The 5 vantages

In order of discovery

Before there was a market, there was a maker. Before there were formal organizations connecting movers, and traders and builders, there were ideas connecting minds and hands and materials. Long before anyone wrote a mission statement, someone shaped a stone into an edge, a fiber into a thread, a thought into a tool, and value existed the instant that shaping began. Ancient India used the Sanskrit word, śilpa, the ancient Greeks had one word, techne, in classical China there was the character, gong, for what we now split into three, craft, art, and technology. They had not separated these things.

When we chose not to remain alone with our materials, when we tried to broaden the reach of our craft, we joined others to bring the world something it needed. At the heart of this are the people who came together to share their skills. The heart of all collaborative effort is the personal experience, the perspective of the value creator, the vantage of Craft.

Today, we continue to build organizations that create and distribute value for our communities. This could be the distribution of food, tools, culture, or wealth. It could be the creation of entertainment, the gathering of knowledge, or simply to protect and defend the value that humans create. An organization allows us to pool our resources, to manage external complexities, and to collaboratively tackle challenges greater than what we could on our own.

We are, in many ways, the purpose of the organization. Not to create an artifact, any singular person can achieve that. We organize to create value. From this the organization, or the organizational experience arises.

As a society and as individuals, we need a set of dynamics to help us create value; to resolve conflict, to facilitate creativity, and to serve as the basis of trust. The organization is the system we create to act as a steward, and the distributor of value. This is the Systems vantage.

Complete but not complete enough

Nothing exists in isolation, and complexity cannot be understood by simplifying it away. Every edge is blurred. Every definition has exceptions. Every action and every part carries a meaning that only appears once you look at it in context.

If we look at personal experience in the context of the organization a third vantage appears: the experience of human collaboration. Our struggles to sustain the system, to refine and improve our craft through shared learning, and yes, even collaborating to try and endure the system. This is the Networks vantage.

Then inverting that, we view the organization in the context of personal experience, and we find the experience of value (the value of human effort); its journey through the topography of the organization from negotiation to creation, and the journey back, as the feedback path that closes the loop. This is the context in which we create and determine what is of value, who it is value for, how, and when; both as consumers of value, and as creators. This is the Contextual vantage.

The whole picture

The Craft and Contextual vantages are often guilty of navel-gazing. These are the perspectives that see the trees as the reason why the forest is a forest. While they are both microcosms of the whole, they are also very much a small-picture view. They present to us the tactical or technical levels of scope.

On the other hand, the Networks and Systems vantages are often guilty of star-gazing. These perspectives see the forest that has lost one of its trees as the same forest. They present to us the more operational or strategic levels of scope.

Neither perspective is wrong, just often misaligned. Their perspectives are shaped by the priorities of the roles we assign to them; the priorities that we ask them to have, and need them to maintain.

So one more vantage is needed to be complete. A vantage that sees the whole-picture. A perspective that sees how the small picture and the big picture are each incomplete on their own, and prioritizes a view of the whole. This is the vantage of Coherence.

Coherence sees the tension inside every other vantage, not to resolve it away, but to keep it in balance:

Craft needs to be free to create, but also needs to deliver value in a way that sustains the system, not simply find itself sustained by it.

Contextual needs value to flow to the customer, internal and external alike, but not so freely that we lose sight of the organization’s purpose, or of our impact further downstream.

Networks needs to coordinate and connect, but not at the cost of becoming an end in itself, coordination that serves nothing beyond its own upkeep.

Systems needs to steward value at scale, but not so much that its own structure becomes more important than what that structure was built to protect.

Peter Senge’s work on systems thinking names this same failure from the outside: a system optimized locally, department by department, can still fail as a whole, because no single department was ever positioned to see the whole. Coherence is the position built specifically to see it.

The value creator, value, the value engine, the creation engine

An organization can be understood as a value engine, built to serve the needs of value creation and value distribution. This traces the same shape Michael Porter’s value chain traces in business strategy: raw capability moving through stages until it reaches something a customer will pay for. Four stages here, matched to the four positional vantages.

The value creator (Craft). Human agency, intellectual capital, and intention behind the enterprise. The employees, founders, and leaders who apply talent and judgment. The strategic intent that decides where and how the organization competes. The insight that senses friction, unmet need, or inefficiency worth acting on.

Value (Contextual). The output itself, the currency of exchange between the organization and the world outside it. Customer value: the product, service, or experience that solves a problem or meets a want. Economic value: revenue, margin, and the savings that keep the organization viable. Social and systemic value: the trust built by everything the organization does beyond the immediate transaction.

