Mastodawn

Carol Lee Jan 2, 2025

People are not neutral observers of their environments; people + their environments create interactions, and the same environment can be sampled by different people with extremely different OR extremely shared perceptual filters because of our shared (or conflicting) social identities.

This is why it is neither about individuals, nor about "systems without individuals"; it is about multisystems models that understand emergent interactions (sorry! it's way harder)

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

Some thought leaders in software seem to get a lot out of saying "just ask the engineers!"

Sorry, but this leaves questions: which engineers? Why the engineers? The engineers at what point in time? Ask them what? What is the variance among engineers in how they are reading the question? What if the group of engineers is all entangled in a specific organizational narrative at a certain point of time?

Usually it comes back to "I'm just automagically right and so are my friends, specifically"

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

This does not in any way mean we can't honor our perspectives, our lived experience. I understand that many engineers are spending their days in very alienating workplaces. This is something I take seriously in my research (e.g., we have measured the visibility & value that engineers feel; I have conducted many qualitative interviews)! But I don't think we serve people by then leaping to saying individualized lived experience is EVERYTHING. Think of the ultimate pressure of this

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

In fact, I believe it is very comforting to allow ourselves to HAVE these different perspectives. Forcing standardized, aggregated average points of view out of richly complex lived experience is often a kind of flattening itself, even if it isn't happening in a "software metric" but in the form of "the loudest voice in the room and his friends summarizing the postmortem in a way that I, personally, feel uncertain about..."

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

Yet obviously, we also have moments when we need to organize ourselves around evidence. We do need to persuade others, and check our beliefs. I believe strongly that self-report will always be an important form of evidence, but too many assumptions are made that those populations of people represent everyone we want to learn about (hardly!), that the questions are read in identical ways (hardly!), and that it's more "empathic" and therefore more true (sometimes?!)

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

Also in general I have observed people spend about a tenth of the time they should thinking about things like nonresponse bias. Create the conditions for people to want to share authentic information with you, and that will cascade across any form that we need that information to be in (interviews, surveys, measurement practices across aggregated team data, all types of methods even used on opposite sides of these ideological measurement wars)

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

Also, I am simply weary of the reductive binary here. Because I am constantly studying emergent social interactions, and that has been the subject of many branches of the social sciences for decades, we are really pretty clear on that point, and it's irritating as hell to come up against both individualistic models, AND models that seem to posit that individuals are just automatons in systems. Neither allows for real change.

Howard Chu @ Symas Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina Reminds me of an old favorite...

I hate responding to meaningless polls

Yes

8.3%

No

91.7%

Poll ended at Jan 3, 2025 at 4:51pm.

mhoye Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina This resonates strongly with the old idea that “the personal is political”, now diluted to mean “one’s personal decisions have some marginal political impact”, but in its original context meant something much more important: that the problems that bedevil us are not actually “personal” problems, but are in fact rooted in politics and policy. Defining them as personal failings puts policy - conveniently - beyond the reach of accountability or change, a recipe for learned helplessness.

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@mhoye definitely! The narrative that advances only personal failing, without a corresponding idea of personal POWER, is pretty telling....!

David Saff Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina I worry that I'm reading this in a different context than it came from. I am not a thought leader, but I do find myself at work often encouraging managers and infrastructure tools teams to "ask the engineers at least once". (Never "just", that was drilled out of me by an excellent music theory professor)

In my case, it's because I've seen too many technical and organizational systems launched with precisely zero intended users ever having been asked "does it seem plausible that this program would solve this problem in your context?" Or worse, they've been asked, all said "no", and it gets launched anyway.

Certainly, the pendulum can, and does, swing to the other side.

I'm curious if this seems salient, or if we're talking about two different things?

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@dsaff I think we're aligned? As I say in thread, I obviously constantly gather and value individuals' reports about their experience and perceptions. It sounds like you're talking about an extremely warranted case. What I am generally waving at are people who make proclamations that individuals are neutral observers who can uniformly report their cultures (e.g., any organizational issue is inherently known and reportable by individuals), and specifically the privileging of eng over others

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@dsaff In my case, I was thinking more of the "everyone who isn't writing hands on code is just stupid and wrong and if they'd only ask me I'd tell them how to fix everything" attitude that I see from some folks, which doesn't remotely sound like the case you're describing; the secondary thing is just that even when we want to "ask people," asking well and comprehensively is much harder than people act like it is :)

Bynkii Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina @dsaff one thing I see coders/techies do a LOT is try to solve a problem without trying to understand the problem at all beyond a very shallow definition and/or not understanding the people with the problem’s world at all.

