It’s a week since the print edition of Wholehearted was released, and I’m finding time to blog again! I’m experimenting with releasing them first as LinkedIn articles, and here are the first two of several planned:
In both cases, and before anyone gets the wrong impression, they expand on things alluded to mainly in the footnotes. Wholehearted is not a philosophy book and neither is it demanding in that way. But writing it, I found it helpful to be forced to think about things more carefully – not to add a ton more detail, but to make sure I wasn’t making any unwarranted assumptions. If that means fewer “huh?” moments for the reader, that’s all to the good!
A favour to ask
If you’re reading Wholehearted or have already finished it, can I ask that you rate it on Amazon (five stars would be lovely!) and perhaps leave a comment? Social proof is everything in this game! And it would make my day 🙂
The issue of ratings aside, few surprises. The print edition is outselling Kindle – quite comfortably in fact, explained perhaps by the e-book’s head start on LeanPub. The UK, US, and Germany are its biggest markets, in that order, the same order I had them on Wholehearted‘s landing page.
Two weeks to go
Wednesday 30th sees the beginning of the spring cohort for LIKE – Leading in the Knowledge Economy – Wholehearted as participatory training. Book here:
Save 15% with coupon code BLOG15, and contact me for other codes (government, healthcare, education, non-profits, NGOs – that kind of thing, also bulk discounts). Don’t stress over your ability to make all 7 sessions – that affects one participant already, and there are ways to catch up.
[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]
A week ago today, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation was released in print, and I thought it might be interesting to expand on some of its philosophical influences. Given that I describe the book as exploring the fascinating (and dare I say somewhat politicised) intersection between systems, complexity, and dialogic/generative organisation development, why not start with the concept of ‘system’?
In Chapter 1, I wrote this about them:
Calling [something] a ‘system’ indicates nothing more than that its function is fulfilled through multiple interacting parts … . The word should not be taken to imply the design of some outside authority; as we will see, these things can come together and change of their own accord. In our multiple-perspective approach, it is not even essential that participants agree on their composition or their boundaries.
Out of context, some might take issue with that word ‘function’. By it, I meant something like “what it does”, alluding to Stafford Beer’s famous dictum, “the purpose of a system is what it does”. But if that’s our starting point for an appreciation of systems, it introduces problems of its own.
Addressing one possible objection, my friend Matt Lloyd improves significantly on POSIWID with “the purpose of a system is what it does based on the perspective of the observer” [1]. That’s an important change that aligns with Wholehearted’s multi-perspective approach. However, we remain in problematic territory if Beer’s ‘purpose’ carries the implication of intent, something that my quoted paragraph is at pains to avoid. I’m inclined to treat his use of that word as a rhetorical flourish and a playful tease (I’ve been guilty of that myself), but it’s important to keep in mind that while some systems are designed and implemented with deliberate intent, most aren’t.
To help avoid that unsafe assumption, sharp-eyed readers of Wholehearted may notice the influence of philosopher Alicia Juarerro [2], and from a more continental tradition, of assemblage theory and other concepts from New Materialist philosophy [3]. (And let me pause here for a moment to express my gratitude to the friends I’ve made while studying them together!) For a little taste, see Ian Buchanan’s Assemblage Theory and Method [4]:
Concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not simply fix a label to something we think we already know about. For Deleuze and Guattari, the critical analytic question is always: Given a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?
Taking those various sources together, let’s expand that question into an approach that begins with something other than purpose and the process by which it is fulfilled:
We begin with some specific situation, the effects it produces, and how they are experienced
We then look to the assemblages of things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or by their narrative or explanatory power affect each other [5] – contributing to the situation and our experience of it by constraining each other, activating or suppressing certain tendencies
For anything that might fall into the category of “a label [for] something we think we already know about”, we increase our confidence in their reality by accounting for their emergence
One interesting and widely observed example of a situational and emergence-producing tendency goes like this: rewarding interactions tend to get repeated [6]. What constitutes ‘rewarding’ may vary widely between individuals, but still this tendency contributes to the formation and maintenance of social relationships and larger social structures. Inside an organisation, those informal networks and the organisation’s formally recognised structures and processes interact with each other. Together, they affect how each person experiences the organisation and the possibilities that they imagine for it. That in turn affects their preferences and choices, and thereby what interactions get repeated!
