Triarchy Press: Changing the organisation

Complexity Thinking

2009-07-09T12:23:00.002+01:00

"Under the new A-level curriculum, it didn't matter how students got there, as long as they got the grade. So what if they couldn't express an opinion of their own, find a secondary source or write an essay without a plan provided by their teacher?... it comes as little surprise to me to learn that undergraduate students are ill-equipped for university, that they lack independent thinking and learning skills." Janet Murray, Guardian June 2009

Crumbs! What future for society one wonders? The habits of thought required for successful innovative intitiatives in a constantly changing environment needs to be encouraged from a young age - that means an education system that values 'thoughtfulness' (learning to be wise) rather than percentages (learning to be wily). Our recent book Adventures in Complexity brings this necessity to light ...

Meanwhile, we can take heart at the work of the International Futures Forum. Their recent pamphlet, Transformative Innovation in Education, offers real food for thought and an insight into the type of conversation and engagement that is needed if children are not to remain frustrated by the present 'dinosaur' type of education.

I'm sure its the policy wonks' machinery that inhibits their ability to make changes and that there is a sound-delay inbuilt into their listening capacity. But society has been trying to tell them, for a long time now, that there is something wrong. There seems to be a faint whisper of change ... still lightyears behind present thinking ...

Imogen Fallows Profile

2009-07-02T11:13:00.009+01:00

Name:
Imogen Fallows

Description/identifier:
A publisher in the field of organisational learning

Contact details:
triarchypress.com
Twitter

Organisation:
Triarchy Press

Brief description of organisation:
Triarchy Press is an independent, author-friendly publishing house that specialises in publications about organisations, the way people work together and how to make things work better.

What first made you interested in learning about organisations?
Through reading Triarchy's publications and proposals I quickly realised that books about businesses and organisations are actually books about people - so they are relevant to everyone's daily life. Learning about how to structure an organisation so that it gets the best out of its staff, products and services requires a deep understanding of how and why people and systems function - and that has benefits in every sphere, whether personal or professional.

Do you have a particular interest within organisational learning? If so, what is it?
At the moment I'm interested in leadership. It's a broad area, but many of the books we publish at Triarchy ask and give answers to questions about how organisations should be led - whether that means making organisations fit for future challenges or looking at the leadership gaps within existing organisational structures.

Which Triarchy publications have you read?...
Almost all of them

...Of these, which would you recommend to a friend, colleague or other organisation?
In particular (and depending on the recipient), The Three Ways of Getting Things Done, Erasing Excellence, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, Inside Project Red Stripe, Organising and Disorganising, The Search for Leadership and Adventures in Complexity.

Have you made any changes to your working practices as a result of reading a Triarchy publication? (If you wish, please include descriptions of the changes and their implications for your work.)
All of the above titles made me change the way I think about my working patterns in some way - For example, Three Ways introduced me to Triarchy theory and the observation that humans have become addicted to hierarchy as a way of organising despite their being alternative (and often more effective ways of getting things done), Systems Thinking in the Public Sector is an effective demonstration of why command and control thinking and target culture is flawed and Adventures in Complexity taught me to see the potential in uncertainty and to consider problems from a variety of perspectives.

What theme/s would you like to see us publish about in the future?
More about Systems Thinking, Complexity and leadership amid today's challenges - new ways of thinking about 21st century problems in an easily digestable form.

Any other comments about Triarchy Press and you?
How can Triarchy reach out to other people and businesses experiencing similar challenges and can we find ways to help each other?

The secret life of organisations

2009-06-30T10:45:00.002+01:00

A complexity approach removes simplistic hopes of an ordered and controllable existence where, if only we had the right ‘keys’ or ‘tools’, we would be able to fashion a successful organisation. Instead, it offers a way to identify underlying patterns of order and indicators for influencing future sustainable practice; it shows how simple recurrent rules result in complex behaviour and that ‘influential interventions’ do not take a neat cause-and-effect path but may generate unexpected outcomes.

The focus of Adventures in Complexity is not so much organisations as the ‘life of organisations’. Author Lesley Kuhn sees organisations as ‘collectives of human activity’ and here describes how complexity theory can be applied in and to organisations.

Complexity theory acknowledges that people are self-organising, dynamic and emergent beings who are capable of discerning thoughtfulness and innovative responses to change both within and between organisations. It argues that sustainability is best served by tapping into this entire pool of potential.

It embraces uncertainty and change. It uses terms like non-equilibrium and turbulence to show that, when systems reach ‘the edge of chaos’, they are most likely to exhibit creative, innovative responses and new patterns and structures are most likely to emerge. In the current unpredictable climate many organisations may consider themselves 'near the edge of chaos'. Yet most will not realise that this is where the greatest potential for success lies.

Lesley Kuhn here introduces the principles of complexity theory in a clear and accessible way through discussion of those concepts and metaphors that are most useful in understanding organisational life. This provides a foundation from which to apply these principles to organisations and much of the book is dedicated to complexity in practice.

Seven case studies, from a not-for-profit to a large pharmaceutical company, examine this sophisticated way of thinking and the application of key complexity metaphors.

fitness landscape – the need for an organisation to act coherently within its wider environment
communicative connectedness – organisations can be seen as existing through conversations between all participants and the nature and quality of those interconnections is critical
sensitive dependence on initial conditions – often referred to as the butterfly effect – small differences to the initial conditions of an organisation can have dramatically disproportionate consequences to the sustainability of the organisation
edge of chaos-chaotic edge – edge of chaos thinking allows organisations to handle change effectively and develop new strategic directions as they flexibly encounter new situations and opportunities; chaotic edge thinking is where organisations perceive themselves to be under threat rather than full of potential, and retreat to rules-based behaviour
attractors – the energies that motivate us in our work; to be aware of and to understand these enables managers to constructively review work practices
fractality – thinking fractally means recognising that the global and the local are embedded in all levels of social practice.

The book has further guidance on how to use complexity – a list of the type of questions that are useful as a starting point for an inquiry, and an action list for managers or leaders who want to enhance organisational opportunities.

