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June 10, 2025
Embracing VUCA in business
Embracing the opportunities of VUCA in business

Meeting Complexity with Complexity

Never has there been so much complexity in our world. Running institutions is proving increasingly difficult due to the complexity they are operating under. Complexity appears to have a life of its own, making it more difficult for organisations to organise themselves sustainably.

Or is it? Is our world really becoming more complex? Or isn’t it just that the methods we are using were never designed for complexity? Isn’t it that leadership in complexity requires a different set of tools, a different mindset, different ways of working? If so, wouldn’t it be better to change our methods and mindset, rather than blaming complexity?

In this article, I want to give an overview of a few of the key thinkers and researchers who have been exploring complexity and uncertainty in a business organisational setting.

The Consequences of VUCA

Complexity is one of four challenges expressed in the acronym VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. The term VUCA was first used in US military, but has largely been adopted in the business world to refer to challenges which traditional leadership models find difficult to address. There is an ever-growing awareness that the methods and mindsets that have worked well in the past do not work in our “complex and uncertain” environment.

Many who have studied different aspects of VUCA and ‘wicked problems’ have concluded that it requires different skills, structures, modus operandi, mindsets and organisational principles from those currently taught and practised. This is true in education, politics, business, communities as well as other societal institutions. It turns out our current leadership approaches are counter-productive, even harmful, to working with uncertainty and complexity. In trying to gain control of complexities, in trying to get a grip, our management methods are actually making things worse.

Are uncertainty and complexity new phenomena? This is unlikely, indeed they have always existed – think of parents raising children, intricately complex and unpredictable, yet generally managed quite well by most. Or think of farmers and how they have to work with changing and uncertain weather conditions. Uncertainty and complexity are not new!

While there is nothing new about VUCA (except the acronym itself), its omnipresence appears to be increasing probably due to, on one hand, external factors like globalisation, the internet and technological interdependence. And on the other hand, I would argue that the cumulative effect of applying the wrong management practices to complexity has exacerbated the challenges of VUCA, a bit like continuously trying to put out a fire with oil instead of water.

The Problem with Management

Applying dehumanising command and control hierarchical management methods over 100 years has progressively made complexity more complex. Ignoring or suppressing issues like the climate crisis, has led to the world becoming ever more unstable and uncertain, to the point now where the existence of many of our institutions is threatened, if not our whole civilisation.

This is bad news for managers and executives in organisations because it requires a complete overhaul of how organisations are run. It is also bad news for politicians, as is evident from the way our Western democracies are breaking down, with politics becoming increasingly divisive and toxic. Education also needs a complete rethink, essentially because it is teaching the wrong skills and mindset.

The ‘natural’ management response to complexity is to do more of what created it in the first place, i.e. to fight and bring it under control, to suppress it or to ‘fix’ it, rather than to accept and work with it. What complexity requires is the forming of a complete picture of an issue (symptoms), looking at it from various angles to identify the root causes (problems), from which new patterns can emerge. Because any individual is limited by the filters or lens he/she perceives through, this can only be achieved by including and integrating the perspectives of all the people affected. Yet this is precisely what our current management structures discourage ….. and so we throw more oil onto the fire.

Retired business strategy and one of the earlier human complexity researcher Ralph Stacey, for instance, a mathematician who spent many years working with leaders in industry before returning to academia, concludes that most management activities in organisations, like annual budgeting, planning & control and strategy development are largely meaningless in an unpredictable world, and therefore a waste. Worse, he reports senior executives often know or intuit this, yet continue to endorse these wasteful activities simply because, like religious rituals, they maintain stability in organisations and minimise the anxiety that would otherwise arise when facing the abyss of uncertainty. While Stacey has elaborated a complex theory of complexity transformation, in order to address the disconnect he essentially calls for more wide-scale conversations in the form of what he called “reflexive inquiry”, the most complex of all complexities.

So what can we do about VUCA? How can we respond to it? And specifically, rather than fighting or fixing complexity, how can we work with it to our advantage, how can we make it our friend, and how can we embrace VUCA? What follows is the research and thinking of VUCA researchers who work practically in the field within organisations.

Cynefin

If you have not come across Dave Snowden‘s Cynefin sense-making model you should definitely do so when exploring complexity. The Cynefin framework offers an easy-to-understand way of looking at complexity. Most complexity research is based on mathematics, computer science, biology and physics. The Cynefin framework is one of the earlier attempts to relate complexity to leadership, culture and organisational development, by exploring the human dimension of sense-making and decision-making.

In the Cynefin framework there are four quadrants: Simple or Obvious, Complicated, Complex and Chaos. The suggestion is that all problems or challenges fall into one of these, each quadrant requires a completely different way of solving the problem, and this framework helps decision-makers decide what kind of thinking they should apply to solve a problem.

Cynefin was conceived in an IT data management context. The framework cannot always be applied in non-IT contexts, so while it is useful conceptually there is more to complexity than Cynefin, and we should also explore other avenues. Many of Dave Snowden’s presentations have been recorded and are worth listening to, if you can get past his cynicism. The name Cynefin has an interesting connotation to complexity – it is the Welsh word for habitat, but refers to one’s place of multiple belongings (cultural, family, national, religious, geographic etc.)!

Vertical or Horizontal

Vertical cost management, which aims to reduce costs, actually achieve the opposite, they increase costs when analysed through the systems lens of the total organisational cost rather than just myopically at the particular activities which are being cost-managed.

