I went to the pool this week at lunchtime and noticed that the drawstrings on my swimming trunks had become uneven again with one side annoyingly long, and the other string dangerously short. As an experienced owner of drawstring shorts, I know that it now runs the risk of pulling itself fully in the direction of the long string and then making it IMPOSSIBLE for me to tie a perfect bow as intended - part of my pre-swim routine.
Worse, once one head of the string has been pulled into the waistband it's really tricky to get it out. Let alone the awful possibility of the drawstring coming out entirely. Shudder.
I have a hypothesis that when the drawstrings are of equal length, they get equally tangled in the wash and neither side gets significantly pulled through. However when - through random variance - one side gets a bit longer, it is likely to gets even more tangled. This leads to that sides getting longer and longer and therefore more and more tangled accelerating exponentially towards ruining my swim, nay my week. I’m fine.
This isn't a massive deal, but it is an interesting pattern. There's an equilibrium, some random variance kicks in and eventually an accelerating self-fulfilling system dynamic evolves which breaks the equilibrium and causes an effect. I hereby term them 'Drawstring Dynamics'. In complexity science language you might call the longer string an attractor.
Our teams are subject to all kinds of interesting Drawstring Dynamics. Sometimes one team member is more vocal, which leads to people not bothering to speak which lets the vocal person become more vocal and eventually they are the only person that contributes.
Or someone steps forward to take on extra responsibilities and then they are in the limelight so they get given extra extra responsibilities and then they are left overloaded and everyone else is left wondering why they are never picked for things. Or one person fixes a bug once and then they become the expert in that kind of bug and before long they are a Single Point of Failure and can never go on holiday.
Interestingly, Drawstring Dynamics can happen at a population level too.
I’ll borrow from the idea of genetic drift in Biology. Genetic drift is the tendency for some phenotypes (biological features) to disappear from a population just through random fluctuations in small populations. To illustrate this, I remember my university genetics professor Steve Jones bringing the example of small towns where everyone has the same surname. To explain this, all you have to do is imagine a geographically isolated town or island where very few newcomers ever settle there. Let’s say every family has a different surname in generation one1. Let’s also assume that the average number of children is 4, with an even split of boys and girls.
Through random chance, the Smith family has 4 boys who all marry and procreate and pass on their surnames. There will now be twice as many Smiths as the average surname. If the Sussers on the other hand have only girls, each of whose children takes on their father’s surnames, the Susser name will be sadly but inevitably be removed from this population. One could imagine that without an injection of new surnames or ‘mutations’ (ie people changing their names), after a few generations everyone is called Smith and all the less common surnames have been removed. Not through malice or advantage of the Smith surname, just through chance.
The same thing could happen with other biological phenotypes, such as eye colour or blood type. Genetic drift happens in tension with the more well known selection by natural selection. In the latter, certain traits are selected for because they give a fitness and survival advantage. One can imagine in our small town example, if the name Smith carried some social prestige, people would be more likely to marry the Smith boys than the other boys. So Smith could become the only surname by genetic drift and natural selection. Or they could work against each other, where Smith becomes dominant despite the boringness of having the same surname as all the other Smiths.
Imagine the population-level Drawstring Dynamics that might be at play in our organisations. Maybe over time all the teams doing estimation with story points become prevalent just because that becomes the example to follow from the other teams. It could be that a particular way of running a retrospective or sprint review or meeting agenda is just learned from one person to another, and before long you have a Drawstring Dynamic that creates homogenous practice.
This isn’t necessarily bad, but it could be. Homogeneity is fragile to change, and if aren’t careful we can spread fragility unwittingly across an organisation. In the actual drawstring case I can tie a slip knot before washing my trunks to stop the problem happening or getting worse.
The answer to our organisational Drawstring Dynamics? Randomness, variation, a move towards equilibrium. Create systems that support experimentation and the influx of new ideas. When you see variety, celebrate it and amplify the successful experiments, whilst being aware of creating a new fragile homogeneity or new single points of failure in the process.
Have you noticed any Drawstring Dynamics in your teams? How do you tie a knot in them?
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For the sake of simplicity I’m going to assume that this town has a custom that in heterosexual couples the children take on the father’s name alone. To be clear, I don’t think this is a moral good, and if you’re paying attention to this part of this substack you’re probably missing the point but I hereby consider my bases covered.