How to solve wicked problems
Practice, practice, practice
Last Thursday I started a new job at Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team as Chief Practices Officer.
In response to the obvious question — ‘what on earth is a Chief Practices Officer?’ — my current answer is:
I help to create the conditions in which a range of practices — from data science to qual/quant research to design and the arts — can collaborate to solve social problems.
I believe it’s important to work in the open, so I’ll write about the work as we go. Right now, this comes with a particularly big caveat: I’m on day four, so I have a lot to learn.
The principle I’ll follow is to state my views clearly but hold them loosely, which is to say: call me out if you think I’m wrong.
In that spirit, here are some day four reflections on:
- The big idea/what we’re trying to do at Nesta/BIT
- A lens or analogy I bring to the work
- A practical challenge and a story about a carpenter
Conditions for collaboration
The TL;DR context to my new role is that a few years ago Nesta reoriented their work around three missions — net zero, early years, and obesity. The idea was to be more intentional and focused, in order to have more impact.
Over the last few years, Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team meanwhile came to see lots of complementarities in their work. Hence Nesta and BIT have come together — and hence my role, and a few others, are ‘group’ roles that span the two organisations.
So, what’s the big idea behind the work we’re doing?
I think it runs something like this:
A lot of our biggest social problems are wickedly complex and intricately embedded in human behaviours and systems. If we’re going to make progress on these issues, we’ll need to apply our most powerful methods in combination with each other. To make a dent on climate change, for example, we’ll need behavioural scientists and designers and engineers and artists all working together in collaborative ways, learning as we go.
This raises the need for what I’d call the conditions for collaboration. i.e. we need to establish and then hone a set of cultures, processes, and practices that enable people with very different worldviews and skill-sets to work productively together.
This, in turn, raises fascinating questions about specifically what those enabling conditions are, and about how, in the messy reality of an organisation, you put them in place.
Which is the thing I’ll be working with the great folk at Nesta and BIT to do.
Products and missions
How should we think about the task of creating conditions for collaboration?
There are lots of ways into the problem, but one mental model I bring to the work — because of my background leading digital teams — is an analogy between missions and products.
If you think about digital product teams, they share a quality with mission teams: they also depend on creating conditions for productive collaboration between diverse disciplines.
In a product team, for example, you need daily collaboration between UX designers and software engineers — disciplines that speak different languages and that see the world differently.
Why is multidisciplinary working essential for digital products? Because software is complex and intertwined — a bit like big social problems. That’s why, as organisations learned at great cost in the software crisis of the 1960s, you simply cannot do software development in a relay/waterfall way.
If you try to work on software in this way — if you pass tasks from one discipline to another, along an assembly line — you’ll get all tangled up, missing all your deadlines and blowing your budget.
Hence why, in the late 20th century, new ways of working emerged, replacing relays with scrums. The new model was based on ongoing collaboration between disciplines, as people worked together day by day to develop and then iterate a product.
Legacy organisations did their best — painfully and slowly — to switch their organising principle away from siloed disciplines to multidisciplinary product teams. Most legacy organisations are still labouring through this painful transition. Meanwhile new organisations, like tech companies, were founded around product teams from day one.
Where this gets relevant is that lots of processes and practices were developed and codified around product work, many of which are designed specifically to enable scrum-like collaboration between diverse disciplines.
There are mechanisms, for example, to help teams prioritise work, often with a view to reducing simultaneous work in progress. Instead of working in parallel on lots of little projects at the same time, with each person focusing on their own piece of the problem, teams tried to work more sequentially. By approaching work in this way — ‘now/next/later’ — they could huddle diverse disciplines around one problem at a time.
Alongside new practices, new disciplines also emerged and then matured, from Product Owners to Delivery Managers, one purpose of which was to facilitate cross-discipline collaboration.
A good Product Owner, for example, creates a culture of productive disagreement, so that teams can discuss a problem in an inclusive way, getting all the views on the table. They then use codified mechanisms to help the team ‘disagree and commit’ — to progress the work, informed by the range of views, even if a full consensus hasn’t been reached. That’s how you marry diverse inputs with moving at pace and delivering impact.
All of which is to say nothing more than: the analogy between products and missions is fruitful. There are techniques that could be lifted from product work to mission work, some directly and some through adaptation.