Uncertainty and unpredictability have ramifications for many of our management practices. It has been shown, for instance, that our practices of vertical cost management, which aim to reduce costs, actually achieve the opposite, they increase costs when analysed through the systems lens of the total organisational cost rather than just myopically at the particular activities which are being cost-managed. This is because they divert attention away from what really matters in business, customer satisfaction, to mere cost reduction compliance. Essentially one cannot ‘improve’ the whole simply by working on the parts, indeed that is often harmful, as Russell Ackoff has repeatedly emphasised, a point often missed by financial control.

Cost management tends to increase ‘failure demand’, a term invented by consultant John Seddon in his Vanguard Method. Failure Demand (as opposed to Value Demand) is generated when not meeting real customer needs. The failure arises from cost management methods focussing on measuring the efficiency of response to (failure) demand, rather than on working on eliminating those failures in the first place. This is also a premise of Beyond Budgeting, as well as one of its derivatives, consultant Niels Pflaeging‘s Beta Codex (see his book Organising for Complexity). Likewise Toyota and Edward Deming already recognised this 50 years ago when they famously showed how, for instance, you do not improve the quality of a product by increasing the inspection at the end of the line; rather you integrate a horizontal zero-defect ‘customer’ mindset on the shop floor, using an ‘internal customer’ outlook and tools like A3-thinking. This has proven very difficult for Western organisations to apply, because it essentially means giving thinking power back to the workers, effectively making management as we know it ‘redundant’.

VUCA Skills

Switching to an educational setting, researcher Dr Theo Dawson has been exploring the ‘Lexica scale’ based on people’s innate curiosity and learning ability, and by implication organisations’ ability to learn and adapt, vital in a world of VUCA. Working with VUCA requires a departure from our traditional (Darwinian?) competitive, adversarial way of thinking taught at school and practiced in politics, the courts and business. She refers to developing specific ‘VUCA skills’. VUCA skills include
- interpersonal skills (e.g. active listening),
- perspective coordination skills (complementarity),
- contextual thinking skills (shifting perspectives according to context) and
- collaboration skills (inclusive decision-making);
so, overall the ability to integrate and coordinate solutions collectively. This is a move away from ‘either-or’ thinking towards ‘both-and’ thinking. The inclusion of different perspectives, rather than their exclusion, is what is crucial here. Our Western democracies are falling apart, because the voting system excludes minorities whose perspectives are simply excluded and ignored. By continuing to teach adversarial debating and competitive achievement skills in education we are putting more oil on the fire – resulting in our society being increasingly divided and toxic.

VUCA requires the integration and fusion of different perspectives, and not alpha heroes with all the ‘right’ answers. Our educational testing culture, however, does not allow for ‘not knowing’ – schools teach us there is always a right answer which we should know. VUCA skills, on the other hand, suggest we have to unlearn this habit of (pretending to) knowing the answer. What we should learn, instead, is how to respond to complex problems from a vantage point of not knowing, probingly approaching inquiry with an empty mind and humility; likewise we need to learn how to integrate seemingly polar opposite perspectives collaboratively.

Like learning to drive or dance at first, acquiring these integration skills can initially feel rather awkward and ‘unnatural’, and we easily revert to the old prima donna habits taught at school. Some of the ways suggested to learn these VUCA skills include design thinking and practicing Sociocracy. We should take note, however, that one cannot learn integration skills by oneself, these have to be practised and refined in groups. We therefore need to create more Communities of Practice where people can hone these new skills. Except for side activities like team sports and school plays our education rarely provides opportunities for pupils to learn these skills – again, education needs reinventing.

Rich Interconnectivity

While it is important to work on individual and team / community skills at the micro-level, this is insufficient without also redesigning the system and culture at the macro-level. This is why the work of practical researchers like Prof Mary Uhl-Bien is important. Building on the huge knowledge base developed in the sciences Uhl-Bien explores the human application of complexity in corporations, a distinctly non-mathematical social technology application of complexity.

Uhl-Bien defines complexity as ‘rich interconnectivity’. Interconnecting parts become complex when the parts interacting actually influence and change each other. She gives mayonnaise as an example in that once the egg and oil atoms start interacting they influence each other and change to a point where they cannot revert back to their original state, like a butterfly never reverts to a caterpillar. This happens in human interactions, whereby people influence and change each other unconsciously – like lovers being subtly yet irrevocably transformed after falling out of love from when they first fell in love.

The richness in interconnectivity is generated by networked parts being as diverse in outlook as possible and being constantly evolving. So while intensive project teams can be deeply effective, for instance, they need to be complemented by another mechanism which magnifies exposure to a dynamic and ever-changing multitude of perspectives.

Uhl-Bien’s team has researched many organisations and observed most try to manage complexity by controlling it. This is precisely what makes it worse. Complexity comprises many moving and interacting parts, and the best way to work with complexity is through complexity itself in what she calls Adaptive Space. What this means is bringing in intermingling constantly reforming and interacting networks of multi-perspectivity into conversation. In an organisation, Adaptive Space sits in between the entrepreneurial / innovative system and the result-driven / operational system. This is currently missing in the structure of most organisations.

Adaptive Space is created by letting the many interacting parts and networks move and intermix, thereby interacting more intensively, richly. This is what enables new ways or patterns to emerge. Most organisations tend to control or terminate such moving interactions and get people to stay in their place, in teams and silos, which has the opposite effect. Uhl-Bien advocates pan-organisational Adaptive Spaces with a strong focus on interchange and connectivity, using practices like Liberating Structures and the like.

A key part in this process is the interplay between Linking and Conflicting. Without tension and conflict, there is no flame of interactivity, but this has to be combined with linking and connecting. It is this combination that sparks new patterns, new ideas, new thinking. Adaptive space should be a safe space where both conflicting and linking can occur. To enable such spaces, a new type of leader is required, which Uhl-Bien simply refers to as ‘Adaptive Leaders’. They have (or need to learn) their own special sets of skills, which are different from entrepreneurial or from operational leadership skills. As I see it the Adaptive Leader skills required are those of, in the jargon, ‘facilitative leadership’.