The value engine (Systems). The internal machinery: standard operating procedures, workflows, and quality control; the technology infrastructure that multiplies human effort; the culture, governance, and incentive structures that make continuous improvement possible rather than accidental.

The creation engine (Networks). The mechanisms, channels, and relationships that carry generated value to where it needs to go. Go-to-market channels, sales forces, and digital platforms. Supply chain and logistics. The communication and framing that turns intrinsic value into value a customer perceives.

Deeper grounding in the Viable System Model

Created by cybernetician Stafford Beer, The Viable System Model (VSM) maps an organization into five interconnected subsystems. These are the pieces required for long-term survival and adaptation.

Craft & System 1, Operations. The autonomous units that actually create value: product teams, hospital wards, individual franchise branches. Each is a small viable system on its own, absorbing complexity through local decisions rather than waiting for approval. The core tension is the autonomy paradox: too much freedom and Craft drifts from purpose or duplicates effort; too little and approval layers strangle the people closest to the work.

Networks & System 2, Coordination. Exists to stop individuals practicing Craft from competing for the same resource, or escalating a conflict a shared standard could resolve. Networks rely on shared infrastructure, not managerial intervention. Pushed too far, it becomes the compliance trap: coordination built to reduce friction starts generating it instead.

Systems & System 3, Control. Manages the present: resource allocation, policy, keeping Craft synced to current goals. Systems is structural and governs through a command channel that passes down targets, and a separate audit channel that gets unfiltered truth. Relying on the command channel alone produces the algorithmic illusion, a dashboard that looks complete but isn’t.

Contextual & System 4, Intelligence. Scans for what’s coming, market shifts, competitive threats, and extends inward to the internal customer with the same seriousness given to the external one. When the signal from this vantage is too weak, the organization misses a disruption it had every chance to see (the innovator’s blind spot); too dominant, and it chases every new signal while neglecting the customer being served today.

Coherence & System 5, Policy. Holds the tension between Systems’ present and Contextual’s future, and makes the values-based call when the two disagree. Coherence fails by insulating itself into the echo chamber: a stated identity with no connection to the people actually doing the organization’s work.

Each vantage mirrors how our brains complete a picture of the whole

The five classic Gestalt principles explain how our brains organize parts into a complete picture.

Closure: our brains fill in the missing pieces of an incomplete shape to see an object as a complete whole.
Proximity: objects that are close to each other are perceived as a single, unified group rather than individual items.
Similarity: we naturally group elements that look alike, similar colors, shapes, or sizes, together as a single concept.
Continuity: our eyes prefer to follow the smoothest, most continuous path rather than abrupt or broken lines.
Figure-Ground: we separate images into a foreground (the main object) and a background (the surroundings) to make sense of what we are seeing.

Craft: A plan, a design, a set of specs or requirements is incomplete by its very nature. Someone has to piece those fragments into the reality of a finished idea. Closure is what Craft does.

Networks builds its picture the way Proximity does: by grouping what sits close together into a single unit, regardless of whether the pieces look alike. Closeness here is relational, not physical, shared reporting lines, shared meetings, frequent contact, and the brain reads a team as one group the same way it reads a cluster of nearby dots as one shape.

Systems sees the parts of an org the way Similarity groups elements that share a trait. A subsystem and the super-system containing it are not identical, but they share the same functional shape: goals, resources, coordination, output. Systems recognizes a part as belonging to the whole because it shares that structure, not because it looks like the whole up close.

Contextual follows the flow of value the way the eye follows Continuity: the smoothest unbroken path, not a break. Value moves from the person who created it to the meaning it takes on once it reaches the org and the customer, resources and creation together defining what the parts are worth within the whole. Sever that line, and continuity breaks with it.

Coherence holds the small picture and the big picture together the way Figure-Ground holds a scene together: by deciding what counts as subject and what counts as setting. A reversible image, the classic vase or two faces, produces two different wholes from the same lines depending on which part reads as figure. Coherence does this at the org level, deciding what is small picture and what is big picture in a given moment, so the whole reads correctly. Get figure and ground backwards, and the whole that appears is the wrong one.

The Gestalt principles are not strictly analogous to the vantages, but they do serve as a metaphorical mirror, to how the brain creates a whole from its parts. These principles can be applied to the vantages in order to help guide our understanding of them, and their applications.

They underscore the reality that each vantage believes itself complete because each individually does contain the whole, at least from their perspective. In spite of the differences between them, they are each entirely correct, even if they are not entirely complete.