The Three Process Problem
Contour Line 023
A quick update on my build-in-public accountability goals: I've narrowed down the concept for my workshop I'll be holding the first week of June, I'll keep everyone updated as to the date, time, and location of this, and hope to see you there. I'm also making progress on other administrative goals, and I appreciate having this space to hold me accountable. I never thought I would, but I'm slowly warming up to the idea of building in public.
I hope everyone had a good weekend and found some way to recharge or relax. I spent way too much time away from the house, but managed to find some calm while doing yard work. It's not always the case that completing things that need to doing is relaxing so I feel fortunate that this time it was.
I also started watching a "new" show this weekend - 3 Body Problem (based on the book by the author Cixin Liu). I had seen good things but didn't want to commit to a new show when I first heard about it.
A few things made it stand out to me that kept my interest throughout the first episode: the score, the cinematography, my curiosity towards learning what was going on. My prediction was that the “answer” would be aliens, parallel universes, or God, and I was a bit concerned that once I found out, the show wouldn't be as appealing due to lack of originality.
I won't spoil it for you, but suffice to say that I was right, but rather than being predictable or unoriginal, the story connected with me at an emotional level because of the way the main characters have to figure out what is going on.
For the viewer it takes several episodes; for the main characters, it takes moving through an iterative process, it takes mental effort, and emotional anguish.
In order to figure out what they had to do, they had to get started, but then put in the work to advance further. Unlike many shows, and unlike what instant gratification culture has done for us collectively, there wasn't just an information dump where everything was known and laid out for us after the first attempt.
That curiosity is what hooks you, whether in fiction or real life. Knowing there is something more,and being open to questioning, pursuing, trying, failing, and trying again - that is where we get started to anything worthwhile.
Even with being open to growth, we still use frameworks or mental models on how to proceed. The name of the show comes from the 3-Body problem in physics, whereby there is no framework or solution to consistently predicting how three bodies orbiting each other will dynamically interact.
I think this serves as an important tie-in to personal and organizational growth. We can know ourselves, and we can at any given time track one other known variable (time, emotional regulation, team morale, etc.) but there will be at a minimum, at least one more "third" body that interplays, and throws our systems and frameworks into chaos.
Think about what you can and can't control or predict in your life, how desperately we all cling to systems, schedules, and ways of understanding the world. What happens when something disrupts that? And what do we do immediately? Try to find a way to anticipate that happening again in the future. Even if we can anticipate something will happen, we don't always know when.
I've spoken about the importance of process over procedure before, and the 3 Body Problem contextualizes my weekend to reiterate the lesson once again. If we view our opportunities and challenges in a manner that is processual versus procedural we are more likely to be able to navigate disruption. Processes are also more easily layered together and intertwined, for example:
I didn't anticipate spending 16 hours away from the house.
I did anticipate it was going to rain again today.
I knew I needed to find a way to relax while also getting things done.
I prioritized the one of my two weekend tasks that would enable this.
This set me up to better navigate third body problems this week.
In those 5 lines I have processes of self-care, task-organization and completion, time management, and strategic thinking. There is too much to keep track of and anticipate for a procedure based approach, and it takes work to incorporate or expand process approaches. If I had tried to hold to systems and procedures that were inflexible it would likely have not been a relaxing or productive weekend of any sort.
But if we focus on just being, growing incrementally, layering our processes, and adjust as needed in the moment, we are more likely to be able to survive 3rd body problem dynamics.
Contour Lines is my anecdotal newsletter segment.
A quick reminder that at the end of this month, I'm planning on making some changes to the Cultivar newsletter segments as long as Substack will let me.
All content will remain free, but current subscribers will be put in the Cultivated Perspective tier, which has both Contour Lines and Compass Points; the other two will be put into their own categories for readers who prefer occasional longer-form and less anecdotal articles over what I put out more consistently.
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