A Little Bit of Knowledge...

Why do our teams make the same mistakes over and over again? 

Why do they fail to do the things they agree to in a retrospective?

Why are some problems so hard to solve? 

Why do so many of our best intentions not survive contact with reality? 

I’m going to present an answer based in cognitive science that will give us a framing to be more effective leaders and team-mates. In the process I’ll introduce you to a framing which I’ve found pretty transformative for my own life, wisdom questing, and ability to create meaning. No big thing then. 

Professor John Vervaeke (Cognitive Scientist at University of Toronto (He’s brilliant)) describes four different types of knowledge, Procedural, Propositional, Perspectival, and Participatory. Let’s dive into those. For each kind of knowledge I’ll give a basic introduction to how we acquire it and what happens when it goes wrong. 

(if you want more of this kind of thing, sign up to my Substack where I'll be publishing in the future)

Procedural knowledge

This is what we might call know-how. I know *how* to play the piano, or *how* to think through a maths problem. You can’t read how to learn the piano - you have to practice. Sometimes we learn some procedural knowledge and apply it to the wrong problem. You learn how to wield a hammer, so everything begins to look like a nail. 

I’d argue that there are lots of command and control behaviours that feel adaptive in some contexts and careers that can be misapplied in Agile teams. Sometimes I’ll work with a Scrum master who is making decisions on behalf of the team, feels pressure to hide mistakes, or conducts meetings by just listening to the loudest people. I’d argue that there’s an element of procedural knowledge being misapplied there. 

Procedural knowledge will rely on knowledge of facts - you will struggle to use the C major scale to play the piano if you don’t know what it is. That leads us on to propositional knowledge….

Propositional knowledge

This is knowledge of facts. Knowing *that* a cat is a mammal, or *that* the agile manifesto was written in 2001 in the US. We acquire propositional knowledge through encountering the world. This is the business of science - discovering reproducable patterns in nature such that we can assemble a list of facts and use them in our know-how - our procedural knowledge. 

We can also acquire false propositional knowledge. This is the world of biases and scientific errors. For example confirmation bias is tendency to privilege information that already agrees with our existing beliefs. This means that we systematically ignore disconfirming information and are likely to form what we ourselves would acknowledge as ‘incorrect’ beliefs. 

If I have good propositional knowledge I will be correct in my predictions about how to navigate the world and more likely to achieve my goals. For example if I’m on an empty road in the UK, my knowledge that ‘in the UK we drive on the left’ is a helpful proposition to get me where I want to go without getting stopped by the police or ramming headfirst into oncoming traffic. Propositions are important. 

In an agile context, propositional knowledge might consist of the contents of the scrum guide, a knowledge of the team’s process, awareness of the GROW coaching framework (although using it well would be procedural knowledge). 

Which propositions do I need in my life? Which propositions are relevant to each other? This will depend on the situation I’m in and how I’m viewing them. It depends on the perspective you’re taking. 

Perspectival knowledge

Perspective consists of the propositions that I see as relevant to each other, and which ones I don’t. There’s infinite available propositions out there in our crazy complex world, so in order to make sense of it we need to ignore stuff. This is what perspective allows us to do. 

On Valentine’s day 1990 the Voyager 1 space probe took a photo of the earth from 6 billion km aware. The photo consists of a barely visible pixel of blue amongst a vast black. All human history, all our concerns, cares, possessions, loved ones, joys and sorrows have taken place on this Pale Blue Dot - as the photo became known. 

There’s no new knowledge in this photo. If you’ve been to primary school you know that Earth is one of 8 (sorry Pluto) planets in the vast emptiness of space. When you look at this photo it does something. It brings into relevance the smallness of the Earth relative the universe. For me it raises the importance of how connected we are as human beings, how similar we are, how responsible we are for the planet. 

As an agilist you can take various perspectives on your team. You can see them as individuals working together - this will raise certain propositions as relevant. Similarly you can see them as a system working together, or a subcomponent within the larger organisation. You could see you team in their dysfunction, or their function. None of these are right or wrong, but they make certain elements of the whole salient to us. 

Importantly, if I take a certain perspective, it necessarily limits the number of options available to me to solve a problem. This can become a problem for us when we *only* see a problem from one perspective, if it’s not a perspective that helps us solve the problem. If I only see a team as dysfunctional, it limits the number of approaches I can take with them, and maybe that will make things worse. It might make it easier for me to do the right things for my team (relationship, career… whatever) if I change my perspective. 

This is perspectival knowing. Knowing how the world looks. In order to have perspectival knowledge, I need to know who I am who is having the perspective. Who is the person participating in the world in such a way that a perspective comes about? 

This leads us onto our final type of knowing - Participatory knowing.

Participatory Knowing 

Participatory knowing concerns itself with who I am as I interact with the world. What kind of participation between me and the world is happening? Professor Vervaeke refers to this as the Agent-Arena relationship. If I show up to Wimbledon in my Tennis Shorts, Sponsored shirt and racket in hand and step out onto Centre Court and smash some aces against Djokovic I’m participating as a Tennis Player in a Tennis Competition. That’s the Agent-Arena relationship. If I turn up to Wimbledon and come out on Centre Court in surgical scrubs, mask and scalpel in hand I’m in a weird Agent-Arena relationship. I’m not well adapted to my context. 

This is foundational stuff. Who are you in the world in different contexts? At home you might be participating in the world as a parent, partner or child. At work you might be participating as a manager, a colleague, a mentor, or a tormentor. Note that none of these make sense in isolation. I can’t be a parent without a child. I can’t be a mentor without a mentee (mento?). You participate together with the environment and with people.

The roles you have will define the perspectives that are available to you. For example if I bring the participatory knowing of being a protector they need me to protect them. my team will present themselves to me a people who need protecting. I can take a number of perspectives on them - they are stressed and upset , bring different propositions about the team grounded in those perspectives they complain in every retrospective and they have too much work, and then deploy my procedural skills time to push back to those stakeholders. 

And alternative version might be

Participatory I am a coach and the way I need to support them become a high performing team 

Perspectival I can see that they don’t know how to say no or that it’s even an option

Propositional the last 5 sprints they have always pulled in more work than they can finish 

Procedural I’ll design a retrospective that can allow this to come up, maybe I can share my observations of what’s happening at sprint planning

Neither of these approaches is right or wrong, they are just different. If we don’t have the self awareness to realise that we are limited in our perspectival knowledge we have fewer options available to us to think differently. If we don’t realise that we are relying on incorrect propositions we will choose the wrong set of skills for a situation. We can all think of situations where all we had was a hammer, so everything looked like a nail. Now we have a framework for understanding why.

That’s it for now - let me know what you think as I throw these ideas out into the world in the hope that they are interesting, and maybe even useful. 

Sources: 

https://modernstoicism.com/the-view-from-above-a-transformation-of-perspectival-and-participatory-knowing-by-john-vervaeke/