Shaping Our Environments
Shaping Our Environments
Res Extensa #53 :: Our working environments, open and closed systems, and how to architect our behavior
I regularly watch former MythBusters host Adam Savage's YouTube channel. In most of his videos, you'll see him in "The Cave" — his chaotic workspace packed to the gills with tools, hardware, memorabilia, and half-made projects. In his periodic shop infrastructure vlogs, he's fond of saying "a shop is never finished". Or "it's a constant work-in-progress." Any space where work happens is an ever-evolving response to what we use it for. There’s a continuous dance between our workspaces and what we’re doing in them. When the purpose of the space matches perfectly the intended activity, we can drop into a flow state where work feels effortless.
Our environments shape the things we do. They cue us to interact with them in certain ways. They compel us into behaviors — some that we like, some we don't. But we also have a say in the matter. We can control our environments to guide our behavior.
In the case of a shop, or desk, or kitchen, we're at individual scale. But the relationship to environment scales up to groups, too.
The past few days I've been digging into Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization, a book on organizational theory that explores how organizations work through the lens of different metaphors: as machines, organisms, cultures, political systems, brains, and more1. The book's broad point is that the metaphors we use to understand an organization heavily influences how we operate within it.
As I read the first two chapters contrasting the "images" of orgs as machines and as living organisms, I ran across an interesting observation I've been thinking about as it relates to the formation of productive habits, and the creative work process in general: the relationship of a system to its environment.
And a primary distinguishing factor between a mechanistic system and an organic one is its level of openness to interfacing with its external environment.
Systems, open and closed
A machine is a closed system: a collection of parts with limited connection to its environment. It only receives specific input and provides specific output. A thermostat turns the heat on when the temp drops below threshold, and off once stasis is reached. A sailboat moves where the wind and waves push it. A bridge stands fixed as traffic moves over it. In closed systems there's no continuous interchange with the environment. The environment doesn't change the system. And neither does the system modify the environment.
Cells, organisms, and populations of them are open systems. They exist in a continuous state of coevolution with their environments. Morgan says (emphasis mine):
It is thus often said that living systems are "open systems", characterized by a continuous cycle of input, internal transformation, output, and feedback, whereby one element of experience influences the next. The idea of openness emphasizes the key relationships between the environment and the internal functioning of the system. Environment and system are to be understood as being in a state of interaction and mutual dependence.
ChatGPT agrees. I asked it to define an "open system" (after some initial conditioning to what I was after) and it states:
Open systems actively interact with their environment. They exchange matter, energy, and information with their surroundings.
This bidirectional interaction is interesting. Environments condition us, but we get to do the same.
Hacking our own behavior
James Clear's Atomic Habits refers repeatedly to the power of environment on habits and productivity. We sometimes don't realize the power we have to engineer our own behaviors by changing our surroundings. Often we just accept what we've got and let the environment tip us where we don't want to go:
Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world others have created for them. But you can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones. Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it. (Atomic Habits, p. 85)
Our surroundings tempt and shape certain behaviors. As we repeatedly perform an action in a certain environment, our habits form pathways in our minds like a river carving a canyon. Eventually, when we switch into that environment again, our mental water will want to seek those paths of least resistance, instead of the thing we wanted to do instead.
If left to our own devices, habits can happen to us. We usually want it the other way around. We want our environment to coax us into behavior patterns of our choosing — not the ones we happened to form without conscious thinking.
But we're not just open systems like any other animal. We’re more than that. Humans have a unique ability (when we want to) to hack of the behavior ↔ environment connection to our advantage. We can be conscious of our tendency to receive tips and cues from our surroundings as compulsion to a certain action. Setting the workout clothes right next to the bed the night before, we limit our choice of outfit to put us automatically in the zone to work out. Not buying guilty snacks so they aren't even around when we go hunting for 'em at 11pm. Ending a day's writing session purposely in the middle of an unfinished section, to kickstart the next day's work with an in-progress train of thought rather than a blank page.
We can engineer our habits by arranging our environment. If we begin to associate time at the coffee shop with "writing time" — and we want that to continue — we can put ourselves there any time we need to be writing. And leave when it's not working out. As the habits start to form little grooves of behavior, we can reinforce them or pull the plug before they get too deep.
Whether we're engineering an environment for ourselves or for a team or an entire company, we have agency. As much as the proponents of "Organizations as Machines" think that groups of human beings can be disassembled, reassembled, and optimized like an engine, there's only so much efficiency to be squeezed out, at high cost. An organic system can resist attempts to control it. And this same agency that makes organization-as-machine a problematic metaphor gives us a superpower. As complex organisms ourselves, the ability we have to adapt our environments — just as we adapt to them.
If you’ve enjoyed this, please share with your friends and colleagues. Also take a look at some of the other issues in the archive.
This book is fascinating and deserves a deeper dive. Stay tuned.