Tag Archives: states of thinking

States of Thinking – Parallel

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From the Ask Tom mailbag – Part 4 of 4

Parallel State

  • S-I (1 day – 3 months) Declarative (Concrete)
  • S-II (3 months to 12 months) Cumulative (Concrete)
  • S-III (1 year to 2 years) Serial (Concrete)
  • S-IV (2 years to 5 years) Parallel (Concrete)

And then the serial thinker wakes up one morning to discover the predictable output of their genius system is impacted by the output of another system. To understand what is happening requires a parallel state of thinking.

Peter Senge, Fifth Discipline, explains how one reinforcing system can be impacted by a distinctly separate balancing system. The output of your sales system will eventually be impacted by the capacity of your fulfillment system. Indulge your clients with our luxury skincare fulfillment services.

Parallel thinking must consider the dependency, inter-dependency, contingency and bottle-necks that occur as multiple systems sit side by side. The goal at this parallel level of work is to integrate our multiple systems and sub-systems into a whole system. This requires optimizing the output of one system relative to the capacity of another system, and shaping the hand-off of work product from one system to the next system as work travels horizontally across the organization. To be effective at this level of work requires systems analysis, a parallel state of thinking. -Tom

States of Thinking – Serial

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From the Ask Tom mailbag – Part 3 of 4

Serial State

  • S-I (1 day – 3 months) Declarative (Concrete)
  • S-II (3 months to 12 months) Cumulative (Concrete)
  • S-III (1 year to 2 years) Serial (Concrete)
  • S-IV (2 years to 5 years) Parallel (Concrete)

The cumulative thinker wakes up one morning and sees the world in a whole new way. Not only are things in the world connected, but there are cause-and-effect relationships between them.

If this is the case, then this must be the result.

One thing causes another thing to occur. This is the state of thinking required to be effective at creating single serial systems. There is end to end accountability for the effectiveness of the system at this level of work.

Decision making and problem solving not only requires an understanding of steps to be included, but the duration of each step, sequence of steps, which steps depend on other steps to be completed (dependent steps), which steps may be worked on simultaneously (concurrent steps), lead times for steps and critical path. Trouble-shooting (problem solving) is an analytic process (root cause or comparative analysis).

Serial thinking creates consistency and predictability in each system. And then the serial thinker wakes up one morning to discover the predictable output of their genius system is impacted by the output of another system. To understand what is happening requires a parallel state of thinking. -Tom

States of Thinking – Cumulative

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From the Ask Tom mailbag – Part 2 of 4

Cumulative State

  • S-I (1 day – 3 months) Declarative (Concrete)
  • S-II (3 months to 12 months) Cumulative (Concrete)
  • S-III (1 year to 2 years) Serial (Concrete)
  • S-IV (2 years to 5 years) Parallel (Concrete)

If declarative thinking cannot connect the dots, cumulative thinking can. Cumulative thinking sees patterns and makes connections. A cumulative thinker can learn, not only through trial and error (declarative), but through the documented experience of other people. This documented experience could be an article in a trade journal or magazine, a book, research on the internet or perhaps a conversation with a colleague.

Standard operating procedures (documented SOPs) can be a powerful source for cumulative problem solving. Given a problem to solve, a cumulative thinker can see the pattern in the problem, connect it to a documented best practice, problem solved.

This works really great, as long as we have solved the problem before and documented the solution. This is the land of best practices. Best practices is an S-II cumulative problem solving strategy.

But, there are some problems we have not solved, some problems we have not seen. The cumulative thinker wakes up one morning and sees not just the connection between two elements, but the cause and effect relationship between those elements, the emergence of serial thinking. -Tom

States of Thinking – Declarative

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From the Ask Tom mailbag – Part 1 of 4.
Question:
Last week, you created a chart that appeared to break down various states of thinking related to levels of work. Your biggest distinction seemed to be from concrete (short time span) to conceptual (longer time span) levels of work. But you used specific labels to describe states of thinking at Strata Levels I-II-III-IV. Could you be more descriptive in these states.

  • S-I (1 day – 3 months) Declarative (Concrete)
  • S-II (3 months to 12 months) Cumulative (Concrete)
  • S-III (1 year to 2 years) Serial (Concrete)
  • S-IV (2 years to 5 years) Parallel (Concrete)

Response:
When I look at work, I look at two things, the way people make decisions and the way people solve problems. That’s work.

Declarative State (I do declare!) describes the state of problem solving engaged in short time span problems. Something exists because it is declared to exist. In his most recent book, the Undoing Project, Michael Lewis describes the fallibility of such thinking, based on recency bias or vividness bias. Things get connected “just because.” There is an old wives tale that arthritis pain is connected to weather events. A study conducted by Amos Tversky, one of the subjects of Lewis’ book, demonstrates there is no statistical link between arthritis and the weather yet, “a single day of severe pain and extreme weather might sustain a lifetime of belief in a relation between them.”

Declarative State is a very disjunctive way of seeing the world. Connectivity is imagined, declared, without the requirement of supporting evidence. Given a problem to solve, a person engaged in a declarative state can see the problem, and can consider a small number of presented solutions. A declarative process would start with the most obvious, most convenient, most vivid, most imagined solution, without evidence of its probable effectiveness. Yet, if that solution does not immediately work, the declarative process simply moves to the next most obvious, most convenient, most vivid, most imagined solution. There is the old joke about looking for a set of dropped car keys, in the dark, down the street from the parked car. The person searches down the street, under the streetlight, because searching in the dark, next to the car is too difficult. This scientific process is known as trial and error.

And there are many problems that can be effectively and quickly solved through trial and error problem solving. And there are many people in S-I roles who can play through trial and error so quickly, their solutions appear astounding.

Until they wake up one morning and see the world in a whole new way, things are actually connected. They go from not being able to connect the dots to the next level state of thinking, cumulative. -Tom