For leaders, managers, and everyone who works in or for an organisation, the book offers a straight-forward and immediately practical way of applying what may seem like a complicated theory.

For academics, researchers and students who may be theorising in a vacuum, the book shows how complexity theory can be translated into the workplace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lesley Kuhn is Senior Lecturer in the College of Business at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. For 14 years prior to this she worked at the Social Ecology Centre, an innovative post-graduate oriented transdisciplinary Centre that brought an integral perspective on the self, nature and society and has been active in bringing complexity habits of thought to philosophical and social inquiry and in developing complexity informed ethnographic research approaches.

She is author of more than 40 book chapters and published papers and has led more than 30 research projects as well as being the Guest Editor for special double issue of the prestigious Journal, World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, that was dedicated to showcasing the work of UWS academics in bringing complexity informed approaches to social inquiry.

She is a master of transdisciplinary thinking, with degrees in music, education and environmental science and a doctorate in philosophy. Her hopes are for a tolerant, democratic and egalitarian society where people are aware of how they are structured and categorised by social and cultural dictates, ideologies and the declarations of those who think they have a monopoly on what is right and should be known. She is passionate about protecting and promoting flexibility and freedom of mind and soul along with a capacity for trust, wonder and hope.

Innovation - the threefold path

2009-06-28T12:27:00.004+01:00

In publishing our recent books, articles and audits on innovation, we've researched the subject widely and compiled a huge list of resources. It seems a shame to keep them to ourselves, so we've collated the best of them (see below).

You'll find case studies, books, articles, blogs, websites, self-assessments, business school rankings and more - all on the subject of innovation and creativity.

If you know of others that you would recommend, please let us know (just post a comment).

To view full screen, click the black and white rectangle below and to the right:

Public Service innovation

2009-06-19T12:44:00.003+01:00

A clear and sensible piece by Irene Lucas, Chief Executive of South Tyneside Council, written for the Public Management and Policy Association and reproduced by PublicNet. Here's the precis:

Our Public Services are reluctant to innovate. They are risk averse. Fair enough. They get spanked by the Daily Mail and everyone else for wasting our money when they get it wrong. Trouble is, they're already getting it wrong and wasting money and are getting spanked by the likes of John Seddon. Instead, we must try and cultivate innovation in Public Services.

"I was delighted to participate in the production of NESTA’s recent publication Transformers: How Local Areas Innovate to Address Changing Social Needs. This work represents one expression of a sea-change in the public sector’s attitude to innovation. Central government now needs to catalyse that energy, and give it the space to flourish. John Seddon’s Systems Thinking in the Public Sector powerfully argues that inspection is ‘stifling innovation and improvement’, and instead of being measured on compliance, assessments should be on showing understanding and improving the work we do. Is it now time to say to our partners in the Audit Commission that we should be penalized for the opportunity cost of not innovating, instead of not complying?"

Of Meerkats and Men

2009-06-18T10:57:00.003+01:00

On the RSA blog recently, Matthew Taylor hoped that his readers would be "more responsive to [my post on an advertising campaign using] meerkats than they have recently been to my fascinating posts on public service reform".

Sure enough, the wave of ensuing comments referenced Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Dawkins and memes, affordances, epidemics, Seth Godin and much more. Matthew's response:

So, do I laugh at the brilliant comments already up on this post or cry at how much easier it is to get comments on jokes and adverts than public services and the future of democratic socialism?

I laugh.

And I pledge to write more posts about things that actually interest people rather than reheated versions of the commentariat blather you can read every day in your ‘viewspaper’.

It's the last paragraph that matters. There's no point banging on about dumbing down or bemoaning declining levels of engagement with nice but dull theory. That's just how it is.

So, in the same vein, I know that almost all of you really despise the soundbite and would infinitely prefer to read a 324 page monograph on Systems Thinking and Leadership. But, just in case anyone is feeling frivolous, here's author Bill Tate's take on what's wrong with polishing fish (an analogy for leader development programmes) in a recent audio interview he did for Management-Issues.com.

Audio interview ~ Sample chapter ~ Buy the book

You can also read a sample chapter of Bill's book (it's called The Search for Leadership) here.

Finally, if you insist, you can buy the hardback, the paperback of the e-book here.

[The interview has a nice reference to Simon Caulkin's systems-based argument that looking to individuals to cure systemic problems is a doomed exercise because we live in an organisational economy not an individual economy. Note to The Observer: Axing Simon Caulkin was a bad decision. You'll lose more readers and money than you save.]

Authors of standing

2009-06-15T10:46:00.003+01:00

Congratulations to Buzz Wilms, whose Liberating the Schoolhouse (published by Triarchy under that title for US readers and as Erasing Excellence for the rest of the world) won second place in the Los Angeles Press Club awards last night (June 14th).

The book tells the story of what happened to a failing California High School when staff were given the freedom to take their own decisions, set agendas and act like autonomous adults - and what happened when the command and control regime removed those freedoms.

It's a modern-day morality tale for anyone interested in the distribution of power in organisations.

Congratulations also to John Seddon, nominated to be the UK's Public Services Tzar on the No. 10 Petitions website.

John's Systems Thinking in the Public Sector - welcomed by Simon Caulkin in The Observer and Philip Johnstone in the Daily Telegraph (and they're not the most natural bedfellows) continues to unsettle the UK government and the Audit Commission. It also continues to delight a growing number of public sector leaders who know from experience that targets, standards, 'deliverology', centralisation and back-office warehouses JUST MAKE THINGS WORSE.

Finally, Good luck to Jemima Gibbons (author of a forthcoming Triarchy book on Leadership 2.0) who is standing for election to the RSA Fellowship Council.

Chemical Caterpillars

2009-06-03T22:22:00.003+01:00

Look, I read today - courtesy of LinkedIn - that they've developed a chemical 'caterpillar' that offers a path to electronics-free robots. That's more important than landing on the moon isn't it? Electronics-free robots.

