The art of writing fantasy

Edward Chalk

The art of writing fantasy

All successful fantasy writers have one thing in common, they create a world into which you can imagine yourself. You are there when the villain strikes, you are there when the hero intervenes and you are there when the hero dies through their self-sacrifice.

The more vivid the imagery you perceive when reading the book, the better a job the the author has done of drawing you into their own fantasy world.

Some obvious points to look out for when creating your own immersive fantasy world are:

  • Effective use of detail: Make sure the detail is authentic and accurate. If you can describe the street scene in a historically authentic manner, the reader is far more likely to buy into the subsequent street action.
  • Opposite sides of your characters: Give your characters depth and substance by illuminating opposite facets. Show their strengths and their weaknesses, their strong-mind and their wavering will. By contrasting different behaviours, you force the reader to reconcile these opposing traits in their mind, thus making the character real.
  • Allow the reader to think ahead: Allow the reader to formulate some idea of what’s about to happen, but keep them in suspense. If the entire book weaves dramatic threads that come together unexpectedly in the climactic scene, you probably have a winner on your hands.

It is worth studying successful fantasy classics for further clues to the art of reader entrapment. The following techniques used by all-time best-sellers, comprise good advice for the up-and-coming writer.

 

Gradation from familiar to unfamiliar

A common technique used by authors to lead the reader into their fantasy world, is beginning with the stunningly ordinary. Through mundaneness, the author leads the reader slowly but convincingly, into the world of imaginings.

An example of this technique occurs in the opening paragraph of Harry Potter:

The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive. Cars that were usually gleaming stood dusty in their drives and lawns that were once emerald green lay parched and yellowing; the use of hosepipes had been banned due to drought. Deprived of their usual car-washing and lawn-mowing pursuits, the inhabitants of Privet Drive had retreated into the shade of their cool houses, windows thrown wide in the hope of tempting in a nonexistent breeze.

Only once the ordinary world of Harry Potter has been introduced, is the reader then encouraged to imagine battles-to-the-death in a school for budding wizards.

 

Familiar among the unfamiliar

Another technique used to grip the reader in the world of fantasy, is the addition of familiar detail among the unfamiliar.

In The Two Towers (chapter 7), while Gollum is leading Sam and Frodo up the dangerous pass that provides an entrance to the Land of Mordor, we are presented with the very familiar:

He quickened his pace, and they followed him wearily. Soon they began to climb up on to a great hog-back of land. For the most part it was covered with a thick growth of gorse and whortleberry, and low tough thorns, though here and there clearings opened, the scars of recent fires. The gorse-bushes became more frequent as they got nearer the top; very old and tall they were, gaunt and leggy below but thick above, and already putting out yellow flowers that glimmered in the gloom and gave a faint sweet scent. So tall were the spiny thickets that the hobbits could walk upright under them, passing through long dry aisles carpeted with a deep prickly mould.

By constantly referring to ordinary details, among imagery of high fantasy, Tolkien makes us feel at home in his dichotomous world of light and darkness, bravery and despair.

 

Unexpected detail

 

In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab leads his whaling ship, the Pequod, in pursuit of Moby Dick, the White Whale. This mad obsession leads to the death of the captain and his crew, when Moby Dick turns on the ship and sinks it. As the Pequod sinks, it is the drowning of a sea-bird that adds a supernatural dimension to the terror wrought by Captain Ahab’s madness:

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

The tragedy of the many sailors brought to a watery grave by Captain Ahab’s madness, is crowned with savage meaning by the tormented death of a single bird.

In summary

As an author, it is your responsibility to drag your readers into the fantasy world that you have animated in your mind. However, you will only be able to do this if your readers agree to come along for the ride.

Allowing your readers to slide gracefully into your universe, together with making them feel comfortable and intrigued once they are there, will bring your fantasy novel to life.

