A weekly journal of practical ideas
Explore the ideas that can change tomorrow, by teaching us how to better organize today.
New essays and research-backed guides, published weekly, free to read, written to help.
Humans create organizations to fulfill a need.
The need isn’t to dismiss or correct for the friction, the tensions, the perturbations and stagnations. It’s to observe and understand them all at once. Disturbance signals disaster and gives us time to respond. Dysfunction drives change, and reveals our systems’ imperfections. Even destruction leads us to renewal, evolution, and diversity of markets, of ideas, and of the people that get us there.
We manage systems and computers; we manage inboxes and workloads. We are good at managing resources, but not people.
What we are good at is mentoring: we share with people, we learn from each other, and we guide each other. And when people are getting on our last nerve… we manage.
Every article and guide here builds on a small core set of ideas: vantages people need to consciously build, depth, a fluid dimension of scope, and tempo, a natural pacing that governs the rhythms of our dynamics.
They can explain why our change efforts work, and when they don’t. Learn it once, and organizational complexity might make a lot more sense.
Discover
Five Vantages
We create organizations to create value. Craft, Network, Contextual, Systems, and Coherence are the vantages we use to see the whole, in all its glorious complexity.
understand
Strategic Depth
From the technical to grand-strategic: the scope is fluid and often overlapping. The strategic level a question is asked at will govern the impact of the answer that’s given.
Connect
Native Tempo
Do our efforts meet resistance in some areas and not others? Like a musician, or a dancer, can we find the tempo that guides us to mutual entrainment?
Latest articles
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Our misconceptions about specialization took a century to undo
For most of the modern era, the concept of specialization appeared firmly defined and understood. Split a task…
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The 5 vantages
In order of discovery Before there was a market, there was a maker. Before there were formal organizations…
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Five Phases for Running Organizational Change
Five phases for diagnosing, launching, running, evaluating, and sustaining organizational change — practical steps, not theory.
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Feedback is the Lifeblood of your Organization
The feedback signal completes the flow of value, it governs the corrections that let fast-loops function as double-loops,…
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The Vantages You Didn’t Need Become a Crisis of Transition
The vantages that were free at ten people and suddenly aren’t — and why the gap usually gets…
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Does Every Vantage Have Its Own Natural Speed?
Craft can run fast: daily practices, quick iterations, skills refined from session to session. Systems run slow, structure…
In every confrontation, and in every conversation, there is an opportunity to be the better person, or to prove that someone else is.
A project about the lessons we learn from others, by the/jp/project.