So in addition to VUCA skills, what complexity calls for are deeper conversations that matter, or as Stacey says reflexive enquiry. However Uhl-Bien emphasises the conversations themselves should be complex bringing in multifaceted, dynamic and undirected, so not just within existing teams, departments and silos, but across the different areas of an organisation. The Adaptive Space maintains a balance between the innovative spirit of an organisation and its operational stability so that both innovation and delivery can prosper while keeping the organisation adaptive and alive. Richness of interconnectivity creates serendipitous cross-pollination of ideas and bring in a multitude of perspectives from different parts of an organisation intermingling, forming rich exchanges, and thereby meet complexity with complexity

This rich interactivity and emergence is precisely what Open Space Technology thrives on as well! Open Space may appear chaotic and complex, but it takes complexity to work with complexity. Harrison Owen knew it all along.

Conclusion

In short, overall what VUCA requires are new individual and team skills of integration and complementarity learned in groups through Communities of Practice. At an organisational level, this needs to be combined with rich interconnectivity of interchangeable networks with a diversity of perspectives brought together in Adaptive Spaces. By applying this human intermixing interactivity, with everyone fully engaged meeting complexity with complexity, organisations should be able to embrace VUCA for the new emerging opportunities it brings.
March 4, 2020
Why do Organisations need more trained Facilitators?
What trained Open Space Technology Facilitators could do for Organisations

Many companies suffer from a lack of cohesion and connectedness. Managers and staff alike generally lack a holistic view of their organisation in terms of its internal flow of energy and value creation. Most people in organisations do not have a full view of what goes on across the organisation, and the executives at the top may have an overview of the various departments, but generally have little understanding of what the issues are at the shop floor level.

This lack of a multi-disciplinary and holistic view of their own organisation is manifest in the way departments and teams often work in very entrenched silo mentalities. Silos produce poor cross-departmental collaboration and pan-organisational coherence. The situation is particularly acute in Western companies where people typically specialise in one area of work and then stay in their field – if they do move on, they tend to go on to similar work elsewhere, changing company rather than changing type of work.

This contrasts to Asian firms, in particular Japanese, where people are routinely rotated to different departments, irrespective of their specialities, typically in 2-5 year cycles, so that as they become more senior, irrespective of position, they gain a good understanding of how the company works and in particular are sympathetic to the various perspectives as seen from different parts of the organisation – in short they also become generalists with a holistic view of the organisation and its place in society, they are the bridges and glue of the whole.

In the West we tend to put resources in tools like process improvements, particularly at a team level. Agile implementations and moves towards business agility are examples of current day efforts to improve team effectiveness, and thus the ability to add value for customers in a speedy, flexible and iterative way. Which is all great, but this happens at a team or section level, with ‘high performing’ teams often rewarded irrespective of whether their high performance is actually beneficial to the smooth operation of the whole organisation as a whole. This is like putting a high performing Rolls Royce engine in a Volkswagen Beetle chassis – this would prove untenable, the Beetle was never designed to cope with the power of the RR engine, the whole would crumble in the long run. Likewise interventions are usually isolated and do not tackle the challenge of getting the organisation to operate more effectively and coherently as one whole.

Moreover, an organisation is only as effective as its weakest link, so concentrating resources on some priority teams while largely ignoring others, or while not considering how this might effect the whole, can actually dampen the overall organisational effectiveness. Even with balanced high performing teams there is often no engagement model in place that guarantees that all teams are operating in tandem towards the same purpose. One often finds teams competing with each other internally, or unknowingly duplicating efforts.

So how could we get more pan-organisational collaboration, cohesion and innovation across the organisation, without switching to an Asian style rotation system, (which would take a full generation before its benefits became apparent, so hardly feasible)? What could we do to enable more pan-organisational coherence and collaboration, and for everyone to start thinking about their organisation more holistically? Why aren’t organisations putting more resources into developing such pan-organisational cohesion?

There may be several reasons:
- a general lack of awareness of the need for it (it is not on people’s minds first and foremost)
- organisations having no experience in trying to achieve coherence
- no knowledge or expertise within the organisation on how to do it
- nobody knowing how to “plan” the thousands of conversations that would need to happen to enable pan-organisational exchange
- likewise nobody in the organisation knowing, for instance, how to run large-scale participatory meetings, instead only relying speaker-centered conferences or motivational talks (which by nature are non-participatory)
- No understanding for ‘unplanning’ conversations to engender serendipitous or emergent conversations
- in a mechanistic view of the organisation open-ended chaordic interventions seen as a waste of time, with the bureaucratic command and control approach asserting itself
- similarly innovation viewed as something best left to the ‘innovation specialists’ – unfortunately many a bright idea from staff, coming from a place of understanding the customer, gets sidelined with this attitude.
Clearly we need pan-organisational models of engagement. These do exist. They can be found in practices such as Presencing Theatre, World Cafe, Appreciative Enquiry, Circle Ways, The Art of Hosting and many other participatory approaches also collated in Liberating Structures. The most open-ended and engaging approach of them all, however, which really allows genuine pan-organisational conversations that matter to emerge, is Open Space Technology (commonly Open Space), the structure used in ‘Unconference’, ‘Hackathon‘ and ‘BarCamp’ events. While there are many ways to run concurrent conversations, Open Space Technology does this particularly well at scale, and is ideal in larger organisations needing cross-departmental exchange at all levels simultaneously.