 

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – book review

Edward Chalk

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG, for short) is a classic science fiction series, by Douglas Adams. The plot goes something like this:

Precis

The world is destroyed by Vogons to make way for a bypass

  • The earth is demolished by the Vogons, in order to make room for a new hyperspace bypass.

The Vogons represent mindless, repressive, unstoppable bureaucracy:

…billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet’s virgin shores… it was as if the forces of evolution ad simply given up on them there and then… They never evolved again; they should never have survived.

The fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-willed slug-brained stubbornness of these creatures…Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the Galaxy and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service.

The Vogons are uniquely suited to work in the civil service, due to their lack of personality and mindless orneriness.

  • Arthur Dent escapes by hitchhiking on a Vogon ship together with Ford Prefect, a friend of his who turns out to be an alien.
  • In the course of his travels, Arthur discovers that in addition to the innocuous reason for the earth’s destruction (it happened to be in the way), there is also a sinister reason for this apparent accident:

The Question, the mice and the psychiatrists

    • Many millions of years ago, the mice (who are really hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings) built the greatest computer in the universe to find the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
    • After seven-and-a-half million years, the computer calculated that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, was 42.
    • The mice realise that they asked for the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, but they do not know the question. That means, they do not know what single question summarises the quandary of Life, the Universe and Everything.
    • Subsequently the mice now have the answer (42), but not the question.
    • In order to find The Question, the mice commission the creation of the earth. The world and its inhabitants comprise a massive organic supercomputer. World history is a computer program designed to find The Question:
Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research programme…
    • However, if the quandary of Life, the Universe and Everything is finally solved, this will put all psychiatrists out of business. Therefore a consortium of wealthy psychiatrists bribe the Vogons to destroy the earth:
…it was in fact Halfrunt (a psychiatrist) who was employing the Vogon. He was paying him an awful lot of money to do some very dirty work. As one of the Galaxy’s most prominent and successful psychiatrists, he and a consortium of his colleagues were quite prepared to spend an awful lot of money when it seemed that the entire future of psychiatry might be at stake.

It seems that two things may foil the Vogon’s plans to demolish the world and to eliminate The Question; Arthur Dent and the dolphins…

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Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture – book review

Edward Chalk 1 Comment

Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture

I recently read Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture (sample chapter available here), by Gerben Wierda.

 

Gerben Wierda

Gerben’s website: https://ea.rna.nl/

Gerben’s You Tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTqv-dxJc_nMsZqBYJW3iCw

Gerben’s blog: https://gctwnl.wordpress.com/about/

 

I really enjoyed reading this book because the author succeeded in making me feel less stupid that I felt previously.

This is why…

 

IT standards

The IT landscape is dotted with standards for everything ranging from application and network design to business analysis and project management. We are led to believe that if only we study these standards and adhere to best practice, then our applications will have 1 million downloads, our networks will never go down and our system architecture will be perfectly aligned with the corporate business structure.

If this doesn’t happen then it’s our fault for not applying the standards correctly.

This plethora of standards is partly an allergic reaction to the good old days of IT. Once upon a time;  anyone who could hack some BASIC code had a good chance of becoming a programmer for a major bank, anyone who could cable up a LAN party had a good chance of becoming a network administrator and anyone who could persuade management that they knew what they were talking about, could become a system architect.

Due to this unprofessional enthusiasm, business departments saw themselves as captives held to ransom by geekdom. Managers rebelled against the IT cowboys and demanded standards and accountability. They asked peevishly, “I had to go to university to get my job. So which piece of paper says that the IT people are qualified to do theirs?”

The IT industry responded to this criticism and so began the age of IT standards and certifications.

 

Standards and rules

Most IT standards are not scientifically structured. Instead, they prescribe a standardised, best-practice way of doing things. In the best possible scenario, this means that an IT standard is comprised of a sensible set of rules that can be used to ensure that everyone is dancing to the same, sensible song.

Management can now feel secure in the knowledge that they have enforced a minimum quality standard. Employees can now feel secure in the knowledge that if they follow this standard they will be perceived to have done the right thing.

