In response to my first post, introducing Ethos Design, my good friend and ethical leadership advisor, Dr Matt Beard, asked me to clarify what I meant by ethos. His questions and suggestions have been so interesting and inspiring for me, that I thought it best to postpone the post I was going to write on Cynefin as a design methodology, and share (my version of) what he and I have been discussing.
A sense-making framework
I want to start, though, by reinforcing a point that Dave Snowden makes about Cynefin that is relevant here. Snowden is adamant that Cynefin is not an ontology - that it is not a claim about the types of complexity that exists in the world, so much as the kinds of sense-making capabilities we have, and what features of the situation make one kind of sense-making more effective than others. That’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.
Sometimes Snowden explains this by saying that Cynefin is not about categorising situations - which can be a little hard to understand, because obviously we are categorising situations as clear, complicated, complex or chaotic. Here, the practice of Cynefin makes more sense than the theory. In practice, Snowden asks any group he is consulting with to define for themselves what clear, complicated, complex and chaotic mean from their own experience. They come up with examples of situations that strike them as falling into the different categories. When Snowden says Cynefin is not an ontology, he means that he has no right to correct them about their categorisation - if that’s where expertise and patient, deliberate analysis is triggered, that is what a complicated situation means for this group. The point of Cynefin is not to prescribe the appropriate kind of sense-making (based on some theory about the kind of complexity at play), but simply to enable us to describe to each other what sort of sense-making we find appropriate, so that we might come to an agreement on how to make sense for each other. After all, as Snowden points out, Chaos we can manage, but the real danger is what he calls “Disorder” - the situation where we can’t agree on what sort of domain we’re dealing with, which makes it hard for us to make any sense at all.
The field of normative sense-making
The framework or “field” I want to share below is intended to perform a similar function as Cynefin, but this field is designed to help us describe the kinds of normative sense that we make of situations. “Normative sense” is a clunky phrase, I admit. Another way of putting it is to say that this framework aims to help us describe the kind of responsibility we recognize as having a legitimate purchase on our decisions and behaviour.
So this is doing its job if:
it helps us articulate to each other the kind of responsibilities that we feel beholden to at work
it helps us to appreciate a greater variety of responsibillities in other people, instead of seeing them as simply unethical if they are not motivated by the same responsibilities we are
it helps us to recognize and openly address contradictory demands we place on each other, as peers, say, or as managers
Let’s break this down a little.
The initial insight that I owe to Matt is that, traditionally, the idea of Ethos is situated in two triads. First, as shown on the left, in the study of rhetoric Ethos is juxtaposed against Pathos and Logos, which I’ve rendered here as Motive and Evidence.
(It’s true that Pathos and Logos are usually rendered as appeals to Emotion or Reason in English. I’m not going to make much of an attempt to be faithful to the original greek triads here, which is why I’ve changed the translation to make the relevance in a business context clearer. )
On the right, you can see the second juxtaposition, from political theory, between Ethos, Telos and Nomos - the latter rendered here as Mission and Rule. You’ll see I’ve labelled this triad Institutional rather than Political, because I don’t want to get too caught up in questions of power just yet. What I’m focused on is the recognition or sensing of responsibilities, not how they are imposed to sustained.
What did appeal to me straight away about Matt’s insight was the idea of Ethos as mediating between the personal and institutional realms. As I said in my first post, I’m interested in local ethical capability - incorporating moral sensibilities into practices, and building the capacity for informed, responsible action by real teams in real situations. That’s because I think it is true that local commitments to those in our vicinity, with whom we share situations, bring us out of the personal, and make tangible the abstract policies and ambitions of large organisation.
The second insight Matt had was that there was something similar about Pathos and Telos - they express something toward which we are drawn - and at the same time, something similar about Logos and Nomos - both expressing something that we recognize as a kind of constraint. As you can see, I’ve tried to capture this by labelling them the Intention Triad and the Constraint Triad, respectively.
Dimensions of the Field of Responsibility
As I said at the start, I’d like to use this framework in the same way as Snowden uses Cynefin - to help people describe the field of responsibility they inhabit.
Let’s set aside the circle of Ethos in the middle, for the moment, and model what such an activity might look like, by imagining some prompts we might give a group of people to help them articulate what sort of responsibilities and obligations they recognize in their own field of responsibility.
