Before noticing
Following last week's post on weak signals, Ben, one of the subscribers to this newsletter, sent through a question.
"How do we keep focus on a broad range of weak signals at any given time?"
I had to think about it. Leaders need to remain sensitive to what is emerging, but they cannot pay attention to everything. Attention is finite. Scanning everything creates noise, not sensitivity.
But Ben also offered something that fed my thinking. "If you look for safety you get safety," he said. "If you look for fragility you get fragility."
That's the insight. Fragility is a lens that makes you curious about where the system of work relies on adaptation, compensation and conditions continuing to hold. Once you have that lens, things become salient that previously went unnoticed: workarounds, bottlenecks, heroic effort, hidden dependencies, accumulated frustration, people carrying unnecessary burden. Without the lens, those are just how we get the job done.
Jop Havinga, who recently reviewed my book on his blog Safety on Scrap Paper, pushed a related argument further. He argued convincingly that patterns aren't simply out there waiting to be discovered. They're partly constructed through the frameworks we bring (and he pointed out traces of my, more or less undisclosed, frameworks in the book). Without a framework, there is no signal for us. The thing exists: the movement, the hesitation, the workaround, but it has not yet become meaningful information.
That reframes the problem. Asking leaders to notice more without giving them a framework for what matters is a call for something that isn't yet possible.
This is why I have always been cautious about checklists and predetermined observation lists. They tell people what to see. A framework helps people understand why something is worth seeing.
So the leadership development question becomes: what are the categories of meaning we want leaders to develop? What aspects of reality should leaders become sensitive to?
There are many lenses available. But here are three different ones to consider.
Behavioural. Performance is shaped by what people do and what they believe is expected of them. When this is our lens we become curious about: Are people following procedures, and why or why not? What can and can't be said here? What norms are actually shaping decisions under pressure?
Physical energy. Harm occurs when physical energy is released without adequate control. Attention goes to: Where is energy stored, moving or transferred? What barriers are preventing uncontrolled release?
System performance. When the assumption is that performance emerges from the interaction between people, technology, tasks, resources and conditions, well then we become curious about: What is the system asking of people? Where is work becoming difficult? How are people adapting? Where is coordination breaking down?
Each lens makes different things visible. A leader relying only on a behavioural lens may find individual explanations for problems that are also being produced by system conditions. The goal isn't to hold all perspectives in your head at once. The goal is to recognise which lens is shaping your attention and deliberately shift perspectives when your current explanation no longer helps.
Erik Hollnagel and colleagues once wrote about WYLFIWYF: What You Look For Is What You Find. It's one of the more important things to understand about organisational perception. You get whatever your organisation has learned to see. And what it has learned to ignore.
Toyota's leaders noticed (see previous post) the worker standing on tiptoes because decades of organisational philosophy had taught them that human adaptation is information. The framework came before the observation. It made the observation possible.
The practice is less about searching for signals and more about developing the ability to see. A lens is an understanding of why something matters, what patterns to look for, and what becomes possible once those patterns are visible. Of course, seeing is not the same as acting. A useful lens is only the beginning. But without it, action is unlikely because the issue never becomes visible in the first place.
So, my answer to Ben is: We don't need a list of things. We need to develop richer, more meaningful ways of interpreting what we encounter.
Daniel