Recently, while looking across the increasingly varied subjects of these Practice Notes, I noticed something that I had not consciously set out to create. The notes range across quality management, assessment, Product Continuity, reference models, watches, clothing, model trains and whatever else happens to make me wonder about something. At first glance, there is not necessarily much connecting those subjects.
Yet the way I approach them seems remarkably consistent. The subjects change. The method does not.
I seem to keep doing three things:
Reveal the Why → Reveal the Inconsistencies → Reveal the Path
I am not sure I ever deliberately chose this as a method. It may simply be how I make sense of things.
Reveal the Why
It usually begins with Why. Not necessarily the first Why, because the first answer often explains only the immediate situation. That answer tends to invite another question. Why do we perform this activity? Because we need this outcome. Why do we need that outcome? Because something else depends upon it. Why does that matter?
Following the chain gradually moves the discussion away from the visible activity and toward the purpose it is intended to serve.
This is where apparently simple questions can become unexpectedly interesting. A Definition of Done stops being a checklist and becomes a mechanism for establishing confidence in completion. Testing stops being merely an activity performed by testers and starts looking like one way of producing evidence for assessment. A watch stops being something that must fit a conventional category and becomes something that must be suitable for the situations in which its owner actually intends to wear it.
The What remains important, but it becomes easier to understand once the Why beneath it is visible.
Reveal the Inconsistencies
Something interesting tends to happen once that underlying purpose becomes clearer: inconsistencies become easier to see.
A practice may still exist even though it no longer performs the function for which it was introduced. An assessment may reward compliance with a process without establishing whether the organization possesses the capability that process was supposed to create. A transformation may successfully implement a framework while failing to develop the organizational abilities that motivated the transformation in the first place. The visible What and the underlying Why have drifted apart.
Perhaps this is why I keep finding inconsistencies in apparently unrelated subjects. I am not necessarily looking for mistakes. I am comparing what something has become with what it appears to be trying to accomplish.
That is a useful distinction. Something can be internally consistent and still be poorly aligned with its purpose. A process may operate exactly as designed. Every required artifact may exist. Every ceremony may take place. Everyone may be following the rules. And yet the original problem may remain unsolved.
Once the Why is visible, that kind of inconsistency becomes much harder to overlook.
Reveal the Path
The final step is less certain. Understanding the Why and identifying the inconsistency does not automatically reveal a solution. There may be several possible solutions. Important evidence may be missing. Constraints may prevent the most obvious change. Sometimes the honest conclusion is simply that we do not yet know enough.
But the direction often becomes clearer. Instead of asking how to optimize the existing What, we can ask how to bring it into better alignment with the Why.
That is a subtly different form of improvement. If a Definition of Done has become a ritual, the question is not necessarily how to improve the checklist. It is how confidence in completion should be established.
If a process assessment rewards the existence of prescribed practices rather than organizational ability, the question is not necessarily how to improve the process model. It is how that organizational ability should be understood and assessed.
If a transformation has become an exercise in implementing a framework, the question is not necessarily how to implement the framework more faithfully. It is which organizational capabilities need to change and which interventions might help them change.
The path does not emerge because the answer was hidden inside the Why all along. It emerges because understanding the Why gives us a more meaningful direction against which possible changes can be judged.
The Recurring Method
Looking back across the Practice Notes, I now suspect that this pattern has been present for much longer than I realized.
Much of my work around capability assessment begins by asking what organizational ability a process was intended to create. The work on reference models asks what a subject is supposed to accomplish before judging its current realization. Product Continuity keeps returning to the reasoning that explains why products became what they are.
Even the apparently less serious subjects seem to follow the same pattern. Watches, clothing and model trains have repeatedly turned into ways of exploring purpose, assumptions, boundaries and the strange consequences that appear when those things are forgotten.
Perhaps those subjects were never as unrelated as they appeared. They were simply different places in which to ask the same kind of questions.
Reflection
I have used Method in the Madness as a working name for the possibility that recurring patterns might eventually be discovered across this growing body of notes.
I had imagined that as something to do later: preserve enough observations, look back across them and see whether a coherent method of thinking emerges. Perhaps that process has already started.
One pattern, at least, seems increasingly difficult to miss:
Reveal the Why. Reveal the Inconsistencies. Reveal the Path.
It is not a universal method, and it does not guarantee an answer. Sometimes the path remains uncertain. Sometimes the evidence runs out. Sometimes understanding the Why merely reveals how much we still do not understand.
But it does seem to describe something about how I approach problems. And perhaps that is exactly what Method in the Madness was supposed to reveal.
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