A chemical gel that can walk like an inchworm has been demonstrated in a Japanese robotics lab.

Scientists have made a colour-changing, motile gel by combining polymers that change in size depending on their chemical environment. This is based on an oscillating chemical reaction called the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. The result is an autonomous material that moves without electronic stimulation.

In case you're wondering, an inchworm is the caterpillar of the geometer moth. It lacks the prolegs of other Lepidopteran caterpillars in the middle portion of the body, with only two or three pairs an the end. Equipped with appendages at both ends of the body, a caterpillar will clasp with its front legs and draw up the hind end, then clasp with the hind end (prolegs) and reach out for a new front attachment - creating the impression that it is measuring its journey.

Oh, and here's an image of spiral waves in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.

Auditing your business innovation processes

2009-05-27T11:12:00.002+01:00

Here's a shameless plug for our business innovation audit, using the magic of an iPublish widget. It could be the first of many, many such widgets...

Systems Thinking and Organisational Leadership

2009-05-19T20:24:00.003+01:00

From Systemic Failure to Systemic Leadership

Although there’s been a long-running debate about whether leadership can be taught, most people would say we know good leadership when we see it. Well, it turns out we were wrong.

In what is destined to become the new leadership ‘bible’, leadership guru Bill Tate takes us back to basics to examine our assumptions about leadership and organisations. As elegantly as a fishmonger filleting a Dover sole, he uses Systems Thinking to expose a number of key misconceptions:

Separating leadership from leaders
Although it is now generally accepted that leadership is not tied to elites or authority, it is still often associated with a senior management position and hierarchical thinking.
Bill reminds us that most leaders spend only a little of their time leading and that leadership can be a vital aspect of people’s jobs anywhere in the organisation.

Separating leadership from people
Even spreading the job of leadership around more widely, still leaves the focus of leadership on individuals.
Bill asks us to put that deeply ingrained approach to one side, and think in a radically different way. He sees leadership activity as grounded not in the individual but in the organisation. Drawing on Systems Thinking, he calls this approach systemic leadership and defines it as follows:

“Improving the way an organisation is led, based on understanding the organisation as a system, focused on the interdependency between leadership and the organisation, concerning how leadership is applied, managed and developed.”

Separating leadership from development
When an organisation identifies a need for ‘stronger leadership’, the first thing to emerge is always an agenda for developing people.
Drawing on his long experience, first as head of HR Strategy at British Airways and then as a consultant, Bill shows how the usual defective thinking about leadership and people has infected the way organisations think about improving leadership. The discussion, he says, typically starts with ‘Let’s have a leadership development programme’, rather than starting with a questioning process that begins with the organisation’s needs and goals.

Separating development from improvement
Conventional thinking means that leadership can safely be left for individual managers to sort out and for HR to develop. Collapsing the leadership agenda into personal development is where the quest for improved leadership in organisations starts to go wrong.
Bill invites us to shift from a ‘development’ to an ‘improvement’ perspective. Asking the question ‘How can we improve leadership in this organisation?’ opens the door to a wider variety of interventions and a wider range of targets for improvement action.

Separating the organisation from the business
The word ‘organisation’ glosses over an important distinction between the business and the organisation. The business is essentially outwardly focused and profit driven. A company’s business model answers the question ‘How will this company make money out of what it is doing?’. By contrast, the organisation is the set of internal arrangements at the service of the business.
Bill insists that a clear distinction must be made between the two before leadership can be properly considered.

Separating the organisation from its people
If the business is to receive the leadership it needs, the organisation has to provide more than a context.
Bill asks us to see the organisation not as a passive vessel waiting to have leadership poured into it but as an active player that has to contribute to leadership if it is to receive its due from managers. The connection between leadership and its host is symbiotic, with the organisation proving a vital partner both to leadership and improvement, and to making use of leadership action delivered by managers.

In an article written to coincide with the book's publication this week, Bill Tate examines our reactions to the systemic failings witnessed in a number of recent and current UK news stories:

* MPs' expenses
* the killing of Baby Peter
* the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by the Metropolitan Police.

They provide a timely backdrop to his incisive analysis of the problems that underpin our current approach to leadership in organisations.

And they highlight the need for a new approach, which he explains lucidly in his new book.

To see the document full screen, click on the rectangle icon which is top right in the box below. Click the X as usual to revert to normal viewing.

For details of Bill's new book The Search for Leadership, visit TheSearchforLeadership.com

Mythogeography

2009-05-15T16:49:00.005+01:00

Early pages of the widely-anticipated new Phil Smith mapuscript.

To view it full screen, click on the black and white rectangle below (it looks like this..........

More on heterarchy

2009-05-14T10:26:00.004+01:00

I came across Ross Dawson talking about heterarchy here. It's a good piece and reminds us that Voltaire had it a while ago with 'If you wish to converse with me, define your terms'. Here's an extract:

The definition for heterarchy offered by Stephenson in her footnotes is “an organizational form somewhere between hierarchy and network that provides horizontal links that permit different elements of an organization to cooperate whilst individually optimizing different success criteria.” While this is a useful definition, this needs to be understood and accepted by others before the argument for heterarchy can proceed to action. A more commonly used definition is that used by Carole Crumley, who suggests that heterarchy is “the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways.”[1] This evokes both the reality of multiple levels, and the communication between levels that is critical in transcending the dysfunctions of pure hierarchies.

It is valuable to remember that organizations are intrinsically systemic. Systems theory and its progeny have helped us to understand how some characteristics of systems and organizations can be self-sustaining. As such, shifting from hierarchies to heterarchies can only be done effectively by viewing the interrelated entities as elements in a system, which very likely will incorporate mechanisms that make structural change difficult.

The talk of heterarchy is taking me back to Gerard Fairtlough's book on The Three Ways of Getting Things Done (hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy) - but this mention of systemic organisations leads neatly to Bill Tate's new book on systemic leadership in the systemic organisation.