Open Space Technology, commonly Open Space, is a method for hosting highly participatory, large group, whole-system collaboration based on self-organisation in which participants themselves co-create the agenda, experience and outcomes that matter to them. Click here to see our article What is Open Space Technology?

Open Space Technology is described in more detail elsewhere. My purpose here is to encourage larger organisations to use Open Space Technology much more frequently and for them to hire or train a few internal facilitators who can actually run Open Space Tech events within their organisation. There is no reason why an Open Space Tech event should be a one-off occasion. If organisations want genuine agility in their organisations, then running Open Space events should be a regular occurrence.

Open Space Technology has many benefits (see Beyond unConferences) but in the context of pan-organisational collaboration, innovation and coherence Open Space Technology enables cross-fertilisation of ideas and cross-collaboration across departments in a highly interactive environment at once on a massive scale. An Open Space event can lead collectively to a holistic re-energising of the whole organisation, creating conditions for the organisation to thrive organically. Moreover it can be a massive and long-lasting boost to staff engagement and morale, largely because deep conversations that matter to them can take place. These vital conversations are rarely had in organisations, and yet are hugely necessary for people within the organisation to flourish.

The benefits of using pan-organisational Open Space Tech for organisations are:
- it helps bridge departments, and thus breaks down silos, encouraging collaboration rather than internal competition
- it stimulates over time a systems view of the organisation amongst all staff, thus facilitating constructive dialogue between different parts of the organisation
- it shifts everyone into an ‘innovation mode‘ and elevates the creativity of the whole organisation; this enables complex problem-solving and disruptive innovation
- it is a brilliant basis for invitation-based culture change
- it represents a highly effective model of engagement, rejuvenating staff co-creativity
- it enables expanded stakeholder dialogues to take place involving the wider organisation
- it enables conversations to emerge which could never have been planned
- it encourages the emergence of new ideas and concepts otherwise inconceivable
- Its self-organising, autonomous and peer-learning format forms the basis for creating a learning organisation.
Ultimately Open Space Tech enables thousands of meaningful conversations to happen serendipitously at scale and across the organisation that otherwise would never have happened and would have been impossible to plan, all within a limited time scale (1-2 days)

So given Open Space Technology has so many advantages, why is it not used more frequently in organisations? What are the stumbling blocks? Some have already been mentioned earlier, but here are few as more:
- it can be logistically demanding, the larger the number of invitees, the better, but also the more demanding it is to organise; Open Space Tech has no limit to size (other than the capacity of venue)
- a general lack of awareness, or a perceived weirdness of the process
- poor quality of facilitators (wanting to ‘manage’ the process, combine it or trying to ‘improve’ it)
- unpredictable outcome can be scary
- perceived costs (in fact Open Space Tech is a lot cheaper, but like a plane crash it sounds big when it happens)
- for most managers not having a clear agenda feels rather frightening.
This lack of a clear agenda (the agenda is created by the participants on the spot at the start of an Open Space Event) is probably the biggest stumbling block within commercial organisations, as managers and sponsors are often expected to state clearly what the anticipated outcomes of such a meeting should be (in order to justify the funding for it, for instance). Yet that is precisely the catch 22. Open Space Technology relies on emergence, serendipity and new creative solutions to whatever challenges brought the people together to the Open Space event in the first place. Agendas pre-define solutions, they pre-determine outcomes and as such they stifle emergence. The whole point of Open Space Technology without pre-set agendas is to enable issues to emerge which would otherwise never have arisen.

Agendas kill emergence and thereby also stifle innovation and motivation. People feel caged in by (other people’s) agendas. Yet for managers coming from a mechanical view of business, “agendalessness” is most difficult to fathom. Managers will almost always want to interfere and include some agenda. It is ironic that in our times when leaders are crying for more staff engagement, collaboration, participation, accountability and innovation, they are also imposing more agendas, the very thing that kills all those virtues. Agendas create precisely those conditions which disengage people. The only agenda that works is one created by ALL those participating there and then, in the here and now, in a free market-place where people can opt in and out of the authentic conversations.

To be blunt: As a manager you can either have engagement and innovation, or you can have agendas and outcomes, but you cannot have both – they cancel each other out. So if agendas and outcomes are what you want, fine, don’t use Open Space Technology, but don’t expect engagement and innovation either. If engagement and innovation are what you want, however, then you have to be willing to let go of any agenda, or rather let the staff and workers determine and deliberate their own issues.

Annette Zera: The Law of Two Feet

For this reason, it is important that some people in the organisation know how to run Open Space Technology events. In particular they need to fully understand the issues around invitations, agendas, co-creation and emergence. It needs people who can resist what many managers want, such as adding items to an agenda in advance. Because Open Space Tech meetings operate on the basis of opt-in invitation, people will only feel inspired to join a meeting, if it is about an issue that concerns them, is burning for them, and is not laden with pre-conceived solutions which do not address their perspective. Open Space Tech facilitators need to have a thorough understanding of the role of invitation (versus imposition) and the effect of agendas on the matter.

There is a general need for organisations to have more facilitators and facilitative leaders, if organisations are to thrive (through innovation and collaboration). But they should also have an Open Space Tech facilitator or two at hand. While more general facilitators or organisational development practitioners are in a good position to introduce people-centric participatory next stage ways of organising and working to the organisation, there should ideally be someone who is specifically able to bring about a pan-organisational, cross-functional and holistic understanding of, and engagement in, the organisation through Open Space Technology. What is needed are facilitators who can bring about internal flexibility and agility by calling Open Space events at short notice, while also understanding the importance of creating a safe and transparent environment for emergence to happen, opening and holding the space.