Within this complex dynamic, organisational forms and the flows of material and information can be understood both as products of that process and also as participants in it, the point being that they are not the only possible starting point for inquiry. One has to start somewhere, and it’s understandable that these are common choices, but let’s face it: confronted with that complexity, it can’t hurt to try some alternatives. Indeed, I argue in Wholehearted that if your goal is to tap into what the book calls the organisation’s ‘adaptive capacity’, you might want to start elsewhere.
Back now to Chapter 1, and to one of several ways to arrive at three key systems highlighted in my previous post [7]. The situation we begin with comprises the following: the organisational scopes with which participants each identify, the value-creating work of those scopes, and the fact that this work is not in such complete chaos that any sense of identity is lost. What then constrains that value-creating work to the extent that it has some coherence? There are very many answers to that question, many of which we can divide into two groups:
Those that have some coordinating effect, helping in a general sense to keep the work within safe and effective limits of operation (and perhaps helping also to make certain interpersonal interactions easier and more rewarding)
Those that have an organising effect, in terms of what the work is currently organised around and guided towards (and also perhaps to motivate new social structures)
That division may seem arbitrary, but it works, it receives support from multiple and diverse sources, and there’s no denying the reality of the detail involved. From that initial system, the value-creating work, we have identified two further systems, coordinating and organising. These are the names [8] I give to what Stafford Beer called Systems 1, 2, and 3 in his Viable System Model [9], the first three of six. This is the model reconstructed bottom-up in Wholehearted as the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a descriptive model of the digital-age organisation and scopes therein. Then, and situationally: How do we experience each of the mutual relationships between those systems? Can we imagine them being healthier and more productive? Taking that further, how might we and other stakeholders experience them in the ideal? What stops that?
That’s quite a turn! What looked like analysis has become something generative, a different way for groups to explore this rich and complex space, to see and articulate new possibilities for it, and to identify focuses for change. It’s using the model as a framework for inquiry, much more open than “What’s your process?”, “Explain the design of your system of work”, or “By what principles and with what intent was your system of work designed?”. If you 1) allow that different people experience those relationships differently, and 2) give them the opportunity to make new sense of them together, you might be surprised at how much can be achieved without the formal aspects of organisation and process being documented. Those aspects can (and do) look after themselves until some specific topic of conversation brings them to the foreground. What’s important meanwhile is that participants will be identifying some real challenges and/or exciting opportunities that they are motivated to engage with. Surely that’s worth something?
[2] Alicia Juarerro, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (2023) and Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (2002)
[3] Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2019)
[4] Ian Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method: An Introduction and Guide (2020). This one isn’t referenced in Wholehearted – it’s the next book for our reading circle, and I haven’t finished it yet!
[5] “Things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or their narrative or explanatory power affect each other” – Juarerro and DeLanda emphasising things whose existence we can make certain of, Buchanan placing more emphasis on how we experience them.
[6] Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1979)
[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]
Where is the complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, the VSM-inspired [1] model that’s central to my new book, Wholehearted? That might seem a strange question to ask, but complexity is an issue for all organisations, and if the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is to be an effective lens on yours, the issue must be engaged with.
Take, for example, Chapter 1, Delivering-Discovering-Renewing (or session 2 of LIKE). How can its slice of the model say anything interesting when it has only the following four elements?
The value-creating work – the “doing” part, if you like
Coordinating – coordinating between participants (people or teams, depending on the level of scale you’re thinking about) and over shared resources
Organising – organising around shared commitments and in some desired direction
The business environment – users, customers, suppliers, competitors, and so on
First of all, there is complexity in the relationship between the work and the business environment. Analysis takes you only so far; probe the environment (by delivering something new, for example), and you can never be certain what you’ll get back, which is why delivering and discovering go together. Likewise when it probes you!
Next, there’s the sense that “virtual” deliberately adaptive organisations (or, if you prefer, “potentially viable” systems) can pop in and out of existence at any time, the product of a process that is emergent and self-organised. If you see some new challenge to the organisation or some new opportunity that’s bigger than you can deal with on your own, you will need to coordinate and organise with others in ways that do not necessarily coincide with pre-existing structures. What you’re experiencing there is a social aspect of organisation aligning with the model (and to that extent, validating it), and it’s an important way in which complexity gets contained to the benefit of the wider organisation.
Then add the effects of scale. As I have hinted at already, the model works for any level of scale – subteam up to team, teams-of-teams and bigger up to the whole organisation, and other ad-hoc or cross-cutting structures. Skimming over the details here, this implies that there must be some interesting structure internal to the four elements above, different strands in the relationships (not necessarily hierarchical) between different levels of scale. That might sound merely complicated, but when you allow for that virtual activity and its potential for knock-on effects higher up the organisation, things get truly complex again. An adaptive organisation both encourages and learns from this activity, some of which may be a signal that the organisation’s more stable structures aren’t a good fit for its challenges, i.e. that it is set up to meet its challenges less well than it could be.
