The Extended Team Mind
Otto and Inga go to a museum. No, this isn’t the beginning of a bad German joke but rather the premise of ‘The Extended Mind’ by Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
Whereas Inga is able to remember the address of the museum, unfortunately Otto suffers from dementia and carries around all the important addresses in his life in a notebook that he keeps with him at all times. Inga remembers the address and the directions and heads successfully to the museum, Otto looks up the location and directions in his notebook and also arrives successfully to the museum. Is the notebook part of Otto’s mind?
Clark and Chalmers argue that the answer is an emphatic yes. Anything that can be meaningfully said about Inga’s memory-mind can be said about Otto’s notebook. Just as Inga has the address in her mind, so too Otto has it in his notebook. Just as Otto can misplace the notebook, Inga can forget an address. Just as Inga has to think for a moment and sort through her knowledge before retrieving the address from her memory, so too Otto has to flick through his notebook to locate the museum’s address.
This thought experiment sits at the basis of what Clark and Chalmers call the Extended Mind thesis - that our minds are not just encased in our skulls or even our bodies, but rather in our tools, and the thoughts of other people even form part of what can be considered our minds. It’s a profound inversion of what we’re used to. Western philosophy is built upon a foundation of the self being centred in one human’s body. Whether you think of yourself as a soul, a self, a brain, an I, it’s likely that that I, self or soul that you’re thinking of resides within the boundaries your skin.
The Extended Mind hypothesis offers an alternative starting point - that crucial machinery of our consciousness and problem-solving capacity sits out ‘there’ in the world. In fact it’s not just tools like Otto’s notebook, but even more ephemeral parts of our selves like the narratives and ideas which are integral to our being also are distributed and shared between people, sometimes going back millennia.
For example, let’s think about the idea of ‘purpose’ in life. Maybe you are looking for purpose, or you believe you have found your life’s purpose and you wish to pursue it. Clearly the idea of having a purpose in life is important to you, and might help you prioritise which decisions to make. Should I take the high paying job that gives me no satisfaction? Or the lower paying one that gives me more of a sense of purpose. Some people even sacrifice their life because they believe it is their purpose to do so. Clearly the idea of purpose is integral to those people.
Where does the idea having a purpose in life come even from? You didn’t invent it. Neither did your parents or friends. I’m not sure who did invent it, but let’s say they dug up a slab from an archaeological dig from a cave in Jordan and on it was written ‘hey guys I’ve got a crazy idea, maybe every person is ‘supposed’ to do certain things with their life and the things they are supposed to do is called a Purpose and it’s really important to find it and pursue it even at the expense of other things - signed, Alan Purpose’.
And after all the carbon dating and scanning and tracing some clever scientists agree that yes indeed in the year 1000BCE Alan Purpose invented the concept of a purpose and whenever we think about purpose today we are using his idea.
In this fictional recreation, an idea from 1000BCE is an integral part of people in 2024’s minds. An isolated tribe living away from Western civilisation may not recognise the concept of purpose because it wasn’t part of their cultural heritage. For them it would feel like a strange and unnecessary device that leads to lots of suffering and confusion and angst.
In that way, the concept of a Purpose is part of our Extended Mind the same way that Otto’s Notebook is part of his. In fact our meaning making machinery is replete with similar extended and distributed ideas and narratives which make us who we are. We are very tightly connected indeed.
I often come across teams at work who think very carefully about what happens between the people in the team, and act with disbelief or confusion about the things that happen ‘outside’ the team. I would argue that a team is a kind of swarm mind, and just as Otto’s notebook is part of his Extended Mind and therefore indispensable and in ways indistinguishable from him, so too the people, processes, events and activities that are outside of your team mind are therefore both indispensible and in ways indistinguishable from the team itself. They are part of your team’s Extended Mind.
We often limit ourselves by defending firm boundaries between the team and the so-called outside world. Scrum for example is very good at erecting boundaries around the team to protect their time whilst they work on important iterations away from concerned stakeholders’ or customers’ prying eyes.
One potentially negative side effect of this approach is that there are often dependencies and entanglements between the team and their customers, users and stakeholders, and these boundaries make those dependencies more fragile and harder to integrate.
Even in a more low key way, as an Agile Coach for a team it’s easy for me to think that everything is a problem that can be fixed within the team by the team. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been most useful to my teams when I’m thinking about the environment in which the team operates and how people who are not technically in the team are feeding into my team’s work.
A team that truly understands the ways in which the world outside of them - their Extended Mind is fundamental to their work will solve problems more effectively and be a more Intelligent Team.
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