In the long run Open Space Technology can set some foundations for the organisation to shift from a mechanical command-and-control perspective to a more living, organic and responsive one, one able tocontinuously adapt and learn. Larger organisations should therefore have one or two internal Open Space Tech facilitators. Ideally organisations should be operating in a permanent Open Space Tech mode or mindset all the time, and having an Open Space Tech facilitator on board who can keep that spirit alive would be nothing but beneficial.
February 14, 2019
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October 3, 2018
The Issue with Hierarchy

First published at Medium https://medium.com/@f12uk/the-issue-with-hierarchy-a986f62963a5

Nowadays discussions about hierarchy abound, especially in organisations, some arguing you need hierarchy to run an organisation, otherwise you have chaos, while others deploring the negative effects of hierarchy, such as stifling innovation, or treating humans as mechanical cogs. These debates have come to the fore with the advent of self-organising structures, self-managing organisations and more recently the hubbub around companies without bosses, networks without hierarchies, and so on.

There is no doubt that militaristic hierarchy can be toxic, especially when fostering independent creativity, innovation and autonomous problem-solving, (and I’m fully aligned with those who have a natural aversion to hierarchy as it is often applied.) Yet it seems to me just abolishing hierarchy, as many movements are trying to do, is somewhat misguided, missing the point, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Hierarchy can fundamentally be viewed as a thought tool or a cognitive skill, which enables humans to group things, ideas and concepts into categories. This ability to categorise allows us to build new constructs and prioritise things. Anyone who has ever tried to have a discussion with someone who sees the world as if it were flat, unable to distinguish between different levels of thinking, comparing dogs with animals, knows what I mean.

In fact our ability to categorise into meta-levels and create higher and lower orders of categories is a fundamental feature of our human ability to think, it is what has enabled science and technology to progress, it is what has enabled humans to evolve, for better or worse. Hierarchies represent different levels of abstraction. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with hierarchy per se.

Where things have gone pear-shaped, however, is where hierarchy has been hijacked by bullies seeking power. Associating power with hierarchy is probably related to Christian body-mind split, and the view that the mind is of a ‘higher order’ needing to control the body, treating the body as if it were some mindless loose morass which would run amok if not controlled.

Views have changed, and there is a societal awareness of the toxicity and counter-productivity of this hierarchical power paradigm. It is hence not surprising that so many people are skeptical of anything that smacks of hierarchy. And when associated with power, justifiably so. However, when blindly rejecting hierarchy indiscriminately on that basis, there is a danger that we do throw the human baby and our core ability to think & prioritise out with the water at the same time.

My view is that hierarchy should be allowed to live, even in human structures, as long it is used as a tool, and not as a rule (or as a way to rule). As I said, it is not hierarchy itself which intrinsically bad, but the misuse of it to serve the personal purposes of some domineering people.

Unfortunately organisational hierarchy is normally illustrated with the boss at the top reigning over the various branches, the ‘subordinates’, who replicate the same structure further below. I prefer to draw organisational diagrams, if at all, the other way round, with the ‘highest’ level at the bottom, branching upwards, holding space and nurturing the ‘lower’ levels at the top, where the main value creating activities of the organisation are performed. This way customers, shop-floor staff and suppliers are no longer governed by corporate bosses and shareholders ruling at the top, but are themselves the main players, supported by co-ordinating stewards now at the bottom.

The purpose of hierarchy in human organising became very clear to me from the work of Edwin John in India with his Children’s and Neighbourhood parliaments. Edwin John has spent a lifetime empowering both children and local communities through local ‘parliaments’. These neighbourhood parliaments get together regular to make their own decisions about things affecting their communities.

Imagine a village, a street, and a neighbourhood say of 20 houses, whose residents meet regularly to determine key aspects in the community (street cleaning, education, sewage etc). With 200 houses in the street there may thus be around 20 such community parliaments. Let’s say now there is a matter concerning the whole street, this affects the other 20 neighbourhood parliaments, and all communities in the street have to be involved in the decision-making. It is difficult to have meetings of 200 households — the more people involved, the more cumbersome meetings become.

So what Edwin John has done is to have each community elect a representative of each circle, of each neighbourhood parliament. The representatives of each community then meet to decide at a street level, each representative representing their community who elected them, thus creating a meta-circle. By nature this is now a new ‘higher’ level of hierarchy.

This does not automatically mean, however, that the meta-level has power over the community they represent. Indeed to ensure this does not happen Edwin John has given each community the right to recall their representative and elect someone else, if they feel he or she is no longer representing the community. Not in 4 year’s time, but immediately! This is very different from the kind of representation UK parliamentary representatives see themselves taking on, who once elected seem to take things into own hands. In Edwin John’s neighbourhood hierarchy the essence of governance is still very much at the local level, and hierarchy is used as a bridging tool between communities.

So we have here an example where hierarchy is being used benevolently, with huge positive effect. So when thinking of hierarchy, rather than throwing the baby out with bathwater, I invite you to use this example to reframe the way we use hierarchy in human organisations. This is in my view closer to the kind of cognitive hierarchy I mentioned at the beginning.

This is not always easy, but whenever we get stuck, or start falling into the trap of treating hierarchy as power-over rather than power-with or different levels of abstraction, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of the hierarchy, starting from the local. Turn the hierarchy upside down, so that the visionaries “at the top” are now stewards at the bottom serving the community, the shop-floor and the ‘locals’ adding value.

The recall button is key to keeping hierarchy away from the hungry wolves. Rather than just throwing hierarchy out completely and losing our baby, let’s ask ourselves who is serving whose needs. And if it is not the community’s needs, just recall the elected representative, immediately!

June 16, 2017
Discovering What is Possible
Guest post by Daniel Mezick at Open Space Agility
First published June 8, 2016 at http://openspaceagility.com/discovering-what-is-possible/

We live in a world where a mechanistic, “machine” view of organizations has served for some time. The end of this era is upon us, and the transition to a living-systems view is well underway.

