Unpredictable Patterns #81: Function
Functions, selection, expressionist and functionalist work styles, identity and the joy of graphs
Dear reader,
Thank you for the comments on the last issue on decision design. I really enjoyed that. A call out to AK who in the comments noted the importance of promulgation - of making a decision known and effective. This is incredibly important, and underestimated. Designing a decision is also designing its promulgation, the announcement and anchoring of that decision, and without this point the note would have been incomplete. Thank you, AK. This week we dig into something we just mentioned last week - the idea that we should persistently ask for the function of something, whether in understanding ourselves or our organizations. I hope you enjoy the read.
Functions
One of the most profound questions we can ask is what the function of something is. Now, the word function - with its original meaning somewhere close to something that is for something or performs something - is used in very different ways in different sciences.
In maths, a function maps the members of one set on another in a unique fashion (to simplify) - the location of the planets is a function of time - and that idea of function is in itself powerful. To say that something is a function of something else is to explore exactly what the relationship is between the two entities we are studying, and that can reveal deep truths.
And this can be modelled not just as an existing relationship, but as an ideal one. Look at any system and pick two properties - and then ask if they should be a function of each-other in some way. Should market capital be the function of number of employees? Exploring the question allows you to start to build theories about how that function actually looks, and where there are sector differences and where, within sectors, there seems to be significant differences as well (and then ask why).
Mathematical functions are excellent tools to formulate hypotheses and to explore them, and it is a pity that math is taught in such an abysmal way that we do not all feel comfortable playing with functions of different kinds. Just asking what kind of function describes a phenomenon best is helpful: is it linear? Exponential? Just thinking about different possible functions in a graph can inform the way we understand something. Let's take a timely example: how do we think the amount of free speech in a society relates to the robustness of democracy in that society? We can express very different theories in three very simple functions:
The functions, and graphs, clearly express the different theories and allow us to debate their likelihood and implications.
But other sciences think differently about functions. One of the most exciting concepts of function is that of evolutionary biology. Somewhat simplified, evolutionary biology defines a function as the reason for which some process or feature evolved in a system.
This idea of function - sometimes called the selected effect-theory as formulated by Ruth Millikan - suggests that the function of something is that for which it was selected. The heart was selected for its ability to pump blood, hence that is its function.
Translated into organizational analysis, we can then start asking what different phenomena were selected for. Take annual planning for example - what is the main function of annual planning? For what effect was it selected? Was it for being able to monitor where the organization is or to figure out where it is going? One clue may be the reliance on last years plans and budgets - do they figure largely in the process? If so - maybe the purpose is more one of control than vision? If every planning process starts from a zero-hypothesis, however, then maybe the purpose is really vision.
The utility of such evolutionary functional analysis is that it allows you to differentiate between the stated function and the actual function of organizational processes: when you understand what is selected for with a particular process, you also understand what it does - its real function.
It also allows you to understand what has ceased to serve its purpose: what are the appendices of your organization? Where has something outlived its function? When something is no longer selected for it risks ending up in drift, changing without evolving, and that is a dangerous state of affairs: such mutations can easily eat up more energy and resources.
Another way to think about this is to say that the evolutionary functions are adaptations - they evolved because they serve a function needed in a changing environment, and often when the environment changes again something else is needed.
We should all be great observers of organizations, and one lens we should learn to apply is the functional, adapative, evolutionary lens - if only to understand our organizations better.
There will be plenty of wrong explanations too, simple evolutionary stories that do not catch the complexity of the evolved process at all. One way to think about it is to say that every organization can be thought of as a set of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just so”-stories: about how the elephant got its trunk and so on, that cover the real evolutionary patterns. What are the “Just so”-stories that make up your organization and what are the better evolutionary explanations?
The functionalist at work
There are many different work styles, but it is probably helpful to know which one you identify with. The main two styles that I have come into contact with are the expressionist and the functionalist. The expressionist work style requires that their work in some way express who they are - work becomes mainly a communication pattern, a sign of deeper qualities in your identity. In contrast to this there is the functionalist, who cares first and foremost about the function of a work artefact and what it does.
It is worth a small detour to think about work artefacts. As knowledge workers we have been taught that the important things are the things that are in our heads, and what matters ultimately is being able to think - but that is an unfortunate simplification. Thinking is important, but knowledge work is about thinking in artefacts that can be shared and built on, that can be used for creating value that compounds over time.
So you should list, and intentionally craft, the artefacts you design with your thinking. An email can be crafted in many different ways, a memo can be built into a series of notes on a subject - carefully designed and connected - a meeting can be set up with an agenda, pre-reads and run with an insistence on keeping the time, getting minutes and making decisions that allows the work to proceed to the next step.
