A balance of enablement and control

Escalator as metaphor for chaos and order
Posted on by SIM Admin Posted in Behavioural Insights, General, Information ManagementTagged ,

tldr: sometimes it’s ok to be messy, sometimes there’s a pattern in a mess, and high performing teams talk about their shared organizing styles.

A supervisor once told me, ‘all management is a tricky balance of enablement and control’. That idea has been living rent free in my mind ever since. I think it originated in the domain of Human Resource (HR) management. When you’re trying to get people to do work sometimes you do need to say ‘wait, think about this first’ or ‘no, stop’. But, when a goal is clear, it’s often best to let people try different things and simply observe how they do it. People will feel creative and proud of their work, and you wont feel like a micro-manager.

Balancing enablement and control is also important in the domain of Information Management (IM). We often try to apply 20th century industrial thinking to documents and records. It’s tempting to think of IM as a “complicated” problem that can be solved if we just engineered a perfect system and forced people to follow procedures robotically. That’s only partly true. I’m all for automating the boring work! But information is more than the sum of its parts. Information isn’t just an inanimate object. Information is a snapshot of what a person observed or thought at a moment in time (yeah yeah censors, drones, data logging, etc. but that’s a different category of blog posts).

Part of the reason organizations end up with messy piles of information about the same events is:

  • different people,
  • with different professional and personal perspectives,
  • save information about the same event
  • for different purposes.

Human beings also have a primal urge to not put all of our eggs in one basket. That way if we lose some to a disaster the others are still available in another location.

Here’s an everyday scenario. Imagine you and the people you live with always have a messy kitchen, and it has started to cause some interpersonal tension. For a while one person was able to assert themselves and make people organize the kitchen according to their plan. But now that person no longer has the time or energy to be the kitchen dictator. So you spend thousands of dollars having a contractor build high-tech custom cabinets. When the project is done everything fits perfectly in one place and one place only. But

  • if you have to think too hard to find the right spot, or
  • something changes and the right spot is harder to reach, or
  • you break a plate and can’t buy a new one that’s exactly the right size,
  • etc.,

you might end up with a big messy pile of plates next to some expensive but useless cabinets. Back at square one but with even more interpersonal tension. Part of your savings have been spent on a contractor’s labour, the value of the system and materials has depreciated, you had a lot of discussions and compromises, but the problem hasn’t been solved. I bet you even had your secret favourite fork stashed in your own desk the whole time…. be honest.

That scenario happens with enterprise document and content management systems more than we’d care to admit. Some highly disciplined engineer makes a mathematically perfect system, but normal human beings find it hard to use on a daily basis. So all the files end up in a messy pile around the system. Am I right, or am I right? That is an example of losing balance and applying too much control and not enough enablement. There’s an art to controlling a mess just enough, while also leaving space for creativity and different approaches. Perhaps that’s why the design of dishes has evolved so they stack easily. You don’t have to think about it, they’re almost magnetically pulled together. That’s how you need to design your documents, so a search engine can vacuum them all up and automatically combine them into different sets for you. If you want a blog post on faceted classification for the domain of IM let me know in the comments below.

Like other types of management, many IM challenges are teamwork and communication challenges when you get down to the root causes. Individuals can usually organize their own things in a way that works for them personally. Even if their way looks “messy” to you. Problems arise when a group of people need to work together but don’t take the time to talk, compromise and agree on a shared approach to organizing shared things. The problems compound when team members go away on vacation or change over time. If you can ask Jordan Doe for some important information then you can keep doing your job. No problem. But when Jordan’s not there you might not know how to find some information and feel stressed about missing timelines. The problems compound even more when work is project based. In a traditional enterprise Jordan was only away on vacation once a year, but in a digital enterprise teammates may only be on a project for 6 months before moving on to the next project. That can add up to a lot of different personal IM styles contributing to a shared mess in a short amount of time. In the domain of archaeology it would be called a palimpsest.

Learning to organize shared things together, and to leave packages of information that can be understood by future employees, is an important aspect of forming high performance teams. If you take some time to better understand your own organizing traits, it can be easier for you to recognize the organizing style of others and communicate your organizing style to them. If they’re receptive to that very nerdy conversation… let’s be honest with ourselves.

  • Are you an alphabet person?
  • Are you a numbers person?
  • Are you a chronological person?
  • Are you a colours or shapes person?
  • Do you use an impressive method of loci technique like Cicero?
  • Do you like to wrap things up in protective packaging, even if you can’t see what’s inside.
  • Do you need to dump everything out on a desktop and spread it around to find things?
  • Do you get stressed browsing more than 10 search results, or do you find it relaxing to scroll through pages of Pinterest or Amazon thumbnails and hope for a moment of serendipity?
  • etc.

Being able to communicate your personal IM style, recognize the IM styles of your colleagues, and coordinate your style with others can help you avoid over-engineering your IM procedures and systems.

Organizing things together can also be a great team building exercise. Here’s a simple online animal classification game you can play for free. The point of this exercise isn’t to find the right answer and “win”. The point is to observe how your teammates arrived at their preferred answers and better understand their style of organizing. Did your team agree on everything immediately, or did someone want to sort the cards differently? Can you think of reasons why you would want to model / classify the world differently? Can you think of simple ways to remember a shared organizing system your team agreed on?

A simpler exercise would be a fireside chat about how everyone organizes their kitchen or packs a bag for a trip. You’ll probably discover a lot about your new coworkers’ organizing styles, and you might even enjoy the discussion!

In case you’ve read this far and still want to think about this topic some more, here are a few articles about the potential power of a mess. Some highlights:

  • Sometimes messiness puts incongruous ideas next to each other and that can spark unforeseen ideas. Consistency and traditions are good, but disruption can lead to improvements. This is an area where some extra enablement can balance out too much control.
  • Everyone understands the world differently, and we have different ways of organizing. So what looks like a mess to one person can make sense to another. That’s fine if no one ever has to dig through your mess, but it can be challenging to mix different messes together. For example, you win the lottery and fly to the south pacific and leave important drafts in your personal storage location. This is a situation where some extra control can balance out too much enablement.
  • Sometimes a bit of mess isn’t really a threat, and it’s better to spend your energy on other things. If you’re spending too much time on details like syntax, and those details won’t help you build an automated workflow one day, then you might be applying too much control. However this is also where the slippery slope to chaos can begin!
  • Sometimes a person can be very good at organizing, but can’t find small daily habits to break their “boom and bust” cycle of perfect order to complete chaos.