Paul: [00:00:06] Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: [00:00:12] I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:00:14] And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:00:16] Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Can we live with the messiness?"

Paul: [00:00:25] So a few weeks ago, in Episode 169, we talked about complicated problems, things where we weren't really sure how to proceed on things. Where we couldn't hold the whole thing in our heads all at one time. So we talked about how do we take things apart, even though we recognize that those pieces are interrelated. Can we work through things in a way that allows us to sort of get to them one at a time, and work through it?

Paul: [00:00:50] And what we want to talk a little bit about here today is when we can't. And the reason for the messiness in the question here is that we recognize there are situations that we need to work through as groups. Where we can't really predict what will happen, where there are high degrees of uncertainty. There are lots of things that are unknown. And probably unknowable and those situations are often very, very messy. And so we want to talk to today is about how to support groups to work through those kinds of things.

Paul: [00:01:20] So in my world, in the corporate space, oftentimes where I see a lot of those things are around two big things. One is new product development. We want to build this new product. We want to move into this space, offer this new service, and we cannot predict what customers are going to do, what user behavior is going to be like. We would love it if we could.

Paul: [00:01:39] But oftentimes that work is very messy in figuring out, you know, we had this theory about what would happen when we built this feature and that's not what would happen. What do we do now? How do we work through that?

Paul: [00:01:50] And the other space where I see it a lot is as companies grow. When we go from being 12 people to being 50 people to being 150 people, we have a vision of where we would like to go, and what we might like that to be like. And it is often super messy and highly unpredictable. So those are some examples of the types of challenges that I often see in some of the work that I do. Karen, Where do you see some of these things?

Karen: [00:02:15] Yeah. So similarly in new development kinds of spaces. So in the co-housing world, when communities are looking to build and making, making lots and lots of decisions about building. And being torn between values of affordability and environmental concerns, and we want nice houses that we can enjoy living in and all those kinds of things.

Karen: [00:02:39] So you've got these multiple values and lots of things you don't know. Prices change, timelines change, and in fact, you know, what's the thing that will get you the environmental thing that you want? Is it solar panels? Is it better insulation, is it a more efficient furnace? All those kinds of things. There's just so many options. So that's one place that I see it.

Karen: [00:03:00] And another place that I see it is anytime that groups are trying to adjust or shift human behavior. So you see this a lot with the shared work in a community and when there's frustration that the work isn't getting done, 'So what do we do about that and do we bring in a management system or do we talk about it differently?' Or, 'How do we address that?'. 

Karen: [00:03:20] Because again, there's the work that needs to be done. There's people's willingness to do it, there's what, behaviors are already happening and how is that impacting people's willingness to do it.

Karen: [00:03:29] Any time you're in the human behavior thing, to talk about your new product development, we can't predict our customers. We often even can't predict ourselves. So you get into these messy things where there's not a clear answer. There are a number of different factors feeding it, and when you're in that space, you don't have a ton of choices.

Karen: [00:03:50] As you mentioned, we talked about in 169, ways to break things down. That can be super helpful, when it can be. So go listen to that one for how to do that.

Karen: [00:03:58] Another approach that I think groups can take reasonably sometimes is to just say we're going to rely on the experts. We're going to rely on our contractors, we're going to rely on our architects, we're going to hire a consultant who does staff increases and can manage things. We're going to take some internal people and a couple of folks are just going to spend a lot of time looking at all these different variables and all of these different factors and come back with a recommendation. So we're going to sort of home-grown experts, as you might think of that.

Karen: [00:04:26] And sometimes that doesn't work either, that they also can't come back with a reliably good suggestion. So I think we want to spend the majority of this episode is having given you kind of the framework of those examples to say, 'What do we do when we can't break it down into pieces and we can't either hire or grow an expert to give a good recommendation?'. 

Karen: [00:04:50] But what's really true is we're going to be stuck with a situation that's not very predictable, not really in our control, and we don't actually have a way to get to a choice that is verifiably better than the others. We aren't going to get to know that. So what do we do then, Paul?

Paul: [00:05:11] Well, I think we, one of the things we need to be doing is paying attention to when we're trying to do one of those other things. And it's not working. Very often when we're in a situation where there aren't clear answers.

Paul: [00:05:22] And what we're really talking about, in all these examples, are things where there is no right answer. We are used to there being right answers, or good enough answers, that we can ask somebody else for. And it's very natural for us as human beings when we find ourselves kind of lost and going, "I don't know what to do here." It's very easy to look outwards to some sort of external authority, right?

Paul: [00:05:44] And that authority may be somebody who has positional power or expertise. And to say, 'What should we do?' to give us the answer. And in fact, one of the most useful things that we can do, if we are one of those experts or we are in a position of authority, is to resist the temptation to give people answers because they want them from us. And we have to recognise that that that doesn't work in these types of situations. Recognise when we're trying to and honestly help people to stay in the mess.