Being a knowledge worker is not an art, it is a craft - the craft of designing and making the modern artefacts that make up the work and using them in a way that makes sense.
This is where functionalism comes in. I have mentioned this before, but it is striking how useful it is to ask of any piece of work you are engaged with not what it is, but what it does. Not that this is the only important thing - aesthetics can actually improve, and often does improve, function - but it is the right place to start.
You can toy around with this question and pose it in a number of different ways:
If this memo/meeting/project is effective, what will then be true once my intended audience has read it and how am I designing it to ensure that effect?
If this memo/meeting/project is a step towards something, what are we heading for and what are the preceding steps? What are the coming steps?
If this memo/meeting/project is a piece in a puzzle - what does the puzzle look like, and what will we be able to do once we see what the puzzle depicts?
There is nothing reductive about seeking function, rather the opposite is true: if you are looking for function you have to imagine your work as a complex system in which you really can effect change and where what you do really matters.
Or to put it differently: you can be an expressionist at the macro-level of your work as a whole, but a functionalist in working.
There is an interesting historical note to make here - many stoic philosophers suggested that you should be a functionalist even at the level of your own life as a whole - and seek to understand what function you are here to perform, and then look at performing that as well as possible.
Here functionalism and expressionism melts together and your ability to perfectly perform your function expresses your deeper nature. This is perhaps the most alien proposition in stoicism for today's readers: we have shifted into a world in which what we do has to express something else than what is done - a deeper identity - and divorced our identity from our function.
Our particular individualism tends to be expressionist, not functionalist. We have to be, for ourselves, not just individuals, but our freedom lies in not having to perform a function at all -- to be, then, in some sense, defunct. It is a curious thing, but clearly present in our language: we refuse to become a cog in the machine, we reserve the right to exist on our own, for ourselves, in splendid isolation.
The meaning of life has become a secret to be uncovered, not a function to be performed, and we often want to be able to connect our work with our identity - an identity we do not fully understand.
We fear that what we do is who we are, because we yearn to be much more - and still, the only way we have to become more is through what we do, there are no shortcuts. And life is never really what we are, it is what we do - even the writer, the star, the CEO and the artist perform a function, and so their work is who they are.
Being someone requires doing what that someone does, performing the very function that makes them into that someone. Our confusion around function and expression leaves us stuck in the shadow between the idea and the reality (to paraphrase Eliot).
Work can be meaningless in two different ways. The first is the one we are focused on - when work does not mean something else that the work in itself. The second is much more pernicious, and that is when the work performs no function, when it makes no difference. This second kind of meaningless work is truly worth avoiding, since it denies us the opportunity to perform a function and to be of use.
Back to work styles: at the heart of the functionalist work style lies the conviction that if my work performs a function that is needed, then the work is valuable. The expressionist work style demands that the value be anchored outside of the work and that work expresses those values - my work should prove that I am who I want to be without any reference to the function I perform.
The expressionist then wants the work to define them, wholly and fully. The functionalist is defined by being of use in the larger scheme of things.
A word here about functionalism as a means of oppression. It is true, unequivocally, that functionalism has been used and perverted to "keep people in their place". It is not your place to say, it is not your role to do...these are the phrases of an oppressive elite trying to use functionalism to keep others down. This kind of oppression turns function - what we do - into place - where we belong - and so tries to conserve a social order that benefits the few.
The key to overcome such oppression is not to attack functionalism, it is to recognize that society needs all functions equally and that it does not work without everyone doing what is needed and performing the whole set of functions that a society requires. Indeed, very often the functions performed of that oppressive elite are the least useful, and should be the ones challenged.
No function should correspond to a place in a hierarchy, or at least not without the corresponding increase in accountability (this is also true of organizations). Now, I know that is a utopian statement, but let's afford ourselves the luxury to take a utopian stance in thinking about this for a moment: a society in which all functions are equally valued and recognized as parts of a larger whole would not be a terrible society, would it?
Functionalist work habits
The functionalist approach is key to time management. Assume you have been asked to write a memo on a new market that your company is interested in entering: how many hours should this work take? This market can be described in many different ways and at many different levels of granularity - but as we noted in the last post, the memo's precision and detail should correspond to the decision that needs to be made, and sometimes be written on 60% of the information you would ideally want (this is true for the smaller, reversible decisions). Any time you spend on it beyond ensuring that it will fulfil its function is time you take away from other tasks, and time that does not compound!
Another advantage of the functionalist approach is that it also allows you to understand organizations better. Assume you have divined what your memo should do, and still do not get the result you expected - what can you then learn? If you are confident the memo was functionally sufficient, then there has to be something else that is broken in the system! Try to find that malfunction and then see if you can find a way to address it.
