes can be graphed. The slope on the curve is positive: more x produces more y; more y comes from more x. More hidden talent results in more system responses. Negative feedback has an inverse relationship between the nodes: more x produces less y; more y comes from less x. More hidden talent yields fewer system responses.

Closed systems are prone to system crashes because of their singular obsessions with positive feedback. They need subroutines that contradict the system's underlying belief. By going against the premise of every step in the closed circuit, stability is introduced into the system. It is characterized as robust and resilient due to the incorporation of a negative feedback subsystem. The logic switch can go for more or less, go further or stop advancing, continue or sidetrack the progress.

A talent development system could get carried away with itself in any of these ways:

• Too many identified talents to develop at once
• Too many options for how to get experience with each new talent
• Too many issues to consider when planning how to develop a latent talent
• Too much feedback to process after giving a new talent a try
• Too many problems resulting from the use of an underdeveloped talent
• Too frequent occasions to focus on talent development instead of other objectives
• Too much peer or management pressure to cultivate hidden talents
• Too much analyzing of past attempts which inhibit further experiments
• Too many reckless explorations in need of clean-up and rework
• Too complicated an approach for casual developers of hidden talents to use

If these excess go unchecked, the talent development system will simply be abandoned. It won't appear useful to the users, so it won't get used by them. Thus, the user's experience in the system is a leading indicator of where error checking needs to be inserted. Questions need to be asked at junctures where the user may be having a dysfunctional experience. As I reviewed in preventing system crashes, the system needs to be on the lookout for users who are feeling disoriented, inhibited, defeated or overzealous. The early warning signs need to be recognized and utilized to interrupt the momentum of the closed system..

These error-checking switches make it the system design's responsibility to be useful in the eyes of the user. This is a customer-service system, not a content delivery system. There is no guilt trip put on the user who finds the system useless. The system corrects itself, rather than fixing the user. A subroutine is switched into where the user gets help while taking time out from the closed loop. The system offers solutions for developing talents and for breakdowns in progress.

Inside a belief system

Talent development systems - Part three
A continuing series on how the cultivation of hidden talents can be imagined as a responsive system

The delivery of any consistent service, value or experience is built around a closed system. There is a single loop that congratulates itself for doing what it's designed to do. The positive feedback produced by the system indicates it's always time for more of the same components, sequence and outputs. The underlying premise goes unquestioned. The system cannot change its own rules. There is no choice but to try harder, maintaining the success pattern as it insists on persisting.

Closed systems are belief systems. They manufacture self-confirming evidence of the underlying belief. They create experiences for everyone engaged in the system of how the belief is true, factual and unavoidable. The belief is ubiquitous and taken for granted. It's assumption "goes without saying" and "seems perfectly reasonable" to the insiders of the system.

Any functional talent development system operates a closed system. It believes without question that everyone has hidden talents to cultivate. It does not challenge this presupposition or test this hypothesis. It assumes hidden talent is true and proceeds from that belief. It goes round in circles of the basis of developing hidden talents. Here's one cycle that occurs in someone's mind, that can be externalized into conversations with others:

1. Formulating hypotheses: What if you have many hidden talents to develop? What if you've already developed some hidden potentials and can replicate that success? What if your hidden talents are like seeds that need time to grow and that cannot be hurried? What if you've already had a glimmer of the next talent to develop and have experienced some encouragement to proceed in this direction? What if the discouragement you've received has nothing to do with developing your talent, only with other's needs to be in control or to avoid feeling envious of you?
2. Strategyzing approaches: How will you verify that this possible talent is more than a passing fancy for you? How will you discover what comes naturally to you when you act as if you have this talent? How will you get practice exercising this latent ability to strengthen and refine it? How will you gain confidence in this potential in order to apply it more often? How will you recognize opportunities to utilize this talent before it's recognized by others as one of your assets?
3. Biasing interactions: How was that recent conversation proof that you've got this talent in you? How is the feedback you've received confirming your suspicion about this new capability? How are the differences between you and them providing evidence of your hidden talent coming to fruition? How is the impact you're having on the situation showing your that this possibility is really worth developing further? How are those relationships, affected by this new trait of yours, revealing how it's valuable to others for you to act this way?
4. Evaluating outcomes: How much confidence have you gained in this new talent? How much progress have you made in cultivating this ability? How much have you refined this potential in you to be valuable, effective and useful in situations? How have you gained practice at using this trait and discovered more depth to its possibility? How have you changed your initial ideas about this talent to appreciate it with more insight, complexity and fascination?

As this closed loop cycles around, new hypotheses will be generated. There will be incremental (first order) changes as the hidden talents get cultivated in steps and stages. The system can only deliver more of the same validation, encouragement and insistence. It maintains its belief in the development of talent.

Capturing the complexity

Talent development systems - Part two
A continuing series on how the cultivation of hidden talents can be imagined as a responsive system

When we design any system, we are modeling several other processes. A systems analysis captures how things happen prior to creating a system to facilitate those events. The staggering complexity of the world needs to be simplified to create a viable system design. The success of a system depends on how the complexity gets captured.

Talent development processes can be modeled several different ways:

• As occurring within the mind of the person who has the hidden talent and brings it to full realization with her/his personal motivation, curiosity, reflection, experiences, etc.
• As occurring between the individual and his/her context which includes opportunities to explore the possible new talent, pressures to cultivate new capabilities, etc.
• As occurring between people such as a mentor & protege, coach & player, manager & direct report, leader & team members, etc
• As occurring within a formal framework of procedures, events, meetings, progress reports, assessments, feedback sessions, etc.

Choosing between these alternatives becomes easier when we can anticipate the consequences of making each choice.

