Guildcraft as Kintsugi for repairing broken organisations

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as Kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"),[1] is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique.[2][3][4] As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.[5]

Source: Wikipedia

I like the metaphor of Kintsugi to describe what we are doing with #guildcraft in my present organisation. It is indeed golden joinery as we reassemble lost or hidden structures and relationships that were inherent in the broken shards of the organisation but perhaps in a way not obvious to the untrained eye.

Most Kintsugi is broken pottery once in a prior form that has been reestablished into a new whole by the technique. In this manner, #guildcraft is the re-establishment of more naturalistic and productive modes of collaboration without the mediation of a central authority.

Other examples of Kintsugi reveal beauty found in novel rearrangements of shards from more than one source creating something unique.

These are the two elements I will focus on.

Reassembling broken but dormant naturalistic interaction

Breakage and repair as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise. I love this statement. It speaks of authenticity and transparency, of walking boldly towards our biases, of uncovering hidden narratives. Of healing, honesty and hope. This is what gives our #guildcraft movement its bottom-up appeal. It's also why platitudinal approaches where we embrace the latest woo-woo management fads at face-value are destined to fail: they just aren't authentic and pay no heed to where we've come from and what we're about.

Why is the vessel broken?

• Silos built-up over time reflect historic internal classifications, political compromise and point-in-time analysis that don't match the current external competitive and VUCA forces operating on the organisation
• In many disciplines and particularly IT there will be a lag between the state-of-the-organisation and the state-of-the-art. This is in addition to the competing forces for resources and attention characterised by Peter Hinssen as the Day-After-Tomorrow vs. the Shit-of-Yesterday:

• Tensions and ideological disputes left unresolved. Specifically those apparent in the Accidental Empires Pioneer, Settler and Town Planner aspects of an organisation
• Because all organisational constructs are limiting and in one sense broken. The only solution to this are dualistic notions like #guildcraft and to treat the organisational structure as a suggestion
• Organisational and interaction paradigms governed by the Superchicken model of leadership do not work as they suppress natural modes of social cohesion

So how do we fix it?

• Through open dialogue first and foremost. Getting views out there and on the table and creating a psychologically safe space to allow people to contribute to the story. Using "yes and" over "yes but" so we are compassionate rather than adversarial

• Over time: the best Kintsugi pieces take many weeks or months to reassemble in their beautifully reborn form and the same is true with healthy interaction dynamics. And as Niels Pflaeging reminds us in BetaCodex, we must continually "flip" AKA choose more healthy interaction paradigms at least until the transformational behaviour is bedded-in ... and perhaps forever
• Bottom-up, with humility and respect. Hearts and minds need to be explored and aligned. That means letting go to an extent and trusting in people and the power of intrinsic motivation. This might seem scary at first but nine-times-out-of-ten it works out just fine

Here is a picture of the original organisation chart from 1855, produced by Daniel McCallum, general superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad as a way of making sense of solving a particular problem: that of flowing information down the tracks to avoid accidents.

McCallum's graphic is more pleasing to the eye than more contemporary horrors unleashed by PowerPoint, and perhaps a reminder of the fact that form follows purpose.

Looking at McCallum's graphic I like to think of our guilds as a gathering of leaves and twigs from across the canopy.

Creating new structures from fragments of the old.

Because guilds are virtual organisations, new structures can be built, torn down and reassembled far faster with #guildcraft than then can be with HR-driven formal organisational constructs. We form new structures base on loose communities of interest of which we now have many. A good example is DevOp. In a large organisation like our own, many discrete practices have built up and our job is to form a loose alliance to pull them together into a methodological whole that works for existing practitioners and those yet to come.

What should these new vessels look like?

Our guilds are made up of a Microsoft Teams channel and for some a weekly session. We pull together influential voices in our movement, typically people operating at the grass roots. We get the issues on the table and work on level-setting everyone and getting all to contribute while breaking the social interaction ice. With our newfound bond we sense-make to develop a shared vision of what we need, write it up and then work to bring it about. Occasionally but not always senior level support is required and welcome. In some cases progress has been rapid and over a few hours or days, in others it has taken weeks and months. It all depends on the community of practice, the individuals, the topic and the level of alignment.

Using these techniques we can catch-up practices to more closely match the drumbeat of the current zeitgeist of management and technical theory, introducing more organisational agility along the way.

Worth mentioning that a major source of gold to decorate the cracks with is goodwill. Many of us do this work voluntarily because we are motivated to grow the practice. This is what makes the whole thing work. We do it because we want to. Another major source is self-interest: normally on behalf of user communities who work together with central functions to allow the organisation catch up with the latest thinking in the knowledge they will get payback in terms of productivity, typically for a short-term assignment and often one that transfers to them more autonomy.

In this way we are able to heal and celebrate our "precious scars":

Here is a quote from the bottom of the article with my commentary added:

The kintsugi technique suggests many things. We shouldn’t throw away broken objects.

And the same can be said for organisations. And while some may be destined to fail, the human relationships they create and their effect on our psyche can be enduring.

When an object breaks, it doesn’t mean that it is no more useful. Its breakages can become valuable.

When an organisation struggles it invites renewal. The breakages are opportunities for repair.

We should try to repair things because sometimes in doing so we obtain more valuable objects. This is the essence of resilience.

Resilience is the silver lining of under-performing organisations. The trick of transformation is to exploit that resilience and allow the new emergent organisation to be reborn phoenix-like from the ashes of the old.

Each of us should look for a way to cope with traumatic events in a positive way, learn from negative experiences, take the best from them and convince ourselves that exactly these experiences make each person unique, precious.

The secret is to get it on the table so all parties can discuss. This is the simple and effective mechanism we have exploited in our guilds. A good example is with Cloud computing where we have brought central service-providing and governance teams face-to-face with user communities of Cloud services. In this manner, both sides have gained a wider appreciation of the perspectives of the other and an emergent vision has allowed us to move forward as an extended team, siloed no more.

In this manner, our #guildcraft experiment has allowed us to start to harness our resilience and mend our organisation with type-2 leadership, living systems logic gold as this article from Giles Hutchins on regenerative leadership explains:

Note: our own variation works just fine without the optional yoga retreats and spirituality. At the end of the day it is up to you.

A lovely article about Kinstsugi from World Economic Forum:

These dynamics are also in play (and thanks to Christopher Dalton for link):

<Postscript>

Later article on related theme by Tobias Mayer: