“Traversing the levels of abstraction” is a tool that helps you live in the real world, see an ideal world, and determine the steps you need to take in order to bring them together.  Today I want to discuss how Rob Dorfman, A2A’s strategic advisor, and I traversed the levels of abstraction in the last three months of 2008 to create A2A’s 2009 goals, and the positive impact this process has had on our organization.

Rob started working with me in September 2008.  I had just started trying to move it from a website to an organization.  Jake was working hard to create change at Mission College.  All in all, it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere.  Rob suggested in our first meeting that I write some goals.  I sent him what I see now is my best-case-scenario-50-year-vision and the list of things I had to do, which included correcting a typo on the website which had been driving me crazy.  I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he opened that email, but the next time we spoke he encouraged me to think about where I wanted the organization to be at the end of 2008 and 2009.

After thinking about it, I had three goals for 2008: three volunteers, have earned a grant, and to have established a club at Mission College.  I didn’t have any plans for how to achieve these goals; and so, for the rest of the quarter, I stumbled forward.  Rob let me do this in a controlled way, and started talking about what he called traversing the levels of abstraction.

Rob explains, “any given system can be organized in many ways.  1. For aesthetics: one arrangement seems to be more harmonious to our senses and cognitive processes than others.  2. For practical reasons: We have a problem we are trying to solve and a particular arrangement allows us to more easily solove it.”  For example, the arrangement of items in a catalog allows us to solve the problem of finding items more quickly or in a scheme.

By abstraction layers I mean that the objects can be arranged in a way such that one set of objects are nested as subsets of other objects and those in turn can have other subsets.  As an example, lets take as our objects the set of all positions at a firm.  There are a variety of ways we can organize them depending on the problem we are trying to solve.  If we are interested in seeing the lines of authority we can arrange them in the familiar staff hierarchy.  However, note that is not the only way we can arrange that set of objects.  The arrangement we use is one that is convenient for the problem we wish to solve.”

I traversed the levels of abstraction between 50 year goals and things to do the next day by writing weekly and monthly reports.  At the end of the three month period, I also wrote a quarterly and yearly report.  He had me start writing weekly reports for our weekly meetings.  In each of these, I thought about what I wanted us to accomplish in the next period, and what we had accomplished in the previous period compared to what I had planned.   Not only did this allow me to start seeing how much we could reasonably accomplish in a week or month, it also helped me see what steps I needed to take to get from point A to point Z.
 
Meanwhile, Rob and I started talking about the difference between strategy and tactical concerns.  This is something I knew about before, but hadn’t really experienced it.  Rob helped me clarify why I was doing what I was doing, and this was the big picture I had been missing.  As soon as we did this, I was able to describe what else in each of these big picture areas we needed to do.

Now I knew how much we could reasonably accomplish in a month and what we needed to do to make A2A a reality in 2009.  Traversing the levels of abstraction helped us see our dream, and create concrete steps toward achieving that vision.