Anyway, Jon Husband at Wirearchy quotes Ross Dawson (above) and goes on to talk about the problems/opportunities posed by large organisations in a networked world:

Anarchy, it seems, is less attractive than rigid hierarchy - and heterarchy requires constant tinkering and fussing via negative feedback loops. We have had experience in addressing these issues before, but not in ongoing, always-on real time everywhere. To where will it all lead we don’t know - but there’s a good chance that this time it will be substantively different. Homo Collegiens is a new term that I have come across recently … hmmm.

What continues to fascinate me is whether, how and when the critical mass of larger organizations that our modern society knows so well will begin to address honestly the clear evidence that a fundamentally new set of conditions - interconnected smart people and increasingly smart software - demands fundamentally different responses to their environment of interconnected customers and employees.

Oh, the signs have been around for a long time - QWL initiatives in the 70’s and 80’s, learning organization theory and practice in the 90’s, coaching, flattening organizations, turning the org chart upside-down, Emotional Intelligence, self-directed work teams, pushing accountability down the organizational chain of command, boundaryless organizations, and on and on, and on …

And yet … for each of these initiatives, there has been an equal and opposite reaction towards … more control, increased hierarchy, a growing divide between winners and losers. It’s as if we collectively don’t know how or can’t trust ourselves to operate in self-organizing, self-regulating, wise networks that will do what need to get done.

And this, I think, is the deeper message I am taking from Steven Johnson’s book - that the self-organization, the changes to the meta-rules of how humans work together in purposeful action and systems, will happen despite the best efforts of the commanders to effect their will.

It all depends on where you look at it from - 10 feet up, 10,000 feet up, 100,000 feet up or a million feet up. If we continue to remember the profound impacts of an order-of-magnitude change to societies around the world due to a profound shift in the means of distributing information and knowledge made available by the printing press … then the emerging changes to us and our social systems due to the gobal wired interconnectedness will, I think, inevitably lead to an age of wirearchy - a dynamic n-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, credibility, trust and focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.

This will be the first age where we are truly, at the meta level, governed by the feedback loops that we create, both consciously and unconsciously. We will be organized for, and governed by, the dynamics of championing-and-channeling rather than commanding-and-controlling.

I believe we are seeing this unfold in front of us, daily. Generally, the people at the top don’t like it one bit.

As Fairtlough rightly says, the hegemony of hierarchy is harder to shake than one might expect and as Alain de Vulpian, social anthropologist and commentator observes, the tendency towards flatter, fairer self-organisation is always matched by an equal 'tropism' towards more hierarchy and control. I'm not so sure as Jon that the goodies will win.

we heart scribd

2009-05-01T20:04:00.002+01:00

Like a beautiful launderette, scribd does the fructifying stuff with our smalls. Here's the preview of Bill Tate's fab Innovation Audit, which you can buy a printed version of here, or read online for just $25 here.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu audit selfassessment

On wisdom and metal detectors

2009-02-20T13:15:00.008Z

If you’ve ever owned a metal detector, you’ll know that the skill lies in deciding where to look and not in wielding the thing. (Where have all the metal detectors gone? They used to be everywhere – beaches, parks, national monuments, unprepossessing fields in East Anglia.)

The same goes for hitchhiking - it used to be possible to snort contemptuously almost daily at hitchhikers standing hopefully at roundabouts or on dangerous bends. (Where have all the hitchhikers gone? Smoking is about a million times more dangerous than hitchhiking. Sleeping is probably more dangerous. But everyone gave up hitchhiking, almost overnight, without a government campaign or an advertising ban or anything. Of course it was a meme thing.)

Anyway, when it comes to wisdom, among the last places you might think to look would be organisations and governments. But think again:

Julie Allan (co-author with Gerard Fairtlough and Barbara Heinzen of an excellent book on storytelling in organisations) is now in search of wisdom in organisations. In a recent article she compared some 18 definitions of wisdom, noting that recent thinking on the subject has tended to stress the importance of cultural and societal considerations. Which, incidentally, is pretty much what’s happening in every discipline – we’ve gone ecological. It’s the context, stupid could be the mantra of the 2000s. [Google it and you’ll find Paul Saffo proposed it in Wired magazine 1994 as a catchy apothegm for ‘ten years from now’. Good man.]

If you’re interested in organisational wisdom or would like to read more about Julie’s research, you can read her article here.

That article of Julie’s is one of a growing number on our website. Three years ago, Gerard Fairtlough wrote about Triarchy Theory (the 3 ways of getting things done) and Cultural Theory (the 5 ways of existing in society). His original article offers a brief introduction. One of the building blocks of Cultural Theory is Mary Douglas’s Grid and Group typology, which maintains that our behavioural characteristics can be mapped on two axes – one which measures more or less externally-imposed, formalised regulation and the other which measures more or less active membership of ‘bounded groups’ where our behaviour is determined by the group.

This bewitching theory can lead us in all sorts of directions:

Back to Julie Allan and Wisdom. Her article includes a method of mapping Corporate Wisdom, again with two axes. One axis has the individual at one end and the corporation at the other (related to Douglas’s Group axis), while the other has sophia at one end and phronesis at the other. Phronesis is practical, applied wisdom and sophia is to do with discernment and universal truth. Julie’s map and the Cultural Theory map, it seems to me, both offer interesting ways of assessing any work group - in terms of motivation, inclination and behaviour.

On to Michael Thompson and his latest book on Cultural Theory. If you’ve missed the fuss, Matthew’s blog on Cultural Theory and the current financial shambles is here, while the book’s web page has links to Michael talking to Matthew Taylor at the RSA and to a recent lecture of his on the subject.

Across to Alain de Vulpian, whose lifetime’s work has been studying sociocultural change – how we have come to think and feel differently about school, work, families, politics, sex, shopping, the lot. He observes that we have scampered from a First Modernity of mass consumption to a post-1968 Second Modernity characterised by a rejection of the more formal and hierarchical social institutions (church, party politics, trade unions) to a wired, networked, empathically-attuned Third Modernity. This Third Modernity could deliver the kinds of self-propagating wise governance that the world needs or end in disaster. Read his book to find out which is more likely! Alternatively, there's an excellent article by him here (in our article collection, of course).