When we regard ongoing processes as objects, we make reductionistic errors. We mistake the continually changing dynamics for a constant condition. We assume the variability occurs within a predictable range. We become perfectionistic about how it should look and intolerant of countless human variations and situational influences. When creating a talent development system, we might cause ourselves problems by regarding talents as things rather than processes in flux. We would certainly do more harm than good by viewing the users as system components rather than unique, evolving individuals.

When we picture interactions between people, issues of power often disrupt the intended system. We want the people involved to coordinate, cooperate, communicate and collaborate with each other. We diagram them as equal nodes in cycles of ongoing interactions. We assume they can get along. Contrary to the design intentions, people get into power struggles if they are rivals, peers or equals. Likewise they fall into cycles of abuse, domination, or persecution if there is a significant power differential between them. When creating a talent development system, power conflicts could emerge between users of the system and the mentors involved, the managers overseeing the developments or other users of the system competing for particular job openings.

When we portray a process as sequential steps, we disregard the cyclical dynamics that may dominate a user's experience. The design assume that linear progress is being made as steps are taken toward a goal. However, the user feels drained by a vicious cycle of perpetual over-reactions to irritations. The users speak of "spinning our wheels", "here we go again" and "enduring pointless repetition". There's no escape from the cycle without dropping out of the system entirely. When creating a talent development system, vicious cycles could emerge in linear sequences to qualify for a position, to comply with requirements or to report on progress.

When we only capture the information flowing in one direction, we fail to incorporate all the informal feedback in the system. We know what the system is telling the users, but not what is being told to the system. The system delivers services without discovering what effects it's having, what to learn from the users' experiences or how to better respond to the situations created by the system design and user needs. When creating a talent development system, the users may talk among themselves about how useless, ineffective, bogus or unresponsive the system has become in their their experience.

As I considered all these issues, I concluded that the prototype talent development system would be least problematic with the first approach. By modeling the development of talent within the mind of a person, these pitfalls can be avoided. The user of the system is in control and maintaining his/her own talent development processes. The user asks for help and then externalizes the current issues for others to lend support. There is no dependency on, disruption by or struggle against a system that models the processes in a less effective way. The complexity is captured in a way that works.

Preventing system crashes

Talent development systems - Part one
For the past week, I've been designing a prototype talent development system. It will take the next several posts on this blog to sketch out the design of this possibility adequately. In the process of presenting this design, you'll see several principles of system design in use by me.

A system design responds to the context it which it will function. The system needs as much complexity as the context to respond to varied changes in and extended ranges of input. When a system lacks sufficient complexity (requisite variety) , it malfunctions, overloads itself or crashes. The system cannot handle what it is asked to do. The system design over-simplified the problem, made gross assumptions or overlooked significant issues.

This prototype design anticipates four potential system crashes spawned by dysfunctional experiences of the system users:

• Disoriented system users: feeling lost, overwhelmed by too many options, confused by what is expected of them, unfamiliar with the procedural steps, expecting something very different than this, stressed out by this imposition on them, conflicted about seeing this through, becoming suspicious of the value proposition, regressing into childish behaviors
• Inhibited system users: trapped in the idea stage, incapable of follow through, all talk and no show, self-sabotaging their success, missing the milestones, stuck in the starting blocks, in no shape to shape up, going nowhere quickly
• Defeated system users: derailed by the adversity, shot down by friendly fire, disheartened by too many obstacles, turning opportunities into unwelcome threats, voicing their "customer complaints", reduced to "fight or flight" mode, put on the defensive
• Over-zealous system users: gone overboard, addicted to the system, compulsively doing more immediately, losing sight of the mission, fallen for excessive devotion, tactically fixated, possessed by the urge to try harder, going to a reckless extreme

Robust system designs incorporate added functionality to safe guard against system crashes. The incoming problem is "no problem" because a solution is already designed into the system. The negative experience of the user is transformed into feeling respected, included, understood and well-served. This often yields some fallout like more buy-in, deeper commitment, and better buzz. This prototype design handles the negative user experiences as follows:

• Disoriented system users enter a "help subsystem" to become more oriented. Their disorientation is captured by menus, questionnaires or interviews. A response is generated that addresses their concern and expects the user to refine the search, question or problem definition. This cycle repeats until the user feels capable of making informed choices.
• Inhibited system users enter a mentoring session to transform their emotional baggage, hot buttons, toxic introject or chronic childishness. Some version of cognitive-behavioral therapy will reframe the presenting problem and resolve the underlying issues.
• Defeated system users go through an after-action review with a coach. The situations and user responses will be rehashed to consider other useful perceptions, interpretations and interactions. Help will be provided for troubleshooting breakdowns, solving problems and reformulating strategies.
• Over-zealous system users take a break to explore a "big-picture" process. The development of their talent is put in perspective with other valid goals. Balance is restored as other objectives are brought into the game plan. Tempo and timing issues are reconsidered in light of the overall mission.

As a system learns from what happens to its users, it discovers what additional functionality is needed to avoid dysfunctional user experiences. A talent development system may experience contextual pressure to become multi-lingual or offer it's responses 24/7. The system may get diagnosed as over-responsive to particular constituencies and inaccessible to others. The system itself may create or feed the problems that appear as disoriented, inhibited, defeated, or over-zealous users. There may be other dysfunctional user experiences that crash the system (violent behavior, erotic misconduct, medical crises, weather-related disruptions, etc.) The design may need modification if the time it takes to prevent system crashes proves too costly. The quality of the responses during the "time outs" may be widely varied, inadequate or excessive.

As you replicate or modify the line of reasoning I've used here, you could also refine your designs for other systems that generate functional and dysfunctional user experiences.