Paul: [00:06:15] As someone who works with organizations as they go through some of those growing pains, absolutely. There are patterns that I've seen over and over again. And I have some expertise around the types of things that groups might encounter. But what that helps me to do is to bring to them the things they're going to need to work through. I can't work through those things for them. I can be able to tell them, 'These are the kinds of questions you're going to need to answer' or, to go to your example of building out an environmentally conscious way.

Paul: [00:06:48] Like, you can say, "I've seen this before, you're not going to be able to satisfy these four things simultaneously. They're going to be in tension." So what we can do is resist the temptation to say, "Oh, obviously you should buy these windows" or "Oh, you need to structure your compensation packages like this". And instead be able to bring to the group, "This is the 'not' that you all need to actually untangle yourselves. To find the right enough answer for this group, at this place and this time.

Karen: [00:07:21] Yeah. And I think the thing I want to really point us to on this one is that's really uncomfortable.

Paul: [00:07:29] Yeah.

Karen: [00:07:29] We don't like not knowing. We really don't like being the person in charge and not knowing. Boy, is that terrible. But we as a group, don't like not knowing. And there's a tendency- well, surely we could reach for some data or we could hire an expert or we could answer a question in whatever way.

Karen: [00:07:47] And what we're pointing to is sometimes that's just not true. Sometimes we don't get to know. We don't get to know when the project building is going to be completed. We don't get to know how many is the right number of employees to hire for a given age of development. We don't get to know which direction the customers are going to head.

Karen: [00:08:06] And so we're going to live with uncertainty. We're going to live with risk. We're going to be in a space where we're going to make some decisions. And hindsight is going to suggest that some of those decisions were a bad idea.

Karen: [00:08:20] Now, hindsight is dangerous. So we want to be careful that we don't judge ourselves by that. But as we step into this, the anxiety is going to show up, the fear is going to show up. And if that drives the process, you're very unlikely to optimize your options to get to the best possibility.

Karen: [00:08:38] And so what I really want us to look at is can we really live with the messiness we are in messy, we are in uncertain, we're in lack of control. And that's our best option right now. So can we name that? Can we hold on to each other through that? Lean on each other, but somehow not be adding to the anxiety and the fear that come with that. We don't need to be feeding that by putting pressure on people to come up with the right answers or that kind of thing.

Karen: [00:09:11] What we want to do is name it, talk about it, even normalize, that there's you know, this is an uncomfortable thing. We don't like it. 'I wish we had better data' or 'I wish we could know the right answer' or 'I wish it would work to hire an expert', that kind of thing. But in fact, we don't. And we're going to move ahead anyway.

Paul: [00:09:30] And it is the moving ahead that's the important part there, that the only way that we can actually find out more about what's going on is to act in some way. We want to try things. We want to, when we're in that space, where we can't know ahead of time, or we can't predict what will occur. The way we get more information is by acting, by doing things and paying attention to what happens. 

Paul: [00:09:54] And having kind of a sense like a compass for are we going in the right direction. When we do these things, is it leading us more towards where we want to be? Or is it leading us away from that? 

Paul: [00:10:08] So that while we can't predict what will happen when we do any particular thing, we can sort of start to assess "Did this lead the way we were hoping that it would, and what can we learn from it?"

Paul: [00:10:20] Like, the only thing that we can do when we're in a situation where we can't predict what's going to happen is to try something and then learn from it. And as opposed to mean two things happen, we either get so paralysed that we just don't act at all.

Paul: [00:10:32] We don't do anything, or we just full steam ahead on something and we don't pay attention to what's happening as we go. We don't actually take the learning with us.

Paul: [00:10:42] And so we've talked before about proceeding iteratively, you know, a good enough, safe enough plan. It's good enough. It's safe enough to try. It's good enough to give it a shot. And then how can we take small steps, and maybe run multiple experiments in parallel to try a bunch of different things and then see what we learn from those. 

Paul: [00:11:00] And then go, "Well, which do we want to invest more in? Where do we want to go now? Let's not try that here." I mean, that also is messy. Where we don't necessarily know what the results of these things are going to be. And are we okay with being able to do that? Or are we okay with experimenting and acting our way forward into the future without knowing what we're going to end up?

Karen: [00:11:22] Yeah. And sometimes we can learn things and then go back and do it a different way or that kind of thing. Sometimes, you know, we already picked the roof. It's going on, and what we can learn from is probably more in the realm of group process and decision making. But there is also a piece about we can't not have a roof and we don't want to delay construction because we know for sure that's a bad idea.

Karen: [00:11:45] So we're going to pick one and whatever happens, we're going to hold together. We're not going to do some power over game with that. We're not going to like we're going to really watch the group dynamics around the decision making. We're going to build trust. We're going to learn to hold on to each other through that. And learn to be peaceful with whatever the downsides turned out to be of the thing that was better than doing nothing, or usually better than doing nothing.

Karen: [00:12:12] But like when doing something is the thing. And I won't say it always is, but it often is, you know, and these are, you know, sometimes there's cases where you can just not make a decision and wait and wait and wait and maybe that's fine.

Karen: [00:12:25] Even that comes with cost. So the decision is to wait. That is also a decision. And whatever the decision is, as the downsides of that become evident- and they will, that we can live with that and that we work with each other through that and that we have our peace about it.

