April 20, 2025 • 26 mins
A discussion about the deep underlying causes of the turbulence we're experiencing, and how to think about our agency in the situation.
Show notes:
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
- Harry’s TEDx San Antonio presentation
- Cynefin framework
- Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me) by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
- Rich Diviney
- Jocko Willink
- Leif Babin
- Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jorge (00:00):
We want simple answers.
We want to know that we can likepress the one button or elect
the right person and everythingwill be okay, right?
And things are more complex thanthat.
Narrator (00:19):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Harry (00:30):
Hey, Jorge, it's great to see you again.
Jorge (00:32):
It's great to see you too, Harry.
Harry (00:34):
I'm so curious, what is on your mind today?
Jorge (00:38):
Oh my goodness.
There is a lot on my mind.
There's so much going on in theworld.
The word that keeps coming to mymind, and I keep seeing it in
various media, is the wordturbulence.
And I've been thinking about allthe turbulence and thinking
about how we're responding tothe turbulence, maybe what's
(01:00):
causing the turbulence.
And that led me to revisit areading from a book that I've
been familiar with for a longtime.
And I wanted to read you apassage.
Harry (01:16):
I love it.
All right!
Jorge (01:18):
All right, so this is a little long, but we'll get
through it.
So it says,"Ever since theIndustrial Revolution, Western
Society has benefited fromscience, logic and reductionism
over intuition and holism,psychologically and politically.
(01:40):
We would much rather assume thatthe cause of a problem is'out
there' rather than'in here.'It's almost irresistible to
blame something or someone else,to shift responsibility away
from ourselves, and to look forthe control knob, the product,
(02:00):
the pill, the technical fix thatwill make a problem go away.
"Serious problems have beensolved by focusing on external
agents (02:10):
preventing smallpox, increasing food production,
moving large weights and manypeople rapidly over long
distances.
Because they are embedded inlarger systems, however, some of
our'solutions' have createdfurther problems.
And some problems, those mostrooted in the internal structure
(02:31):
of complex systems, the realmesses, have refused to go away.
"Hunger, poverty, environmentaldegradation, economic
instability, unemployment,chronic disease, drug addiction,
and war, for example, persist inspite of the analytical ability
and technical brilliance thathave been directed toward
(02:51):
eradicating them.
No one deliberately createsthose problems, no one wants
them to persist, but theypersist nonetheless.
That is because they areintrinsically systems problems,
undesirable behaviors,characteristic of the system
structures that produce them.
They will yield only as wereclaim our intuition, stop
(03:16):
casting blame, see the system asthe source of its own problems,
and find the courage and wisdomto restructure it."
Harry (03:28):
Wow.
That's heavy stuff, dude.
Really topical and oddly,there's an affinity between that
and what I have been thinkingabout recently regarding a TEDx
(03:49):
talk that I gave back in, gosh,was it 2012?
On problem framing anddiagnostic thinking.
I dunno if you ever had a chanceto take a look at it, but it's
this simple framework that, the,Oh man, I always get the X and
(04:14):
the Y axis mixed up, but thevertical axis, we'll call it
that, is the scope of impact,right?
So on the bottom it's like verylow scope of impact.
On the top, it's like epic scopeof impact.
And then the horizontal, axis issolvability, or what you might
(04:39):
characterize as perceivedsolvability.
And so, in the lower left handcorner, what you would have is
low scope of impact and highlysolvable.
And and then in the upper rightcorner, you would have epic
impact in terms of number ofliving things, the scope of
(05:01):
damage costs at every level.
And you would have theintractable, would probably be
the best word to describe that.
So in the upper right handcorner, I call those ELEs, or
extinction level events.
So in the bottom left you haveissues, and in the upper you
(05:24):
have extinction level events.
And then in between you have aseries of distinctions that
place problems which are bydefinition solvable, roughly in
the middle, and then to the leftof problems you have things that
(05:46):
are less than problems and tothe right of problems you have
things that are bigger thanproblems or more messy than
problems, less solvable thanproblems.
And so that's what I wasthinking about.
I was thinking of this frameworkwhere, there's always people
think about Dave Snowden's work,the Cynefin never say it right
(06:09):
the Cynefin framework, whereyou're dealing with dynamic
versus static complexity and soon and so forth.
But I've never really...
I have friends that love thatframework, but I was never
really able to pinpoint how touse it effectively.
That is to say, how to frame agiven problem and then pick an
intervention strategy to thenaddress the problem.