And back to those participants (people, teams, or larger structures) that need to coordinate and organise together. Are their respective commitments coherent? Likewise their respective senses of progress? Whether it’s through many bilateral conversations up, down, and across the organisation, fewer conversations with wider participation, or some combination, that process of reconciliation takes time, and the world moves on meanwhile. And who can be certain of where those conversations will lead?
Finally, and in some ways most importantly, there’s the simple truth that every participant experiences all of this differently. There is no unifying picture that can hope to describe it all. Let’s embrace that! Let’s give it voice! In Wholehearted, we use the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation not as an encouragement to draw concrete representations of the organisation’s formal structures but as a framework for generative conversations and other forms of productive dialogue [2]. Different colleagues – perhaps from different parts of the organisation – can understand things differently, but shared concerns will quickly reveal themselves, and with those, perhaps some underlying organisational constraint. Already we have motivation for change, and likely ideas for making it happen too. Ultimately, that’s what Wholehearted is all about!
That’s just one chapter’s worth of model, covering roughly half of its main elements. Add in Adaptive Strategising and Mutual Trust Building (the overlapping “spaces” described in Chapters 2 and 3), the “space between” described in Chapter 4 (exploring those inter-scale relationships and their strands), the “organising without reorganising” of Chapter 5, and the constraint-based perspective offered by Chapter 6, What Lies Beneath, then, yes, there is plenty of scope for complexity. That is a good thing. Your organisation has it, and you need to engage with it. You’ll need also to invite others into that process, and a shared framework for those conversations will make that very much easier.
___
[1] VSM here referring to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, and the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation being a ground-up, complexity-friendly reconstruction of it, scoped to the digital-age organisation.
[2] See also Organizing Conversations (2024) and Agendashift (2ⁿᵈ edition 2021)
What was it? How did it go? What next? Where next?
What was it?
A three-day, in-person training, Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which brings together roughly half of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum:
Day 1: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – exploring what it means to lead in a transforming organisation, learning how to develop and pursue strategy in the language of outcomes and with high participation
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is my 21st century take on a 20th century model, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. Fittingly, a fractal model of organisation meets a fractal model of engagement, the former approached in a relational and constraints-based way, the latter replacing the engineering approach more typically employed. These two aspects combine to make something accessible, complexity-friendly, and practical.
For an added bonus, Leading in a Transforming Organisation has by design enough experiential content that with some additional online learning it can serve also as an alternative to Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F). At least a couple of participants attended with that purpose in mind.
How did it go?
A small sample of the overwhelmingly positive feedback:
Relevant to anyone with leadership responsibilities
A helpful journey through the neglected responsibilities of leadership – with helpful tools to attend to those responsibilities
A full learning experience – relevant, effective, great to share with others
Building on a journey throughout, in a practical, visual way
Can clearly see how this would apply to our organisation
This is the Leading with Outcomes masterclass
There were things I would change – in fact on day 3 we tested an impromptu change to how we finished each “chapter”, a change that I have since made to the materials for day 2 also. Quicker, more impactful, and more clearly setting off the two “interludes”, those being the opportunities to practice classic Agendashift exercises such as Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle, 15-minute FOTO, and various ways to (per the second slide above) “Organise the strategy”.
I was pleased that after some post-London rework, certain themes came out much more strongly:
The value in a bottom-up understanding of organising – not that it doesn’t also work top down, but a bottom-up understanding is essential if you want to go with the grain of emergence and self-organisation or to promote those at non-trivial scales
The question of How might we increase our decision-making capacity? came up repeatedly. Important again for reasons (i) of self-organisation (ref McCulloch), (ii) because the time will come when you don’t have enough of it, and (iii) because it reframes in an interesting and positive way concepts such as reducing waste (Lean) and minimising cognitive load (Team Topologies)
The importance of context – not only in the senses (i) that it is folly to impose solutions from foreign contexts unquestioningly, or (ii) that context affects relationships, but (iii) in the sense that our delivery work and our strategic decision making will both suffer for lack of it – almost inevitably if we rest more than we should on formal structure, agreed process, and established communication paths
As anticipated in previous posts, Agile coaches were very much in the minority. Our hosts were the University of Manchester (a big thank you to Andrea Place for organising), several of the participants were members of staff with leadership and/or leadership development responsibility, and on day 1 we were joined by a senior leader from another university. It was fascinating to see the models, tools, and exercises applied not to a technology organisation but to a highly respected institution that celebrates its bicentenary next year. I find it very hard to believe that a process-based approach – process meant here in the Agile or Lean sense, not the OD sense – would have been anything like as successful.
