See It! Days 10-16

This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction.

This section of the Advent series is largely concerned with material I can't share in much detail, a practical exercise exploring a real-life scenario at work. I've done the exercises and given at least a little commentary on the value of them here.

Day 10

Task: 1. Draw an organization that you have been part of at least 3 different ways (2) Jot down reflections (3) Go "meta” and think about the views you drew.

As the task suggests, it's well known that org charts are, at best, an approximation of the way that work gets done in an organisation. The kind of diagram to draw depends on the perspective you want to obtain.

Many of my colleagues don't like Miro, but I love it because I can shuffle bits of model around until a view that helps me make sense of whatever I'm looking at emerges. Whiteboards are good for this too, but the ease with which I can copy-paste makes the discovery phase so much more convenient with an electronic tool. (See e.g. Going Underground where I did just that.)

Day 11

Task: Think of a situation you’d like to explore with a systems lens. Write a few paragraphs describing the situation.

I need to understand an existing system sufficiently to test the partial reimplementation of it as we migrate from one stack to another for our core product at work. I talked about this a little in Just Looking recently.

Day 12

Task: draw an Actor Map for the situation described on Day 11.

Actor maps are new to me. Making one reminded me of the Team Onion model for collaboration It's helpful for me to externalise the motivations of different parties when there are potentially politics at play. (And there are always politics at play.)

Day 13

Task: Jot down characteristics of the current state of things and what would happen if you did nothing to change it.

I didn't find this valuable for my situation. Other than hypothetically, there is no option where my team does nothing.

Day 14

Task: Explore how your situation came to be. Either focus your exploration on a textual narrative, or use a graphical history canvas.

For this exercise I chose to draw a timeline but, without significant research, I can't give a very precise order. I think that doesn't matter as much as understanding some significant design choices in this case but in general I find that the history can be an important part of the context.

I try not to judge historical decisions too harshly because we tend to see the result rather than the state of the system at the time. I mean, come on, we've all done something that in retrospect looks awful because it was the pragmatic choice at the time. Haven't we?

Day 15

Task: Create a Value Network Map for the situation you're working on.

I superimposed this onto the actor map I created on Day 12. I like the idea of trying to establish tangible and intangible value flows, but find myself sceptical that the business cares about intangible value. Much like the magical org chart from Day 10, it feels like management tends to abstract a crude model of value generation that discards anything which doesn't drive the bottom line directly.

Day 16

Task: Create another page for your zine, on the topic of constraints.

I have long held that constraints are our friends. I prefer the term to requirements because I think of constraints as more general. In particular I think of constraints as including negatives: "no solution that includes X, Y, or Z" might be one, ideally with a "because ...." chaser to help the team understand the reasoning behind the restriction and so be able to make better judgements when implementation choices arise later.

In Bottom-up or Top-down I think about three types of constraints, coming from above, the context, or below. For example:

management: use Jira for managing work items
market: use standard technologies to be able to integrate and compete
team: we want to build our product using hexagonal architecture

Next: Days 17-19
Image: Inspired by Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson. Pragmatic Press

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