(06:30):
Because for something like aproblem, in the category of
problem, the, interventionstrategy is to look for a
solution.
But if you move to the right ofa problem, which moves it from
solvable to unsolvable, thefirst category you get to is a
predicament, which is anunsolvable problem, right?
(06:53):
It means it's going to come backto bite you like a whack-a-mole.
And so, therefore, what is theintervention strategy?
If you're gonna have anintervention strategy for a
problem that's gonna keeprecurring, but it's seemingly
solvable, that interventionstrategy probably looks
something like managing it.
(07:15):
You don't try to solve it,because by definition it's gonna
come back to bite you.
So, this reading went right tothe heart of this framework that
I was using at Rackspace, andultimately led to the book that
I wrote, because the folks atRackspace in San Antonio when I
was there asked me to give thisTEDx talk on this topic, and
(07:37):
that led to a South by Southwesttalk that led to a number of
discussions at Adobe and, USAAand a NU number of other
companies.
And I was all excited about thisframework and about this
powerful problem framing methodand about the intervention
strategy selection model.
(08:00):
And I would give these talks andlike, crickets.
Nobody said anything, they justsat there.
I'm like,"What?" But at somepoint, I think it was when I
gave the talk at Adobe, andmaybe the Innovation Game
Summit, with Luke Holman, andsome questions came up around
prioritization, and I was like,"Huh, that's interesting.
(08:22):
That's a very weak signal aboutpeople being interested in a
piece of this.
Like, how do you figure out whatmatters most in order to be able
to solve something or addresssomething or to manage
something?" And then that led tothe whole world of, maybe we
(08:42):
ought to be figuring out how todo prioritization better.
So, you just put the key in andturned it on when you went for
that, that reading with me,'cause it opened a whole world.
Jorge (08:54):
Let me tell you what it's from.
But first, I'll say that, theway that I'm hearing your matrix
there is that the vertical axishas to do with relevance,
somehow.
When you say"scope of impact,"what that communicates to me is
like some things that you'relooking to tweak have greater
relevance than others.
(09:17):
The other dimension has to dowith agency.
It's, how much can I actually doabout this?
And the reason I'm bringing thisup is that the author of this
book has a framework that Ithink addresses both.
So anyway, I'll tell you what itis, this is, Donella Meadows's
Thinking in Systems.
Harry (09:36):
Oh wow.
Jorge (09:37):
Which is the textbook that we use in a course I teach
on systems thinking.
I think that it's a lot ofpeople's first contact with
systems thinking.
It's a primer and it'sexplicitly written to be
accessible.
The reason I wanted to bring itto our conversation is that my
(10:00):
sense is that a lot of theturbulence and instability that
we're seeing in the world isbeing caused by a lack of
systems literacy.
Maybe our almost inherentinability in grokking the degree
to which the things that weexperience are actually outcomes
(10:28):
of really complex sets of thingsthat are interoperating.
It's like we want simpleanswers.
We want to know that we can likepress the one button or elect
the right person and everythingwill be okay, right?
And things are more complex thanthat.
Harry (10:50):
Let me share with you the next category.
So I told you one category wasproblem, that's solvable.
The next category to the rightof that is predicament.
That's a problem that keepsreoccurring.
The next category is the one Iwanna focus on, which is
quagmire.
(11:12):
And a quagmire is one whereyou're implicated.
That's one where any attempts toaddress the problem, and in
fact, even to understand theproblem, may in fact affect the
problem.
And I agree with you, I thinkthis is a systems issue.
I also think it's apsychological issue, because we
(11:34):
still wanna look at systemsissues as out there.
And,"It was not me.
I did not press the button." Andwhen I learned about systems
thinking back in the, like latenineties, that's scary; that's a
long-ass time ago! It was socool, right?
(11:56):
You get these charts and you getthese bubbles and you get these
arrows and all this stuff.
But I'm still here looking atthat.
And it wasn't until many yearslater, that I realized that you
have to be inside and outsidethat system at the same time in
order to understand how thatsystem may in fact be
functioning.
So the intervention strategy fora quagmire is mindfulness,
(12:21):
because it is the place whereyou need to accept the
possibility that yourinvolvement in any way is going
to affect how that system isfunctioning.
So I'm not sure how to resolvethis tension between systems
thinking and"it's out there andI'm in here," yet for the first
(12:43):
time I realized that I've beenthinking about this for a long
time, and in fact, it's built into the problem framing
diagnostic model that I've beenusing.
