Employing Differences, Episode 149: Will duct tape work?

Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employing about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:16

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:18

Each episode we start with a takes us. This week's question is, "Will duct tape work?"

Karen: 0:27

So we're speaking here about the we sometimes talk about 'duct tape and chewing gum' as a solution to a problem. And of course, we're talking about this in the spaces between people. In the relationships, in organizations and companies and communities. About when we don't have the right solution for whatever reason. When the, like, 'take it into the mechanic and have them actually replace all the parts' isn't available, isn't happening. Will it work to stick it together with the relational equivalent of 'duct tape and chewing gum'? And so we want to just explore when that is actually an excellent solution and when you'd want to think twice about it and what you can expect to come along with that kind of solution.

Paul: 1:16

Mm hmm. One of the tensions that you've heard us talk about this on the show before, playing out where there's two things that are going on in any group as they're getting things done. One is, are they getting things done? And two, what is the state of the relationship between those people? And so oftentimes when, we've talked about this on the last episode, we talked about this idea of "Is this process worth it?" If we're using a particular process, what's the relational cost of using that process? We're kind of looking at this from the opposite side here of,"Look, we don't have a good process for doing this, so we don't have a good structure in place for making this type of decision. Or allocating this money or working through these types of difficulties." And so that lack of process, and that lack of a clear understanding in the group of how we're going to address things like this, has a relational cost to it. It creates anxiety. It usually creates power imbalances that we aren't necessarily comfortable with. And so there's a cost to not having that. But at the same time, we also recognize that putting those sorts of clear systems and structures and processes in place isn't free, right? It takes time and energy to do those sorts of things to figure out. "What is our budgeting process going to look like?","How are we going to make decisions as a team?", "How are we going to make these different types of decisions?" And so we tend to do them on an ad hoc basis. Often when, and what we tend to say is, "Well, it's working well enough." And my experience has been when people say that, when they say it's working well enough, you know, this ad hoc way of doing it, it means generally that they don't feel the need to invest time and energy into coming up with some actual formal structure to it. And it usually means that they're only looking at the result of that process. The actual, the work that comes out, 'Yes, decisions are getting made'. And it tends to be ignoring what's the cost that the group is paying in the relational space for not having that in place?

Karen: 3:24

And interestingly, I think that having it in place are almost equivalent to the relational costs of having a process that doesn't work. That costs too much. So, what we talked about last week, you'll hear a lot of the same themes here of "What disrupts relationships when there just isn't a process." Because when the process that you have is too costly, you tend to pretend there isn't a process. So we sort of land in the same place. And I want to think about this in a few ways. Sometimes there isn't a process because the process that we had wasn't working and we all just started ignoring it. Sometimes we haven't gotten around to designing one yet and there can be really good reasons for that. We can be, you know, forming an organization and, you know, everything is 'duct tape and chewing gum' and we're just throwing things together. And budget isn't necessarily going to be different than that, or codes of conduct or whatever it is that you're thinking. We just sort of know the thing that we're doing is a sloppy thing and it's going to be sloppy for a while. And we can contract that with each other, and that that's its own thing. It doesn't mean the relationship costs aren't there. They are. But that can just be 'we either do it with the relationship costs or we don't do it' kind of thing can be where we are. And it can be a thing that we say, "You know what? It's not worth trying to regulate this." You know, we're willing to live a little bit in what some people talk about, like 'the wild, Wild West' of- like everybody is. Just, you know, people do what they think needs to be done. It feels very egalitarian and maybe it annoys other people, but they can talk about it or whatever. And as soon as there's a process, we slow down progress kind of thing. So I think it can be both ways. But I think it's interesting to look at that space of "We haven't built a process for this yet." It's not that anybody is ignoring it. It's not that we didn't, you know, nobody's doing anything wrong. But the fact is we're trying to function without a process. And when is the right time to say, "Yep, we're going to be this way." Like we're just going to have to forgive each other for a while because it's just going to be like this right now. And when is the time to say, "You know, we're really accumulating too much relationship debt as a term I would use for that. And we need to do the work to build a process where we all feel safer. Where we all feel better and stronger in our relationships." So, how do we know that tipping point?

