Blogtalmud: is organisational transformation intired of itselfe?

Blogtalmud: I take someone else's blog and intersperse commentary, insight is unfurled flaglike, sometimes accompanied by sparks, smoke, or something else. On the olde table-sawe today, Dave Snowden's recent blog on organisational change titled, intire of it selfe.

Exploratory is good, work-in-progress is good also. Organisational change can certainly be complex. Being a Praxis Bold as Love type of guy with more of the practice than theory under my belt I am happy to learn. As for health warnings, some of my blogs definitely could do with some of these. Particularly this one. As far as basic science relating to constraints within which a theory can be developed, my guess is it must deal with the contradictory forces at work both necessitating the transformation and preventing it from happening. My take:

• Necessitating: market, technology, growth, wider context
• Preventing: mindset, leadership, learning/skillset deficit, organopolitical inertia, including the ever-important flogging of a dead value chain dilemma cf. Autopoiesis

Hmm, I am Anglo Saxon (with a little Dutch) but agree it would be a grave mistake to think of organisations in these terms. It leaves so much of the fun on the table. I believe people mostly work within their limitations largely as a result of habits, and this goes for organisational change practitioners as well I imagine. Being one of those myself, in my own Gonzo fashion, confers certain advantages in talking about this topic. My head already hurts with talk of consultants, uncuttable atoms, politics and the utility of the unit of work: the individual. Dave is deliberately conjuring a dystopia here, and one that pays scant regard to team spirit, Agile or otherwise.

I like the invisible hand of Adam Smith connecting with the subconscious of Jung and enjoy mischief. Here is my mash-up of this concept (invisible hand not shown):

Now Dave has asserted that the subconscious does not exist and need to study this more before giving my view. What is clear to me as an organisational change practitioner is that, regardless of terminology, what is "below the table" is a potent force in transformation, specifically of the preventing force kind. This chimes with Jung:

Bang on. Here are some paths to transformational enlightenment predicated making the darkness conscious AKA putting hidden things on top of the table where they can be seen and discussed:

• Power, politics, conflict of interest, fear, agency, psychological safety, ego
• Buzz killers, energy vampires, toxic leaders and zero sum games
• Cognitive bias, unstated (and false, over-simplified) assumptions
• Representation, diversity and inclusion, sociocracy
• The emergent value chain e.g. we are never going to be able to patch servers better than AWS, Azure, CGP etc. so let's not try to maintain a dead past on life support

Parsing this so consciousness in the mind and body, less so in my swivel chair but never say never. Yes like the point about a lot of autonomic stuff happening in the background, as previously discussed, there is a lot going on here that frankly hacks down genuine transformational behaviour in its tracks. As Dave points out and Ben Ford asserts, these biases are important cognitive hacks that allow us to function at a lower energy gradient (the mind's lazy classification short-cut. My guess at a Cynefin analysis is we are applying sense-categorise-respond when we should be applying read-the-signs-panic-meltdown.

The novel and unconnected also plays its part, and is heavily subjective. For one transformation, another education and a third patience. I like using simple terms to explain complex topics. Ran a recent Cloud for Beginners course and used bicycle ownership to explain the NIST framework. Helping people transform their understanding of the arcane with reference to the humdrum and everyday.

Protect-access control = use bike lock

As Dave points out aesthetics and abstraction are fundamental to human thought and by using well chosen metaphor we are able to conjure meaning by lighting up the neural pathways of the familiar, extending into the unknown discipline in a similar manner to polymath chunking. I also buy the point about relationships matter more than things. This is the basis of my emerging discipline of #guildcraft as a psychosocial organisational transformation paradigm. Note this bears some resemblance to the Participatory Narrative Enquiry work of one of Dave's collaborators, Cynthia Kurtz.

Another relationship to dwell on is the false relationship between the clauses of our unstated assumptions. This the territory of the still fiery through dead Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt and his Evaporating Clouds ??????:

(and notice his self-questioning, brow-beating of audience and immaculate storytelling).

'Don't do unto others what you don't want others to do to you. This is all of Judaism. Everything else is direct derivatives. Go and study ... One word definition for ToC: Focus'

Goldratt was a discerning student of Pareto, who stated in 1906 that 80 percent of the impact comes from 20 percent of the elements.