Jorge (12:53):
it's Schrodinger's quagmire, right?
One of the sentences I readthere I think speaks to what
you're saying here.
and I'm gonna reread it becauseI think it's important.
And I don't know if I pausedlong enough to communicate the
quotes, and I think the quotesare important.
Meadow says,"psychologically andpolitically, we would much
(13:15):
rather assume that the cause ofthe problem is'out there,'
rather than'in here.'" Endquote.
Harry (13:24):
Yeah, I'm glad you re-read that, because I did hear
it and then I myself fixated onthe"out there" part of it.
This gets to the heart ofcognitive dissonance and
starting to look at how do wemaintain our sense of self when
we are, in fact, part of theproblem?
We are implicated.
(13:45):
And the questions start topercolate up.
Okay, if we start with that asan assumption, what do we then
do with it?
So I haven't...
I read that book a long time agoand I don't remember how it
addresses this notion that we'reimplicated, we're part of the
(14:05):
system, can you refresh mymemory?
Do you have access to that?
Jorge (14:12):
I don't remember right off the top here whether there's
a portion that addresses that.
And I think that part of thereason might be that one of the
purposes of this book isprecisely to break you out of
this situation where you areunaware of the degree to which
(14:36):
you are a participant in thesituation.
This book invites you to stepback and see the situation as a
holistic mess rather thansomething that can be easily
tweaked.
Harry (14:50):
One of my favorite books ever and we may have talked
about this at some point isElliot Aronson and Carol
Tavris's book Mistakes WereMade, But Not By Me.
And it's the book that reallysheds such a bright light on the
idea that we'll go throughextraordinary efforts,
(15:14):
psychological efforts, tomaintain our sense of identity
and self in the face of anycognitive dissonance that we
have.
That is to say that our ownobservation of the way that
we're acting is out of phasewith who we think we are, and
therefore, when we get to thatlevel of discomfort, our first
(15:36):
response is to disavow ourselvesof what's happened, or of our
role in it.
And, I'm wondering whether someof these ideas need to get
brought together and simplifiedin a way that takes the system's
effect and takes thepsychological and bolts them
(15:58):
together so that there's a moreexplicit dialectical or
interaction model for problemframing, diagnostic thinking,
and intervention identification,prioritization, and selection.
Jorge (16:18):
You talked about giving a presentation and the responses
being crickets, and when yousaid that, I thought,"That
sounds familiar." Because when Italk about these things,
oftentimes, I'm met with puzzledlooks.
Harry (16:41):
Mm.
Jorge (16:42):
And I think partly it has to do with the fact that this is
a subject that requires thinkinga little bit abstract.
Or a lot abstract, right?
When you're talking about tryingto take in the idea that things
are more complex and they seem,and that you're dealing with a
very complex system, there'sthis scale problem.
(17:03):
Like, our sensory apparatus andour minds and stuff, they're
not...
We're not well equipped tounderstand problems at large
scales like that.
Or problems whose outcomes havea long duration.
Like climate change, I think, isis an example of this, where
(17:24):
like the scale and the time thatit takes for effects to be felt
are so detached from our livedexperiences, that it's hard for
us to assign cause and effect,causal relationships, there and
to get a sense of the degree towhich our actions influence what
we are observing, the outcomesthat we're observing.
(17:48):
I do agree with you that I thinkthat finding ways of talking
about this stuff that helppeople understand it and
internalize it is important.
I recently posted this thing insocial media where I said, that
it's becoming increasinglyevident to me that some degree
(18:09):
of systems literacy is essentialto the commonweal, the wellbeing
of a society.
Now, this sounds a little kindof like highfalutin and maybe a
little outside the scope of whatwe usually talk about, but I
think it's relevant because thisalso plays out in organizations.
(18:35):
Organizations are complexsystems as well, and knowing the
degree to which have agency andmaybe working explicitly on like
the matrix that you highlighted,where you try to like somehow
locate yourself with regards tothe degree of agency that you
can have at any given time, canmake you more skillful in
(18:58):
gaining traction.
Harry (19:01):
I super appreciate what you just said for a whole bunch
of reasons, but partly becauseit gave me the space to reflect
on where I have been hearingabout this out in the field.
And I'm a big fan of, of RichDiviney's work and I'm a big fan
(19:22):
of Jocko Willink and LeifBabin's work with Extreme
Ownership.