In reality, however, an IT standard must always represent a simplification of a complex problem. It is not possible for an IT standard to cover every nuance in every scenario, because if it did, it would describe the way the entire world works.

As Gerben Wierda relates in Chapter 3 – The Orthodoxy (page 48):

…I visited the enterprise architecture outfit of a large bank… we ended in the room of the enterprise architects… in that room was a shelf. And on that shelf stood something like twenty large binders… Those binders contained this bank’s reference architecture, which almost exclusively consisted of principles, guidelines and other comparable items (policies, suggestions, explanations, examples and so forth)… When I visited them, they were still very proud of their accomplishment…

There was a problem though: nobody used them and that… made them meaningless… it was impossible for any architect in a change initiative to know all these rules…

When organisations started to realise that these huge sets of rules (principles and guidelines) were unusable and thus meaningless, a counter-movement ensued. …speaker after speaker announced that organisations should… select roughly ten or so ‘basic’ or ‘foundational’ rules to guide change initiatives. …This approach… clearly doesn’t solve the problem either. The main reason is that these ‘high level guidelines’ are far too abstract and – indeed – high level to have a deciding effect on the actual low-level choices that create the chaos in the first place…

In short: a set of principles is either a too large set of narrow rules, or a small set of overly broad rules.

By definition, an IT standard, which defines set rules for approaching an IT implementation, must simplify a complex problem. However, simplifying complex problems guarantees that you will never address the core of the problem, which occurs in the area of greatest complexity.

How then should we relate to these helpful, but possibly limiting, guidelines?

 

Chess

In Chapter 4 – Chess, Gerben Wierda compares enterprise architecture to chess. To play chess you need to know the rules. You also need some pointers to guide your strategy and tactics. It can also be useful if you are able to memorise some classical games and moves. But ultimately, playing good chess depends on pure skill that will tax the player to their utmost.

Similarly, to do good enterprise architecture, you do need to know the rules of the game as set forth in enterprise architecture standards. But the rules are the beginning, not the end; the end is pure skill. Doing good enterprise architecture demands all the perspicacity, staying power, decision making ability and intuition that is required of a world-class chess player (page 76):

A good chess player does not follow the rules, the rules are ’embedded’ in his skill without being exactly visible during play. For enterprise architects the same must be true: the architect should not be governed by the rules, the rules should be an (invisible) part of the architect’s skills.

A 10 year old chess player knows the rules of chess in the same way as a chess grandmaster knows the rules of chess. But there is a vast difference in the way they play. The 10 year old thinks, “According to the rules, what can I do?” The grandmaster thinks, “Keeping to the rules, how can I design this game of chess?”

And the same goes for enterprise architecture. The standards are the rules, but personal skill is irreplaceable.

 

Detail and wishful thinking

The argument that IT standards are just the rules of the game, and not the be-all and end-all of good practice, applies equally to all areas of IT. Gerben Wierda makes the following point about enterprise architecture in particular, however:

Enterprise architects like to think that they are the big-picture people. I personally came across this attitude when talking to the enterprise architect for a large corporate who said, “The dev team will get into the nitty gritty, while I survey the landscape from a high altitude.” This attitude of disparaging detail, is apparently common among system architects (ibid.):

Many enterprise architects loathe details. For them, details are for (IT) engineers, a rather lowly form of corporate life… But the devil is in the details, as the saying goes… The enterprise architect has his mountain perfectly targeted in his crosshairs, but the enterprise never even hits that mountain because it has stumbled over a neglected molehill long before it gets to its goal.

Enterprise architects pride themselves on being the people who look at the big picture, but the big picture is comprised of small details. Getting the details right will probably lead to the big picture being right. Focussing on the big picture alone, will probably lead to the big picture fragmenting into shards, when the rubber meets the road.

