I bumped into an acquaintance this week who asked me to Blog more often. Buoyed up by the idea that someone out there might actually be reading this, I decided to oblige....
"This is a city built on the circular. So if you want to understand it, you have to get into that circular frame of mind. And that frame of mind is everywhere...... You refer to others in the same circle. You don't think outside the circle."
(Angus Lordie in "The World According to Bertie", by Alexander McCall Smith.
We often find ourselves saying, "We've come full circle". Indeed, it's a phrase that comes around again and again. Circles are mathematically pure, structurally strong, visually appealing. Circles are socially both inclusive and exclusive: "He mixes in certain circles".
In the worlds of design and systems, circles represent a more highly-evolved condition than lines. Closed-loop systems and feedbacks make for more efficient, more responsive operation - and this tends to be better for sustainability, too. A linear system has a productive output and a waste output, but in a closed-loop system there is, in theory at least, no waste.
Of course, there is also a negative language to contend with in terms of management and decision-making: "We're just going round in circles". "We're back where we started". "This is a circular argument". Linguistically we're making an assumption that, if we have gone around in a circle, we haven't made any progress.
Perhaps the problem is that we're getting hung up on travelling IN A CIRCULAR MOTION, whereas we should be thinking about travelling IN A CIRCULAR ENVIRONMENT. The area of land bounded by the M25 motorway is infinitely more varied and interesting than being on the road itself (although there is a whole other essay half-written in my head about roads....that's for another day). A circular walk is attractive over a point-to-point walk for three reasons: one, you know that there is your home, a railway station or a pub at both the start and end of it; two, you get to travel through places en route; three, you never have to turn back on yourself in order to reach your destination. It isn't the circular line itself that is of interest, but the sights, sounds and smells that lie either side of the line. In that example, it's worth noting that we can be just as interested in what is outside the circle as what's inside it or, put another way, what it is that the circle is travelling through.
We know that the world is round and that the universe is governed by circular forces. We are also familiar with the argument that life is not linear, but circular (we do call it a life-cycle, after all), and we can extrapolate from that that time is also circular. So, in terms of aspiring to make progress, in society, art, science, politics, whatever, the question we should really be asking is, "How do we want this to look next time it comes around?"
In the sphere of project management (note cunning use of circular language), it would be particularly interesting to move from linear planning to circular planning. Imagine a Gant Chart (sorry, I know, I loathe them too) where the end of the chart is actually back at the beginning. Yes, it would be possible to draw a circular Gant Chart, but would it be useful? We'd have to try it, to find out. More importantly, we could ask these questions:
1. Are we bound to travel all the way around the circle in order to complete the project, or can we make shortcuts within the circle?
2. If different project partners need to be at the same place in/on the circle at the same time, are there different arcs they could take that would intersect at the right points?
3. What is the operational landscape (time, resources, people, decisions) that the circle is travelling through?
4. What happens if someone goes off at a tangent?
5. How do we expect the start/end point to have changed when we get back there?
6. Do we plan to go round again?
This week'd homework is to try applying circular project planning to something you're currently working on. I'll see you back here next week, to find out how you got on.
AW