They wrote the book ExtremeOwnership, and I've been to one
of their major events.
One of the most fundamentalideas that Extreme Ownership
promotes, put bluntly andperhaps wrong, is"How am I at
(19:46):
fault?" And they'll tell youthose are the wrong words, there
are probably better words sothat it doesn't come off as
judgmental as it seems, but Ilike the term,"How am I
implicated?" But then implicatedis to erudite, right?
So I'll stick with what theExtreme Ownership folks, which
(20:09):
come out of the US military,love them or hate'em, and the
Navy Seals, they're just themost effective teams in the
world at doing what they do.
They know a lot of stuff and oneof the core ideas that they put
forward is you have to startwith self.
And starting with self is thesimplest, best, most effective,
(20:32):
most pragmatic way of getting tothe heart of change.
And perhaps the way back throughthis is to start with self and
not to start with what's theproblem.
But you can look at thesymptomology, you can look at
what's happening right now andhow am I at fault?
(20:53):
What is my role in it?
How am I implicated and thepower of doing that in the
context of what's going on inyour home, with your partner,
with your kids.
It's astonishing, right?
Because I have been practicingthis now for a couple of years,
like driving home first, what'smy role in it?
How am I implicated?
(21:15):
How am I at fault?
Rather than, what did they do?
You did this.
It's your fault.
You're bad.
Like, turning it all around.
If I want something different tohappen, I have to start by
looking at my role in it first,and maybe it's that simple.
Jorge (21:34):
You know, part of the reason that I said that there
was something in Meadows's workthat kind of echoed the matrix
that you were talking about, isthat she has a list of what she
called"leverage points" tointervene in a system.
And there's one of the chaptersin the book that covers them.
There are twelve points, andthey're ranked so like number 12
(21:59):
is the least impactful in someways, and then they work
themselves up to the mostimpactful.
Harry (22:05):
Oh, you mean they're prioritized?
Jorge (22:07):
They are prioritized.
Yeah.
And I have to say, I think thatsome of the rankings might be
arguable.
But broadly, I think that thismaps to what you were talking
about, in, saying that there's away of thinking about
solvability, right?
What can I do in this situation?
Anyway, the reason I'm bringingit up now is that the two most
(22:30):
impactful leverage points in herlist, number two, she says it's
the mindset, or, paradigm thatis causing the system to arise.
So there's this kind of sharedmental model that is making this
happen.
(22:50):
And then, number one is thepower to transcend paradigms.
To understand we're not set withthis mental model.
We could adopt different mentalmodels.
And, to your point, it's onething to talk about doing it out
there, but this is somethingthat we can do for ourselves.
(23:11):
And we can take a step back andsay,"I've been thinking about it
this way, but what if there wereother ways that I could think
about this?
What if there were otherframings I could bring to this
situation?"
Harry (23:25):
And as nuanced as this might sound, a minute ago, I
think you said,"How can I fixthis?" But the echelon front
Extreme Ownership is how did Icause this?
It's, start with that it's yourfault, leaving the judginess
aside of the word fault, andthen use the window of how is
(23:52):
this unfolding in thisparticular way in where there's
a gap between the state that Iwant and the state that I have,
and pinpointing my role in it sothat I can own it, so that I can
take responsibility for it, sothat I can then take somebody
else off the hook of themthinking that I'm looking at
(24:17):
them as the source of theproblem.
So it creates a dynamic.
It's a paradigm shift to allow adifferent psychological frame to
exist around this.
The echelon fronts folks talkabout this in the context of
subjugating your ego and lettingyour ego step back from needing
(24:43):
to be right and being on thebrink of being forceful about
being the agent of change andasserting that by starting with
the place that that person, asthey've shown up, is actually
(25:04):
potentially the cause of thething that's unwanted to begin
with.
Jorge (25:09):
And interestingly, I would assume that by doing that,
by restraining the ego in theway that you're describing, and
accepting responsibility for thesituation, you are also gaining
some degree of agency and nolonger being buffeted by forces
(25:29):
that are seemingly outside yourcontrol.
Harry (25:33):
It's weirdly counterintuitive in that way.
Jorge (25:37):
Wow.
That's something to ponder.
I'm gonna be sitting with thatone for a while.
Thank you for bringing that,Harry.
As always, I've gone a lot outour conversation today.
Thank you.
Harry (25:50):
Yeah.
Thank you, Jorge.
Narrator (25:56):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the shownotes@tractionheroes.com and if
you enjoyed the show, pleaseleave us a rating in Apple's
podcasts app.
Thanks.
We want simple answers.
We want to know that we can likepress the one button or elect
the right person and everythingwill be okay, right?
And things are more complex thanthat.
Narrator (00:19):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Harry (00:30):
Hey, Jorge, it's great to see you again.
Jorge (00:32):
It's great to see you too, Harry.
Harry (00:34):
I'm so curious, what is on your mind today?
Jorge (00:38):
Oh my goodness.
There is a lot on my mind.
There's so much going on in theworld.
The word that keeps coming to mymind, and I keep seeing it in
various media, is the wordturbulence.
And I've been thinking about allthe turbulence and thinking
about how we're responding tothe turbulence, maybe what's
(01:00):
causing the turbulence.
And that led me to revisit areading from a book that I've
been familiar with for a longtime.
And I wanted to read you apassage.
Harry (01:16):
I love it.
All right!
Jorge (01:18):
All right, so this is a little long, but we'll get
through it.
So it says,"Ever since theIndustrial Revolution, Western
Society has benefited fromscience, logic and reductionism
over intuition and holism,psychologically and politically.
(01:40):
We would much rather assume thatthe cause of a problem is'out
there' rather than'in here.'It's almost irresistible to
blame something or someone else,to shift responsibility away
from ourselves, and to look forthe control knob, the product,
(02:00):
the pill, the technical fix thatwill make a problem go away.
"Serious problems have beensolved by focusing on external
agents (02:10):
preventing smallpox, increasing food production,
moving large weights and manypeople rapidly over long
distances.
Because they are embedded inlarger systems, however, some of
our'solutions' have createdfurther problems.
And some problems, those mostrooted in the internal structure
(02:31):
of complex systems, the realmesses, have refused to go away.
"Hunger, poverty, environmentaldegradation, economic
instability, unemployment,chronic disease, drug addiction,
and war, for example, persist inspite of the analytical ability
and technical brilliance thathave been directed toward
(02:51):
eradicating them.
No one deliberately createsthose problems, no one wants
them to persist, but theypersist nonetheless.
That is because they areintrinsically systems problems,
undesirable behaviors,characteristic of the system
structures that produce them.
They will yield only as wereclaim our intuition, stop
(03:16):
casting blame, see the system asthe source of its own problems,
and find the courage and wisdomto restructure it."
Harry (03:28):
Wow.
That's heavy stuff, dude.
Really topical and oddly,there's an affinity between that
and what I have been thinkingabout recently regarding a TEDx
(03:49):
talk that I gave back in, gosh,was it 2012?
On problem framing anddiagnostic thinking.
I dunno if you ever had a chanceto take a look at it, but it's
this simple framework that, the,Oh man, I always get the X and
(04:14):
the Y axis mixed up, but thevertical axis, we'll call it
that, is the scope of impact,right?
So on the bottom it's like verylow scope of impact.
On the top, it's like epic scopeof impact.
And then the horizontal, axis issolvability, or what you might
(04:39):
characterize as perceivedsolvability.
And so, in the lower left handcorner, what you would have is
low scope of impact and highlysolvable.
And and then in the upper rightcorner, you would have epic
impact in terms of number ofliving things, the scope of
(05:01):
damage costs at every level.
And you would have theintractable, would probably be
the best word to describe that.
So in the upper right handcorner, I call those ELEs, or
extinction level events.
So in the bottom left you haveissues, and in the upper you
(05:24):
have extinction level events.
And then in between you have aseries of distinctions that
place problems which are bydefinition solvable, roughly in
the middle, and then to the leftof problems you have things that
(05:46):
are less than problems and tothe right of problems you have
things that are bigger thanproblems or more messy than
problems, less solvable thanproblems.
And so that's what I wasthinking about.
I was thinking of this frameworkwhere, there's always people
think about Dave Snowden's work,the Cynefin never say it right
(06:09):
the Cynefin framework, whereyou're dealing with dynamic
versus static complexity and soon and so forth.
But I've never really...
I have friends that love thatframework, but I was never
really able to pinpoint how touse it effectively.
That is to say, how to frame agiven problem and then pick an
intervention strategy to thenaddress the problem.
(06:30):
Because for something like aproblem, in the category of
problem, the, interventionstrategy is to look for a
solution.