Round the back to Gregory Bateson, whose Steps to an Ecology of Mind places him as one of the first modern thinkers to squarely place the emphasis on the individual operating and the environment where everything that happens is co-created by both. Of course, Siddhārtha Gautama had something to say on the matter as well. Anyway, I briefly discussed Gregory Bateson’s influence on Deleuze and Guattari in Inside Project Red Stripe. One idea that appealed to the latter was this:

Sovereignty has two poles: the magician-king, who uses capture, bonds, knots, webs and nets (so, feeling and intuition), and the jurist-priest who governs by treaties, laws, pacts and contracts (analysis and logic). Officially, business is done on the basis of analysis and logic and run by jurist-priests; in practice, it is often run by magician-kings operating by capture and ensnarement. Wisdom probably requires both.

Which is quite close, on reflection, to Mary Douglas’s Group and Grid – the group ensnares and manipulates, while the grid prescribes and proscribes.

Professor Howard Doughty, who was a student of Bateson’s and who reviewed the Red Stripe book, sent me a note he’d written about Bateson. It concluded with a quote from Mind and Nature: "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me and me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction, and the backward schizophrenic in another?"

With a skip and a jump to the IFF and the brand new edition of Ten Things To Do in a Conceptual Emergency. ‘The new organisational structure is a pattern of relationships… characterised by its density of transactions with the external environment…' where, as in de Vulpian's description, society becomes a social network and where we need to hold multiple, paradoxical views simultaneously and give up on the myth of control. Just published by Triarchy, you can read it online, here, free or buy a printed copy here. Warning: it's rather a beautiful object as well as an insightful piece of thinking. You find it wants to be boprrowed.

[PS The multiple, paradoxical views thing takes us to Perrine Bailleux’s website which starts with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s words: "La haine de la contradiction est la structure ontologique de la bêtise." Catch her on the first Wednesday of every month at Le Chat Noir, 76 rue JP Timbaud, Paris 11e, at 9.30pm. Go.]

[PPS - wordle courtesy of www.wordle.net].

Innovation: Not just 7, but 10 Lessons

2009-02-10T22:39:00.003Z

In April 2006, when its Internet Strategy Group met to discuss ways of improving the company's presence on the Internet, The Economist was doing very nicely, thank you. Global circulation had just passed one million; Roll Call, a sister magazine, had become the most widely read publication in the US Congress; and new titles had been successfully launched in China and India.

All in all, it was a time when most companies might have been happy to build on what they'd got. Instead, The Economist approved a proposal from their CIO, Mike Seery, to recruit a team of five people plus himself from within the Group, remove them from their current jobs, and give them £100,000 and six months to launch an innovative web-based product, service or business model.

The team began work in January 2007 and encountered all kinds of problems and challenges. Many would be immediately recognised by any innovation team. The solutions they found were often ingenious and the lessons they learned could be applied in thousands of businesses around the world.

Bravely or generously, or both, The Economist team invited me into their offices to observe them at work over the next six months. Here's the very condensed version of what I saw and learnt. A fuller (but still limited) version is online here. And the book is here.

10 Lessons for Innovation Teams: from The Economist 10 Lessons for Innovation Teams: from The Economist Andrew Carey Inside Project Red Stripe is an inside account of a six-month innovation project at The Economist. The book highlights nearly 100 dilemmas that the team faced as they set out to do something dramatically new on the web.

This brief summary picks just ten of those dilemmas to give a glimpse of the project and the book.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business eBooks innovation teams project red stripe

Wow, head spin

2009-01-08T20:50:00.003Z

No but listen. Really.

The #1 (in the UK that's No. 1) most read blog post on the Harvard Business Publishing website in the whole of 2008 was called Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too.

In a minute I'll give you the link, but listen. The blog post (or blōt, as we might say) contains some immortalia. Here's one:

This is a company that’s bursting with personality, to the point where a huge number of its 1,600 employees are power users of Twitter so that their friends, colleagues, and customers know what they’re up to at any moment in time.

When did the phrases 'being a power user of Twitter' and 'bursting with personality' ever belong in the same sentence?

Here's another:

Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head spin. Zappos is one of those companies.

That's OK, but now see the comment from Vicky H:

What an awesome article and an inspiration for all of us in business.

Business needs special people, who continually raise and keep the bar at a high level.

It is these innovative thinkers who are the trail-blazers, who after having acquired success with their strategy, will be replicated by businesses for years to come.

In one sentence, I was able to pick out the following set of keywords: original - strategy - determined - execution - transparent - thinking - head spin.

That's it. Here's the link.

Oh, and remember, be careful out there. Business needs special people and needs them to stay alive.

Grief costs billions

2008-11-28T12:56:00.001Z

Followers of this blog (Hello Mum) will know that I'm becoming fond of Harvard's Daily Stat. The latest factual soufflé reported as follows:

About 4 million American workers experience the death of someone close to them each year. According to the "Grief Index" published by the Grief Recovery Institute Educational Foundation, employees tend to hide their grief at work, and the effects of this hidden grief cost U.S. companies an estimated $75.1 billion annually.

Now I've looked at the Grief foundation and it seems to do admirable work. But these statistics. Every day business 'loses' staggering amounts of money to things like this. I've just checked. According to the Torygraph, Australian business loses $2 billion a year through unclear communications. While British business loses $2 billion a year because of spelling and grammar mistakes. British business loses over $13 billion a year because of staff absenteeism. According to the Equal Opportunities Commission, stress costs the UK economy £12 billion a year. Every year, U. S. businesses lose as much as $120 billion because of power reliability problems, according to Batteries Digest. And every year, U.S. businesses lose $32 billion dollars, and 132 million work days, because of employees' premature deaths that are associated with cardio-vascular disease.

