The Art of the Cut
Designing Reality through Constraints
Learn how to distinguish between Governing Constraints and Enabling Constraints and how to apply the right "knife" to cut through the noise and design a reality where innovation and safety are probable outcomes.
In our previous post, we established a radical idea that your organisation is not a collection of people and tools but an entangled mesh where the ‘worker’ and the ‘software’ co-create each other. We termed this the apparatus.
But if the apparatus creates reality, we must question who is designing the apparatus?
If you do not consciously design it, the apparatus will design itself based on legacy code, old habits, and accidental architecture. You end up with a ‘Frankenstein’ reality where everyone works hard, but nothing flows. To take control, we need to master the art of the Agential Cut. And to make those cuts, we use a sharp tool from complexity called constraints.
The Agential Cut
Karen Barad teaches us that the world is originally a messy, entangled blob of potential. Nothing is distinct until we make a ‘Cut’.
Think of a performance review. Before the review, an employee’s year is a fluid, complex stream of millions of moments consisting of late nights, brilliant ideas, typos, coffee chats, and frustrations. It is messy and ‘real’. Then, the apparatus (the HR Form) comes down like a guillotine. It creates a cut.
It captures ‘Sales Numbers’ and ‘360 Feedback’ (the signal).
It cuts out ‘Mentoring peers’ or ‘Preventing disasters’ (the noise).
The apparatus resolves the ambiguity into a fixed value: "You are a 3.5 out of 5." This cut creates the reality. The employee becomes a ‘3.5’. They start acting like a 3.5. The cut determines what matters and what is invisible.
Constraints
If the cut is the outcome, then constraints are the knife. Alicia Juarrero, a philosopher of complexity, argues that constraints are often seen as negative blockers but she extends this with constraints that are creative. Without constraints, everything is random noise. Constraints reduce the possibilities so that meaning can emerge.
To design an effective organisation, you need to use two specific types of blades:
1. Governing Constraints
Governing constraints are the rules and conditions that keep a system together once it has formed.
The primary job of governing constraints is to maintain the coherence and identity of the whole system. They are the established 'ways of working', the culture, or the shared principles that preserve a team's unique character and purpose over time. They hold the system's coherent dynamics together and contribute to their persistence.
Governing constraints operate from the top down, from the whole to the parts. They focus on the overall dynamic of the system, shaping the behaviour of the individuals within it.
For example, an organisation's strong culture of 'customer first' is a powerful top-down governing constraint. It guides how an individual employee behaves when dealing with a customer complaint, ensuring their actions align with the identity of the whole organisation. The system's overall dynamic modifies the behaviour of those caught up in it.
The result of effective governing constraints is stability and persistence. They regulate the system's components to keep behaviour within the boundaries that define the whole.
This allows a team or an organisation to absorb changes and withstand challenges without falling apart, ensuring it can maintain its identity and purpose over the long term.
2. Enabling Constraints
Enabling constraints are the rules or conditions that make a group of separate parts start working together as a single, coherent system. They take independent parts and link them together, making them rely on each other. This process reduces randomness and makes coordinated action possible.
In a team, a clear, shared goal is a powerful enabling constraint. It takes a group of individuals and focuses their separate efforts, making their work interdependent in achieving that one objective.
These constraints typically arise bottom-up from the interactions between the parts themselves and make one path much easier to traverse than another:
The ‘2-Pizza Team’ Rule: You could invite 20 people to the meeting, but the rule suggests you invite 6. It nudges you toward efficiency without locking the door.
The Agile Stand-up: You could sit down for an hour, but the ‘Standing’ constraint makes a 15-minute meeting the path of least resistance.
Enabling constraints reduce cognitive load. They tell the energy where to flow. They create a ‘Basin of Attraction’ where the behaviour you want (e.g., collaboration) becomes natural.
Designing the Topology
When you combine New Materialism (The Entanglement) with Juarrero (Constraints), you realise that Leadership is architecture. You are looking at a landscape of energy (your people/resources).
If you want Innovation, do not give a speech or hang up some glossy image of a lightbulb. Remove a wall (governing constraint) that impedes experimentation, and introduce an enabling constraint, such as a ‘20% Time’ policy or an Innovation Lab with 3D printers.
If you want safety, introduce a governing constraint like an automated checklist that prevents the code from deploying if it fails a test.
The Challenge
Most organisations are accidental landscapes. They have governing constraints where they need enabling constraints, and enabling constraints where they need governing constraints. Your job is to look at your Apparatus and design the constraint regime of both governing and enabling constraints by asking:
Where are we creating ‘dead ends’ with rigid constraints?
Where are we creating ‘chaos’ by having no constraints at all?
How can we re-cut the apparatus by designing a constraint regime to make the right behaviour more likely?