(2022-09-20) Chin Dancing Landscapes In Business

Cedric Chin: Dancing Landscapes in Business. I had a conversation with Dr. Rand Spiro. Spiro is the primary researcher behind Cognitive Flexibility Theory.

The simplest kind of landscape they call a Mount Fuji landscape. The highest part of the landscape is the solution

Then the kind of complex landscape — when we deal with (any amount of) complexity at all — is what’s called a rugged landscape. There’s a lot of mountains, and perhaps one is bigger, and is a better solution, than all the other peaks, but you can’t see it because if you’re over here, it’s blocked

then you get to the dancing landscape

the landscape changes

You have to be ready for those moments or you die.

now, especially in industries related to technology and so on, the timeframe when you reach the next dance is sped up.

even when you don’t have times of change, you can have dancing in ordinary, non-macro change times

American Airlines announces its new plan

businesses are going to need leaders with more cognitive flexibility going forward.

I can think of two objections to Spiro’s point

The first is that complex adaptive systems don’t ‘dance’ forever — rather, they tend to go through ‘phase transitions’. (phase change)

perhaps exceedingly high cognitive flexibility is well adapted to times of rapid change; a more classical ‘optimisation’ stance is better fitted to the stable

A second objection — one that I’ve ruminated on in the weeks after our call — is that ‘solution landscapes’ seem a heck of a lot more theoretical compared to the core ideas of CFT.

I suppose you could say that dancing periods are when concept instantiations become the most variable

Michael Mauboussin on Fitness Landscapes

As it turns out, legendary finance researcher Michael Mauboussin covers the exact same concept in chapter 23 of his book More Than You Know.

describes the three types of fitness landscapes as an answer to the first question, though he uses slightly different terminology:

Stable

Coarse:... Some companies deliver much better economic performance than do others.... These industries run a clear risk of being unseated (losing fitness) by a disruptive technology. (disruptive innovation)

Roiling: This group contains businesses that are very dynamic, with evolving business models, substantial uncertainty, and ever-changing product offerings...Economic returns in this group can be (or can promise to be) significant but are generally fleeting. (5GM)

And then he concludes the chapter by arguing that each of these three fitness landscapes call for different strategies and therefore different forms of organisational design.

Email: Dancing Landscapes in Business

there are three types of ‘problem solving landscapes’ in complexity science: a stable, simple landscape, a rugged landscape, and a dancing landscape. The most wicked problems in business involve a dancing landscape — you think you’re navigating one kind of terrain, and then suddenly the landscape dances all around you.

Spiro believes that tech-exposed businesses are more vulnerable to drastic changes than the businesses of his youth. He argues that businesses will need leaders with more cognitive flexibility going forward. (Great Weirding)

This week, I’m linking to ‘Boris’, an exercise Vaughn Tan runs for large organisations that helps with goal-setting under uncertainty (which is a fancier way of saying ‘how do you set goals when you don’t know what goals to set?’

One way of looking at Boris is that it is a way to introduce ‘commander’s intent’ into a centralised organisation. Commander’s intent is a method of military command intended to allow multiple autonomous teams to improvise on the ground

the simpler way of looking at Boris is: An organization that does conventional goal-setting will have agreed on shared goals but not on the acceptable/unacceptable tradeoffs in achieving those shared goals. Boris surfaces those tradeoffs.

I’m about 75% of the way through Warfighting (1997), and it is a short, concisely written, remarkably influential account of how to fight a war if you treat it seriously as an uncertain, complex adaptive system. (FourGW)

Why am I linking to a philosophical manual on how to wage war? The main reason I’m doing so is because it is inextricably tied to two training methods for better field decision making, that I think we could steal for the world of business:

Tactical Decision Games

Shadowbox, which is in many ways the spiritual successor to TDGs (it was created by John Schmitt, the same person who originated the TDG training approach in the Marines). Shadowbox is now used to train law enforcement officers, emergency room nurses, and other technical professionals