Where does all this money go? To whom do they lose it? Presumably my competitor profits if I lose a lot of money because my fat colleague dies? But what about the bad grammar? How does that work? Well, some pedantic old gits apparently boycott companies that send out leaflets with apostrophes in the wrong place. Presumably they then go any buy from someone else. So, every year British business gains over $13 billion because of bad spelling and grammar. Doesn't it?

Anyway, how much money does business lose each year to employees writing blogs? Or reading other people's? How much money does it lose because of staff going to the lavatory or breathing? It scarcely bears thinking about.

My mother's dead by the way.

Somewhere between millennials and the slugmonster

2008-11-24T09:58:00.002Z

I get the sogennante Daily Stat from Harvard Business Publishing. It's funny and alarming in equal measure. The latest told me that:

"67% of Gen Y'ers (21- to 29-year-olds) and 65% of X-ers (30- to 39-year-olds) agree that a 'formal appearance on the job is important for career success'". This was designed to undermine my presumed prejudice that Gen Y are 'spoiled'. Well, I don't have that prejudice as a result of a) reading Sally's report and b) rearing a couple of millennials who are obviously perfectly unspoilt in any way. But I do wonder about these 20 year-olds who are worried about looking smart on the job. Where can they be? So I checked the source. Aha. They're all citizens of the USA.

More joyfully, the source of this Daily Stat blether turned out to be JWT Intelligence. They 'identify changes in the zeitgeist in order to convert shifts/challenges into compelling opportunities for our clients'. I'd like to mock, but that's exactly what Alain de Vulpian was doing for 40 years and his conclusions and JWT's aren't so radically different. They're just spoken rather differently. Here are two, for example, from JWT, which are also written about by Alain in very similar terms:

People are less concerned with conformity and more interested in self-expression. Consumers have gone from wanting to blend in to wanting to stand out. Cell phones, iPods and laptops have helped create personal worlds where media is immediately relevant only to the individual.

Today, “me” is eclipsing “we.” Key developments in business, technology and society are ... and driving a wedge between traditional communities and the individual: the rise in telecommuting, the fragmented media world and personal everything—from computers, mobile phones and music players to trainers, coaches and shoppers. We examine the rise of the “New Antisocial” and the impact of this trend on the market spaces in which brands play...

But what I love is the technique that the copywriter at JWT has found for capturing our attention. It has to do with with picking a couple of extreme views or instantiations of popular prejudice or big names and then suggesting that somehow everybody else occupies a kind of dull mediocrity between the two. Like this:

Somewhere in between the two pop culture extremes of Seth Rogen's free-spirited slacker in Knocked Up and real-life dot-com entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg is the Millennial at Work.

Somewhere in between the pop culture extremes of the rehab-renouncing, filthy-mouthed Amy Winehouse and the refined, polo-playing Prince William is the Millennial at Work.

Let's try it for ourselves:

Somewhere in between the two pop culture extremes of a terrier-faced German pope with an irritatingly whiney voice and Bond's latest conquest, the ineffably demure Strawberry Fields is Iran's President Ahmadinejad.

I think it works nicely. But that's a diversion. The thing that struck me this morning was provoked by the fabulous What in the hell blog, which talks about das vogelfreie proletariat - a Marxian term that simultaneously describes and suggests alienation, poverty, lack of self-determination or personal power as well as freedom from constraint, birdiness and the ability to make some productive personal choices. Presumably somebody is saying that the current economic debacle, taken to its proper conclusion, could lead to us all finding our vogelfreedom again or, alternatively, make us all more malleable puppets of the capitalist politico-economic system as it emerges salamander-like from the flames. And presumably someone else is saying that the current debacle, like 9/11 was therefore the conscious creation of a bunch of mad Jewish Bush noeconmen aiming to steal all our houses and consumer goods and then sell them back to us after the crisis is over. I can't be bothered to scour the conspiracy theory blogs to see if this is true. Anyone know?

Ten Habits of an Anally Retentive Bookseller

2008-11-20T11:53:00.003Z

Talking to the IFF about their wonderful Ten Things to Do in a Conceptual Emergency (scroll down when you get there), I'm struck by a couple of things.

1. Their claim that "the anchors of identity, morality, cultural coherence and social stability are unravelling and we are losing our bearings. This is a conceptual emergency" is, of course, spot on. This is what Alain de Vulpian talks about at length in his Towards the Third Modernity, as he catalogues the decline and fall of those institutions, hierarchies and socially programmed deferences that defined our societies until recently. While Alain clearly sees this as the springboard for all the exciting new opportunities that social networkers, internet entrepreneurs and radical philanthropic activists (to name a few) are seizing , IFF (who love the future too) see it as an emergency. Of course it's both.

2. Numbered lists really do help because they reintroduce the finite into our lives. Wandering around the interweb is always existentially unsettling because you know at some level that it could go on for ever. It's why the new activity of booking the perfect holiday online is so gut-wrenching. Knowing that there are only ten of these things means I can breathe out. Like knowing that I'm only going to have to hold this horrendous meditation pose for another 183 seconds.

3. The excellent Mike Gene has a point when he says, "People are either selling products or ideology. In fact, just because someone may come across as calm and knowledgeable does not mean you should let your guard down and trust what they say". It helps me see the interweb as a sort of intellectual pick-pocket zone. Keep my wallet in an inside pocket and my manbag securely buckled. See his ten signs of intellectual honesty. S'fun.

