I’ve been looking for new ways of thinking about problem-solving beyond the tired lean frameworks, and better ways of helping groups decide what to do next. This month, I’ve found something.
Online reading
From Beth Sawin’s June 21st Multisolving Institute newsletter:
People are removing dams so salmon can spawn. They are replacing asphalt with urban gardens, to help cities stay cool and prevent flooding. Highways that divided neighborhoods for decades are being phased out, replaced with parks and walking paths and bikeways. … The systems that surround us—bricks and mortar infrastructure, the structure of healthcare, the endowments of universities—have not always been constructed in ways that respect the interconnection of our world. The tree cover of cities aligns with maps of racial segregation. The wealth of many powerful interests traces back to conquest, slavery, or extraction. Because of this, moving forward is going to sometimes require looking backward and removing structures (and laws, incentives, and habits) that are doing harm.
I learned from my technical days that multi-objective optimization is hard. Yet it no longer makes sense to suppose that a group can solve one problem at a time—or to ignore the fact that when they do, they’re merely pushing problems around in ways that are unhelpful and unjust.
And “moving forward is going to sometimes require looking backwards and removing structures… that are doing harm.” This reminds me of TRIZ: the laughter that comes with noticing system behaviors that reliably produce bad outcomes. Stopping those and patiently seeing what happens next can be more fruitful than actively starting new things.
Facilitation for engagement with FLOWER
Also from the Multisolving Institute, The Framework for Long-term, Whole-system, Equity-based Reflection (FLOWER), which “helps a group explore the co-benefits a project might produce. … Who would need to be involved? How do we design for co-benefits? How do we ensure burdens and benefits are shared equitably?”
I haven’t had a chance to use FLOWER yet, but have slotted it right next to the strategy-culture bicycle as a method to help a group get real about evaluating projects and their benefits, impacts, and possibilities.
How to fry a Mars rover
Let’s end on a lighter note. Enjoy Chris Lewicki’s story about a simple wiring mistake on the Spirit Mars rover:
The pulse was sent to the motor. As always, the result was immediate, but this time, alarmingly unfamiliar. The strip chart did not look like anything we had seen before. It did not even look like a broken motor. It was decidedly—something else. … My eyes followed the wires from our breakout box on the test cart to the spacecraft, and the reason for the unfamiliar signal landed like a dagger through my heart. All that power we just released did not go into the RAT-Revolve motor. Due to a mistake I had made with the break-out-box, it went the other direction on the connector interface, sending a surge of electricity straight into the spacecraft, instead of the motor.
Chris Lewicki