In many ways organizational work should be more like the work of a car mechanic: when the engine does not start, or runs in a low gear, then something is not functioning or missing in the car as a whole. And one more thing: functions are not people.
This perspective allows you to assume that people are doing ok, but that the functionality of the organization fails them - a good first approximation of any problem, because it looks for systematic failure and does not focus on blame. Car mechanics rarely blame drivers. (At least I hope they don't.)
The functionalist also approaches planning in a specific way - looking at the objectives the organization contemplates, the functionalist ask: what do we need to be able to do for this to work? What functionality do we need to build in order to be able to reach these targets? The company may want to go to the moon - and that is where the functionalist describes what it would require to build a rocket.
Functionalist planning is focused on planning functionality - the capabilities that we have spoken about in an earlier note.
This also changes simple things like corporate procurement (!). The functionalist does not buy tools, but functionality. Think about the perhaps most common example in corporate procurement: buying a CRM. The way many organizations approach this is to say that we need this functionality, and then start to review the tools available to build it. If typical, they will spend very little time defining what the tool should do - its function - and just describe the macro functionality "we need to track and manage relationships".
The functionalist would instead spend quite some time listing what she meeds to be able to do: keeping track of contacts, finding new contacts, periodically updating contacts, compiling invite lists to different events, track changes in the network, explore who is up and coming, explore who is allied with who...and so on. But then the functionalist would do something very different: they would look at all of these sub-tasks as part of a larger functionality and ask what this would require: updating the system, logging meetings, running searches, gathering networking intelligence and entering it into the system, using data mining...and here the functionalist would note that the subtasks come at the cost of building that larger functionality. Every tool bought comes with a long shadow of work for the organization - so maybe it would be worthwhile buying both the work and the sub tasks?
That is - buying the functionality rather than the tool?
So the functionalist starts to search the market for a service rather than a good, and tenders a number of consultancies for the complete functionality. If that is too expensive or sensitive the choice may still be to do it internally, but then, at least, the work cost will be a part of the plan from the beginning.
Functionalists also realize that all systems break. Time management, relationship management, team routines, projects...since all of these perform functions they will be clogged over time. Wear and tear will reduce their ability to function well, and friction will mean that many of the functions break.
For the functionalist this is natural. No-one expects a machine to run forever. We schedule service! We do so for cars and washing machines as well as for large factories - but when did you last schedule service for your team's different functions?
Here is a fun thing to try: look at the key functions you perform and the teams you work with, and then schedule service appointments where you meet and review what needs to be repaired, exchanged or updated. Schedule a service meeting for team time management and review all the meetings on calendar - are they doing what they should? Schedule a service meeting for the outreach work in a market or for relationship management - and then see what needs to be fixed. Such meetings are not for planning, or even necessarily for improvements - they are for recognizing and dealing with the inevitable entropy that enters all systems.
Finally, then, functionalists also turn that critical eye on themselves. How well are they functioning themselves? This is where health and fitness, diet, sleep and relaxation come into the picture - but this is also where you can find an interesting connection to coaching: coaching can be a way to consciously examine where friction has worn you down, where you seem to be functioning less well now than before and where there is need for some maintenance. Regular self-examination, focusing not on how you feel, but more on how well you are functioning, is actually quite liberating.
So what?
Understanding the function of something is fundamental to understanding what it is. It is not all there is to know about the thing or phenomenon, but if you do not understand the function, you will have a hard time really understanding what something really is. We understand nature through function, we understand what something is through what it does.
Learning to observe, study and think about functions is key to modern work as well and allows us to prioritize in ways that are helpful. Here are few things to try, should you be so minded.
Whenever you are tempted to ask why, try asking for what purpose and function instead? Why are we having this meeting is an existential question, but asking what function this meeting has is an instrumental question.
Find what the organization selects for in its processes. What is selected for in management, planning, relationships -- and make it explicit. It may be right or wrong, but making the evolutionary function explicit is a good way to evolve the organization as a whole.
Play with mathematical functions as toy models. Do not fear maths, and embrace graphs.
Schedule service for the key processes in your team and for yourself. It is not a mechanistic perspective, it is a recognition that all things fail and break unless regularly maintained.
Oh, and did you think we would miss the poetry this time around? Nope! Here goes, Ravi Shankar’s response/rephrasing of a classical poem by Byron:
Lines on a Skull
Start spirit; behold
the skull. A living head loved
earth. My bones resign
the worm, lips to hold
sparkling grape's slimy circle,
shape of reptile's food.
Where wit shone of shine,
when our brains are substitute,
like me, with the dead,
life's little, our heads
sad. Redeemed and wasting clay
this chance. Be of use.
As always, thank you for reading and let me know any comments! Be of use.
Nicklas