People are multi-dimensional.
I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times.
I’m 42 and I’ve been all of these things at different times.
"These aren’t immutable aspects of your personality. They’re more categories for how you approach the job of software engineering - you’ll move around between quadrants as you change your approach to work, for all the usual reasons."
Probably could make a garmin watch function to plot "stress level" vs "body battery"
unless you're talking about the stock measure, in which case it is less contextual (but sorta), but very real and sought after.
That is, this is an instance of a diagram that you'll see repeated over and over in business texts; I personally call it a "fourbox" but I suppose "business matrix" is more common and "quadrant analysis" or something like that is even more descriptive. The idea is that you identify two different things, graph those as separate axes, label the quadrants and then tell a story about the four different labels. The Eisenhower matrix is the usual example (one axis is how close is the deadline, near vs far, the other is how much is lost by missing the deadline, a little vs a lot. The immediacy is called "urgency", the stakes are called "importance," things that are important-and-urgent should be done by you now, things that are important-not-urgent should be scheduled, things that are urgent-not-important should be delegated to someone else, and everything in the last quadrant should be safely ignored).
A "true" fourbox in my view should tell a particular story, which I call "cynefin flow" after a different iconic fourbox that told this story compellingly. According to this flow, there should be motion in a circle about the center of the axes, except that it gets interrupted at one transition between the quadrants and becomes stuck in a U-shape, unless some outside stimulus pushes it over that edge. So there is a motion I -> II -> III -> IV around the quadrants but then things get stuck in IV unless an outside stimulus pushes it back into I.
The cynefin story for the Eisenhower matrix ends with things getting stuck in not-important-not-urgent, so that is your IV quadrant. Of the two stories you can tell from there, the more compelling story is that, "Things that are important but not urgent, become important-and-urgent as the clock runs down, but then the deadline will pass and the pain becomes a sunk cost and they become unimportant-and-urgent, only to eventually fade to being unimportant-and-not-urgent, until an external stimulus acts to suddenly attach additional stakes to them and make them important again." So you have a bill (I), that bill comes due (II), you miss the deadline but still have a chance to pay it (III), and finally it gets sent to collections and impacts your credit (IV). And it sits there until either the debt expires or you're trying to get a new house, in which case it becomes Important again (I) to clean up your credit history.
Similarly with the BCG matrix, which is a fourbox with your capture of a market on one axis, the market's growth rate on a separate axis. Then the businessfolk carefully write "cash cow, question mark, star, dog" on each of these four quadrants. But what makes it a true fourbox is that your "question marks" that you invest in become "stars" as you capture their markets, then become "cash cows" as growth dries up, then become "dogs" as the market itself stagnates, until some external stimulus creates the opportunity for growth and more question marks again.
OP's diagram has "work intensity" on one axis, and a sort of "idealism-vs-pragmatism" axis for the other, and they have identified the intense pragmatist as naturally falling under a Cynefin flow into being a coasting pragmatist as they burn out. Presumably this is the accumulation point and those are the III and IV of the system, in which case some external stimulus causes coasting pragmatists to become coasting idealists, at which point they will naturally become intense idealists as their aspirations come to the fore, and then naturally become intense pragmatists as the organization fails to reward their idealism?
As for why it is a part of my definition of what makes such a diagram "correct" (as opposed to 4 random labels applied to irrelevant axes), it's kind of because that's the only interesting story that can be told in those 2 dimensions?
So suppose you had an hourglass shape of flow; then if you conditionally invert one of the axes (invert y when x is negative) you get a conventional cynefin flow. So if you were faced with a case where intense idealists were turning into coasting pragmatists, it suggests that you would want to just choose a different axis for one of the sides. Say you wanted to keep idealism-vs-pragmatism, but now you have to describe something that's "intense work if you're an idealist, but coasting if you're a pragmatist." And you might call that "mission work" or "evangelism" or something, acting out your most fundamental values. If you choose that as your axis, the one side inverts and the hourglass becomes a conventional fourbox (or 2x2 as a comment above calls it).
Curious, did you write all this out for this comment? I appreciate it either way because I was truly skeptical at first but kept reading thru the end.
In theory text-to-speech is a significant accelerator even though I'm a touch-typist? I haven't found an AI that can actually properly mirror my style and hit the basic points that I'm interested in in a way that I can say "eh, close enough."
But the idea that every 2x2 is a state space that has some kind of attractor path in it only covers a subset of such plots. There are lots of other kinds that don't fit that paradigm, e.g. binary action vs binary outcome, diagnostic test pos/neg vs condition true/false, etc.
And yes, I agree, I am trying to exclude a large class of 2x2s. I don't consider "false positive, false negative, true positive, true negative" as a more insightful classification of the four quadrants than just saying "test=positive condition=negative" etc., and the point of such a diagram is not to tell a story to your management. (In this particular case it's usually to point out that by making the test more or less stringent, you have a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives.)
Similarly, a 2D graph can also be used to depict a cost-benefit analysis for a bunch of different options, to try to emphasize "I think this is a low-cost high-benefit remediation strategy compared to those other strategies", I don't regard this as a "proper" 2x2, it's just a persuasive tool.
Believer - When you first join the company and they sell you on the vision
Grinder - You work hard for a year or two to make a difference
Coaster - You realize you wont get promoted, they company will always have no money on the bonus pool, except for the execs. And that the company will go on by sheer force of momentum, not by your grinding.
Grifter - You see the company hire friend after friend of execs, friends' kids as interns, friends' wives as Executive Directors, execs' girlfriends as "Chief of Staff" - and you realize you need to get something too, so you use company time to form your own startup.
Now you repeat the cycle, except you are the person at the top and someone else goes thru these stages.
They do this because no one wants to work at their startup. How do you see this being solved then?
The rest gets the cozy positions and does nothing.
Not really. Startups cannot really operate without doers, and most doers want something out of the experience -- equity, money, promotion, etc.
I've seen two start-ups (one Series A SF startup with bigname VCs) which promoted VC-frields' kids while the doers waited and waited.
In one case, the "child" was 25yo, became manager 6mo later, became Director 6mo after that, became senior Director 6mo after that. Some facebook stalking revealed the relationship, some photos at Lake Tahoe.
Eventually the startup collapsed because there were so many senior folks w/o real experience. I saw the same individuals follow leadership to a new company, which also had a huge implosion.