Framework for Entropic Empathy
I’ve long held a hobbyist type interest in physics and the concept of entropy has always been interesting to me. My understanding, which I’m proposing can be related to the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), goes along these lines:
Entropy is a concept from physics that describes the amount of disorder or randomness in a system. Over time, systems naturally progress from order to disorder. So entropy is about the shift from order to disorder, from predictability to randomness.
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, touched on concepts analogous to entropy through his philosophical reflections in his most famous work “Meditations”. The importance of accepting change as part of the universe’s nature, and the natural order and disorder of life, are some examples:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do?”
And closer to our lifetimes, the renowned Physicist Brian Cox explains entropy beautifully while wandering the Namib Desert using the ghost town Kolmanskop as a vivid example of entropy:
Entropy explains why, left to the mercy of the elements, mortar crumbles, glass shatters and buildings collapse. And a good way to understand how, is to think of objects not as single things, but as being made up of many constituent parts.
I think what piqued my interest in this topic is that it is a form of universal truth — a pure and objective truth — that impacts our lives remarkably but subtly.
In relation to the SDLC
Bringing this back to the SDLC, and specifically when we start an initiative, we can consider it to be in a state of high entropy — our time and energy investments should be directed towards decreasing entropy by creating order from chaos, alignment from misalignment, and clarity from vagueness.
To assist with this I developed a personal framework that I find useful in context of the SDLC and complementary to the North Star Framework. In my mind it also acts as a personal compass. I call it FEE — Framework for Entropic Empathy.
The Framework for Entropic Empathy
This framework can apply to all phases of the SDLC from Requirements Analysis to Deployment. As illustrated in Figure 1 above, our North Star “direction” is on the y-axis and the arrow of time on the x-axis. The decision plane acts as a neutral point from where our decisions branch. Chaos is depicted by the blue and red dots being disordered, unconnected, random, confused. Each decision we make in the SDLC either:
- Decreases entropy (good move, aligns to our North Star)
- Increases entropy (bad move, moves us away from our North Star)
Some examples:
- Making a call to skip kickoff meetings as “We all know what to do” is a step towards increasing chaos when objectives, scope, responsibilities, dependencies and risks are not effectively understood, socialised or documented in a transparent manner. Melissa Perri alludes to this in her book “Escaping the Build Trap”.
- Prioritising non-value creating activities, with likely my favourite example from Theory of Constraints: “any improvement past the bottleneck is an illusion”)
Bad decisions, no matter their root cause, simply increase system entropy and take us further from our end goals, increasing technical debt and wasting time.
This all may seem obvious, but I like to understand the “Why” behind things, and I like the efficiency and clarity of thought this Framework provides.
You may be rightly asking: “How does Empathy fit into all this?”
I’ll expand my thoughts in a post next week. In essence, I’ll explain why I believe transparency is a crucial, yet frequently underestimated component of genuine empathy, and one that drives clear thinking.
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