Organizations are more like living things than they are like machines. Without getting into all the details of “why,” this essay assumes the living-systems view is the more accurate view, the more useful view. The view that is actually closer to reality.

In the living-systems view, change is not “managed.” Instead of having a definite end point, the process of change is based more on encouraging a general direction rather than a specific, ultimate destination with a date attached.

Which brings me to the subject of this essay: discovering what is possible. For purposes of this essay, assume the organization under consideration has these properties:

The org is a business entity, organized as a corporation

The org is not focused on selling software. Instead it has a services or products that it sells.

Leaders (formally authorized) are contemplating the “change management” that may be involved in helping the entire org change in some way; presumably to become more effective.

The org employs at least one hundred people and may have thousands of employees.

The “formally authorized leaders” (hereafter, the “FALs”) are entirely well-intentioned even as they may be ignorant of certain fundamentals with respect to the conditions necessary for manifesting an adaptive, resilient organization

The people in the organization are for the most part quite familiar with the current cultural game, and are generally happy with the way things are. They know the expressed and implied goals, the rules, and how the overall culture works.

Given these assumptions, the completely normal pattern goes something like this:

Behind closed doors, the 100% well-intentioned FALs formulate a plan for change. This usually includes the “rolling out” of training, followed by some scheduled “coaching” with the help of highly paid consultants.

An announcement of intent is issued. This is usually in the form of some emails from the FALs to the organization’s employees. These emails from the FALs describe what is about to happen.

The program is initiated, usually with an immediate and pronounced uptick in everything that is being measured. This is reassuring- at least at first.

Typically, measurement is happening in a meaningful way for the first time. Before long the highly paid consultants are busy doing their work.

After a while, things start to wobble. There is some “murmuring” from the rank and file.

Not just the rank and file resist the change. Some people who are in authority also are uncomfortable. Their direct reports sense this vibe and adjust accordingly.

Those uncomfortable with the change do not simply vacate. Instead they serve to thwart the change by subtle moves intended to outwit, outplay and outlast the change issues from “on high.”

The budget for consultants is consumed, and they leave. Shortly after that, the “change” begins the process of reversion to the mean. In other words, a backsliding to the starting point.

Does this sound familiar to you? I certainly hope so. I have not told the whole story, but you get the idea.

After a time, the “coaches” and consultants vacate. When they do, the org reverts back to it’s previous state, or, at a minimum, heads in that general direction immediately. At the end, the org has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a “change management program” that never did actually work.

The Prime/OS approach short-circuits this by-now-familiar pattern of failure, by discovering what is possible. By helping the FALs figure out the immediate next steps via quick, short, actionable “loops of feedback” that provide rich data for input into leadership decision-making.

Prime/OS

Instead of putting down a bet of hundreds of thousands of dollars with far less than 50-50 odds for success, Prime/OS invites everyone affected to come and discuss the change.

Instead of following a monolithic “A-B-C” plan (typically the “framework” of a consulting firm,) Prime/OS invites everyone into the process of changing. And to write the new story. And be a character in this new story.

Instead of an edict or mandate from management, Prime/OS suggests a series of experiments to be inspected.

One of the goals of Prime/OS is to engage the people affected by the change. To do this, Prime/OS leverages the concept of invitation. Those who are curious and want to explore how to make change happen accept the invitation. Those who like things the way they are do not. In all cases, Prime/OS increases your chance of success by increasing the level of human engagement in the change.

Prime/OS increases the level of engagement in the process of changing and this is why Prime/OS actually works.

Avoiding the “Self Organized” Approach

The idea that self-organization and self-management are messy any chaotic is actually quite false. Groups of people who share a common purpose and organize around it are often called “self organizing systems.” This label assumes that people are the same as birds, insects and fish that “self organize.” This is not strictly true, and I therefore prefer the term “self management” when describing how people self-organize. Where people in organizations are concerned, “self organization” is in fact self-management.

Tremendous gains in productivity are possible when individuals and teams are self-managing.

Self-management is only possible when the people involved are making decisions. Decisions are what engages people, and decisions are essential if the group is to self-manage. Since self-management requires enough authority to make decisions, FALs often freak out at the notion of authorizing self-managed teams, departments and divisions. The assumption is that chaos will ensue.

In Prime/OS, the FALs to do not encourage chaos and do not give up “control.” Instead, FALs create the very conditions for self-management by clearly identifying and communicating the following:

The direction of the organization (an example might be “towards continuous improvement” or “towards more efficiency in operations.”)

The “guardrails,” or limits outside of which are considered out-of-bounds. (an example might be a set or principles, or a set of rules for action.)

Interestingly, the FALs in Prime/OS need to avoid defining the practices or “ABC” steps needed to get started. Instead, individuals and teams make decisions about the specifics. To encourage this, FALs stop well short of naming specific practices. If specific practices must be specified, these are presented explicitly and repeatedly as “experiments with specific practices for a specific limited time”, or “a trial period after which we will inspect results.” The “why” behind this is quite obvious: we need the people who do the work to be making decisions if we are to engage them. The entire hypothesis of Prime/OS (and OpenSpace Agility) is very simple:

Human engagement is essential for any change to be authentic, genuine and lasting.

Sometimes, the definition of practices cannot be avoided. The solution here is to frame the entire thing as an temporary experiment to inspected. The org will “suspend disbelief” and “pretend” during the temporary/experiment period, confident that we will then inspect the results. This framing-the-experience-as–an-experiment is a way to bring everyone into the story of “inspect and adapt.” This is the way to introduce the idea of a change. The hypothesis is that those who resist the change can in fact assure failure. Experimentation affords those who may resist, with the opportunity to speak their mind after getting some experience with the contemplated change.