But if you move to the right ofa problem, which moves it from
solvable to unsolvable, thefirst category you get to is a
predicament, which is anunsolvable problem, right?
(06:53):
It means it's going to come backto bite you like a whack-a-mole.
And so, therefore, what is theintervention strategy?
If you're gonna have anintervention strategy for a
problem that's gonna keeprecurring, but it's seemingly
solvable, that interventionstrategy probably looks
something like managing it.
(07:15):
You don't try to solve it,because by definition it's gonna
come back to bite you.
So, this reading went right tothe heart of this framework that
I was using at Rackspace, andultimately led to the book that
I wrote, because the folks atRackspace in San Antonio when I
was there asked me to give thisTEDx talk on this topic, and
(07:37):
that led to a South by Southwesttalk that led to a number of
discussions at Adobe and, USAAand a NU number of other
companies.
And I was all excited about thisframework and about this
powerful problem framing methodand about the intervention
strategy selection model.
(08:00):
And I would give these talks andlike, crickets.
Nobody said anything, they justsat there.
I'm like,"What?" But at somepoint, I think it was when I
gave the talk at Adobe, andmaybe the Innovation Game
Summit, with Luke Holman, andsome questions came up around
prioritization, and I was like,"Huh, that's interesting.
(08:22):
That's a very weak signal aboutpeople being interested in a
piece of this.
Like, how do you figure out whatmatters most in order to be able
to solve something or addresssomething or to manage
something?" And then that led tothe whole world of, maybe we
(08:42):
ought to be figuring out how todo prioritization better.
So, you just put the key in andturned it on when you went for
that, that reading with me,'cause it opened a whole world.
Jorge (08:54):
Let me tell you what it's from.
But first, I'll say that, theway that I'm hearing your matrix
there is that the vertical axishas to do with relevance,
somehow.
When you say"scope of impact,"what that communicates to me is
like some things that you'relooking to tweak have greater
relevance than others.
(09:17):
The other dimension has to dowith agency.
It's, how much can I actually doabout this?
And the reason I'm bringing thisup is that the author of this
book has a framework that Ithink addresses both.
So anyway, I'll tell you what itis, this is, Donella Meadows's
Thinking in Systems.
Harry (09:36):
Oh wow.
Jorge (09:37):
Which is the textbook that we use in a course I teach
on systems thinking.
I think that it's a lot ofpeople's first contact with
systems thinking.
It's a primer and it'sexplicitly written to be
accessible.
The reason I wanted to bring itto our conversation is that my
(10:00):
sense is that a lot of theturbulence and instability that
we're seeing in the world isbeing caused by a lack of
systems literacy.
Maybe our almost inherentinability in grokking the degree
to which the things that weexperience are actually outcomes
(10:28):
of really complex sets of thingsthat are interoperating.
It's like we want simpleanswers.
We want to know that we can likepress the one button or elect
the right person and everythingwill be okay, right?
And things are more complex thanthat.
Harry (10:50):
Let me share with you the next category.
So I told you one category wasproblem, that's solvable.
The next category to the rightof that is predicament.
That's a problem that keepsreoccurring.
The next category is the one Iwanna focus on, which is
quagmire.
(11:12):
And a quagmire is one whereyou're implicated.
That's one where any attempts toaddress the problem, and in
fact, even to understand theproblem, may in fact affect the
problem.
And I agree with you, I thinkthis is a systems issue.
I also think it's apsychological issue, because we
(11:34):
still wanna look at systemsissues as out there.
And,"It was not me.
I did not press the button." Andwhen I learned about systems
thinking back in the, like latenineties, that's scary; that's a
long-ass time ago! It was socool, right?
(11:56):
You get these charts and you getthese bubbles and you get these
arrows and all this stuff.
But I'm still here looking atthat.
And it wasn't until many yearslater, that I realized that you
have to be inside and outsidethat system at the same time in
order to understand how thatsystem may in fact be
functioning.
So the intervention strategy fora quagmire is mindfulness,
(12:21):
because it is the place whereyou need to accept the
possibility that yourinvolvement in any way is going
to affect how that system isfunctioning.
So I'm not sure how to resolvethis tension between systems
thinking and"it's out there andI'm in here," yet for the first
(12:43):
time I realized that I've beenthinking about this for a long
time, and in fact, it's built into the problem framing
diagnostic model that I've beenusing.
Jorge (12:53):
it's Schrodinger's quagmire, right?
