Dimensions

Vantage

Depth

Tempo

Complexity

The Science

The JPProject — THE 3 Dimensions Model

Organizational Harmony
is Built in Three Dimensions:
Vantage, Depth, Tempo

Most of us can describe our own job in great detail. How many of us can describe how the organizational whole actually works? What it needs to thrive? What we need to thrive?
This is a structural gap, bridging it could help us to see, and to build, more completely.

01 POSITION (WHERE WE STAND)

Five Vantages

Where we are in an organization shapes what we can see, and it predicts the things might be overlooking.

02 SCOPE (WHAT’S AT STAKE)

Depth

At what strategic scope does a decision need to be made? Is it a grand-strategic one, or technical? Any one decision might be right at one depth, but entirely wrong for another.

03 SPEED (HOW FAST WE CAN AND SHOULD)

Tempo

At what pace does an activity need to move? Is that pace shared or is it imposed? A response correctly delivered at one tempo can be wrong at another.

A role, by design, gives us a detailed view of one part of the system and almost no equipment for seeing the rest of it.

Dimension One

Five Vantages

We exist independent of the organizations we are a part of. What it needs to thrive is not the same as what we need. To balance these tensions we need to develop multiple vantages to see the whole, or to gain value from autonomy in our own corner of it.
Tap a card to expand it.

Craft

The personal vantage.

We are value creators. We build Craft through practice, and while we can build it with others, it is personal, we take it with us when we leave. We are more than our roles. We are complex. We are foundational. Craft is knowing, not just what we are capable of, but where that capability is needed.

Network

The organization in the context of personal experience.

Connection, interdependence, and coordination among peers. We build communities wherever we go, and we are stronger for it. It is our nature. How do we connect to the people around us? How do we align our separate goals to a common purpose?

Contextual

The personal in the context of the organizational experience.

This is the value we create. But everything we create in an organization is consumed by someone else. Every handoff has a recipient, and their experience of the handoff, not the artifact itself, is the real unit of value. How does it connect to what people around us are doing?

Systems

The organizational vantage, that sees and maintains its complexity.

We are holons. Wholes that are parts of and larger whole, yet made of parts that are also whole. We are teams, and teams-of-teams. We are complex, we are structurally emergent. But complexity cannot be simplified. How can we observe and understand it as the continuously dynamic whole that it is?

The whole.

Coherence

The vantage that maintains the full picture (small and large) simultaneously.

The more we organize, the more we specialize our roles. But as we do, our grasp of the whole erodes, as does our connect to it. Coherence doesn’t exist within complexity unless it is built, deliberate structure. Every piece of puzzle needed to see the whole is already in someone’s Craft, Network, Contextual, or Systems vantage. The roles that are structured around Coherence never exist outside the organization, they’re equal participants, with a shared fate.

Dimension Two

Strategic Depth

Not where you’re looking from, but the scope at which the question should be answered.

Grand-StrategicThe organizational whole’s direction and purpose. This scope looks beyond time, and envisions the future. It looks beyond the organization, and it sees an ecosystem.

Strategic TheaterA major front, a market, a product line, a region. This scope engages allies, and partners, structure and proactive knowledge building.

OperationalThe systems and means connecting strategy to daily work, meant to protect both. This scope can serve to manage shared resources or choke by gatekeeping political rewards.

TacticalWhere specific decisions (win this negotiation, ship this fix) become results.

TechnicalThe concrete tools or methods used to execute a task today. A short lived scope, fast and deep, but closest to the value of an organization, and the foundation of its efforts and successes.

Depth is fluid, and should be allowed to overlap. A vantage is close to a structural position. Depth isn’t a position at all, it’s a property of the questions being asked, and a single decision can and should be examined at more than one depth at a time.

You don’t overcome resistance to change by pushing harder against it. You give the energy a path to travel through, instead of a wall to hit or to reflect off of.

Dimension Three

Tempo

At what pace can a question, process, transition move or need to move, and whether that pace is arrived at mutually like a shared rhythm, or imposed unilaterally and disruptive.