It is a very attractive proposition to think that focussing on the big picture alone will create a nice clean corporate IT landscape. But anyone who has had programmed will know that getting the big picture right is the easy part. It is getting the last 1% of the program to do exactly what you want it do, which is hard. And getting that last 1% of the program right, may require changing 50% of the program structure. The same is likely to happen to a wishful picture of the future IT landscape, which is painted with a flourish by an optimistic architect.

Gerben claims that this fatal error is instinctive (page 86):

We do not confront complexity… but we run away from it to a make-believe simplified world where life is not complex beyond our capabilities, where we can reliably plan and feel ‘in control’. The belief in… those understandable and simple principles and guidelines gives is the idea that we are not powerless at all, and this is an extremely seductive psychological state. It is a form of ‘wishful thinking’.

In other words, getting IT architecture right is a hard problem, which perforce must take detail into account. Applying comfy IT standards at a high level, will be dashed against the rocks of detailed reality before long.

 

Precis

To summarise, Gerben Wierda’s fundamental points seem to be as follows:

  • It is not possible to derive precise knowledge from IT standards, because IT standards are not based on scientific principles. Instead, IT standards consist of general advice given by professionals who have experienced similar problems to those that you are attempting to solve.
  • If you come to a conclusion in your specific scenario, that is at odds with the standard, it is likely you are right and not the standard.
  • You will not learn how to think precisely and rigorously by studying a standard (maybe the converse). If you want to learn how to think precisely and rigorously, go and study the works of a methodical thinker (Gerben seems fond of Wittgenstein. There is an interesting post here which matches Wittgenstein against Heidegger .)

Getting back to how Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture saved me from feeling stupid…

I used to gaze wonderingly at IT standards as founts of knowledge and think about all the awesomely clever people who had contributed to these standards. However, in reality, there is a limit to the fidelity of the information contained in IT standards.

IT standards are the rules of the game. The rules cannot predict the right move, they can only tell you what comprises a valid move. Studying the rules more will not provide the correct answer. Ultimately, only your creativity, insight and foresight can tell you what the best move is.

Zentralbild/Kohls/Leske
1.11.1960
XIV. Schacholympiade 1960 in Leipzig
Im Ringmessehaus in Leipzig wird vom 16.10. bis 9.11.1960 die XIV. Schacholympiade ausgetragen. Am 28.10.1960 begannen die Kämpfe der Finalrunde.
UBz: UdSSR – USA: .Weltmeister Tal – Internationaler Großmeister Fischer

Intuition and meaning

Edward Chalk 1 Comment

Intuition and meaning

Intuition and meaning go hand-in-hand; through intuition we gain true understanding of subjects with which we are grappling, through deep understanding we come to further intuition. However, although intuition can lead to valuable breakthroughs, it can be hard to come by.

It is worthwhile understanding what intuition is, so that we can increase the natural flashes of insight that give us new understanding.

 

Microchips and intuition

One of my favourite stories about intuition relates to the 741 op-amp.

The 741 op-amp is the godfather of all chip-based amplifiers, it was designed by David Fullagar in 1968 at Fairchild Semiconductor.

The IEEE Chip Hall of Fame relates the following story:

David Fullagar… realized that the chip, however brilliant, had a couple of drawbacks. The biggest of these was that the IC’s input stage, the so-called front end, was overly sensitive to noise in some chips, because of semiconductor quality variations.

“The front end looked kind of kludgy,” he says.

Fullagar embarked on his own design. The solution to the front end problem turned out to be profoundly simple—“it just came to me, I don’t know, driving to Tahoe”—and consisted of a couple of extra transistors. That additional circuitry made the amplification smoother and consistent from chip to chip.

Fullagar took his design to the head of R&D at Fairchild, a guy named Gordon Moore, who sent it to the company’s commercial division. The new chip, the μA741, would become the standard for op-amps. The IC—and variants created by Fairchild’s competitors—have sold in the hundreds of millions.

Part of David Fullagar’s brain had been thinking about the chip design problem in the background. When that part of his brain finished processing, it told David the answer.