One of the sentences I readthere I think speaks to what
you're saying here.
and I'm gonna reread it becauseI think it's important.
And I don't know if I pausedlong enough to communicate the
quotes, and I think the quotesare important.
Meadow says,"psychologically andpolitically, we would much
(13:15):
rather assume that the cause ofthe problem is'out there,'
rather than'in here.'" Endquote.
Harry (13:24):
Yeah, I'm glad you re-read that, because I did hear
it and then I myself fixated onthe"out there" part of it.
This gets to the heart ofcognitive dissonance and
starting to look at how do wemaintain our sense of self when
we are, in fact, part of theproblem?
We are implicated.
(13:45):
And the questions start topercolate up.
Okay, if we start with that asan assumption, what do we then
do with it?
So I haven't...
I read that book a long time agoand I don't remember how it
addresses this notion that we'reimplicated, we're part of the
(14:05):
system, can you refresh mymemory?
Do you have access to that?
Jorge (14:12):
I don't remember right off the top here whether there's
a portion that addresses that.
And I think that part of thereason might be that one of the
purposes of this book isprecisely to break you out of
this situation where you areunaware of the degree to which
(14:36):
you are a participant in thesituation.
This book invites you to stepback and see the situation as a
holistic mess rather thansomething that can be easily
tweaked.
Harry (14:50):
One of my favorite books ever and we may have talked
about this at some point isElliot Aronson and Carol
Tavris's book Mistakes WereMade, But Not By Me.
And it's the book that reallysheds such a bright light on the
idea that we'll go throughextraordinary efforts,
(15:14):
psychological efforts, tomaintain our sense of identity
and self in the face of anycognitive dissonance that we
have.
That is to say that our ownobservation of the way that
we're acting is out of phasewith who we think we are, and
therefore, when we get to thatlevel of discomfort, our first
(15:36):
response is to disavow ourselvesof what's happened, or of our
role in it.
And, I'm wondering whether someof these ideas need to get
brought together and simplifiedin a way that takes the system's
effect and takes thepsychological and bolts them
(15:58):
together so that there's a moreexplicit dialectical or
interaction model for problemframing, diagnostic thinking,
and intervention identification,prioritization, and selection.
Jorge (16:18):
You talked about giving a presentation and the responses
being crickets, and when yousaid that, I thought,"That
sounds familiar." Because when Italk about these things,
oftentimes, I'm met with puzzledlooks.
Harry (16:41):
Mm.
Jorge (16:42):
And I think partly it has to do with the fact that this is
a subject that requires thinkinga little bit abstract.
Or a lot abstract, right?
When you're talking about tryingto take in the idea that things
are more complex and they seem,and that you're dealing with a
very complex system, there'sthis scale problem.
(17:03):
Like, our sensory apparatus andour minds and stuff, they're
not...
We're not well equipped tounderstand problems at large
scales like that.
Or problems whose outcomes havea long duration.
Like climate change, I think, isis an example of this, where
(17:24):
like the scale and the time thatit takes for effects to be felt
are so detached from our livedexperiences, that it's hard for
us to assign cause and effect,causal relationships, there and
to get a sense of the degree towhich our actions influence what
we are observing, the outcomesthat we're observing.
(17:48):
I do agree with you that I thinkthat finding ways of talking
about this stuff that helppeople understand it and
internalize it is important.
I recently posted this thing insocial media where I said, that
it's becoming increasinglyevident to me that some degree
(18:09):
of systems literacy is essentialto the commonweal, the wellbeing
of a society.
Now, this sounds a little kindof like highfalutin and maybe a
little outside the scope of whatwe usually talk about, but I
think it's relevant because thisalso plays out in organizations.
(18:35):
Organizations are complexsystems as well, and knowing the
degree to which have agency andmaybe working explicitly on like
the matrix that you highlighted,where you try to like somehow
locate yourself with regards tothe degree of agency that you
can have at any given time, canmake you more skillful in
(18:58):
gaining traction.
Harry (19:01):
I super appreciate what you just said for a whole bunch
of reasons, but partly becauseit gave me the space to reflect
on where I have been hearingabout this out in the field.
And I'm a big fan of, of RichDiviney's work and I'm a big fan
(19:22):
of Jocko Willink and LeifBabin's work with Extreme
Ownership.
They wrote the book ExtremeOwnership, and I've been to one
of their major events.