Paul: 6:01

And I work, you know, a fair bit they're inventing things on the fly, as they go, right? The phrase is often 'building the plane as it's in flight', right? And so, absolutely, there are these tons of these duct tape things. And that is actually a real strength! In a lot of ways, you know, the things that they're trying to do are not well defined. And so they can't necessarily figure out a process ahead of time that's going to work. And so doing that 'fly by the seat of your pants' sort of thing is useful. It is actually beneficial. And your point about relationship, that is a really good one! Because in order to work in that space, what you need to have is a strong web of relationships. A container, as I often talk about. Because it allows us to hold that stuff. It becomes a reserve that we can draw on. And I think an important part to recognize is that, that we are operating at a relationship deficit when we're doing that. That we're tapping into that reserve and at some point it will bottom out. And so I think that, to your question about like noticing when do we actually need to put the time and effort in to put something in place, I think that's largely determined by what is the current state of our relational reserves. And being able to say, like, "If this happens three more times, if we think it's going to take us six months to figure this out, how many more times is this going to come up in the next six months?" And, "Do we think we can withstand that many more times if this happening?""Are things going to go sideways if that happens?" And that's my general sense of, you know, what are the things that are currently relationally taxing in your group and your organization and your thing. And like, how much more of that do you think the system can take? And then I tend to tell people it's half that number, right? They're always terrible at estimating that because as we've talked about before, relationship systems break down nonlinearly. It's fine. It's fine, it's fine, it explodes. So I think that's really what it requires is being tapped into a sense of "What is the relational cost of not having a system for this?" Of not having a process that's clear and understood, and used by everybody. And then recognizing how close to empty are we running on this.

Karen: 8:20

Yeah. I'll add a corollary to are to empty, the more effort it will take to agree to a process'.

Paul: 8:29

Uh huh.

Karen: 8:29

So there is a, the amount of process when you all feel good about each other is significantly less than the time it will take to create the same process when people are sort of fit to be tied and barely speaking. So, and again, that's not linear, so we have to be careful about that. But I think that's generally I like that frame of what reserve have we built up, what goodwill do we have? And then I'd be looking at, okay, so "What are we doing in the absence of a good process?" And, "What are the danger zones about that?" So one thing that might be happening is we'd like to be making a decision as a whole group, in a very egalitarian way. Maybe by consensus or whatever our process is. But we don't have a good way to do that. And so one person or two people are just making decisions. Individuals are making decisions. And it may be a lot of decisions are being made just by the CEO, or it may be, you know, this kind of decision is being made by this person and somebody else is just making decisions randomly. And is that working? That can be a very efficient way to make decisions. And in fact, at some point you might just say "That's how we operate! That is our process!""That's what we're doing. It's working for us." Well, say it out loud to each other. And now we have a process. But if it's resulting in people saying, "You know, that wasn't what I signed on for", "That wasn't what I understood was going to happen", "I'm feeling, you know, left out or betrayed" or those kinds of feelings, resentment building, then that's a different thing. And so looking at "What are we doing in the absence of a process"- the other thing that happens in the absence of a process is we just don't do the thing. So that there's work that doesn't happen, or decisions that don't get made. "I'm living in a brand new community and it appears to me that nobody has figured out how we're going to acquire a lawn mower because the lawn is getting longer and longer and I'm not sure what to do about it. And I don't know who to ask because we don't have processes in place." And for me. One's- kind of long."Oh, well, like, this is not a thing that's doing me in." But what are the signs that what we're doing, either by not doing things, or by doing them in a more dictatorial kind of way- and I don't necessarily mean that in an ugly sense, but in a'one person just makes the decision'. How are we feeling about that? How is that landing? And then if, if we can sort of assess that, and weigh that against sort of what our relationship reserves looking like, that begins to give us a path forward.

