The reductionism trap
Summary
Performative productivity sacrifices outcomes for outputs and visibility for effectiveness. While dividing, conquering and hustling without thinking twice may portray a “go-getter” attitude, it’s never a substitute for deep thinking, planning and periodic alignment.
Last week, I had to help my daughter with a school project. The children had to learn about various environmental topics, such as global warming, the ozone layer, and air pollution. The teacher divided the class into groups of five, where the children would teach everyone else about their topic. Each child could pick one of five tasks:
research about the topic;
slides to present the topic;
building a chart about the topic;
creating a quiz to engage the class;
and finally, conducting the session itself.
Not a bad plan, eh? Except I think it’s an epic fail! You see, the teacher announced the project on a Thursday. She conducted a Q&A about the project on a Friday. The students had to lead the class on Monday. Since Saturday and Sunday are school holidays, the children had no choice but to divide and conquer.
I’m a big fan of dividing and conquering. After all, isn’t that what asynchronous collaboration is all about? But dividing and conquering without a cohesive vision is mere reductionism. Ingredients are nothing without a recipe. A recipe is nothing without a vision. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Think about it this way.
What if one kid builds slides that are orthogonal to the research?
What if the chart has no relation to the slides on screen?
What if the children quiz their classmates about content they haven’t presented?
What if the child presenting has a script that doesn’t relate to the slides or the chart?
When we deliver an exciting talk or run an engaging educational session, the visual aids, activities, and narrative build on the research to provide a cohesive experience to our audience. But the children had no chance to even think about that experience. Indeed, the teacher had unwittingly led the kids into the “reductionism trap.”
I don’t envy the teacher’s position, by the way. They’re doing the best they can in the limited time available. A flipped classroom seems like a novel and fun idea, so we can’t blame them for trying to break the monotony of one-way teaching. But beyond all the superficial engagement, is the activity effective? Probably not.
Corporates are as prone to the reductionism trap as this teacher, in case you thought I was picking on academics. I’m sure you’ve seen how people at work decide they have to make a presentation, and the first thing they do is steal canned slides from past presentations to create a “Frankendeck”. It’s almost as if “the deck is the presentation”! No wonder “Death by PowerPoint” is still a thing - 23 years since Angela Garber first coined the term in 2001. We’ve moved to death through Keynote, Prezi, Canva, Google Slides, and whatnot, and slides continue to wreak untold suffering in corporate boardrooms and video calls.
Slides are not the presentation. The “presentation” includes the presenter, the credibility they bring, the story they tell, and how they relate to their audience. The slides are a mere visual aid. Yet, all we’ve gotten to in 23 years of death by PowerPoint is the ability to @mention someone on shared slides so that they can contribute to the Frankendeck. The sum of parts creates a sub-optimal whole.
The story repeats itself across various types of projects. People rush to complete tasks without knowing where they’re collectively headed. Think about how we “collaborate” on projects that have almost gone through a paper shredder of a ticketing system, and everyone gets a disconnected part of the work. No one owns the whole.
I wish there were simple solutions to the reductionism trap. It’s easy for me to criticise the teacher’s plan without understanding their constraints. Similarly, it’s easy to laugh at Frankendecks and the disenfranchised versions of Scrum that run rampant at the workplace. Some of these dysfunctions are beyond the control of the actors who perpetuate them.
But if you see yourself falling into the reductionism trap and believe you have some autonomy over your work and workplace, I have a two-word suggestion.
“Festina lente” - Octavian Caesar Augustus
That Latin phrase stands for “make haste slowly”. If that’s too retro for your liking, I have a more modern alternative.
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” - Navy seals.
Rushing in too fast to complete any project is counterproductive. We’re better off pausing to agree on the goal and how we plan to achieve it before we divide things up and go our merry ways. Let’s take the school presentation as an example.
The goal is usually to make a compelling case about a particular topic to an audience. If so, here’s a process that may embody “Festina lente.”
In the group, start by agreeing on what you’d like the audience to take away. What’s the STAR - something they’ll always remember? Every part of your narrative must be subservient to the STAR.
Once you’ve got the STAR, build a storyboard that shapes your narrative. Each panel in your storyboard should relate to the visuals supporting your narrative. Using sticky notes and whiteboards makes this exercise flexible and dynamic.
Only after you’ve built the narrative can you divide and conquer.
Someone can do the research and build the slides.
Someone else can plan a quiz to engage the audience.
Others can create charts and physical artefacts for the session.
And the designated presenters can plan their speech based on the narrative.
None of this will work if the team can’t periodically align to check that they’re singing from the same song sheet. There’s a sweet spot to the frequency of such checkpoints, and it often depends on the nature and complexity of the project.
All of this is more complex than dividing, conquering, and going straight to outputs. The creative process is messy. It needs deep thinking, reflection and the willingness to pivot if necessary.
Creative collaboration keeps sight of deep thinking and reflection
Sure, this deliberate approach is slower than my daughter’s team's ”hustle, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Presentations with solid narratives beat Frankendecks hands down every day of the week. When you have a storyboard for your narrative, you can build slides faster than if you were to operate off a blank slate. With this approach, children learn about teamwork and coordination much better than the superficial, performative productivity of mindless reductionism. They build proper storytelling and presentation skills. More importantly, they engage with the topic they’re presenting more deeply. Yes, the process I described takes more time, but aren’t these outcomes worth the time?
Collaboration is not an unqualified good. Poorly designed, reductionist collaboration sometimes does more harm than good. My daughter may have learned more from going solo than the school’s group project. Instead, she went through the motions, feeling like collaboration was the end-all.
We’ll all do heaps better at school and work if we embrace “Festina lente.” Collaboration isn’t an end in itself. It’s the means to an end. Slowing down to agree on what that end looks like, will stand us all in good stead.