What next? Where next?
With the event still fresh in my mind I updated the materials over the weekend. There are corresponding changes to be made to the shorter Adaptive Organisation Workshop, and they include changes to the What Lies Beneath string of exercises, whose blog post I have updated for reference already.
I won’t be re-recording the two-part online Adaptive Organisation module just yet (see Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy below for links). The existing version is still quite new, none of my most recent improvements invalidate in any way what’s there, and it’s more urgent that I re-record the much older Inside-out and Outside-in modules. Not only will it be good to realign those with the newer material, it will let me retire the old learning management system and thereby improve the Academy’s onboarding experience.
I’m hoping to run the three-day in-person event at least twice publicly in the UK next year. Very likely in London, and having taken it north to Manchester, I’m also looking at doing it somewhere between Bournemouth and Brighton on the south coast. Mainland Europe would be good too – Germany and/or Scandinavia seeming the most likely destinations. If you are interested in any of these options or any other (public or private), and especially if you can help get a group together (it doesn’t have to be large), let me know.
I intend to do the abovementioned 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop in person a few times before I offer it online, in both cases only privately. Accordingly, introductory pricing (with further discounts for public sector, non-profit, etc) remains available until the end of January, possibly for delivery at a later date if you get your order in soon enough. Unless a longer trip can be made worthwhile, I’m looking to do it in the UK or in European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airports. If you’re suitably located and your organisation could use an organisational strategy exercise soon, there’s an opportunity here not to be missed.
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:
Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.
To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.
At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.
With a week to go to the Manchester training, let me mention a recent (post-Melbourne) update to the Constraints Club exercise. As you may recall, this forms part of the string of exercises described in some detail in the blog post What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints), which I have updated too.
For full context, read that post. Here though is the relevant slide, to which I have added the question “Out of what does that emerge?”:
About the Manchester training (see Upcoming events below), this is probably my last opportunity to mention the following:
1-day, 2-day and 3-day tickets available. Use BLOG20 for 20% off, and ping me if another discount might apply. There will be NHS and university staff attending – they and other public/educational/non-profit employees get at least 40% off.
It is not its primary purpose, but I should mention that as described on the event page and below, it offers a path to Authorised Leading with Outcomes Facilitator and Trainer also.
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:
Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.
To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.
At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.
The immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation workshop
And closely related to that:
Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta
Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation, Manchester
New experience/practice sessions begin next week
1. Announcing the immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation Workshop
This new 1-day workshop takes the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module (two days of training when done in person, three days when taken with Foundation) and dials down the training dimension to make it all about the conversations your organisation needs to have with itself.
It follows much the same structure as the training:
Introduction
Delivery-Discovery-Renewal – value-creating work and how it is coordinated and organised
Adaptive Strategising – keeping us in the game, strategising and self-governing
Mutual Trust Building – addressing the formal organisation’s deficit in information and decision-making capacity
Between and Across Scales – examining the relationships between scales of organisation
Organising at Human Scale – promoting adaptation, innovation, and learning at all scales
What Lies Beneath – dealing with organisational constraints
Points 1-5 above each correspond to a section of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment, and we’ll be working with that, making this a thorough health-check for your organisation. Per this recent blog post, the final part of the workshop takes it all forward into action, via some very interesting new tools for identifying and visualising organisational constraints.
The material has already been made available to authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitators and trainers. For myself, I am pleased to offer it in the form of a private, 1-day, in-person workshop. I charge a fixed rate for anywhere in mainland UK, and I make things as easy as I can for European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airport also. Outside those parameters – further afield, online, or spread over multiple days – let’s see what we can work out.
2. Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta
I have already mentioned the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module on which the new workshop is based. This second announcement relates to its presentation in the form of online, video-based, self-paced training at the Agendashift Academy.
Following on from Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale (v2.0 beta), I have released the first chapter of Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales (v2.1 beta). Still to come in part II: two more chapters and an “interlude”, one of two windows into the in-person Leading in a Transforming Organisation. The beta tag will disappear when I’ve released all the videos and done their captions (still in progress for part I) and student workbook. Part I will at some point be re-recorded at version 2.1 or later but there is no great rush to do so – the two parts remain compatible.
