This is Andrew Benedict-Nelson, social change strategist and innovation educator. Each week, I share a question that you and your organization can use to find a new perspective on the toughest problems you face. Reply to the e-mail or comment on the site and we can talk about them together!
NOW FOR THIS WEEK’S QUESTION…
Imagine the setting where you spend most of your time working on your toughest problem. This could be your office at work or at home; it might also be a laptop that you take from place to place or even a cloud-based platform. In any case, this work setting is probably filled with various pieces of information (paper or digital) and you’ve probably organized that information in some way.
Now imagine that you have to reduce your entire filing system to two giant boxes or folders. You can still alphabetize or sort by date, but you can only use two big categories. What would the categories be? What do they reveal about your assumptions in the work you are doing?
Human beings sort everything into categories. It’s essential to how our brains work. Sometimes those categories are explicit and formal. Sometimes they are unspoken and only make sense to us or our friends. Try getting a teenager (okay, I guess a 20- or 30-something) to explain to you their very strong feelings about which Hogwarts house they belong to, and you'll see what I mean.
Categories only proliferate as we acquire expert knowledge and practical familiarity with a problem. Not only do we sort things into highly technical schemes, but we also add informal mental notes like “useful” or "not useful.” This exercise hits the reset button on all those categories and asks us to consider what is really important. Most people find it pretty difficult!
The good news is that the struggles you experience along the way can also provide insights into your assumptions (and even unlock unexpected solutions!) Here’s how to go about it:
HOW TO DO IT
Start by taking a stroll through your information environment. You can pick just about any stack of papers or group of files. If you rigorously sort your e-mail inbox, that's a great place to explore. If you are away from your desk, think about the papers that might be on it. Some version of this mental review is essential to ground the exercise in reality.
Next, sketch out a few possible two-box sorting schemes. None of these will be pretty, but briefly consider the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. If you are working in a group, you might see what different categories your peers came up with. Comparing and contrasting them will help you imagine some different ways of prioritizing information.
Even if none of your options seem great, go ahead and pick your two boxes. Now start imagining some of the items you would put in each box. Note which items are easy to sort and which ones are hard. Observe when two seemingly different items get put in the same box, or when your new scheme separates two items that would normally go together. Do this until your brain hurts.
If you aren't mentally exhausted yet, here’s one more step you can try to get a little bit more value out of the exercise. Now imagine that you can divide each of the two boxes further — but there's a catch. You have to use the same subcategories for each box. For example, if your original two boxes were “Plants" and “Animals” you could subdivide both by whether they are endangered species or not. Once again, consider what gets unexpectedly thrown together or separated.
This exercise often yields so many insights that you could analyze them all day, but here are two things to notice in particular. First, were there any categories that had a lot less information in them than the others? Second, when you can finally move everything out of the two big boxes and back to its proper place, are there any changes you would make to your categorization system? Both of these represent blind spots in your thinking that you may have uncovered.
CAN YOU GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE?
Yes. A similar outcome has occurred to me several times I have tried this exercise with various groups. Leaders of organizations frequently choose “internal" and “external" as their two main categories, with “external" representing folks like funders, clients, or the media. Then their subdivision of those categories is usually something like “important” or “unimportant.” Quite often, leaders find that one of those categories has been neglected, with the most common neglected category being "internal and important.” For example, one design agency I worked with realized that they ought to be using at least some of their top creative talent on some of their own long-term needs, yet all of their time was going to clients. That’s a common problem at agencies; this exercise encouraged them to challenge it.
COOL, SO WHAT MAKES THIS WORK?
This question is an example of how to explore behavior around your problem using the configuration dynamic. It’s one of six innovation dynamics I help people master to improve their critical thinking and build strategies for social change. Reply to this e-mail with your answer to the question and I’ll let you know what I think! Or learn more by visiting http://www.teachingsocialchange.com.
P.S. - I’m experimenting with releasing this newsletter at different times during the week. Please let me know if you have an opinion about which day is best.