The six ‘W’s’ relentless cascade and feedback.

(Or how we get hopelessly lost in brain lock.)

Establishing harmonized transitory complex systems is easy when everyone starts from the same place (Orientation), answers the six ‘W’ questions and their follow-ups within the same timescale and the environment doesn’t change. Good luck with that.

Basically the six ‘W’ questions are:

  

1.       What is my job?

2.       Where should I be?

3.       Who is my concern?

4.       When do I act?

5.       How do I go about it?

       6.       Why does this matter?

Lists like this are useful for understanding complicated systems and multiple-choice tests. Alone they are useless in addressing complex problems. First off, every question is dependent on an answer to one of the other questions. For example, your job depends on where you are. Where you are constrains when you should act and so on. Which question comes first is itself an open question.

(Note, all of these questions are from the point of view of the individual. This POV will conflict with the POV of the group, the collective POV. That POV is based on the transitory complex system the individual is in at the moment in question and that moment can only be viewed in retrospect. If that’s confusing consider what’s going on during a game.)

Venkatesh Rao writes about the underlying ideas for each of these questions. “What gives you the study of options. Why gives you the study of causation, motivation, reward and punishment. How leads you to the classic problems of means-end reasoning, such as planning and scheduling.” Questions of “when, where and who” are “about timing, framing, background and context.” This perspective reinforces the notion that this isn’t a set list but a grab bag of interrelated questions that has to be answered in a time competitive dynamic environment. To stay too long on any one question can take you down a rabbit hole of indecision.

In the diagram above consider the change for each player when the ball moves from $1 to $2. On the field this ‘difference that makes a difference’ is three feet. But, in a cascading sense the answer to each question will be modified for every player. For a and d “what is my job” shifts and that change cascades throughout the field. Now consider the influence that the open independent movement of every player and the ball has on how each individual deals with the six questions. You soon find yourself skipping the follow-up questions and focusing on a smaller and smaller slice of the big picture. The ultimate small slice is ball watching where all six questions are rolled up into one overriding concern, the ball.

The need to get to the important questions first, and the knowledge that you’ll be short changing others is important. In a time competitive environment like soccer optimal is rarely an option and 20-20 hindsight is only good after the fact. Good enough decisions based on incomplete information and understanding will have to do. It clears the way for the next action and helps to avoid brain lock.