Part I develops the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a model to describe any organisational scope at any scale (or many/all such scopes all at once!). Part II pays attention to issues of scale:
Relationships between scopes at different scales – between team and team-of-teams for example
The difficulty with which organisations adapt as scale increases
Identifying and managing organisational constraints
3. Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Manchester, 14-16 November
This will be my most diverse group yet at a public training. Thanks to staff from the NHS and two universities (three if you count former staff), it’s quite possible that consultants, coaches, and trainers won’t be in the majority. An experience to savour I think!
New this time: with some additional study, this event allows prospective trainers (not only facilitators) to bypass Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); further information about that on the event page.
The material (shared with Adaptive Organisation parts I & II) can be considered well-tested now, even a joy to teach! Between London, Melbourne, and my preparations for Manchester, each of the two parts fits comfortably in a day, and they take things more consistently in an emergence and complexity-friendly way, which is to say bottom-up. Not that it was ever top-down, but making it more consistent has definitely added to its impact.
A different assessment tool each month, and we’re starting with the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment (mini edition), a version of the one used in all the Adaptive Organisation workshop and training products mentioned in this post. A great way to get a firsthand impression of what it’s all about!
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:
Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.
To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.
At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.
2024-05-10: Minor edits for consistency, in the summary most especially
2023-11-18: Improvements to the Constraints Club wording; Removed a pre-visualisation step of sorting by difficulty before sorting by energy
2023-11-07: Added the question “Out of what does that emerge?” to the Constraints Club exercise
This is a writeup of What Lies Beneath, a new string of exercises that now forms the final session of the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales, and by extension, the 3-day in-person training Leading in a Transforming Organisation. I tested it in that latter form in Melbourne, Australia last week and will be bringing it back to the UK soon (Manchester, November 14-16).
In right to left style, I will describe it backwards:
Premise, goals, next steps
Visualisation: Estuarine Framework
Inquiry: Constraints Club
Establishing context: Assessment
I will summarise the process from start to finish at the end of this post.
Premise, goals, next steps
In a complex adaptive system (CAS), lasting change is achieved in two ways:
By shocking the system into finding a new configuration from which regression is unlikely
By changing the constraints under which the system operates
The first has some obvious drawbacks. How can you be sure how the system will respond? Not to rule out that option entirely but coherently with goals of adaptability (more on that later), we’ll be taking the second route. Broadly, we identify constraints that are open to change and prioritise some of those for further work, doing that in such a way that participants are well motivated to find and then act on potential solutions. That “moving into action” aspect – ideation, hypotheses, experiments, and feedback – is a mature part of Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes, and it won’t be developed further here.
Visualisation: Estuarine Framework
Feeding that “moving into action” aspect is this visual organisation of constraints – constraints having been identified in a generative process to be described shortly:
This is Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework, which comprises an Energy/Time “affordance grid” overlaid with boundaries between four groups of constraints:
Those we accept as given
Those we can’t manage on our own but might engage on with others
Those we can manage
Those volatile or flimsy enough that we need do little more than monitor them
The significance of the colours will be explained later, in the Inquiry section.
The Estuarine Framework is the visualisation part of Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Mapping [1]. I have been guilty of confusing the two names, but to disambiguate them: Mapping here is the overall process, and Dave uses Framework consistently with something familiar to most readers of this blog, his Cynefin Framework.
Energy here refers to the amount of energy (or quantities convertible to energy) required to make a constraint no longer applicable; Time similarly. Our inquiry process (which differs from Dave’s) captures them in the form of “true and fair statements”; here we are organising them according to the energy and time required to make those statements no longer true.
Consistent with other mapping techniques in the Agendashift / Leading with Outcome repertoire we build the visualisation in stages. This is not necessarily how Dave does it, but it will feel familiar to many:
Beginning with extreme examples – most and least energy requirement – arrange vertically by energy requirement, using all the available space
Decide where the 0 of the energy axis sits (some constraints may have enough pent-up energy that their net energy requirement is negative)
Keeping vertical positions fixed, organise horizontally by time requirement, again beginning with extreme examples so as to use all the available space
Make adjustments where an energy/time tradeoff may exist
Regarding constraints as affordances (ie things we can interact with in order to effect change), prioritise some for action, marking them visually in some way
In Melbourne, we built our visualisation horizontally on a tabletop, convenient in some ways but not at all conducive to photography. A photo of our work in Melbourne is available on request but it is so awful I do not include it here! That niggle aside, the feedback (linkedin.com) was enthusiastic, most notably:
“Energised by the E/T mapping exercise”
Inquiry: Constraints Club
The first rule of Constraints Club is not to mention constraints
Constraint can be a difficult word, often interpreted as something negative. But without the tendency of constraints to contain or connect, complex systems would not cohere. Although the preceding training / workshop material does deal explicitly with constraints, with that difficulty in mind we are experimenting here with identifying constraints without mentioning the term – a successful experiment, as it turns out.