Why was the background process in David’s brain able to come up with the correct chip design, when David could not consciously come up with the answer?

 

Types of knowledge

Our first impressions of the world come through direct experience via sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. After this brief introduction to the world, we are sent to pre-school and our education begins. The teachers tell us that the way to think is to use words to label those things which we have directly experienced. Using words, we can define relationships between those things. These relationships allow us to know about things which we have not directly experienced.

  • This is a car.
  • Look, the car has wheels and an engine.
  • Not only does this car have wheels and an engine, but all cars have wheels and an engine.
  • So if ever you see a car, you can know that it has wheels and an engine.

By using words and classifications, we have converted experiential knowledge into abstract knowledge, which can then be applied to further real-life situations.

 

Words as an interface

Every writer has a different way of expressing the same idea. As Strunk and White say (page 64):

All writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable. All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation — it is the Self escaping into the open.

The way a writer puts words to paper gives a unique insight into the way that the writer themselves perceived their subject matter. Therefore, we can understand a writer’s thoughts and feelings through their writing, just as we can understand an artist’s thoughts and feelings by admiring their art.

This rule does not only apply to writers. Every time anyone speaks, they do so in a way which reflects their unique way of perceiving the subject of their speech. Speech is the interface between our internal sensations and our external expression of our inner world. Our inner world is wordless, it is where we maintain our internal equilibrium. It is the world beyond our inner-selves, that is created by people communicate with each other using speech, that contains words. Our inner sensations and thoughts are invariably richer than the words we use to express ourselves, which is why we sometimes find it difficult to find the right words.

 

The problem with learning

We learn from others in many ways; by attending lessons and lectures, by reading textbooks, by listening to the radio and by watching TV (or their modern equivalents). In most cases, the majority of the information is transmitted verbally.

When we absorb that verbal information, we assimilate the way that the speaker has subsciously decided to string the words together, as well as the words they used. Subsequently our thinking on that subject is coloured by the way the speaker decided to express themselves. When this happens, we can become locked in to thinking in the same way as the person who introduced us to the subject. Even if we formulate our own thoughts concerning the subject matter, our new thoughts are simply an extrapolation of the essential intuition that lay in the words that we first heard on the subject matter.

Therefore the problem with learning is that the more we learn, the more we tend to lose touch with our own natural way of thinking.

 

The art of forgetting

When we turn the lights off in the study, we give our inner-selves a chance to figure out the true meaning of our studies. By turning away from the artificial world of words and entering the world of naturalness and spontaneity, we break free of the circular thought-patterns that result from thinking like other people.

Intuition occurs after we abstract and internalise the verbal knowledge that we have learnt from other people. Once we understand the knowledge on our own terms and in our own way, we can home in on the basic principles and think intuitively and about the best way to build on our understanding.

In other words; after you have figured out what your knowledge means to you, you can gain intuition. But in order to know what something means to you, you sometimes need to stop thinking about it!

As David Fullagar was driving to Tahoe, he had entirely forgotten about the chip design problem, to the extent that he was surprised when the correct solution popped into his head. But it was exactly because he had forgotten what he was working on, that he was able to break free of the old thinking in chip design and come up with circuitry that is still in use today.

Finding balance in business decision making

Edward Chalk

Finding balance in business decision making

Making balanced business decisions is complicated. There are simply so many variables and interactions involved in the situation, that sometimes we feel we can only guess at the best move.

Additionally, we sometimes feel we are caught in a Catch 22 situation where “You are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

  • Why does this happen?

Or perhaps better

  • What can we do about it?

 

Implementing high-level decisions

We can be faced with making two types of decision.

  • The first type of decision is where we autonomously realise that a decision has to be made, due to the way the situation is evolving.
  • The second type of decision is where we are tasked with implementing a high level decision. Senior management has decided that a project will be implemented or that the company will proceed in a certain direction. Lower-level decision makers are then tasked with implementing the high-level decision.