This is a great angle on simplification, lower energy gradients and focus that, as a budding apex complexity predator, I find myself returning to again and again. And Goldratt goes on to say:

'The amazing thing is that people ignored what Pareto himself was highlighting. And Pareto himself bothered to say the 20/80% rule is correct only when the elements are not dependent on each other. But when you have interdependencies, the situation itself becomes more extreme.'

This chimes well with Dave's point on (inter) relationships. To get back to evaporating clouds:

This is a technique I use a lot in my complexity savant sort of way. It is not something I learnt, just the way my mind works: getting the unstated assumptions out on the table and pulling apart the clauses with my marlinspike until novel combinations can be identified that satisfy more parties. A type of infinite game, and faith that what is below the surface contains the answers. My recent example from earlier this week: breaking the change management logjam between modernisers and traditionalists by stipulating that discretion of advanced notice of change is dependent on being within an error budget:

Thus incentivising teams to keep within theirs and enjoy the benefits of less red tape. As Charlie Munger said (thanks Ben Sangwa for the introduction):

Dave talks of strange attractors. My own experience of organisational transformation is more around what I would call low energy attractors, those tropes whose draw outweighs their utility but whose gravitational pull is hard to escape, trapping the unwary in their dismal orbit. In my recent Enterprise DevOps transformation work at Centrica I have ITIL in this category, and even the notion of "standard process". They both stand in the way of reimagining the value chain, allowing too many opportunities to refuse the call to adventure. Reimagining new value chains is also an area where I have started to use Wardley Mapping.

Communitarianism, seem to have stumbled into these with two pizza teams and guilds. Also the work of "Maverick!" Ricardo Semler who, lest we forget, ruthlessly fired his father's management team getting them to clear their desks and leave the same day before installing the instruments of his communitarian experiment. It is not all hippies and mediation in the world of self-organisation. I also appreciate the entanglement comment relating to each other and the planet and heed the warning, calling to mind Malthus. My own recipe for "from enlightenment to entanglement" is to build communities called guilds, lowering the energy levels required to engender trust and using this to usher in an accelerated cultural renewal.

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Not into the idea of banning words, particularly ones I have associated with my new livestream show--lol. More interested in noting that people will exploit, bluff, recuperate, misunderstand, over-simplify, over-complicate, exaggerate and bullshit. And, very occasionally, refrain from these things. Change the word(s) and the same caveat applies. It is not a word problem. That being said, there is a need to change the frequency, to stay ahead of the curve.

Agree with the constraint point.

• Constraint number one: the human condition
• Constraint number two: time, as 90% of it will be used up unravelling constraint number one.

My own shortcut here is to derive my own mental map of who has the capacity to imagine both the old and new paradigm simultaneously. It tends to be rather small so I generally use my fingers. These are my transformational allies. The idea of continuous feedback, improvement is sound, though more radical approaches are also required.

Yes to informal networks and a nod to Niels Pflaeging and Organisational Physics. One of my own blogs on this topic. And use guilds--see my published works. The typical health barometer reads excess fear and a lack of psychological safety and trust. Cultivate this or go bust. Google good here.

Dog to vomit style I will mention guilds again. They dissolve eventually and what remains are higher levels of trust, a smarter network (Harold Jarche good here) and shared mental model.

Constraints, ecosystem and scaffolding, kind of makes sense. I think it also requires a focus to use Goldratt's term, a schwerpunkt ?

Sideways from therapeutics is interesting: my model for the Centrica guilds was group therapy sessions attended in the 90's. I wanted to recreate the intimacy and psychological safety. Perhaps the lack of any other spin helped avoid the concerns Dave is raising.

On the Aristotle/Jung point it calls to mind a card from Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies: when faced with a choice do both. I read Modern Man in Search of a Soul a couple of years back and enjoyed it. Am not so versed in Aristotle, but often quote his Poetics point about stories as retold by Andrew Stanton from Pixar in his stone wall story:

Yeah, relationships are important. Trust is important, listening and receptivity important. Less is more.

The "higher state" I aim for is putting other people's success over my own. Simple as that. The gold standard for servant leadership and an important transformational tool. Many people struggle with this. That being said I do see people who "get it" in terms of mindset, e.g. Public Cloud, DevOps, and those who do not. Oftentimes it is familiarity and immersion in the new rather than a "higher state", turning their yuck into a yum.

I'll end with a quote of my own "I am become VUCA, destroyer of words."

Agree, Dave, it is time for some new stories.

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Useful transcript of Dave's thinking:

Recent blog by Harold Jarche: