Navigating the waters¶

These exercises are about getting your bearings before you sail. They are not technical drills. They are the kind of exercises that feel suspiciously like having a conversation, right up until someone draws a diagram that makes the whole room go quiet.

You do not need a facilitator with a lanyard and a prepared slide deck for these. You need people willing to look at their situation honestly, which is harder than it sounds and more valuable than it looks.

Come back to these whenever a new storm appears on the horizon. The crew that mapped the currents in January may find the map looks entirely different in September, particularly if something broke in between.

Mapping the waters¶

The crew takes a large piece of paper, a whiteboard, or something drawn on a shared screen at whatever resolution someone’s laptop can manage. They draw the sea they actually sail in: not the org chart, not the architecture diagram, but the real landscape. The currents that carry work forward. The rocks that everyone navigates around without ever discussing. The whirlpools where requests go in and nothing comes out.

The interesting thing about this exercise is that the rocks are never where management thought they were.

Colour helps. Sticky notes help. Someone will draw a shark. That is allowed; sometimes the shark is real.

When the drawing is done, the map gets discussed. Where are the currents in conflict? Which whirlpools have been there so long that people have started treating them as features? Whose job it is to deal with a particular rock may, at this point, become the subject of an unexpectedly frank conversation. That is the point.

Take a photo of the map before the whiteboard gets erased for the next meeting. This is a lesson that only needs to be learned once.

Crossing the river¶

The crew is split into small groups and handed a scenario: resources are limited, the path is not obvious, and there is a river between here and where you need to be. The river has specific crossing rules. Some stepping stones are safe; some are not; some are occupied by someone else’s problem. There is a time limit, because there is always a time limit.

Participants plan a crossing. Then they cross. Then, at some point mid-crossing, a storm arrives, because that is when storms arrive: mid-crossing, when the plan was going so well.

The debrief is where the value lives. Who led? Did anyone freeze? Did the group converge on a decision, or did three people each set off in different directions with total conviction? Did someone know something important and not say it?

This exercise has a way of producing a very quiet moment during the debrief, followed by someone saying that is actually exactly what happens at work, and then a lot of nodding.

Storm signals¶

Before every significant incident, there were signals. Afterwards, someone usually says they had a funny feeling. This exercise is about that funny feeling.

Participants share stories of anomalies they noticed: the log entry that seemed odd, the email that was slightly off, the system that was a bit slow for no obvious reason, the colleague who was suddenly very interested in the backup process. The group categorises, clusters, and discusses what the signals were pointing at, and what a reasonable person might have done at the time.

The key word is reasonable. The point is not to retroactively assign blame for having missed something. The point is to build the pattern-recognition vocabulary that makes the next signal slightly easier to catch.

It helps to bring real examples from the news. The industry is not short of them. Stories of incidents where the warning signs were visible months before the event tend to generate good discussion and a certain amount of collective sighing.

Anchor points¶

When everything is going wrong simultaneously, the crews that do best are usually the ones who know what they can rely on. Not optimistically, not by assumption, but actually: the backup that runs, the person who stays calm, the process that holds even when adjacent processes are on fire.

Participants recall moments when things went wrong but the group held steady. What was the anchor? Was it a person, a habit, a redundancy that finally earned its keep? Stories get told. Themes get identified.

The resulting list of anchors is practical. It names the specific things and people that provide stability, which also, usefully, names the things that need protecting and the people who should not be quietly moved to a different team without anyone noticing what was holding.

Harbour master exercise¶

The harbour master exercise involves more incoming ships than any harbour master can reasonably handle, each with urgent cargo and a captain who is absolutely certain their situation is the exceptional one.

A facilitator introduces a scenario with incomplete information and a steadily worsening situation. New demands arrive before the previous ones are resolved. Some information turns out to be wrong. One of the ships is in a different time zone and has misunderstood the instructions.

Participants manage the harbour. Or attempt to. Coordination, prioritisation, and communication under pressure are all on display.

The debrief covers the patterns that emerged: who decided when there was no time to consult, who had information that others needed but did not share it, at what point did the group shift from planning to improvising, and was that shift visible to everyone or only to the person who made it.

Roles rotate between runs so different people get to experience the specific misery of being the one in charge. Learning it this way is faster than learning it the first time something actually breaks.

Currents and countercurrents¶

Every organisation has forces that nobody fully acknowledges: the unwritten rule that a particular system cannot be touched because of what happened in 2019, the policy that technically exists but has not been enforced since its author left, the cultural current that determines how decisions actually get made regardless of what the process document says.

Participants write down the forces that push things forward in their environment and the forces that push back. These are collected, clustered, and discussed. Anonymity is optional but tends to improve the quality of the countercurrents considerably.

The interesting discussion is not about what the forces are. It is about which of them are load-bearing. Some of the rocks in the current are rocks. Some of them are the things holding the whole structure together, and removing them without understanding why they are there is how incidents get created.

This exercise pairs well with Mapping the Waters. What looked like a whirlpool on the map might, from this angle, be a countercurrent doing a job that nobody formally asked it to do.