A Practical Example for Your Consideration

Let’s take a practical example: say you are a formally authorized leader who is going to be introducing some pretty big changes to your organization soon. Let us assume further that specific new practices are the content of the change. Here is your solution:

Define a period of experimentation

Start in “open space.” Call an enterprise-wide, “all hands” meeting to air concerns and issues. Assure everyone that this is an authentic experiment- that is, one to be inspected, 45 to 100 days hence.

Do the experiment.

End in “open space.” Call an enterprise-wide, “all hands” meeting to inspect the results.

Use the wisdom harvested from this process to “go again” if necessary.

The alternative? Simply announce the change, fire everyone who disagrees, and hire new people who agree to the new “game change” you want to implement. There is only one problem with this: it is traumatic for your organization, and will result in chaos, negative emotional energy, and also poor results for years to come, before stabilizing.

A better approach is to view your leadership as cultivation and stewardship, rather than driving a vehicle or operating a machine. Your organization is more like a greenhouse than a train.

Summary

The Prime/OS approach actually works, if you define success as “reaching extremely high levels of engagement in the investigation of how to change.” It starts and ends in Open Space, a meeting that is optimized on creating the conditions for the highest levels of human engagement possible. A key hypothesis of Prime/OS is that for any lasting change to occur, the humans affected must be engaged. Prime/OS therefore encourages very high levels of engagement. And that is why it uses Open Space.

Prime/OS is very simple and can lead to much higher performance across the organization. But to use it, if you are a formally authorized leader, you must first believe that for any change to be genuine and lasting, the humans affected must be engaged in the process of changing.

Prime/OS is a tool for formally authorized leaders who actually believe this is true.

See also:

The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis (link)

Prime/OS described (link)

70% of USA Employees Not Engaged At Work (link)
July 6, 2016
Brexit & Shift: How can we transform the workplace together? Thurs 14 July, London

After Brexit: How can we transform the workplace together?
Shift : 14 July 16 : London UK
http://events.caterfly.co.uk/
#OrgShift
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Please help us spread the word

In response to the shock, division and disaray unleashed by the Brexit referendum, we feel it is essential to make space for people to come together. This is a participant-led ‘Open Space’ event, so the experience and discussions you have is up to you. But with many people distracted from fancy notions of reinventing work by very real and immediate worry, fear, anger, despondency this is your time to let off steam, ask big questions, get support and support others, or get constructive.

One thing seems certain: If it is true that many people have reacted to feeling ignored, impoverished and powerless, then making the workplace work for everyone, of making sure that everyone has a voice and can participate is more important than ever.

How can we respond? How we drive this movement forward? How can we help make work better for everyone? What can you contribute?

Thanks. In despair, in hope, and with determination…. see you there?

July 6, 2016
18 June 16 at 16:00 London: Don’t we all want to change our organisations?

Workshop Saturday 18 June, Green Park 16:00 – 18:00, Free

No need to register, just show up

Don’t we all want to change our organisations?

Experiental workshop exploring new ways of changing human organising, not by planning and imposing new systems, but by inviting all affected to co-create the new together.

It is said most culture change interventions fail, partly due to resistance to change. Change resistance is a myth, most people don’t resist change, after all wouldn’t most people want to change their workplaces, to make them more democratic, purposeful and human? What people resist is the imposition of alien systems which they had no say in. However good the new ways are, imposing them is doomed to fail – and this applies just as well to new ways of organising, like teal, responsive, holacracy, B-Corp or other great ideas.

A better way of transitioning from old to new forms of organising, is by inviting al those affected to co-create the change together. Come and find out how do do that at scale in larger organisations. Transformation by co-creation.

This event is part of Human Organising Festival 16 – 18 June in London – go to Festival website

For latest updates, eg change of venue in case of rain, check out Facebook or Twitter

May 28, 2016
OpenSpace Agility, On Demand Workshop, London
OpenSpace Agility™ with Daniel Mezick
Workshop: On Demand, London+, U.K.

Graphic (c) 2015 www.OpenSpaceAgility.com. . . . . All rights reserved; provided by permission of OSA.

Co-creating Transformation At Scale

Booking information below

Struggling to get buy-in? Brilliant implementation plan getting stuck in reality?

Caterfly is excited to be teaming up with Daniel Mezick, whose OpenSpace Agility™ method is the foundation of Caterfly’s model for introducing organisational change. Daniel has developed a new approach to creating an adaptive and customisable, collaborative culture shift at scale; for example introducing Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum or new ways of working, becoming more ‘responsive’, ‘teal’ or self-organising, implementing sustainability programs and more.

Daniel is a well-known Agile coach, culture hacker, speaker, author of The Culture Game, and co-author of The OpenSpace Agility Handbook.

In this workshop you learn
- How you can create a culture of enthusiasm, agility and effectiveness in your organisation
- How you can prevent resistance to change
- Why on average 70% of change programs ultimately fail
- What actually works, and how you can transform your workplace with proven tools that get the job done
- How to save money by reducing coach / coaching days to get solid results and continuous improvement.
- Why the power of invitation, co-creation and self-organisation avoids cultural inertia and change fatigue
- How to harness latent ingenuity and collective-intelligence
- How to invite the whole organisation to collaborative action using Open Space Technology
- How to integrate and consolidate what’s already working well
Each student receives
- A proven and repeatable method for rescuing faltering change initiatives
- A very rich learning experience with colleagues from diverse backgrounds working in a highly interactive self-organising peer-learning environment
- The OpenSpace Agility™ certificate of completion
- Listing in the OpenSpace Agility-certified consultants list, on the OSA web site.
- Membership of the private online group of certificate holders, for continued peer-development
- A free copy of Daniel’s OpenSpace Agility Handbook
Who Should Attend

Leaders, managers, facilitators, consultants, coaches and anyone involved in process and culture change in organisations. Although the process has so far been used most for the adoption of Agile working, it is a tool for a broad and diverse range of contexts. Professionals familiar with Open Space Technology and tools for self-organisation will be interested to learn of new applications in the workplace.

