Part 3: Understanding why your processes work (or don’t)
Aligning intent, common meaning, capability, and readiness for change is essential for successful processes.
The third part of the book focuses on describing why your organisational knowledge processes work (or don’t). This considers factors such as how intent aligns to means and ends, how meaning is developed and understood across agents operating within your organisation, how capability is measured and confirmed, and how easily changes and optimisations will be understood and accepted.
The importance of these topics is that process is far more than a mechanistic linkage from an expressed outcome to its achievement. Rather, processes co-evolve as a complex interplay in individual and joint willingness, coherence, alignment, and readiness across organisations.
Part 3 will include descriptions and implementation guides for four tools:
9. Intentionality classification
Building on the various knowledge application models, especially David Williams’ AKI model, my own problem solving pattern (PSP), and John Boyd’s OODA loop, a framework for describing and evaluating intentionality in a complex system is set out using four process descriptors:
teleosis — how the goal of a system is set
anathesis — how system knowledge is evaluated and solutions are chosen
kinothesis — how an action is effected
synthesis — how information is sensed, evaluated and combined into new forms
10. Process semiotics
Leveraging the terminology of semiotics — how we determine meaning — helps us to quantify and talk about the applicability and effectiveness of organisational practices and processes. They can be evaluated in three dimensions, with low scores in any dimension indicating opportunities for greater effectiveness and optimisation:
Designation — The purpose or value of a process or practice within the organization. Can be tangible, symbolic, or both.
Structure — The form, rules, and sequences that organise a process or bound a practice to make it recognisable and reusable by staff.
Application — The enactment and interpretation of a process or practice in specific departmental, managerial, or environmental contexts.
For example, if people don’t understand the underlying reason for a process (ie a lack of designation), it would be unsurprising for it not to be implemented consistently.
11. Understanding capability
Individual skills are the foundation of execution within organisation, but descriptively they are often qualitatively thin — focusing on a novice/professional/leader continuum that does not consider the robustness and flexibility of skills application in novel situations.
This tool uses a three axis scheme to look beyond mere skill to the synergies offered to an organisation from a person’s with substantial breadth and self-development:
Axis 1 – Depth / Mastery: Taxonomy to describe highest level of acquired expertise
Axis 2 — Breadth: Categorising development of I → T → π → M shaped skills
Axis 3 — Development: Sophistication of self-knowledge and contextualisation of relationship to their environment
12. Degree of disruption
Degree of disruption is a metric for pre-measuring how rapidly people are likely to be able to take on new knowledge, develop capability, and start executing new or better processes. Based on Daniel Kahneman’s framework for cognitive ease, the challenge level in successfully adopting a process can be predicted by these five factors:
Accustomed (to) — Have staff had prior exposure to repetition of the process (or very similar ones) in familiar contexts? (mere exposure effect, illusion of truth)
Equipped (for) — Do staff feel prepared and competent to execute the new process effectively? (primed readiness, skill alignment)
Intentional — Do staff perceive clear agency, personal control, and/or purposeful causality in the new approach? (coherent, intentional narratives)
Optimistic (about) — Is there a prevailing positive mood or hopeful outlook toward the change among staff? (low skepticism)
Unambiguous — Is information about the process and the change steps required clear, simple, and free or confusion? (acceptance as safe and true)
Where these scores are low, change is not impossible but a longer period of disruption and lower productivity is expected and will need to be factored into planning.