Shadow Scaffold

Pushing the boundaries of Scaffold Thinking

At the Snowdonia Cynefin Retreat in the fall of 2018, Dave Snowden brought up the notion of shadow scaffolds. Scaffolds, as discussed here, are temporary supports whose work may go largely unnoticed. I initially understood ‘shadow scaffold’ to mean a support operating through tacit practices. But taking “shadow” as an image of another object suggests a further possibility: a less visible support that helps the first scaffold work. What would it mean to scaffold the scaffold?

So what is the work of the shadow scaffold? It could be the work of tacit practices. But if we are after truly novel thinking – novel work that breaks through where other ‘solutions’ have failed – it could also be the mental muscle work we associate with the imagination. If that is the work the shadow scaffold does, then what is the scaffold itself? How do we scaffold the imagination to make it pragmatically productive, not merely expressive? (9)

References

1. David Snowden, Welsh management consultant, founder and CSO of Cognitive Edge, a management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sense-making. Also known for his development of the Cynefin Framework.
2. A. Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown in Design Unbound. Designing for Emergence in a WhiteWater World, Volumes 1 and 2, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2018).
3. “TOCO Software – Theory of Change Community. www.theoryofchange.org. Retrieved July 16, 2020.
4. John Rendon, founder and CEO of the Rendon Group; senior communications consultant to the White House and Department of Defense, in conversation, March 4, 2012.
5. S. Anthony, “Harvard creates cyborg flesh that’s half man, half machine” in ExtremeTech, august 29, 2012. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/135207-harvard-creates-cyborg-flesh-thats-half-man-half-machine
6. John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, (New York: Basic Books, 1998) p 3.
7. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000) pp. 17, 273.
8. In Design Unbound, ApJ and JSB elucidate principles and tools for doing this. Paraphrased from chapter 11, “Designing for Emergence”:

In Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland wrote, “the hallmark of emergence is this sense of much coming from little.” He then went on to describe four characteristics that belong to the phenomenon of emergence. In emergence:

1. “Possibilities for emergence are compounded when the elements of the system include some capacity, however elementary, for adaption or learning.” (Complex adaptive systems are systems that learn through feedback. They acquire information about the environment and their interaction with that environment. Identifying regularities and irregularities in that information, they form schema or models that allow them to act. Actions then produce new information that feeds back to modify the schema as necessary. In this manner, they adapt. Emergence depends upon systems that learn.)

2. “Component mechanisms (in an emergent system) interact without central control.” (They act in relationship to each other not by directives from a central authority.)

3. “Possibilities for emergence increase rapidly as the flexibility of the interactions increases.”

4. “Persistent patterns at one level of observation can become building blocks at still more complex levels.”

Holland’s characteristics are useful as a framework to talk about designing for emergence as a purposeful approach.

If we are aiming to design rules that engage with a complex system—one that self-organizes, advances from the inside, and learns because of relationships that depend upon resource and information exchange—then we need to design rules that are about relationships and processes of resource and information exchange between components and their environments/contexts.

And further, following John Holland’s parameters for emergence, these rules must scaffold learning in the system. They must stimulate interactions that function without central control. They must encourage flexibility of interactions. And they must inspire the creation of coherent packages of exchanges, communications, and actions that can become building blocks at still more complex levels.

Start with simple rules for how participants interact and exchange resources in a particular setting. Allow them to learn and combine their actions into larger patterns. Then design the practical mechanisms that put those rules to work.

1. See ApJ and JSB, Pragmatic Imagination, (Blurb, 2016), or Chapter 19, “Pragmatic Imagination” in Design Unbound. Designing for Emergence in a WhiteWater World, Vol. 2: Ecologies of Change, (MIT Press, 2018). Or see “Pragmatic Imagination. A New Muscle for a WhiteWater World” http://www.desunbound.com/assets/papers/a_new_muscle_for_the_white_water_world.pdf