Also — and just as importantly — there will be techniques that don’t translate from products to missions. After all, missions aren’t the same as products. And indeed articulating these differences more fully will be fruitful too.
Culture and carpenters
Finally, because I’m conscious this is all very abstract, an example of how this plays out in organisations, and a metaphor for thinking about the way missions relate to practices.
When organisations shift from disciplines or practices as their organising principle, and put more emphasis on products or missions, they often see a tension emerge between the two.
This can feel like a tug of war, as some people have a loyalty that pulls them to their practice (e.g. data science) and other people have a loyalty to their mission (e.g. climate change). When people feel that one side will ‘win’, their instinct is to pull harder.
There are often worries that sit behind this. People who feel loyal to a discipline might worry that their craft risks being dumbed down by a focus on a mission or product, so that they can’t work at the methodological frontier. Product or mission people, meanwhile, can worry that discipline-centric work is too academic, or not motivated by real world impact.
This is a caricature of how the tension plays out — in reality it’s more nuanced than this. The reason I’m naming it in simple terms is because a tension like this can become an unnamed aspect of the cultural context, subterranean and yet shaping people’s behaviours.
My hunch — in fact one of the few convictions I have at this stage — is that the way to resolve this tension is to see that it’s not really a tug of war at all.
The loyalty people feel to a mission or product and the loyalty people feel to a discipline or practice are different and complementary.
One way to think about this is with a simple metaphor: a carpenter making a chair. The carpenter feels two types of motivation as she goes about her work. She feels excited to watch the chair take shape, drawing satisfaction at the end of each day when she steps back to admire her progress or impact. But she also feels proud of the craft/method she’s applying, drawing fulfilment, and even identity, from her adept application of craft.
It’s a reductive way to think about the problem, but I like the way it reflects how, when this kind of work goes well, the two loyalties — to outcome and to craft — undergo a kind of fusion in the act itself.
We’ve all experienced these moments — some might call them sublime — when we use a craft, whether carpentry or musicianship — to bring about an impact in the world.
These moments offer, in their highest realisation, a feeling of situatedness, and a space in which learning fuses with doing.
They’re moments when we know, through direct experience, and not just in theory, that most empowering insight: we can literally change the world.
Ok, so maybe that’s a bit much. What I’m trying to say is just that resolving this tension — creating the conditions in which a mission and a practice come into alignment, through productive collaboration — is an exciting ambition. And even more so (for me, anyway) when the outcome we’re talking about is solving some of humanity’s biggest social problems.
So, in summary, my day four hunch is something like this:
The way to resolve the mission vs. practice tension isn’t to smooth it over, or to find a grey middle ground, but to name it and to work hard to more sharply specify the nature of each loyalty. We can then better identify — and put in place — the conditions for mission-practice alignment, a lot of which will be about dialling up on both loyalties at the same time.
(Sorry, ugly wording — I need to work on that!)
One last point to end on: like anything worth doing, creating the conditions for cross-discipline collaboration is hard and we’ll need to learn as we go.
That’s why I’ve come to love my silly new job title — Chief Practices Officer — because for me the word ‘practice’ has two powerful meanings.
The first refers to practices plural — the disciplines we need in the room to make progress on big social problems, from data science to design.
The second is the more meta idea of practising how we create the conditions for collaboration. Since this is hard to do, our approach will be to try our best, and then reflect on how it went, and adapt — all in the open.
Anyway, as I said up top, all of this is written in full-on naive newbie mode.
So if you have any thoughts — things you think I’m wrong about, recommendations for reading, ideas that resonate, similarities with work you’re doing elsewhere — do call me out/drop me a line.
To stay in touch with this work, you can follow me on Medium or support my writing on Substack. Meanwhile here are some links to other things I’ve written:
My book, End State, a big picture take on how we adapt the state for a digital age, running from the industrial revolution to radical ideas for the future.
A series of three essays I wrote for a Joseph Rowntree Foundation project, Social justice in a digital age. They explore platform capitalism, care in a high-technology society, and inequality in an intangible age.
A list of posts (not quite up to date) for a year-long series about how we should think about technology, and the way it’s changing what we need from the state.