Impedance (resistance & reactance

Push too hard and too fast, and the effort is resisted, or pushed back!

Resistance burns off effort as waste, but reactance stores and shapes energy. Rather than dissipating it as waste, it releases it, often as push-back. A perceived threat to independence may see visible compliance turn to quiet reversion.

Mutual entrainment

Coordination shouldn’t imposed, it is emergent. It’s a shared rhythm two parties arrive at together.

Mutual entrainment is a responsive state of synchrony, like orbiting bodies, that perpetuates itself. A leader who sets the pace of teams without helping them find their finding their native rhythm, is forcing synchrony. A constant effort, that holds only as long as the authority behind it does.

Fast loop, slow loop

Fast changes are more visible than slow ones, but rarely as durable.

A fast cycle (try, check, adjust) is good at tactical corrections (action and behavior), but unequipped to ask whether a working result should become new structure. Building new habits, exploring new terrain, these are questions and challenges that need a slower, protected pace; coupled to the fast loop, but allowed their own rhythm alongside it.

The roles that are structured around Coherence never exist outside the organization, they’re equal participants, with a shared fate.

Connections

Some Ideas That Put these Dimensions to Use

Outcomes over outputs

Outputs are single vantage. Outcomes look at all five.

An output is what a single domain produces in isolation (a deliverable shipped, a target hit, a task complete). An outcome is what actually resulted in the world. The impact, and the experience of the whole. An organization that only measures and only rewards outputs, imprisons us (and them!) within our vantage.

Flow of value, and the customer (internal or external)

Every handoff is a customer relationship, whether it’s treated as one or not.

Value moves sideways between peer teams, backward as downstream learning improves upstream process, and gets stored and released as institutional knowledge. Value can be a design, a decision, a proofread, or a contract, but it’s value is measured by the experience of the receiver. A team can hit every output it’s measured on while the person receiving the handoff never actually gets what they needed.

Why Complexity Doesn’t Simplify

Complex systems can’t be understood through simplicity, but their complexity can be harnessed to build better organizations.

A dozen independently discovered mechanisms from ecology, organizational sociology, engineering, physics, psychology…, fields that don’t often talk to each other, still converge on the same human experiences: roles narrow vision by design, constraints can restrict when they’re meant to empower, and whole-picture judgment has to be deliberately built into the structure of organizational life because it won’t grow from it naturally.

Simple tools for harnessing complexity

Four checks, before reaching for a fix

CHECK 01

Which vantage does this actually live in?

A Craft problem, a Network problem, a Contextual problem, a Systems problem — or a genuine Coherence gap where nobody’s role includes seeing it at all.

CHECK 02

At what depth does it need solving?

Is a tactical fix being asked to carry a strategic problem, or the reverse?

CHECK 03

At what tempo does it need solving?

Is a fast-loop correction being asked to carry a genuine double-loop question, or is a tactical fix stuck waiting on a slow-loop cadence it never needed?

CHECK 04

Does this sit inside one vantage, or at the seam between two?

A problem that keeps recurring despite a correct fix inside one vantage may not belong to that vantage at all. It may be the neglected boundary it hands work off to next.

Misdiagnosing any one of the four is the most common reason a genuinely good tool, applied with real effort, still fails to solve the actual problem, or creates new ones.

Organizational Harmonyis Built in Three Dimensions:Vantage, Depth, Tempo

Five Vantages

Depth

Tempo

Five Vantages

Craft

Network

Contextual

Systems

Coherence

Strategic Depth

Tempo

Impedance (resistance & reactance

Mutual entrainment

Fast loop, slow loop

Some Ideas That Put these Dimensions to Use

Outcomes over outputs

Flow of value, and the customer (internal or external)

Complex systems can’t be understood through simplicity, but their complexity can be harnessed to build better organizations.

Four checks, before reaching for a fix

Which vantage does this actually live in?

At what depth does it need solving?

At what tempo does it need solving?

Does this sit inside one vantage, or at the seam between two?

Organizational Harmony
is Built in Three Dimensions:
Vantage, Depth, Tempo