The Method Grid

Hero is one of several methods we have of solving problems.  And, as you can tell, gentle reader, it’s not a particularly Agile method of solving problems.  Indeed, the term was originally coined in order to be used as a foil to carefully differentiate between a few standard problem-solving methods.

However, in our exploration, we discovered a few more methods, and discovered that you could categorize them neatly.  Let’s begin with hero.  When we explored the characteristics of a heroic approach, we identified two factors as being the primary signifiers.

First, hero is about independent actors, each doing what they do well.  Perhaps they’re in a group, and perhaps not, but they remain independent.  Dirty Harry and John McClane (Die Hard) are iconic individual movie heroes.  The more recent Avengers movie show us a group heroic effort.  Each hero does his or her own thing, brilliantly, and independently (except for a few touching scenes in which they help one another for a few seconds).  But the independence is central to the heroics.  Each participant helps, but they each work solo.

Second, we might call out that the heroic approach relies on expert intuition to solve problems.  Each participant is required to be expert in order to solve the problem.  And it is by virtue of their expertise that the problem gets solved.  In the case of the two cop-hero movies, it is their grit, determination, individual excellence, and their long careers as cops that make them succeed.  In the Avengers movie, it’s their individual superpowers (a very impressive form of expertise).

If we were drawing a diagram, we might see hero sitting at the intersection of independent and intuition:

Optimizing / Grouping	Independent
IntuitiON	Hero

With hero as the first method, the second method we named is now generally referred to as Director.  Director is modeled after the approach of any legendary movie director.  Steven Speilburg is among the best of the modern examples.  How does Spielburg develop a movie?  He does it very differently than a hero would, both on the grouping axis and on the optimizing axis.

On the optimizing axis, Spielburg makes a plan.  Not only does he make a plan, he takes years to make a plan.  Get a thousand scripts.  Read them all.  Throw them all away, except the best two.  Rewrite/improve those scripts 30 times each.  Pick the better of the two.  Rewrite it another 30 times.  Nail down every shot location, every line, and every look in the movie.  And then?  Hire some actors to make it work.  Spielburg is a planner.  A darn good planner, but his fundamental method for excellence is nonetheless to plan exceptionally well.

On the grouping axis, Speilburg manages his group.   Not only does he have a plan, and share his plan with the team, but when the team doesn’t follow his plan to the tee, he cajoles sometimes, yells sometimes, fires someone even sometimes, and then gets back to the business of managing the details of all 7000 participants in the movie-making process.

A director, to be successful, plans and manages his team.  A heroic group operates with intuition and independence.  These are hugely different.  Putting these two into the grid, we now have this:

Optimizing / Grouping	Independent	Managed
IntuitiON	Hero
PlannING		Director

Once we see this relationship, it becomes pretty easy to fill in the other two quadrants.  Intuitive-Managed is Supernanny or Gordon Ramsay or any other Managing Expert approach, including essentially all management consulting.

Planned independent is a lone caterer, prepping a meal for 500.  Alternately, an individual carefully planning his or her stops on a cross-country driving vacation.

Our graph has grown

OPTIMIZING / GROUPING	INDEPENDENT	MANAGED
INTUITIon	Hero	Supernanny
PLANNING	Caterer	Director

This exhausts most normal methods for solving problems.  However, we assert there are more, and that they fit nicely into our grid.

Let’s take another method, and see if we can place it.

The notion of a high-performing team (HPT) has been discussed in management literature for the last 60 years.  What are the characteristics?  The three primaries are group-decision-making, and highly competent individuals who flow into one another’s roles as needed.  Rather clearly, they optimize their decisions based on intuition and expertise, but they organize in a completely different fashion from the independent and managed groups.    The simplest way to describe their method of organization is tribal.  The team forms a common bond with a common purpose, and in a very egalitarian fashion (while recognizing individual expertise) moves towards a solution as a tribe.

This expands the grid to look like this:

OPTIMIZING / GROUPING	INDEPENDENT	MANAGED	TRIBAL
INTUITION	Hero	Supernanny	HPT
PLANNING	Caterer	Director

But wait, there’s more (It’s not sold in any store).   We know of another method for solving problems besides intuition and planning.  What does a scientist do?  A scientist proposes a hypothesis, and then runs an experiment to determine if (s)he is right or not.  Rather than planning a correct result, or relying on years of expertise and the hard-won intuition, a scientist gets to the truth via feedback.  Michaelson-Morley figured they’d measure the directional flow of the ether.  Turns out that they couldn’t find one.  Indeed, that experiment in which they attempted to measure something turned into one of the foundations of Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Run an experiment.  Measure the results.  Decide what to test next.  Run another experiment.  Eventually we converge upon the truth, but we get there only via feedback systems.   Expert intuition, or even perfect planning are simply insufficient.