Paradoxically, it may be easier for senior management to make a balanced decision than it is for lower level decision-makers. This is because senior management are in a central role, vis-a-vis the company’s overall capabilities and direction. Thus senior management has a high-level bird’s-eye view of the various capabilities which the company as a whole can exert to implement their decision.

The low-level decision maker is limited to the department-level resources or the team-level resources which they have at their command, however. Subsequently, even although the management decision may seem balanced relative to the entire company, it can create a local imbalance.

It is worthwhile understanding the nature of this potential imbalance, and how this imbalance can be usefully fed back to the high-level decision maker.

 

Systems

Generally speaking, most of the complex decisions we make, are made in the context of a system.

Q: What is a system?

A: Generally speaking, a system is any collection of interrelated parts that work together to produce a result. Examples of systems can range from a biological system (e.g. a tree or a flower), to a computer operating system, a socio-cultural system (e.g. a school), a country’s medical system, a computer business system, a psychological systems (e.g. the human mind) and a business.

Most professional work is performed within the context of a system.

Within a system, multiple capabilities are intertwined and many actors are involved in producing the final result. Any action taken to optimise one aspect of the system may have a deleterious effect on another part of the system.

Identifying the right course of action in a complex system requires intricate and detailed knowledge of all the moving parts, in addition to having a general overview of how the system operates. Categorising the forces that operate with a system can assist in simplifying the decision making process however, to a level that provides at least a reasonable chance of success.

It is difficult to find a way of analysing things that is applicable to every type of system, but the following is the closest to a set of universal analytical building blocks, of which I know.

 

Fundamental system aspects

Every system includes the following three fundamental aspects:

  • Logic: The type of thinking that takes place within the system.
  • Control: Controls that are enforced internally to ensure that the system operates within its set parameters.

Q: What are system parameters?

A: According to Wikipedia, a system parameter is, “any characteristic that can help in defining or classifying a particular system. That is, a parameter is an element of a system that is useful, or critical, when identifying the system, or when evaluating its performance, status, condition, etc.”

For example, an engine may be expected to revolve between 300 r.p.m. and 4000 r.p.m. Any slower, and the engine will stall. Any faster, and the engine will break. In this case we can say that the parameter for safe operation of the engine is between 300 r.p.m. and 4000 r.p.m.

  • Energy: The internal “life-flow” that is generated as a result of the system functioning correctly.

For example:

System Logic Control Energy
Human mind Life-fostering logic Check for conditions (both internal and external) that are adverse to life and respond appropriately. Feeling of well-being
Computer business system Encoded business logic Check for program and data errors and when these are found, either self-correct or alert users. Business benefit
School Educational paradigm Maintain educational standards, control student behaviour, etc. Education

We are used to assuming these basic system aspects in our everyday speech, so that:

  • If we say “That person has a good mind,” we mean that they create healthy positive thoughts.
  • If we say “This is a good business system,” we mean that it brings great benefit to the business.
  • If we say “That is a good school,” we mean that the children who graduate from the school are well educated.

 

System integrity

In a robust system, each fundamental aspect of the system must maintain its own internal integrity. This means that

  • the logic-aspect of the system must function correctly,
  • the control-aspect of the system must function correctly, and
  • the correct energy level must be maintained.

In addition, each system-aspect must interact correctly with the other two system-aspects:

 

Internal logic interaction

The logic-aspect of the system tells the control-aspect the correct parameters within which the system should operate. The logic-aspect of the system also tells the energy-aspect how to best employ its energy, for the betterment of the system.

Internal control interaction

The control-aspect of the system tells the logic-aspect the current operating state of the system, so that the logic-aspect can process this information. The control-aspect of the system also directly controls the energy levels of the energy-aspect, in order to make sure that the energy-aspect is operating within safe and sustainable levels.

Internal energy interaction

The energy-aspect of the system provides actuating energy to the logic-aspect and the control-aspect of the system.

Quandaries in decision making

Many of the quandaries that are found in system-centric environments occur because of the fine balance required between the logic, control and energy aspects of the system, which can be upset by an imbalance in one area.

Going back to the example systems above:

System Aim to increase the energy level Suggested method Quandary
Human mind Increase feeling of well-being Perform more recreational activities Energy level: Trying to increase your energy level by engaging in additional recreational activities can lead to out-of-control energy levels (e.g. by drinking too much) and  can use up the energy available to the system (e.g. by getting a hangover).
Computer business system Increase business benefit Automate business processes Control: The business process can become too controlled, insofar as it cannot now cater for exceptional cases.

This can lead, for example, to the familiar bank clerk response, “Yes, I know what you’re saying makes sense, but the system won’t let me do that.”
School Increase students level of engagement Make teaching more informal Logic: The students do not amass sufficient knowledge, due to the more relaxed school atmosphere and reduced accent on scholastic accomplishment.

In each of the above cases, attempting to increase the system energy level can lead to unexpected outcomes, to the detriment of the system beneficiaries.

 

A system within a system

Within the operations of a company, we can identify a logic-aspect, a control-aspect and a energy-aspect as follows:

  • The company’s logic-aspect is the overriding way of thinking which permeates the company. Setting this thinking-tone is normally the responsibility of the CEO or the senior management team. Implementing and fleshing out this thinking may be the responsibility of the business analysis team or of the product development team.
  • The company’s control-aspect is the way in which the company controls its own operations. Practically this may consist of the legal department or the quality control department.
  • The company’s energy-aspect is the actual work that occurs within the company, which produces the company’s products.

However, all of these functions also exist within each department and team. This is because each department and team also requires their own localised methodology, their own localised way of maintaining quality control and their own skills and aptitudes which are required to perform the work that is required of them.

Therefore, a department or a team, comprises a system that operates within the context of another system (namely, the company).

 

Local imbalance

The reason that a good high-level decision can lead to a local imbalance in a department or in a team, is because although the high-level decision maker may have correctly taken into account the general, overall capabilities of the organisation, it may not be possible to implement this decision in a department or team, in a balanced manner.

This is because doing what needs to be done in order to implement that high-level decision, may require that one aspect of the department or the team should be preferred at the expense of the other two aspects.

For example:

  • The management decision may require that controls should be tightened within the department or within the team. This may suit those employees who are tasked with maintaining internal standards, but can pose a strangulation hazard to those employees who are responsible for carrying out the every-day business processes (the logic-aspect and the energy-aspect of the department or the team).
  • The management decision may require that the throughput of the team or the department should be increased. Management assume that the team is capable of making their internal processes more efficient, in order to be able to cope with the additional throughput.
    In this case it is likely that business process fidelity will suffer, even if the increased throughput is achieved. Thus the energy-aspect of the department or the team has increased, but the logic-aspect has been compromised (since the logical fidelity of the overall business processes has been reduced) and the control-aspect has suffered (since processes now run out of their control limits).
  • The management decision may require that the complexity managed by the department or the team should be increased. More products may have to be offered, or more nuancing may be required in existing products. This will require an increase in the logic-aspect of the department or the team (since the department or the team is now dealing with increased complexity in their everyday business processes), but may cause throughput (the energy-aspect) to suffer, and may also cause business processes to go out of control.

 

Push-back

Often the only realistic way to respond to a local departmental or team imbalance, which has been created by an upper-level managerial decision, is to push back on the decision. This is not always so easy, but by explaining the issue using precise and positive language, you can broaden the perspective of the senior decision-maker, who will then be able to take the ramifications of their own decision into account.

The decision may need to be re-thought, more resources may need to be supplied in order to implement the decision, or the business initiative may need to be implemented in stages, rather than all in one go.

However the situation pans out, by adopting terminology that is meaningful to the senior decision maker, you will earn their respect and consideration, and hopefully preserve the department’s or team’s homogeny, into the bargain.

 

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