Full details of workshop content. Further reading and booking, see below.

How OpenSpace Agility™ works

In these times of rapid change and complexity, the triple-win of organisational culture is engagement, agility and effectiveness. Our framework will help you get there, together: a radically different approach to leading change, which is confoundingly simple and practical. The whole team or organisation is invited to co-creative change together, in a way that is more effective, manageable and genuinely long lasting, while reducing stress and change fatigue.

In place of change initiatives that rely on a disenfranchising mandate from above and a rigid, pre-planned roll-out, OpenSpace Agility™ approach integrates the power of invitation, leadership storytelling, iteration, self-organisation and game mechanics to achieve rapid, lasting and effective change across an organisation.

There is growing awareness that the reason many change programmes fail or do not work as expected is not because of the often quoted poor communications and people’s ‘resistance to change’, but because the people affected by the change are not asked, never mind invited to contribute to the change. Culture shifts and new ways of working cannot simply be imposed. What is needed is to invite all affected to co-create and customise change together, in a manageable and iterative way.

OpenSpace Agility works for one simple reason: it generates extremely high levels of engagement across your organisation. This engagement is essential to the success of your program, and no other method does this better than OpenSpace Agility.
Daniel Mezick

But how do you do that at scale? Surely this involves thousands of conversations and story rewriting across the organisation or department? Surely it’s an impossible and expensive task to get all the networks and collaborations connected without hampering the main operation of the organisation? Yet there is a way, using the principle of self-organisation in large scale gatherings, which not only achieves all these necessary cross-connections, but also produces positive synchronicity and serendipity, efficiently and with results that are staff-led.

OpenSpace Agility is a clearly structured, repeatable framework for introducing, reinvigorating and consolidating agility, lean and other collaborative forms of working in organisations. Daniel Mezick has created this framework incorporating ‘Open Space‘ events to invite all affected to drive collaborative transformation based on staff expertise:

a more human, engaging and participatory approach to leading change.

About the Main Instructor:

DANIEL MEZICK: OSA CERTIFIED TRAINER

DANIEL MEZICK is an author, executive and Agile coach, and keynote speaker. He is the formulator of OpenSpace Agility.

He is the author of THE CULTURE GAME, a book describing sixteen patterns of group behavior that help make any team smarter. The book is based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations.

Daniel’s client list includes CapitalOne, INTUIT, THE HARTFORD, CIGNA, SIEMENS Healthcare, Harvard University, and many smaller enterprises. Daniel is based in Guilford, Connecticut, USA. Learn more and contact Daniel at www.DanielMezick.com.

Supported by UK facilitators Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel – See the About US page.

Find out more

Full details of workshop content – This is an experiential workshop which is structured to demonstrate the principles of the approach it teaches, including using some Open Space Technology for participant-led learning and practice, adapted to your needs.

The OpenSpace Agility process At a Glance.

Caterfly Article: Invite staff to co-create change / OpenSpace Agility Handbook review

Caterfly Article: Why Coercion Doesn’t Work

Caterfly Article: The Problem With Change Management

Caterfly Article: What is Open Space?

Daniel Mezick’s website, blog and further details

OpenSpace Agility testimonials

Prices and booking
- Standard: £790
- Early Bird until 15 August 16: £590
- Individuals / not-for-profit: £690
  Note: VAT is not applicable
Fees include all course materials and the book. They also include coffee breaks and lunch on both days, but does not include transportation, accommodation or dinner.

No charges for bank transfer payments upon invoice
Invoice sent by email following booking, with charges removed. Reservation held for 1 week, booking completed upon payment by bank transfer (or cheque).

Payment by card now
We regret that payment processing charges will be added.

In the unlikely event of any cancellation or if you need to cancel, full refunds will be made immediately until 2 weeks before, after which if you need to cancel then we will refund 50%.

This event is brought to you by Caterfly, a collaboration between Thriving Planet CIC and Transcultural Synergy Ltd

If you have (or can gather) a group of at least ten people who would like to take this course in London, or anywhere in the U.K., either in-house or as a public event, then please contact us to explore further.

Team: Daniel Mezick, head instructor, founder of OpenSpace Agility and Prime/OS,

with Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel, hosting team.

Contact: events@caterfly.co.uk or call 020 7117 8648

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March 11, 2016
Shifting Organisations – What’s the Problem? 14 July London

Open Space Event, Thurs 14 July ’16, London

Caterfly presents: a 1 day event exploring the need for transforming the way we work together, the move toward more collaborative, responsive workplaces, for businesses that place the customer at the centre, with respect for people and planet, the reality, complexity and barriers to change, and ways to move forward.

#OrgShift

Share. Learn. Connect: Building alliances for collective impact

http://events.caterfly.co.uk

Just as the combined efforts of the powers-that-be in the 16th and 17th Centuries were unable to halt the progress of Copernicus’ Revolution in astronomy, so also today’s big hierarchical bureaucracies, though seemingly all-powerful, will ultimately succumb to the power of a better idea for running organizations—better for customers, better for employees, better for managers, better for society, and better for the organizations and their investors.

Steve Denning, Forbes: The Copernican Revolution In Management

What is Open Space?

January 14, 2016