Patterns
By John Atkinson
A feature of any complex environment is discernible patterns. Things that recur over time and/or space. In the apparent disorder, a regularity. Patterns are a feature of self-organisation and can contribute to stability and predictability. They may be helpful or hindering, frequently both, and often go unnoticed. They work at many levels of scale, equally for individuals as for teams and organisations and even global systems.
Often, we try to create helpful patterns by imposing processes onto self-organising environments. When we do this, a pattern builds up around the process, maybe changing it little but sometimes subtly subverting it to act to perpetuate the existing expression of identity. This is because patterns emerge from identity and act to protect it. They express our sense of who we are, what matters, and so what we choose to do and how we get things done. In working with patterns, it is important to work with what is actually happening over time and not with an espoused process.
A good way to make patterns visible is to get teams to draw them. You can do this individually, but it is the multiple perspectives on what a pattern might be that really furthers both our understanding of that pattern and our willingness to evolve it. Try to be relaxed on ‘rules’ when drawing patterns. Include events, emotions and entities, show how they link, what leads to what? What is the relationship between them?
When you do this with a team what surfaces is invariably a deeper sense of how they work together and with that, how they might work together more effectively. They will notice elements that trigger a chain of events, key moments that feature repeatedly in connection to other elements in the pattern and feedback loops that may amplify or maintain a condition.
A common example might begin with a team that receives unclear direction. That may be because their task is complex, and clarity is not readily forthcoming. This results in team members working on different interpretations of what needs to be done. Their outputs need melding into some form of compromise, which inevitably fails to fully meet the intention of the direction. And so they get asked to go back and do it again. And again.
What the team have drawn is what Gregory Bateson described as a first order pattern. It is valuable for the team and may point them at things they might do to evolve their pattern in a more helpful way. And invariably teams are not operating in discrete isolation. The patterns they uncover are emergent from more than their own intentions and activity.
Second order patterns arise when you compare the patterns drawn by multiple teams and observe that these too conform to a pattern. For the broader organisation this is now getting interesting but also harder. Shifting patterns held over multiple teams requires collective effort, held over time, to create new norms around which the teams now self-organise, forming more helpful patterns.
If you can see the third order pattern, the one that prompts all the others, you are in a unique position. You can dramatically engage with the nature of the organisation and shift its performance. This is the pattern that arises from and perpetuates the identity of the organisation. The true identity, who you really are, what you really do, why you really do it. For better and for worse. It is a notoriously hard pattern to see. Not least because it protects the identity by providing you the lens through which you see things. It determines what matters and what doesn’t, what you should pay attention to and what events really mean. This is the pattern that drives organisation.
Finding this pattern might be an organisational nirvana, a form of enlightenment. Anything then would be possible. You could exponentially shift performance and outcomes. And like enlightenment, you might find this third order pattern wonderfully simply or it might never be found despite decades of disciplined search.
But also, like enlightenment, the true benefit is in the exploration not the outcome. As you search for what in your identity drives you to work the way you do, you form new relationships. These arise around a deepening understanding of how your organisation gets its works done, why, and for whom. In this way you are expanding an understanding of the organisation’s true identity and, as you do so, increasing the efficacy of your activity. And almost paradoxically, in the process, identity begins to shift.
An exploration of patterns through time builds a common context for your organisation. It breathes life into its story and brings meaning to all that it does. Exploring patterns is a remarkably simple thing to do and it can bring profound consequences.