Paul: 11:02

Yeah. Yeah. And it's always a it's a dynamic sort of balancing act. And one of the things that I, the other thing around that that I generally recommend is a way forward is, with regards to this thing that we're trying to duct tape together. What's the smallest improvement we could make to it, that would make a difference? Because there's a tendency to want to overdesign for all of these things. And I actually like what you have talked about, in terms of like "Sometimes we just decide to formalise the thing that we're already doing." I actually, for a lot of groups, recommend that they don't design everything upfront. Because they don't know what problems they're going to have yet. It's like, I'm working with a group that wants to come up with working agreements. I make them do some work together first and then go,"What are some agreements that seem like they might have been useful if you had had them yesterday?" And that's a case where absolutely, we're duct taping it, right? We're, we're building it on the fly as we go. But what we generally are asking is, what's the smallest thing that we could do based on what we've learned about from working together, that would make this better next time around? That would make it so that there isn't as much relational cost to this? And so you can evolve your way towards those sorts of things rather than saying- and because I think that's what people tend to think, is that we have two choices. We have 'absolute duct tape' and we have 'the Empire State Building', and that there's no in between. And so I think looking at the ways that our duct tape system, I mean, what is it actually doing well? Because it's doing something well. But also, what is the cost of doing that well? And then what's the smallest thing that we could do that we think would improve it? That would make it at least as effective as the thing we're doing now with less cost.

Karen: 12:49

Yeah, and I like that too, from that instead of sitting down in meeting rooms and spending hours and hours and hours predicting what will work well for us, can we adopt an evolving process? And this is straight out of Sociocracy work. But this frame of 'good enough for now, safe enough to try', can we, instead of like, debating, what would be the best approach or the best process or the best possible? And we disagree about it and we have to work through all of that. Is there a time where somebody came up with something that looks pretty good and maybe everybody had a minute to offer a tweak. But if we don't come pretty quickly to agreement about it, just say, "You know what? Instead of arguing about hypotheticals and guesswork, because often that's all you've got early on, what if we just try a thing and we agree we're going to try it for some period of time, a week or a month or whatever?" Seems like enough time to try that out. And then how do we want to tweak it from there? What didn't work about it? What do we need to add? And that sort of evolving process, of developing processes and policies, can be way more effective. And frankly, less painful. Because those hypothetical conversations, I think I find incredibly costly.

Paul: 14:06

Yes. And that it is the currently have and that we might never have. And I think it's important to recognize that usually when somebody brings those up, it's because they're thinking about something else that has happened to them, or someone they know at some point in the past. But that may not be relevant in the current situation, and that may not be here. We've talked before about bringing with us things from previous organizations, previous groups and things like that. And I think that's an important thing. To recognize when we're doing that. But yeah, that idea of, of evolving. I mean, it's the same idea in a lot of agile ways of working. Of we're going to reflect on,"Hey, we did this work together and what was the effect that it had on us as a group?" Not just what effect it had on the product, but what effect did it have on us as a group? What can we learn from that and what might we want to do differently? And recognizing that any of our systems, any of our processes are never done. They're always work in progress. There always is room for improvement. As we change, as we have more in our relational bank. As we have more time, and breathing space as the situation that we're dealing with changes, we need to be continually evolving those. Because you get to the other end of "This was a really well-designed system that started to have some stresses as situation changed around us. And guess what? It's held together with duct tape again!"

Karen: 15:28

Right! So just to track where with this idea of when relational processes are not in place in a robust way. And we find ourselves 'duct taping' them together. And when is that a useful thing, and when is it not going to work very well. And the things to look at there are 'why are we duct taping it together'? Is it because we don't have something at all? Or is it because we have a thing that's outdated? And then what's the cost? What will it take to get a process agreed? And the way that we'd like. What is it costing us to have it duct taped together? And what kind of reserve do we have in our relationships to draw on, as we pay those relationship costs? And really weighing the various sides of that. And then thinking about, if we need a new process, how can we get there in the sort of least resource intensive way? So, what's the simplest thing that we can change that might make an improvement? And what are the sort of incremental steps, and how can we try things and then review them and come back and look again? So instead of working through every hypothetical to try to get the perfect thing up front, find something that seems plausible. And try it with a commitment that we have to honor, that we come back to it and say, "Is this working?", and have that evolving thing happening? And that really in the end probably gives us the best processes of all. At the least cost!

Paul: 16:58

Well, that's going to do it for Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 17:02

And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.