The Virtuous Cycle
In writing these last few posts, I realized that the process I’ve been exploring for shifting process and tooling within a biotech organization can be thought of as a virtuous cycle, or rather a small virtuous cycle within a larger one. Here’s what the two cycles looks like:
Here’s how it works:
You build, within your organization, a story about how the digital and wet lab teams can work together more effectively. This story has to be understandable and believable, so it will be limited by the existing shared mental models.
You iterate on process first, then tooling, to make the story a reality. Because you need the whole team to understand well enough to manage and contribute to the details, this step is limited by the story you were able to tell.
The members of your organization update their mental models of what's possible based on the new process, building a shared mental model that's closer to where you want it to be.
You go back to step 1, but this time with a shared mental model that's closer to where you ultimately want it to be, allowing you to tell a better story.
Written in this short, condensed form it seems very abstract, but the case study in my last three posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) is a more concrete example of what this can look like. In my upcoming posts, I’ll look at some more examples to build a more concrete picture of this cycle.