Karen: [00:12:40] And don't go into pointing fingers or blaming or beating ourselves up or telling ourselves that this was obviously the wrong thing. I mean, it's obvious now, maybe, but it wasn't obvious then. And to just have a lot of patience with, 'Boy, I wish I could go back and turn the time back and tell my earlier self what I know now', but we don't get to do that.

Karen: [00:13:06] And so instead what we want is to be in communication, to be talking through feelings and accepting. We made these decisions and now this is the next piece so that we're in a position to either cope with whatever happened that we didn't like, or learn and make and fix whatever we need to fix.

Paul: [00:13:29] And the key there, and kind of what you're talking about, is not letting our feelings about uncertainty tear the group apart because we're having a reaction to that uncertainty, the things we couldn't predict, or the things like that. And we may not get the result that we want.

Paul: [00:13:46] But the question is what impact does that have on the group. And how are we, as a group, able to absorb the discovery of things that we rather weren't? You know, when things turn out not to be the way that we hoped they would be, what impact does that have on us as a group?

Paul: [00:14:02] And kind of what you're pointing to is, when we accept that we couldn't have predicted some of those things, when there was no way to know about these sorts of things. It kind of helps us to set aside blame and finger pointing and that impact on the space between. Which can help us be a lot more accepting of each other, even if we're not necessarily all that accepting of the outcome.

Paul: [00:14:25] But what we're really pointing at in a lot here and kind of all the examples we've been using, what we're really talking about is situations where the group is trying to do something new together.

Paul: [00:14:36] There may be individuals within the group who have had experience with something like this before, but not this situation. Again, you know, they may have some expertise, but not with this particular group, but the group as a whole. This isn't within their repertoire of capabilities. Like, that's one of the things that makes it so difficult.

Paul: [00:14:54] And so recognizing that, that it's like, "Well, of course we wouldn't be good at doing this. We've never done this together before", is another piece that can kind of help. That doesn't mean that we give ourselves carte blanche to just screw everything up and not do our due diligence about things.

Paul: [00:15:10] Like, we can still hold ourselves accountable to following good process, to like actually communicating around things. But it becomes much more about how do we make sure that we are working in the right ways when we can't predict what will come out of those things?

Karen: [00:15:25] Yeah. And I want to say just a couple of words about while we're in that process. So we've talked about going into it, try to normalize, coming out of it, be forgiving of ourselves and be understanding of where we were. But while we're in it, I think it is useful to remind ourselves what are our values. What are the things that brought us into this thing together? You know, are we product building? Are we community building? Are we- what are the values that hold us together? What are our goals? What are the things we're trying to accomplish?

Karen: [00:15:57] And sometimes those bigger picture goals get lost in the kind of minutia, fears. And so if we can kind of refocus on those things, the values and goals that are such common ground that can help tie us together.

Karen: [00:16:12] And then the other thing to look at is anything that will mitigate the risk, anything that will strengthen the foundation or create a softer landing. If we're going to, if it's going to go badly, how do we make it more easy to tolerate that, whatever that bad result was? If we can be thinking about those things in the conversation, I think it helps us increase our odds. It doesn't give us a guaranteed outcome, but it helps us get to the more likely chance of getting the result that we're looking for.

Paul: [00:16:45] Well, in an episode about messiness. We've kind of been all over the place here today. This has been a little bit messy, but you know where we've been is this idea that there are going to be times working with groups where breaking things down into pieces isn't necessarily really possible. Where delegating something out to a group of experts isn't really possible. 

Paul: [00:17:05] Where we've got something complicated, unpredictable and unknowable that we need to work through together as a group, that's usually something that is a new capacity for a group, something that group has never done collectively before. Where there's a lot of interdependent pieces that are going to interact in highly unpredictable ways.

Paul: [00:17:24] And so we can't know what's going to happen. So what's useful for groups as we're moving through those spaces? And we've talked about a few things here. One of them, that you kind of came back around here, here at the end, Karen, is that idea of keeping our eyes on the prize of where is it we're actually trying to get to. What are the things that, as we experiment our way forward, are telling us that we're moving more towards that way, or away from that way.

Paul: [00:17:47] And oftentimes that isn't concrete, but that may be rooted in our values. And we want something that is like this, even though we can't predict exactly what it's going to be like. So how do we move towards those sorts of things? How do we recognize, normalize, acknowledge and accept the discomfort that comes from being in that mess, from being in that space of unpredictability?

Paul: [00:18:09] And how do we recognize that when our anxieties come up around not being able to know what's going to happen, how do we work with that effectively and help that not to just tear the group apart?

Paul: [00:18:20] And then how do we as a group be together in the face of all of that mess? How do we make sure that we continue to communicate, that we continue to talk at the right levels about things that we're doing that probably more frequently than we feel would normally be necessary in something that is simpler than this.

Paul: [00:18:38] There is a lot of mess here. We've got 170-some episodes of how to work together as a group and think just about every one of them applies in some way to what we're talking about here tonight.

Karen: [00:18:49] I think that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:18:53] And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.