The Four Lenses
The four lenses operate in a continuum between the poles of the invisible aspects (left side) and the visible aspects (right side), as well as individual (top) or collective (bottom) aspects. If I want to describe an organization, I would use both invisible and visible perspectives. For the visible side of the organization, I can look at its organizational architecture, policies, and strategy (bottom-right). I could also observe employee behavior, practices, and habits (top-right). However, I am not able to see what people are thinking, feeling, and the values that they live by (top-left). I also can’t observe invisible norms, relationships, and shared values amongst the employees that make up the organization’s culture (bottom-left). The culture is intangible and resides within the mind and relationships of the individuals who are part of the organization.
We can look at any organization from these four lenses. The four lenses are closely intertwined and can help us map every bit of organizational knowledge and experience into a holistic view. We have to look at an organization through all of these lenses in order to adequately describe it. It always has the systems and structures, culture and relationships, practices and behaviors, and individuals who have thoughts, feelings, and values. Evolution in organizations takes place in all four lenses.
A wicked problem in any of these areas will reverberate through all four lenses because every wicked problem has these four facets. Your mindset lens (upper-left) zooms into your interior experience, intentions, motivations, ethics, emotions, and mindset. The culture (lower-left) lens helps you see the culture of your organization that’s comprised of the shared values and beliefs of your peers. The systems (lower-right) lens zooms into the various contexts in which your organization exists, including its systems, structures, customers, and the wider environment. And the actions (upper-right) lens looks at the exterior actions and behaviors of you and your peers. This includes the way your awareness is expressed in terms of the actions, behaviors, and competencies which are used when you are performing our role effectively. Let’s say that your organization doesn’t have an equal pay system (lower-right). That will reflect in low morale for people that feel that is unjust (upper-left), and that feeling, thinking, and lack of motivation will be apparent in their actions and behaviors (upper-right), leading to a culture of low employee engagement (lower-left). Thus, a dysfunction that shows up most prominently in one lens is also present in the other three lenses.
Let’s look at each lens in more detail:
Mindset Lens
The top left lens represents individual needs, values, mindsets, beliefs, emotions, self-awareness, cognition, worldviews, and attitude. These are things that are invisible and subjective from other people’s point of view. We can’t observe individual mindsets, thinking, and emotions but we can infer it from behaviors and practices in the top right quadrant. For example, nobody can see what I’m thinking, feeling, or what my values are.
Actions Lens
In the top right lens, our behaviors, practices, habits, skills, performance, and other observable actions will be visible and highly influenced by our mindset quadrant. The actions lens helps us make sense of how we use our actions to satisfy our needs. For instance, if my mindset and values are very ego-centric, then those will manifest themselves through my actions towards satisfying my needs and controlling my environment to achieve those needs.
Systems Lens
In the bottom right lens, this is the big picture and it shows how things fit and work together in an organization as a bigger system. As a group, we use our collective thinking, feeling, values, behavior, and actions to implement organizational systems such as architecture, structure, governance, policies, processes, strategy, and technologies, as well as metrics to measure our organization’s performance across these systems.
Culture Lens
Our shared values, shared history, invisible norms, relationships, ethics, stories, meanings, and group dynamics exist in the bottom left quadrant. Culture emerges from the other three quadrants and, in return, this lens reinforces them. In other words, our culture is a reflection and manifestation of our mindset, actions, and systems.
By considering all four lenses, you acquire a holistic view of the current reality of how your organization functions. These four lenses each reflect organizational reality in their own unique and valuable way. The right side of the quadrant that includes actions and systems focuses on competency and functions. The left side of the quadrant that includes mindset and culture focuses on capacity. What you see through these lenses will depend on the platform that you use. We need to increase our cognitive capacity (top-left) to improve our competence (top-right). If you want to be better able to deal with wicked problems, you need to evolve your mindset lens. Our mindset drives how our actions and organizational systems manifest. Mindset, actions, and systems are what determine your culture. And culture always wins.