Mission
By this, I mean a collective aspiration, which, if I behaved in a way that undermined it, would be grounds for excluding me from the institution, or at least bring my motives and my loyalty into question. Strategies and visions and even social licence might live in this part of the field.
Why do you think an organisation such as yours exists? What purpose does it serve for the community?
What’s the most important thing your organisation is trying to achieve in the next year or two?
What sort of activity, service or product, would your organisation never consider, because it is at odds with that mission?
(Note: Corporate values, in my opinion, are aspirational, and so resemble a mission more than any other dimension of the field of responsibility)
Rule
This is about compliance with policies, rules or even expectations. Some of these will come from within the organisation, in the form of compliance or bureaucracy, some will be imposed from the outside, in the form of public or govt scrutiny.
How do you know what you are and are not allowed to do in your organisation?
How do you know if you’ve broken a rule?
Whose expectations matter the most, when it comes to deciding whether you’ve done a good job?
Evidence
Each environment has different measures and behaviours to generate accountability and liability for positive and negative impacts.
How do you demonstrate to others you’ve done well, or done the right thing?
What sort of numbers are you held personally accountable for?
How else does you organisation measure your contribution to its success?
Motive
This is about personal motives, drivers and incentives, which might be either intrinsic (grounded in personal identity) or extrinsic (driven by the promise of a reward, or fear of a loss)
Why makes it worthwhile for you to come to work each day?
How does your organisation reward you when do well?
What sorts of behaviours do people get rewarded for?
What is at stake for you personally in doing a decent or good job?
That’s probably a long enough post for now.
I’ll talk more about the kind of tensions within this field of responsibility, and how the core concepts of Ethos - goal, role, place and craft - mediate those tensions on the one hand, and exacerbate them when they are suppressed or denied.
In the meantime, please have a think about your own field of responsibility at work:
Do these categories resonate with your experience?
How might we improve the questions for each of the four dimensions I’ve described?
Are there responsibilities that have no place in this framework yet?
Would making this field of responsibility more explicit help or hinder effective collaboration in your context?
Also I suspect the attempt to map the dimensions of normative sense in this way isn’t new. If you’re aware of other attempts to do this in psychology or philosophy, please share them in the comments.
Philosophical aside: For the philosophers in the group, I think it’s possible to interpret Cynefin’s domains as transcendental or phenomenological categories of sense. Revisiting Kant or Husserl in light of the phenomenon of complexity would be fascinating, but a) my wife may not survive another philosophy thesis, and b) it would not be very useful in a business context. For my part, the most accessible version of these concepts comes from Daniel Dennett, who introduces the notion of different stances. While I’m making promises about future posts, I’ll promise to map Dennett’s stances to Snowden’s Cynefin domains. Please let me know if you’d find that interesting.
Thank you Justin, intrigued by the idea of a ‘field’ where (as I read the thought) responsibility acts as lens as well as organising principle.
What I feel you’ve provided here are categories that imply certain dynamics, without getting into those dynamics just yet?
I found your aside concerning Corporate values as being ‘aspirational’ interesting. Wondering if corporations, (particularly, perhaps, less mechanical and more service oriented corporations) are, in their entirety, aspirational? And with humans involved I guess they need, in some sense, to be emergent. If emergent (and intentional), how and on what terms do we negotiate coining and shifting commitment? Who authors? How do we create anything new? Does the overarching, pervasive glue of corporate story-telling need to keep shifting and informing itself of its emerging reality? What is the role of force (ability to delimit alternatives, options) in relation to such narrative and the locations of roles, acts and esteem it affords? I feel that somewhere in these questions we find ourselves and others on terms we find acceptable, or not.
Looking forward to thinking about how one might use your framework to think about such dynamics, many thanks!
Thanks for the comment, Faruk
I’m sure you’re right about the need for continuous storytelling to stay connected to an emergent, dynamic reality.
Which made me think of another point I was going to make - that individuals probably treat one or some of these dimensions as more real than others. When as an individual you’re forced to conform to responsibilities that don’t make sense (normatively) - well, I think that’s when we cry “bullshit!”