Verbing the nouns of business agility

Posted on by Mike Burrows

(This post is closed for comments but it is discussed on LinkedIn here)

Silke Noll, who is 1) the Agendashift community’s resident expert in all things intercultural, and 2) a member of book 5’s review team, said something interesting to me this weekend:

Are the findings about knowledge organisation simply due to the fact that Western language encourages the use of nouns, which results in categories of objects, and Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, which the consequence that it is relationships that are emphasized?

Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a “subject-prominent” language. … For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, it is something that is undertaken in concert with others or is a consequence of the self operating in the field of forces.

Silke was quoting Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. I haven’t read it myself, but it’s next on my list! We went on to discuss book 5’s deliberate use of verbs in the present continuous tense, or “-ing” words, to you and me. I observed that the corresponding noun forms can be a trap. Organisations act as though it’s enough to have certain things – a strategy and an execution capability, for example. Having seen a former employer lose 50 billion dollars that way – a catastrophic loss from which it was fortunate to survive – I think I may be allowed a degree of scepticism.

So… how does this “verbing” thing work?

Execution or, if you prefer, delivery, becomes delivering, discovering, renewing – three verbs for the price of one or two nouns! It’s not enough just to deliver; you need to be discovering what you should be delivering, which includes but is not limited to discovering how well the things you deliver actually perform in the real world. And if you are going to be delivering new things, you’ll need new capabilities. I could have used “developing” for that, but because in relation to products and software it means something more specific, “renewing” it is.

Now that the value-creating work (sneaking an “ing” word into a noun phrase) of that delivering-discovering-renewing space is seen as something more present and continuous, yesterday’s strategy won’t do – at least not for long. It becomes adaptive strategising, and its job is to ensure that the organisation (or organisational scope – this model is beautifully fractal) never runs out of options in a game whose rules may be changing. Not just reactive, “responding to change”, but proactive, prospective, anticipatory, making things happen.

The team that strategises together stays together

For any organisational scope that is meaningful enough to its participants that they identify with it, some of that strategising will be devoted to maintaining and sometimes challenging and even changing that identity (on the change part, think of the pivot as an extreme example). “The team that strategises together stays together”, one might say. A self-governing scope that is serious about sticking around goes further: it manages the balances between thinking and doing, planning and executing, and so on, even the three-way balance between delivering, discovering, and renewing. Key to long-term sustainability is adjusting those balances as conditions change.

Balance is no less important in the delivering-discovering-renewing space. You might follow world-class practices in the value-creating work, but if multiple people are involved and you are not coordinating effectively, much of their effort will go to waste. Neither though do you want people serving best-of-breed coordination systems (tools, processes, etc) that don’t work for them. It’s much the same with organising, which is what connects the adaptive strategising space with the delivering-discovering-renewing space; it’s counterproductive to organise around goals and plans in ways incompatible with capability and capacity, or for that matter those coordination systems. In fact, between the value-creating work, coordinating, and organising there is a three-way balance to maintain, four if you include the customer. Small wonder that in a single endeavour there can be multiple, contradictory views on what actual progress is being made, how everything is performing, and what its most important issues might be (which is one reason why a clear customer focus can be transformative).

Between the two “spaces” I’ve mentioned – delivering-discovering-renewing and adaptive strategising – balance is mostly accounted for by self-governing (that’s its job), but that’s not quite the end of the story. The capacities that an organisation or scope has for communication and decision-making are finite. To assume perfect information flow is to risk bad decision-making and further taxing those limited capacities. Whether strategy-related or delivery-related, decisions need context. It’s crucial to escape the routine for contextualising – think going to the gemba, managing by walking around, and sense-making conversations of various kinds. That’s central to mutual trust-building; this third space is responsible for ensuring that the other two understand each other so that the more trustworthy organisation can use its precious capacities effectively.

I could go on! In the relationships between and across different scales of organisation there are several strands: structuring (the work, the organisation, and by implication, its business environment), translating (between the different levels of abstraction that apply up and down the organisation), reconciling (between the strategies of related scopes), and more – connecting, participating, identifying.

Verb forms aside for a moment, the deeper magic here is a relational model. Things have relationships, they relate to each other. For better and for worse they constrain each other’s behaviours. Over time, they co-evolve, perhaps becoming structurally coupled to the point that they can’t be changed independently. More even than the things that they relate, relationships can be described as being in healthy and productive balance, departures from which likely indicate some kind of dysfunction. That’s powerful: if you’re at a loss to work out what’s wrong with something by looking at what’s inside, now you have several more perspectives and your range of potential solutions is greatly expanded. You might not even need a definitive diagnosis; mere possibility may be enough motivation for change.

But those “ing” words do matter. Think less about what you have and more about what is happening – what must be happening, because in this descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) model, everything I have described really must be there. They might not be all working as well as they could, their relationships might not be entirely healthy and productive, but if enough people identify with an organisational scope strongly enough to care, all of those things will be there. Start noticing them and their relationships. Talk about them. See what happens!

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (aka book 5) is due in the coming months, i.e. soonish. Watch this space!

(This post is closed for comments but it is discussed on LinkedIn here)

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