Seesaw — A Decision Making Framework

Introduction

As you grow in your career it’s likely you’ll be faced with a set of challenges that have increasing levels of complexity. These increasingly complex challenges will require decisions to be made under increasingly ambiguous contexts with uncertain outcomes. As you navigate these decisions, you’ll have to use imperfect information and lean on a healthy mixture of qualitative and quantitative information to find the right balance between data and intuition. This post introduces a tool for striking the right balance between trade-offs for “Complicated” decisions. But first, what exactly is a “Complicated” decision?

Decision Making Contexts

There are several different contexts in which decisions are typically made. I’ll use the Cynefin (pronounced: ku-nev-in) Framework in order to create a map of the terrain.

The Cynefin Framework is a problem-solving tool that helps put situations into 5 domains/contexts. I’ll briefly summarize the first 4 here:

• Simple (the domain of best practices) — Cause-and-effect relationships are easily discernible by everyone. Decisions in the “Simple” domain have readily available tools you can lean on to guide your way: checklists, best practices, guidelines, instructions, etc…
• Complicated (the domain of experts) — Cause and effect can be known upfront, but may require significant effort and/or domain expertise to address. Additionally, there may be many potential viable solutions.
• Complex (the domain of emergence) — Outcomes cannot be accurately predicted and the relationship between cause and effect cannot be known until after the fact.
• Chaotic (the domain of rapid response) — Relationship between cause and effect is unclear, even after the fact. Searching for right answers would be pointless.

This post will focus on making decisions in the “Complicated” domain. In theory, the Seesaw Framework may aid with “Complex” decisions as well, but the confidence level may be lower since cause and effect (i.e., the inversely proportional variables) may be more difficult to identify.

The Seesaw Framework

“Complicated” decisions always have trade-offs. The Seesaw Framework is meant to help reason about the trade-offs so that the right set of tactics can be applied to achieve the objectives you desire. In particular, the Seesaw Framework is useful for reasoning about things that are inversely proportional to each other.

There are three dimensions to consider, in addition to the variables that trade-off against each other when applying the Seesaw Framework:

• Direction
• Magnitude
• Velocity

With inversely proportional variables A and B, any upward movement in one variable causes a proportional downward movement in the other variable. Additionally, the movement can be small or large (magnitude) and the movement can be fast or slow (velocity).

Remember playing on the seesaw (aka teeter-totter) when you were a kid and the heavier kid let the seesaw drop to the ground, shooting you up and into the air? The Seesaw Framework is just like that, except for evaluating decisions.

Let’s look at an example.

The Seesaw in Practice

The notion of the Seesaw Framework occurred to me when I observed the difference in how accountability manifests itself in projects that are staffed by cross-functional groups (e.g., product facing work) vs those that are staffed by a single team (e.g., platform work).

In cross-functional groups, accountability tends to be baked in by default (i.e., intrinsic). Bottlenecks become visible pretty quickly when a project stops moving forward and a lot of eyes will be on you if your part of the project is blocking progress.

On the other hand, with platform work, accountability needs to be owned and managed by the team directly. Bottlenecks aren’t as obvious unless you’re actively managing accountability.

I found myself wondering, how can my team do better at holding ourselves accountable, while also continuing to have the space to take risks and build creative, innovative solutions?

This led me to the Accountability Seesaw.

The Accountability Seesaw

Raising the level of accountability seems like a good thing on the surface, but there are trade-offs. For example, if you lean all the way in and aggressively hold people accountable (imagine public shaming on the extreme end), the trade-off will be reduced risk taking and a lack of creativity. Ultimately, this would lead to a lack of innovation and stagnation. So some accountability is good, but the magnitude is important and public shaming would be a tactic with too much magnitude. I’ve visualized this in the Accountability Seesaw below.

How much creativity and how much accountability? You need a balance.

Let’s review the dimensions of the Accountability Seesaw:

• Direction — assuming we perceive a lack of excellence and desire more accountability, we presumably want to increase accountability, which will impact risk-oriented behavior.
• Magnitude — we want to move in noticeable increments, but not a complete shock (most of the time).
• Velocity — we want to move the increments over weeks or months, not in hours or days, in order to give people time to absorb the change and alter existing behaviors.

Next, let’s walk through a hypothetical example of a few incremental changes, triggered by simple tactics, to shift the balance of the Accountability Seesaw.

Changing the Balance Through Actions

Ideally, you have a sense of your current level of accountability and what level of accountability is desired over the long term in order to meet your objectives. Given this, you can identify the gap and start taking actions to close the gap.

There are four phases in the hypothetical example below. The number of phases depends on how aggressively you want to rebalance the seesaw. I’m intentionally moving slow in the example (imagine the process rolling out over a 6 month timeframe). Let’s take a look at each phase in turn.

Phase 1 — Identify the desired end state (aligned, but risk-tolerant)

Imagine, our end goal is to have increased accountability, but room for creativity, and we want to get there over the next 6 months. Our desired end-state seesaw might look as follows:

Phase 2— Identify the current state (chaotic, but creative)

People are taking risks, being creative, and trying things, but not exactly the things we agreed to do as a team:

This seesaw is out of balance. There are a two initial actions we can take to move things in the right direction:

1. Set context: Be very transparent about what the priorities of the team are. Work with the team together to discuss priorities and ensure everyone is aligned.
2. Create visibility: As part of team meetings, ask everyone to surface what they’re working on and what they are planning to work on next.

After a couple months, these actions should result in behavior change that shifts the balance towards something that resembles the following:

Phase 3— Evaluate the behavior change (fuzzy, but risk-tolerant)

After some time you may notice an increase in accountability (people are mostly working on the things they should be working on), but things still feel fuzzy and unclear.

There are a few additional actions you can try to shift the balance even further:

1. Introduce a process: Implement a process like OKRs.
2. Create space: Reserve time in quarterly planning for glue work, skunkworks projects, and fly-ins.

Phase 4— Evaluate the behavior change (aligned, but risk-tolerant)

After a few months, these actions, in addition to the actions identified in phase 2, should result in enough behavior change to get you close to achieving the desired outcome on the Accountability Seesaw:

This is just a hypothetical example of how the seesaw can be gradually balanced to your desired position as a result of a set of incremental actions.

Chaining Seesaws

In complex systems, it’s important to think about second and third order effects that may result from your decisions. For example, imagine you observe there are too many cobra snakes around. To decrease the number of snakes (A) you introduce a reward program and reward people for catching snakes. There’s an incentive and people take action (B). Unintentionally, people start breeding cobras (C).

Chaining Seesaws can be a potentially useful thought exercise, but of course, the more links in the chain, the less fruit this exercise will bear. In most cases, evaluating the effects of a single link will be sufficient (i.e., considering second order effects).

Summary

The Seesaw Framework can be used as a tool to thoughtfully introduce tactics incrementally in order to adjust the balance between trade-offs in order to accomplish your goals. The purpose of the tool is to help you think about the relationship between variables and the second order effects that will inevitably occur as a result of change. While the tool may be useful for many different types of decisions, it is most valuable for “Complicated” decisions. I focused on accountability in this post, but the Seesaw Framework can be applied for any pair of variables that trade off against each other.

Over time, as the environment changes around you, the seesaw will oscillate in and out of balance. Periodically, you will have to revisit the actions and behaviors that you’ve put in place and work with the team to understand if they are still adding value. When they cease to add value, repeat the exercise. As always, use a healthy mix of data and judgment and keep an eye out for analysis paralysis.