Organising and Disorganising and financial turmoil

2008-10-20T16:57:00.017+01:00

Clearly, in the landscape of organising and disorganising, disorganising has the upper hand these days. That's why last week's publication of Michael Thompson's book Organising and Disorganising: A Dynamic and Non-Linear Theory of Institutional Emergence and its Implications is so timely. The book was written a little while ago (unlike the subject of Andrew's last post) and so, while anticipating the turmoil of recent weeks in a general sense (for which, see Chapter 7 on Surprise and its Invisible College), does not specifically address the credit crunch. But the framework Thompson lays out is invaluable for coming to grips with the situation and for envisaging workable solutions. He explains how there are exactly five fundamental modes of societal life: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individualistic, the fatalistic and the autonomous, each of which is a way of disorganising the other four whilst depending on them for its existence, or it would have nothing to organise itself against. A flexible and dynamic organisational theory emerges which exposes the unfortunate consequences of any single socio-cultural mode (or pair of modes!) seeking to dominate the others. The fragility of the banking system so dramatically exposed in recent weeks is a consequence of the individualistic voice of free-market enterprise drowning out all other voices except for a faint whisper from hierarchy. Hierarchy had delegated its fundamental responsibilities to the market itself when it gave itself the task of enforcing market dominance; the market depends however on hierarchy enforcing the law of contract between firms and if that law or its enforcement is too weak, as in the worst days of the Wild West, the Wall Street crash of 1929, or now in the global financial sector, the market collapses.

The question remains: how could the market players and regulators be so blind to what was happening and to the risks involved? Cultural Theory clarifies this by revealing that the socio-cultural modes are reliably sustained by specific myths of nature. The modes in turn support the myths that sustain them. The individualistic myth is that of nature benign: nature's resources are effectively boundless. From this point of view, if we understand that nature may include artificial structures created by the market itself, there was no risk involved. It was fine to allow an opaque shadow banking system to build up and come to depend on huge and unrepayable loans. This shadow banking system however hid risk so profoundly that when a chunk of it collapsed, all inter-organisational trust collapsed with it. The shock of this undermined belief in the individualistic myth and allowed the hierarchical myth to come to the fore. This is the myth of nature perverse/tolerant: nature is controllable, but only within limits, which can be determined by the experts. It thus became imperative to bring the market to book. The problem was that the limits had been grossly exceeded. The shock of realising that the risks had been misjudged undermined the hierarchical myth and made room for the myth of nature ephemeral: nature is fragile and her resources are strictly bounded. This myth belongs to the egalitarian mode, so often ignored in political discourse. The egalitarian voice is now expressed as that of the (mythical) taxpayer, whose financial sacrifice is invoked to restore balance. Even now, the voice is only faintly heard, since it is being invoked at second hand by the Governmental hierarchies.

If enough has been done to return the markets to basic functioning, we may expect to hear little more than complaints from the real taxpayer (that is, from people who embrace the egalitarian mode of life when they contemplate government spending). However, if the market continues to disintegrate, we can expect the voice to become dominant and even take to the streets. I will not discuss the remaining modes of fatalism and autonomy in any detail, but they are essentially passive. The fatalist myth is that of nature capricious: the future cannot be foreseen and so no strategy can be used to meet it, while the autonomous myth is that of nature resilient: nature can show the face of each other myth. This myth belongs to the hermit who minimises transactions rather than maximising them as with the other four modes. To view the world through the prism of cultural theory (as we are now doing) requires the perspective offered by the autonomous myth.

To return to Thompson's book: through a range of examples and analogies drawn from his exceptionally broad experience, he shows how best outcomes depend upon an essential argumentative process between these five socio-cultural forms, especially between the three active ones. I don't think this argument is going well when it comes to the credit crunch. The dominant players (hierarchy and markets) still seek to suppress the egalitarian voice, yet as nature increasingly turns out to be aligned with the egalitarian myth, its message becomes ever more important.

The message from the master bankers of the West appears to be that while the banking and possibly other sectors need to change, to be more responsible, no profound change needs to happen. We are going back to basics, but fundamentally it is business as usual. Even the language of recessions and depressions begs the biggest question of all, which is whether perpetual growth under a system of capitalism is possible, never mind desirable. George Monbiot makes this point very well in his recent article for the Guardian. Thompson suggests that a more workable (that is, clumsier) solution to the banking crisis is exemplified by banks such as the Grameen Bank.

Michael Thompson has done an excellent job of making the richness and subtlety of Cultural Theory accessible to a wide audience. The book is written in a lively and engaging style and is full of fresh insights. Organising and Disorganising criss-crosses the conventional divisions between complexity theory, ecology, sociology, anthropology and political science, weaving an intriguing and fertile theory of systems behaviour which emphasises dynamical change over static classification. It is still available from our bookshop at the pre-publication price of £18.

Time and Tide

2008-10-01T18:38:00.002+01:00

Time is doing funny things. The last time I posted to this blog (3 weeks ago), we had just received an impressive manuscript, which we were planning to publish as a pamphlet. We got our first printed copies at the end of last week. Which is fast for a book publisher, I think. Of course it's not fast for a newspaper publisher or a blogger.

The time thing is this. We don't publish the book until 10th October to give the book trade a little time to find out about it. But, in fact, the book trade likes a minimum of 3 months to find out about a book. (Waterstone's wanted Christmas 2008 book submissions in by April this year, for example). And journal publishers are in another league altogether. I received a Call for Papers today from the journal Leadership. The deadline is March 2009 and the special issue of the journal will be published in August 2010, to 'allow for the reviewing process'.

And this is in the week that I discovered that more people now contribute their opinions online on a range of products/services (including clothes, music and groceries) than seek other's opinions. How do you get writing properly refereed and meet the demand for 'publishing on demand'?

Anyway, I'm very happy with the pamphlet. The Forward March of Children’s Justice Halted exposes the government’s extraordinary and shameful handling of children’s justice in England and Wales. As District Judge Nicholas Crichton says in his Foreword,

“Edward Lloyd-Jones has pulled together the strands of what now seems to be a systematic dismantling of all that has been achieved in the last 17 years. He raises questions which need to be urgently addressed.”

And it's only £5.99. Get a copy and give it to a Minister.

Systems Thinking and the Law

2008-09-10T14:34:00.003+01:00

Last week we received a draft of a pamphlet written by Edward Lloyd-Jones - a solicitor who specialises in representing children and parents in public law care proceedings. He said he sent it to us in part because of John Seddon's book on Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, which he had read recently.

Edward's paper does the same sort of demolition job on successive Labour Governments' handling of the legal system as it relates to children who are thought to be at risk in their families and whose situation is being assessed by the local authority - in case they should be taken into care.