It leads to “solutions” that keep growing and morphing because they are fixing something that doesn’t exist.

David Saff Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina Yeah, I think we're aligned. And definitely recongize the all-too-common coder mindset you describe!

John Schrag Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina As a boy who happened to be good at math, I was always told that I was Special and Smart - completely ignoring the vast lacunae of knowledge I had in other (undervalued) areas. People assumed I was generally smart, because I could do one thing they found hard (likely only because math is taught so badly). I think a lot of people raised like that really internalize the idea that they are just generally smarter, and a lot of other people foolishly believe it too. (I suspect it’s more true of males because of social bias, but I’m sure you know better than me about that)

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@jvschrag oh this is a funny synchronicity as I was just talking about this exact dynamic and how it can be damaging to people on either side of it

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/113759611342790492

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@jvschrag and, I appreciate your sharing & the amount of self-knowledge it must take to navigate this. I think there is a deep loneliness in being seen in only one way even when that way is "good" (for certain societal outcomes and opportunities), and I generally sense a kind of unhealed loneliness in people who are deeply committed to the idea that everyone else is a fool (because honestly....what a terrible world to create for yourself)

Jonathan Yu Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina I personally love systems thinking and resilience engineering for this, it's been a much more productive lens for me when operating systems at scale

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@jawnsy what is your definition of systems thinking?

Jonathan Yu Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina Great question! This definition is going to lack rigor, but thinking about software, organizations, and humans holistically, in terms of their interactions with each other. I also like Donella Meadows' concept of stocks and flows. The behaviors of individual components can influence the overall system behavior in ways that are emergent and difficult to predict, but perhaps understandable in retrospect.

Maybe a shortcut is "systems thinking is whatever @RuthMalan says it is" 😅

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

Fair! "Whatever @RuthMalan says it is" is basically my definition too. I sometimes feel a tiny bit prickly when people say "oh that's systems thinking" because I'm like....this is social science and psychology and always has been, you engineers just never valued it or read any of it 😅 (not speaking directly to you two as individuals ofc)

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@jawnsy @RuthMalan re: Donella Meadows, I LOVE environmental science for bettering my thinking. I often identify with "ecological psychology" and am strongly influenced by being surrounded by literal ecologists and biologists in my personal life :)

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@jawnsy @RuthMalan if I haven't recommended it before, I bet you would both enjoy this bold paper from a social science POV (written to challenge psychology and other behavioral science fields, but I think quite attuned with what you think about)

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10432387

Ruth — of systems & design Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina @jawnsy that’s wonderful! Thanks!

I read some reviews of Diana Montalion’s book (Learning Systems Thinking) on goodreads… that struck me as “what gives this woman the right to use the systems thinking term, and take it in a direction i don’t expect/think it should go” … It’s more like a ..space.. and trying to force-fit it into *a* conceptualization is going to make it wonky…

Cat Hicks Jan 2, 2025

@RuthMalan @jawnsy "what gives this woman the right" title of my autobiography and essentially the reason I never use terms like systems thinking lol

Ruth — of systems & design Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina @jawnsy yeah… things get “complicated” by creating “territories” around terms… Humans. Gotta love us, because the other thing is not a good place :)

fanf42 Jan 3, 2025

@grimalkina @jawnsy @RuthMalan oh, I will reuse that definition too :)
I used to use something like "systems thinking is what Meadows/Ostrom say it is", but we get a nice update and encompassing view here.

Plus I can actually talk with @RuthMalan here, so that trumps any reasonable arguments 😝

fanf42 Jan 3, 2025

@grimalkina @jawnsy @RuthMalan (now I've read the remaining of the thread, and it's funny 😁)

Ruth — of systems & design Jan 3, 2025

@fanf42 @grimalkina @jawnsy :) so neat to be included in a group that truly inclines toward community dialog and community forming-evolving of concepts and practices — our commons :)

Ruth — of systems & design Jan 2, 2025

@jawnsy @grimalkina hahah this is great because i very much avoid saying what system thinking is :D (while offering didn’t [edit: different*] ways to think about, see, reason, try to understand the systems we impact) :)

* what the “pre-conscious” interjects lol

Alonso Jan 2, 2025

@grimalkina
O sea, "nada es verdad o mentira, depende del cristal con el que se mira".