Adam Zeiner

For those that aren’t familiar, a boundary object is an artefact (thing, concept, discourse, process, etc.) that can hold a diversity of incomplete perspectives and enable communication and collaboration amongst those stakeholders despite that incompleteness.

Pace Layers help visualize, distinguish, and discuss different kinds of work and teams within an organization. Here, I bring together a bunch of great thinking into a single construct.

...we’ve been trained to think of organizations as homogenous and mechanistic, with a clear set of rules, a command-and-control structure, and the ability to leverage hierarchy to get things done quickly by issuing top-down directives to reallocate resources to meet objectives.

So, there are two kinds of competences that make up what design is: the theoretical and the practical. And we can use this as a mental model for how we think and talk about design – as a kind of philosophy for what design is, what it means to be a designer and to do design.

This explains a good deal of what works and doesn't work for teams, especially when it comes to their mission. For highly capable knowledge-work teams (marketing teams, software teams, research team, etc.), low-leverage missions tend to be uninspiring.

By mapping the components of individual services (or portfolios of services) against these two axes, perhaps we can explore their relationship to systems change. To what extent are we tweaking around the edges of the existing system, versus changing the behaviour of the system itself — and how ambitious is the effort?

I worry sometimes that there’s a danger of embracing the theatre of systems thinking — using it to position services and to navigate what’s desirable, feasible and viable within the existing system — without actually reshaping the system itself.