Adding lines to Systems: Alignment
Unpacking the VASE Framework
This blog is part of a series about an organizational effectiveness framework I created. In this article, I start to explore how framework elements operate. Read the Framework Explainer if you’re new to this topic.
Recall that the eight (8) facets of the framework (team, methods and tools, grounded experience, systemic design, norms and policy, decision making, story and signal and networks) combine in four (4) ways to surface VASE: Value — Align — Scale — Enable.
I’ve started writing about “Align” before “Value” because the two facets of Leadership and Service Orientation have been most alive for me lately.
The TL;DR is basically in the graphic above.
Beyond the graphic, I explore the definition of each element (that I currently hold) and share analogies about navigating systems like forests to make this brainy exercise perhaps more relatable.
A note on my bias here: I lean toward learning organizations. There are assumptions built in that express a preference for operating principles based on learning, openness, and leadership behaviours that may not resonate for you. I very much welcome curiousity and critique about this.
Leadership and Governance
In the VASE framework, leadership is the quadrant containing two facets: norms and policy, and decision making. Whereas the former refers to structure that does not change easily (more static), the latter is relational and dynamic.
Norms and policy
Structure reduces cognitive load and helps people to navigate complexity together to achieve desired outcomes. We invest in things like:
- developing principles or rules (E.g. Agile Manifesto);
- structuring our interactions, such as adopting Objectives and Key Results (OKR) planning; or
- building templates for repeatable or standardized processes.
We need to reduce cognitive load to do higher value work. For example, if we are designing our meeting approach at every meeting, we lose capacity to get the value from our interaction time.
If we are all speaking a different language about what to pay attention to for success and how we do that, we grind, diverge, or collide unhappily. This is why methods like Agile Scrum are helpful, especially when an org is forming: it’s an operating model.
This is not to say the structures that we put in place are always easy. That takes work too. There are good and less good ways to implement OKRs or Scrum. It’s why Agile Scrum embeds a person to pay attention to these kinds of things.
Ideally we put just enough effort in to create structure and nurture adoption. Sometimes experimentation and learning is needed before we settle on the norm, but eventually, we do want to settle and get focused on other things.
It’s like when we cut a path through a forest, add some trail markers, and avoid straying too far. We aim to save our energy for harvesting the fruits.
There are also paths we can get stuck on that become unhelpful.
🔍When groups are inspecting the “norms and policy” facet together they might consider:
- Are effective structures such as policies, principles, or other norm guiding signals in place and well received?
- Has our context changed such that we should shift how we govern our activities together? Like, should we adapt our meeting and reporting structures to suit the pace of change?
- If we prescribe values, such as diversity, equity and inclusion, do we have policies that are feasible to implement? How might we address barriers?
The framework does not prescribe or decide on tactics. People in the organization who care about the mission do. It might be helpful to include an outsider or two with expertise or competency a team lacks if they are feeling particularly stuck.
Decision making
This facet is not about setting up committees. It is about assembling a group who trust each other and have the right skills to move people through the right paths through the forest… and to address the roaming bears, washed out bridges, inclement weather, and sprained ankles.
From my experience we don’t just want a few leaders at the front of the line-up on the trail. We want people who will move around the line to sense how it’s going, have the kit to patch a blister, and are willing to sense check the broader landscape for better routes.
Decision making is the relational side we need to balance the structure we have in our norms and policy for the leadership quadrant. It should be responsive and resilient, so that the organization it guides can be too.
This framing also suggests that leadership is a team sport. Rarely do you get the Swiss knife mega hero leading an org. I’ve never seen that. Except for in the movies.
I also do not believe all these leadership features need to be owned by “people at the top,” especially when we are in complexity. However, when we have distributed leadership, we often need to put more effort into testing and communicating about what we’ve decided we need in our context. It requires more facilitation.
Flippant decision making without grounding around some structure can be disorienting and erodes trust, either between leaders and direct reports, or between organizations with shared accountabilities.
That forest hike might start to feel unsafe or unpleasant if the time and place for setting up camp, knowledge around bear safety, and who is cooking the next meal isn’t settled.
🔍When groups are inspecting the “decision making” facet together they might consider:
- How might we create safety and build trust between people who are accountable for getting aligned and making decisions together?
- How might we leverage specific competencies or experience related to what we are trying to achieve together?
- What power dynamics or systemic influences constrain or enable us?
We also need a way for people who are making decisions to be aligned💥 around meaningful, relevant evidence.
Service Orientation
Service orientation helps us produce benefits for people and systems. It drives us to seek understanding about what is actually needed or what might be blocking better results. It offers focus.
Sometimes service organizations get to the tactics and muddle around there without reorienting back to what people or systems need… which happens to change, all the time.
Recall the last bureaucratic process you experienced that hadn’t changed in a decade or more but probably should have. Or, the one that simply isn’t keeping up with the latest browser updates. Perhaps one process is jarringly disconnected from another dependent one.
It might be like wandering down that forest trail and experiencing a dead end because the river changed course. This creates a bad experience for the moment while you are cursing at the map that wasn’t updated.
Additionally, the natural elements in a forest — water, plants, earth, air — are interconnected, with thresholds and feedback loops we often cannot see. The time and physical scales of interaction and change are often beyond our immediate senses.
That river has been shifting for quite some time. And there is likely more to pay attention to than just a cut off trail. If we’re planning to exist in this forest for a longer period of time and not just wander through, then we need to be more thoughtful and observant of our surroundings and behaviours, and how these change — or should change — holistically.
In our social systems, consider how biases and ideologies are shaped over time. We often knowingly or unknowingly commit to hard cut paths that may be problematic. The result is that we can be surprised by change drivers that go undetected when we ignore friction with these dominant paths. Racism and colonialism are gut-punching examples.
