This is the universal protocol to handle Uncertainty.
Whether and how You apply, it’s up to You.

Start

You begin by identifying the situation. What do You know? What is unknown?

Major decision: red or blue path?

Do You face any kind and amount of Uncertainty?
It is irrelevant whether this is complexity, complicacy, knowledge out of reach or just knowledge at Your hand which You did not noticed, yet.

Whenever You feel uncertain – take the red path first to gain full available certainty.

Red path

Now, You establish the room for Your solution – eternity of possibilities (∞).
But, before You work on that, You have to …

Setup Your Team

This is Your complex solution system. Chose it wisely. Every aspect that is missing within the Team will not be part of the solution >> cross-functional Team (not only inter-disciplinary)

Meanwhile, more about Teambuilding is found here.

Share data

Remember, “information” is data that is new to the recipient. You cannot predict, what the others ought to know, have to know and really know, because it is undefined, yet.
You are on the red – not on the blue – path of the solution protocol.

Therefore, You have to share data. Make it public!
The solution depends on thoughts, views, requirements, experiences, (mis-)understandings and all that stuff.

It is up to the Team to decide what is relevant and what is not!

Every detail, perspective and nuance You hide in this step will weaken the solution.
And in the end, it is Your personal fault. Do not load guild on Your shoulder!

Relief Yourself by sharing Your MIND.

Once, everything is on the table, You can begin to shape the vision.

 

Note:
The most common failure in applying the suitable action patterns is exactly here. As long as You follow the Q+A pattern (blue path) in complex solution finding, Your mobile phone batteries will explode, Your Diesel engines will fail in meeting requirements etc.

Scope

The next step is to define, what is relevant and what not. That’s home where the team wants to move in.

Relevance is determined in relationship to the vision (the aim, the goal) You share within the solution system.
No shared target, no need to proceed. Be careful on visioning.

You do that openly within the Team.
It could have surprising results where the single person initially could not imagine what is relevant (and what is not).

Finding solutions in a Team of about 5 to 9 people will enter the solution area – the polygonal solution area.
Everyone has the “perfect solution” in mind in the beginning. But, it is his or her solution within the situation – not the solution that suits to all participants dealing with it.
In the end – as they leave the table – the solution area is greater than everyone thought by him/herself.

But You need it not only great, You also need it brilliant, cool, outstanding, awesome etc.
That is influenced by the diversity of equals You defined by Your Team-setup at the very beginning.

Finalize Scope

Now, managers can see the light.

The team decides about what the >initial scope to encounter the vision< should be.
They describe an image of success. “[in the end], We want to do …/be able to …/.”

There is nothing difficult in it. Every affected party is represented. Therefore, all stakeholders are empowered to decide about the best under given circumstances.
That is Your initial scope (triangle) to execute on.

You now have the content for Your first major release.
Now, everybody can (and depending on the role) must know what Your scope is.

Time to document it.
Remember, scope is a shy deer. If You forget to fence it, it will disappear.

Decider is a nice tool to finalize scope. It has a good-working negotiation-option to get outliers into the solution. “What does it take, to get You in, also.”

Now You are ready to slide down the skid to the

Blue path

Now, You are within the cosyness of complicated, defined space.

There might be billions of variations, but You can compute all options if You like to invest processor cycles on this.

Focus!

Finally, You can focus on something: Your task

You do not need a complex solution system anymore. The Team can be transferred into a group of co-workers that parallelly tasking down the available work.

Request < > Reply

Now we enter the powerhouse of it solutions.
The power of Information Technology is generated exactly here.
To be more precise: the quality of the interface between available data and requesting recipient makes a product great (or not).

By establishing (Micro) Services, You encapsulate complicacy and make usage of Your product simple (or not).

This encapsulation of complicacy is the engine of intellectual progress. The better that is, the faster the growth. Do not mess around here!

Act on data!

Sounds trivial, but at this point, most failures occur – most deviations to perfect are established.

Data is something EVERYBODY could know. It is there by design and hopefully stored in a secure and available manner.

“Secure” addresses integrity. Everybody needs to trust correctness of data replied. Otherwise requester needs to proof and consequently achieve data integrity by her-/himself. But that is not the job of the requester – otherwise You act on the “share data” pattern where everything needs to be published. The more You publish the less You encapsulate and the less powerful Your solution will be.

“Available” addresses the possibility to access. Remember the times of vinyl-audio-media? You could not reproduce (as standard user), You have to care for the data carrier to get the data (“sound”) available now and in the future.

Some things happened in the meantime … there was this guy who added “one more thing” to the public. And now, data is everywhere – nearly.

Anti-Pattern

What do You do, when data is not available? Waiting? Until when?
In projects You do what is a very powerful solution pattern to get out of stuck – You make assumptions. But there is a difference, that is small and gigantic at the same time. You do that, if data is not available. Then, nobody could know – that is complexity. And making assumptions is a common action pattern where You need to convert complexity into complicacy and Your solution system is weak (less than 5 people interacting).

Making assumptions in a complex world is the second-best solution.
Making assumptions in a complicated world is an act of laziness and the number one generator of the data hell.

This is the end

In the end, everything will be perfect. If it is not perfect, it is not the end.

Now as You acted on data, You got an error-free result. You stated the new now.

Is it sufficient? Does it fit?
You can judge by parameters that are defined in the beginning as expected results.

Sounds familiar? Yes!
Results of a well-defined procedure are testable. They are SMART.

And if they do not fit in the defined area of tolerated quality deviation, the result will be refused and requested another time. QA. Stupid.

The new now is the end of one solution sequence and the basement of build-up processes, depending to each other.

> iterate as long as the initial task/story/product is finally done.

At the end of every sequence, You got the new status quo.
This will be the foundation also for other dependent stories.

The dependency is laid within the matter and its definition.
The more dependency You reduce, the more flexible Your solutions get.

That is the deep promise i.e. behind Microservice Architecture – it is the operated basement of dynamic-robust systems.

Dynamic-robust systems are the least energy consuming systems, and therefore You should aim for them – that is the deep meaning within permaculture.

/some thoughts about

Defining the plan for a dynamic robust system is a complex thing.
You need humans for that.
Operating components which encapsulate complicacy (request <> reply) is a complicated thing that needs a lot of knowledge.

Using the power of people that are remote from You, unknown to You and even unreachable personally for You is possible, when they

• did the best that they could to convert complexity into complicacy
• handled resulting complicacy free of procedual errors
• and made the result of their process available to You (i.e. via the internet)

In a brief

• Designing a Product is complex
• Producing a Product is complicated
• Using a Product needs to be simple to be successful.

/famous last words

Life runs in circles. Some are smaller, some are bigger.
And in the end, there is no end – only beginning of the other.

“Enjoy, and share if You like.”
“Feel free to make life great!”

“Likes” are welcome. Comments are appreciated.