Know Your Boundaries
“You learn about boundaries by crossing them.”
To flesh out the idea of “boundaries,” let’s take a short trip to space: When the astronauts in Frank White’s The Overview Effect flew above the Earth, they became keenly aware of the physical boundary that defines our home as a planet in the sea of space. At the same time, they were struck by what they couldn’t readily observe – the human-constructed boundaries of national borders, race, ethnicity, and ideology that tend to define our day-to-day reality.
Boundaries describe the perimeters of a system. While they may seem impenetrable, all system boundaries are permeable to some degree, allowing information and resources to flow between the system and its environment.
For example, a pharmaceutical company is profoundly impacted by its environment – government regulators, tax laws made by Congress, consumer attitudes, competing therapies offered by rival companies, and coverage choices made by insurance companies. And the reverse is true too: Actions by that single pharmaceutical company can have huge effects outside its boundaries as well.
Some boundaries are easy to identify. We can readily recognize that a corporation’s Human Resources department is a system bounded by its unique set of functions. And it’s obvious that a corporation’s office in Omaha, which is bounded by its location, is distinct from its another corporate office in Kansas City.
I’ve often been amused by how important such boundaries can be for the individuals in an organization. Early in my career, I was one of about twenty public servants working for a newly-elected congressman; we were evenly split between Washington, DC and his home district, in Pennsylvania. While we were generally an effective team, we all shared the same perception: Regardless of which office we worked from, each of us was convinced that our colleagues who worked in the other office were dopes.
In fact, very little distinguished the people in one office from the other. We were all smart, capable, and dedicated. We all got along well with one another. But when we looked across the boundary at our peers in the other office, all we could see were the small ways in which they weren’t just like us, and not as good.
And it wasn’t just our staff. I had a friend at the time who worked in the Washington, DC office for a congressman from Oregon. They derisively referred to their clueless colleagues in Portland as “the dark side of the moon.”
Other boundaries are less apparent. For example, a company may have employees scattered across the organization who were “acquired” during a merger, and who still share a unique set of experiences or allegiances. Or there may be a group of female employees who share a commitment to promoting qualified women up the corporate ladder. The boundaries that delineate these systems don’t exist on a formal organizational chart and can be easily overlooked, but they can be extremely powerful nevertheless. Shifting your perspective (like the astronauts did) can illuminate boundaries and systems that have been there all along.
Another complication: We all have our habits of mind, which enable us to readily perceive some kinds of boundaries while habitually overlooking others. You can think of your own pattern of overlooking some kinds of boundaries as your personal set of blind spots.
But don’t feel bad: There is no “right” set of boundaries, only what we perceive. Because bounding is a human construct, identifying boundaries isn’t a definitive and scientific task. For example, the concept that human beings belong to different races is imbedded in Western culture even though science has definitively proven that there is no set of coherent genetic boundaries that describe race; at the biological level, the concept of race is utterly meaningless. There is more genetic diversity within our “races” than there is between them, yet we still cling to our perceptions of who is in our racial tribe and who is not.
As I described in the last blog post, boundaries also exist between levels of an organization, such as the general membership, the staff, and the Board of Directors. You learn which are important and which can be ignored through trial and error.
Time boundaries are particularly tricky. Show up ten minutes after the announced starting time for a movie, and you can easily find your seat before the opening credits start. Show up ten minutes late for a play, and you may end up standing in the back with the ushers for all of Act 1.
Similarly: Some cultures are meticulous about starting and ending times, and others are much more relaxed. If you want to find out which you’re in, show up late and see what happens.
Our skill at constructing boundaries helped ancient human species sort dangerous situations from benign ones, but our perceptions can mislead us. William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico asserts that when Tlaxcalan fighters first saw conquistador Hernan Cortés on horseback in 1519, they saw one entity, possibly controlled by the horse’s enormous head.
And boundary setting can be culturally specific. Since the Enlightenment, most westerners (like me) place ourselves as distinct systems at the center of our own environment. But while westerners may hold “the self” to be the basis of reality (with everything else seen as being in relation to it), this is not the only way. Buddhists see the self merely as “a temporary phenomenon, a nonpermanent combination of matter and mental/spiritual functions.” As the Japanese expression says, “Our experience of life isn’t based on life. It is based on what we pay attention to.”
Being open to and aware of fluid boundaries and systems is an essential skill, and seeing these constructs enables you to mobilize energy for change in yourself and others. The more insights you have into the system, the more opportunities you’ll have to choose where and how to intervene, and the more opportunities you’ll have to exert influence and create change.