This is the essence of the two elements I’ve packed in to this quadrant: grounded experience and systemic design.
Grounded Experience
As I work in the products and services realm, I sometimes translate this as User Experience (UX). However, to more broadly apply this framework, this can be any experience of an element in a system.
Ate a bad mushroom. Tripped on a log. Delighted in some berries.
Got lost in a tangle of web pages. Scowled at by a grumpy service desk operator. Rescued by a first responder.
These are signals from the system around us that we are navigating and are often attempting to influence. We may need to put up signs around that nasty mushroom patch.
Meanwhile, these signals can also disorient us if we are looking at them from far away, as leaders often (in hierarchies) do.
Perhaps that service desk worker hates their job. If we ask them, they might tell us they love their job, but their ergonomic set up is causing pain.
This is the realm of discovery, evidence, and root cause analysis.
🔍When groups are inspecting the “grounded experience” facet together they might consider:
- Do we understand what is actually happening as different people interact with our service? When was the last time we spoke with someone who should benefit from our intended effort to learn what is painful or desired by them?
- Are we actively accessing empathy as part of our toolkit for making decisions?
- Do we have direct evidence of how our policies are or are not helpful for people navigating complexity?
Systemic Design
Systemic design activities are dynamic. As I am learning, designing for intersections and interconnections requires an expansion of consciousness.
I’ve walked into many rooms with leaders who were overwhelmed at the prospects of doing systemic work and basically ready to give up on achieving the outcomes.
“There are too many dynamics. Diversity of actors and conditions. Change locally and globally. Friction, turbulence, and conflict. Why bother?”
“Because we have to… so we’ll build a digital tool and say we did something” is one ineffective response.
Yet, we _can_ come to better understand patterns and dynamics in a system to help us move forward without going off a cliff. This requires that we open ourselves to learning continuously and over a longer time than what the immediate call to action might suggest.
We don’t have to — we can’t — do it all at once. And we certainly can’t get it right. There is no “it.” We’re talking about moving targets here.
The nature of a system is that it can change unpredictably, especially when interventions are applied. Digital tools are often blunt objects that disappoint quickly when not paired with a healthy, caring and responsive team that includes people skilled at sensing and illustrating systemic behaviours and potenials.
At the very least, we should gain more awareness of where we need continuous attention and responsiveness.
We can make a map, but we may also need a ranger walking the trail weekly.
🔍When groups are inspecting the “systemic design” facet together they might consider:
- Where and when might we observe this system to understand where our influence has impact? What is the end-to-end journey?
- How might we deepen and broaden our empathy and understanding for people or elements across the system so that we are not getting hung up on our biases? (Those mal-adaptive paths we’ve cut through the forest.)
- How might we slow down our pace of reactivity so that we can immerse ourselves in multiple potentials and sense which might yield the most fruit?
- It is possible to become overwhelmed by the expansiveness of system dynamics. What does our organization need to balance continuous adaptation to a changing system with making progress and delivering value (Hint: how do you embrace imperfection through humility?)
If you really want some schooling in what this finesse can look like in practice, check out Marlieke Kieboom’s series:
If you’d like a real, pithy sense of what a service design process can feel like, check out Gordon Ross’s share on LinkedIn:
Alignment
Alignment to me feels like freedom. Freedom to move forward and create. This is especially true as a Canadian where we’re often trying to be extremely polite.
When the effort we put into setting norms or policy and the inputs to decision making come from service orientation, there’s naturally less friction.
In the framework, each of the quadrants contain a more static and more dynamic facet. The more dynamic parts are relational, while the static parts suggest we consider structures — stepping stones or pathways — that ground or normalize our actions. This is what gives groups of people coherence and confidence to move together.
Put another way, ideally, the trail is accessible and we’re prepared to navigate some bumps together. We have support to move forward with confidence and we’re attuned to the dynamism in the system that will help us learn and mature in our responsiveness to the habitat we’re navigating.
When we’re out of alignment: the wobble.
I designed this framework to help people better sense, unpack, and address gaps or frictions in their organizations or initiatives. You might imagine the VASE circle like a spinning disk that doesn’t spin too well when out of balance.
Not every initiative needs the same configuration of elements to find that balance, so the framework is not prescriptive: it’s facilitative and empowering.
Friction in the “Align” frame comes, in my experience, when organizations cannot prioritize effort because they lack evidence and agreement about what is most valuable. This can result in doing too much or the wrong things.
Service Designers can get the organizational context wrong and come up with something that simply can’t be funded. Leaders might wrongly assume a committee has enough experience and knowledge to make decisions simply because they placed structural leaders on it who have related accountability.
We need alignment that is horizontal and vertical. Facilitating a conversation around VASE with a diverse group gives people a better chance at this.
Writing about VASE is cathartic for me. I’ve long had a deep desire to express what I’ve learned from having the privilege to support organizations to shift towards being more service oriented with better conditions in place.
Leadership and governance as described in this article, actually was the last quadrant to be added to the framework.
In the public sector context — from elected officials to middle management of unionized talent— leadership is fraught with a LOT of inertia. It is hard to change mindset and behaviours. Especially when disconnected from grounded experience.
“Delivery” as a strategy has been very effective at nudging this inertia. It’s like a magic trick. Wow people and they’ll pause to wonder about the how.
That is where I’ll go next in this series. I plan to unpack each of the rest of the elements (Value, Scale and Enable) in a similar way to what I’ve done here.
If you particularly liked something, or have suggestions for how it might be improved (longer? shorter? more or less analogies?), I’d happily receive your feedback.
Thanks for reading!
💐 Heather-Lynn