One of the most fundamentalideas that Extreme Ownership
promotes, put bluntly andperhaps wrong, is"How am I at
(19:46):
fault?" And they'll tell youthose are the wrong words, there
are probably better words sothat it doesn't come off as
judgmental as it seems, but Ilike the term,"How am I
implicated?" But then implicatedis to erudite, right?
So I'll stick with what theExtreme Ownership folks, which
(20:09):
come out of the US military,love them or hate'em, and the
Navy Seals, they're just themost effective teams in the
world at doing what they do.
They know a lot of stuff and oneof the core ideas that they put
forward is you have to startwith self.
And starting with self is thesimplest, best, most effective,
(20:32):
most pragmatic way of getting tothe heart of change.
And perhaps the way back throughthis is to start with self and
not to start with what's theproblem.
But you can look at thesymptomology, you can look at
what's happening right now andhow am I at fault?
(20:53):
What is my role in it?
How am I implicated and thepower of doing that in the
context of what's going on inyour home, with your partner,
with your kids.
It's astonishing, right?
Because I have been practicingthis now for a couple of years,
like driving home first, what'smy role in it?
How am I implicated?
(21:15):
How am I at fault?
Rather than, what did they do?
You did this.
It's your fault.
You're bad.
Like, turning it all around.
If I want something different tohappen, I have to start by
looking at my role in it first,and maybe it's that simple.
Jorge (21:34):
You know, part of the reason that I said that there
was something in Meadows's workthat kind of echoed the matrix
that you were talking about, isthat she has a list of what she
called"leverage points" tointervene in a system.
And there's one of the chaptersin the book that covers them.
There are twelve points, andthey're ranked so like number 12
(21:59):
is the least impactful in someways, and then they work
themselves up to the mostimpactful.
Harry (22:05):
Oh, you mean they're prioritized?
Jorge (22:07):
They are prioritized.
Yeah.
And I have to say, I think thatsome of the rankings might be
arguable.
But broadly, I think that thismaps to what you were talking
about, in, saying that there's away of thinking about
solvability, right?
What can I do in this situation?
Anyway, the reason I'm bringingit up now is that the two most
(22:30):
impactful leverage points in herlist, number two, she says it's
the mindset, or, paradigm thatis causing the system to arise.
So there's this kind of sharedmental model that is making this
happen.
(22:50):
And then, number one is thepower to transcend paradigms.
To understand we're not set withthis mental model.
We could adopt different mentalmodels.
And, to your point, it's onething to talk about doing it out
there, but this is somethingthat we can do for ourselves.
(23:11):
And we can take a step back andsay,"I've been thinking about it
this way, but what if there wereother ways that I could think
about this?
What if there were otherframings I could bring to this
situation?"
Harry (23:25):
And as nuanced as this might sound, a minute ago, I
think you said,"How can I fixthis?" But the echelon front
Extreme Ownership is how did Icause this?
It's, start with that it's yourfault, leaving the judginess
aside of the word fault, andthen use the window of how is
(23:52):
this unfolding in thisparticular way in where there's
a gap between the state that Iwant and the state that I have,
and pinpointing my role in it sothat I can own it, so that I can
take responsibility for it, sothat I can then take somebody
else off the hook of themthinking that I'm looking at
(24:17):
them as the source of theproblem.
So it creates a dynamic.
It's a paradigm shift to allow adifferent psychological frame to
exist around this.
The echelon fronts folks talkabout this in the context of
subjugating your ego and lettingyour ego step back from needing
(24:43):
to be right and being on thebrink of being forceful about
being the agent of change andasserting that by starting with
the place that that person, asthey've shown up, is actually
(25:04):
potentially the cause of thething that's unwanted to begin
with.
Jorge (25:09):
And interestingly, I would assume that by doing that,
by restraining the ego in theway that you're describing, and
accepting responsibility for thesituation, you are also gaining
some degree of agency and nolonger being buffeted by forces
(25:29):
that are seemingly outside yourcontrol.
Harry (25:33):
It's weirdly counterintuitive in that way.
Jorge (25:37):
Wow.
That's something to ponder.
I'm gonna be sitting with thatone for a while.
Thank you for bringing that,Harry.
As always, I've gone a lot outour conversation today.
Thank you.
Harry (25:50):
Yeah.
Thank you, Jorge.
Narrator (25:56):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the shownotes@tractionheroes.com and if
you enjoyed the show, pleaseleave us a rating in Apple's
podcasts app.
Thanks.
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