This area is a minefield. Anyone who remembers the uproar about satanic ritual child abuse in the late 1980s and the Butler-Sloss enquiry would surely agree.

So it's profoundly shocking to read about what has happened in recent years. Here are two short extracts:

Having enfeebled the system of family justice during its first decade in power the government has recently produced a series of linked measures which may well have the effect of subverting the system introduced by the Children Act 1989 and of returning matters to the pitifully inadequate pre-existing system. The first wave occurred in October 2007 when a system of fixed fees was introduced for solicitors in public law children’s cases which could mean that essential work running into thousands of pounds will not be paid for. This may well prove ruinous for the small firms within which the majority of specialist children’s solicitors work and serve only to further hasten the exit of specialist lawyers from this area. The Legal Services Commission has also recently announced proposals to further reduce the fees paid to barristers for such work. At the same time the government changed the legal aid rules so that publicly funded parties could no longer be called upon to share in the costs of residential assessments of children with their families. The consequence is that the entire cost of such assessments now falls upon local authorities. A prerequisite of a successful application for a residential assessment has often been a positive viability assessment carried out by the proposed specialist assessment unit. Such viability assessments are also no longer publicly funded; this is a major injustice for children and their families especially where local authorities oppose such assessment. These changes have been strongly criticised by the Family Justice Council, as was noted by Mr Justice Bodey in a recent case when he also observed that: “It is unsatisfactory, if not invidious, that courts charged with taking serious and sensitive decisions about children, where an under-informed decision could on occasion spell disaster, should have to choose between (a) over-burdening an already over-stretched local authority or (b) denying a residential assessment to a parent for whom it represents the only hope of avoiding the loss of his or her child to adoption”.

The measure, however, which really takes the biscuit is the extraordinary increase in court fees. These are charged to local authorities in public law children’s cases and came into force on 1^st May 2008. Previously the local authority paid a fee of £150 when issuing a care application in relation to a child. The new fees scale brings the total cost of proceedings to £5,025, an increase of well over 3000%.

If you'd like to read more, look out for the pamphlet, to be published at the end of this month. Called The Forward March of Children’s Justice Halted, it makes salutary reading.

Gerard Fairtlough and the Triarchy Group

2008-07-03T14:18:00.003+01:00

I was enormously moved by the memorial service for Gerard last Saturday. And, though I was initially disappointed at the relatively small attendance at the symposium on Sunday, I also realised that the group was just the right size to get the ball rolling for the future.

With people travelling from far and wide - LA, Washington, Brussels, Paris to name four - to be at the memorial weekend, there was also a palpable energy and enthusiasm to do something more, to take forward Gerard's thinking, to develop it and spread it widely, under the banner of something like The Triarchy Group.

While we wait for the dedicated e-mail group, blog and forum, or whatever, to be put in place so we can talk to each other - two things:

If you weren't able to be there on Sunday but would like to be part of planning what happens next, do get in touch. Post a comment to this blog or e-mail me.

I don't think we want to try and copy TED, but I do find some genuinely inspiring talks on there and this one from Benjamin Zander I like in particular, because it seems to be a classical musician's introduction to Systems Thinking and because classical (and not so classical) music was very close to Gerard's heart.

The model - distributing and circulating the presentations free of charge (which is how I'm allowed to reproduce the talk above) - but charging huge amounts to the people who attend, seems a wonderful one. I'm certain Gerard would have approved.

Interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource

2008-07-01T06:08:00.003+01:00

"A member of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard, the chair of the Academica Sinica's advisory committee on the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Tu Weiming is currently interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for the emerging global community."

I'm indebted to Stephen Meng for introducing me to the work of Professor Tu. Here, for example, he writes about multiple possible modernities, the need for the US to stop teaching and start learning, the suggestion that liberty as an intrinsic value cannot generate a humane society without distributive justice, and much more.

In short, Professor Tu has identified two apparently contradictory diagnoses of the present state of human affairs: one the one hand, 'an optimistic assertion that fundamental ideological divides no longer exist' and, on the other, 'a cautionary note that cultural, especially religious, differences are the major sources of international conflict'.

This is precisely the dichotomy that Alain de Vulpian notes, though Vulpian is rather more inclined to see scenarios for the future of the world fitting into one or other of these two categories (peaceful and optimistic - violent and pessimistic). Tu, by contrast, suggests that different ways could easily develop in different regions (which seems hard to imagine in the face of current globalising tendencies, but who knows what Peak Oil may change in that respect?).

Anyway, I think they'd both agree that it might be a good idea for the individualistic West to stop deriding the collectivist East for their psycho-social backwardness, when the former got us into the present mess and the latter might help us out of it.

Lives devoted to pure pleasure

2008-07-01T05:21:00.006+01:00

I'll shut up about Gen Y shortly. As soon as I turn off the Google Alert, to be precise. But I couldn't resist the latest bit of drivel from Greer McDonald of New Zealand's Dominion Post. From yet another recently commissioned piece of research we learn:

Marriage, house and babies? No thanks. Generation Y 'party animals' would rather splurge money on five 'lifestyle pillars' in pursuit of the good life and in an attempt to dodge traditional commitments...
In case you're wondering, and I reckon you'll probably be all aquiver to know, the 5 Pillars are: 'the hedonistic pursuits of entertainment, fashion, sport, travel and music'. Well blow me, these Ys know how to have fun don't they? In my day we used to have to make do with hitching to India, Bob Dylan concerts, football, finding laughably fashionable clothes and going out on a Friday and Saturday night. Or all week if possible. Oh, but dang me, that's travel, music...

Anyway. It gets better. According to the report, Greer tells us:

[Gen Y] expressed their rebellious ways through spending more time outside work hours socialising...

Wow. Bet they could show Jimmy Dean a thing or two.

The thing is, it ends up sounding like I've got some sort of vendetta with Gen Y., when my only complaint is about the dismally thought-free journalism that produces stuff like this.