Disjoint Awareness

Many modern organizations achieve their objectives by organizing themselves into teams or other collaborative structures. And because their people are working as collaborators, they need some awareness of what their teammates are doing or what people in other collaborations are doing. But in forming or maintaining shared awareness of each other's work, people often encounter a problem I call disjoint awareness.

Disjoint awareness is a mismatch between what people believe their collaborators are doing or intending and what their collaborators are actually doing or intending. It can also denote a mismatch at the level of an entire team — a mismatch between what Team A believes Team B is doing and what Team B is actually doing. So disjoint awareness is due to a mismatch between the collaborators' awareness of each other's work and the awareness they would actually need if they were to avoid interfering with each other.

The mismatch can appear as a result of numerous phenomena, including ignorance, misconceptions, willful blindness, or unintended consequences of security measures. We'll examine some drivers of disjoint awareness in coming issues. To understand what we can do to reduce the incidence of disjoint awareness, let's begin by exploring its nature and effects.

A fictitious scenario

Here's an example of a scenario in which disjoint awareness reduces the chances of an organization achieving its objectives.

But the problem of disjoint awareness isn't restricted to the BAT or to administrative or executive teams. In this fictitious scenario, many of the people who sponsor or manage the numerous projects in IT did have risk plans to cover budget cutbacks, but those plans weren't always coordinated with each other. That is, very few projects had plans for coordinating with other projects to revise schedules or devise alternative approaches to mitigate the effects of the cuts collectively. Such plans would have required more complete awareness of the changing needs and changing status of other projects — awareness most of the project managers lacked at the time the cuts were announced.

As a means of Disjoint awareness denotes a
deficiency in people's awareness of
what their collaborators are doingensuring that the team and the organization achieve their objectives, some collaborators focus almost exclusively on achieving their own objectives. But as members of a team, it isn't enough to "do our part." We must go about doing our parts in ways that allow, enable, or support others as they do their parts. Just as important: as we do our part, we must avoid interfering with others as they do theirs.

The zeroth step required for avoiding interference with the work of our collaborators is awareness of how our own actions might interfere with teammates' work. It's difficult to avoid interfering with others unless we're somewhat aware of what they're doing or planning to do, and how our own activities might interfere with theirs. That's why a narrow focus on "doing my part" creates a risk of disjoint awareness, and consequent interference with the work of others.

And the problem transcends the individual. In complex organizations that have dozens or hundreds of teams, each team pursues its own objectives. And like the individual members of a single team, each team must have some continually refreshed awareness of the work of other teams. Absent that awareness, one team might interfere with others as all pursue their own objectives. That's what happened with Daffodil, Marigold, and the BAT.

Last words

So for any given objective and for any set of teams, there's an optimal set of awarenesses that corresponds to an acceptably low level of interference between teams. If the respective awarenesses of all involved don't match that optimal set, we have a state of disjoint awareness, and collaborators or even whole teams are prone to interfere with each other.

Next time we'll examine some of the phenomena that tend to produce disjoint awareness.   Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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