In place of Estuarine Mapping’s constraint typology, a generative process:
Why is that important? – of a prompt, story, obstacle or outcome we have prioritised or captured
How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?
Short sentences, true and fair observations
No blaming, theorising, or selling (solutions or theories)
If you struggle to write something that most people would easily agree with, scope it down – independent sentences, as few as needed
What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?
More true and fair observations, kept separately (or different colour)
Drilling down or expanding, rinse & repeat from 3, 2, or 1
For two aspects of that process, I’m grateful to Mushon Zer-Aviv, who is also doing some Estuarine-adjacent experimentation. The first is the idea of answering with short sentences that are (in my words) “true and fair observations”. The second is the drilling down aspect, which Mushon does with multiple mapping exercises. “No blaming, theorising, or selling a solution” references the Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle [2] that participants will by this time be familiar with; Mushon deals with those issues in his own way.
The idea (if not the wording) behind “scope it down” in cases of disagreement is Dave’s.
Mainly with visualisation in mind, answers to questions 2 and 3 are kept separate – in separate lists on paper or by using differently coloured stickies. This explains the two-tone colouring in the visualisation slide in the preceding section.
Establishing context: Assessment
The string of exercises we call What Lies Beneath begins with a twist or two on the long-established Agendashift Assessment Debrief. The first twist is that we’re debriefing the assessment as a whole not at the beginning of the event, but towards its end. We have however been interacting with it section by section for some time, developing all the while a model of organisation that is both relational and constraint-based, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [3]. This is an innovative “re-presentation” of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), making it more accessible and (in the modern sense) complexity-friendly.
In contrast with typical systems practice, at no point do we seek to establish system boundaries. Instead, we take a “start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach, and this is reflected in the invitation to the assessment [4]. Participants each bring their perspectives on all the organisational scopes with which they individually identify, likely at multiple scales of organisation, ranging from sub-team to whole organisation and sometimes (as was the case last week) beyond.
The full Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment template has 35 prompts in the following 5 sections:
Delivery, Discovery, Renewal
Adaptive Strategising
Mutual Trust Building
Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales
Organising at Human Scale
A free, 12-prompt mini template is available at [5].
Each participant scores each prompt on a four-point scale, then “stars” (ie multi-votes) prompts they would prioritise for further development. Participants may also compose their own prompts, for which purpose a style guide is provided.
The typical survey debrief proceeds as follows:
Score distributions overall
Areas of closest agreement
Strongest
Weakest
Most starred (ie most votes)
The second twist is to return at the end of the debrief to step 2, Areas of closest agreement, reviewing prompts that have the strongest consensus on scores. In the first pass, we have used this page of the debrief report to build confidence in the results, spending little time on what seems uncontroversial. Second time through though, we are wondering whether something interesting might be going on. Given the range of scopes and scales considered, might this level of consensus be seen as remarkable? What might explain that? The Constraints Club exercise isn’t limited to areas of high consensus on scores (rather on the strength of desire for change), but the thought certainly carries across.
Summary: What Lies Beneath
To finish, a summary of the process, this time forwards:
Assessment Debrief
Unconventionally, this finishes with revisiting areas of closest agreement, ie strongest consensus on scores
After the debrief, prioritise prompts that identify areas in which there is the strongest desire for change
Constraints Club
Initially to those prioritised prompts, in answer to the questions “How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?“ and “What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?“, generate constraints in two lists (or colours)
Drill down and/or expand until a suitable number have been generated
Estuarine Framework
Arrange by energy and time
Draw boundaries
Moving Into Action
Prioritise constraints
Ideation, experimentation, feedback, etc
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my thanks to the following:
Dave Snowden, for the Estuarine Framework
Mushon Zer-Aviv, as mentioned in the Constraints Club section
Participants at the Melbourne Leading in a Transforming Organisation, October 2023, where the What Lies Beneath string was first tested
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
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