Michael made a great point on a recent post, referencing Noel Tichy’s confusingly named “Mirror Test”. In that test, you look at your schedule from the previous week, or other period of time, and see how your time was spent. You say your priorities are, for example, your children. How much time was spent with your children? How much of the output of the things you say you were doing for them actually benefit them? The mirror test is a smart hack to look into your blindspot.
It is a specific instance of a general concept for realigning you to reality. That concept is the cybernetic concept of “The purpose of a system is what it does”. This is quite powerful, and can apply “the mirror test” to anything.
In looking at your own priorities, the mirror test reveals what you prioritize by looking at what you actually prioritized. Elegant. You, as a system, have a purpose. When we say “purpose” we often mean “an ideal purpose”. But you, as you are currently operating, are a system. Not the ideal you that does stretches and calisthenics at 6am before reading wise books and then going to a job that doesn’t have the underappreciating leadership team you currently go work for. The actual you is a system. And the purpose of that actual system – not the one you know you could be, but the system that you are now, that system has a specific output. The mirror test reveals that output. The purpose of you-as-currently-configured is the output you create. Short tempered? The purpose of the system you currently are is to snap at people. Lazy? That is your current purpose.
I keep using “current” as a modifier to help the resistant see what I’m saying, and to give hope to the fragile. It’s possible you can become a different system with a different purpose.
But everything is a system. We understand nature this way – the purpose of a wolf is to catch small animals and eat them, and to enjoy the company of the wolves of it’s pack, and to respect the pack hierarchy, and to make more wolves. The purpose of the aggressive young male wolf is to challenge the hierarchy, and so on.
What is the purpose of a nation. We debate this. We don’t just debate what the ideal nation does, but we often fail to agree on what it is doing. A nation is vast, and information is the dreams someone else would have us believe. We don’t know what it does. But whatever it is doing now, that is it’s purpose.
What is the purpose of your most intimate relationship? What is it doing? That is it’s (current) purpose. It is built to do exactly that.
The point of the mirror test, and The Purpose of a System is What It Does, is to center in the real now, and not the fantasy future, or the now dead past. It’s a beautiful concept.
