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.
We are good at managing systems and computers. We are good at managing 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.
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 ideas that get us there. We don’t need to dismiss or correct for the friction, the tensions, the perturbations and the stagnations. We need to observe and understand them; to build from them.
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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The Mechanics of Mutual Entrainment
Coordination isn’t imposed from outside a system — it’s a rhythm two or more coupled parties arrive at…
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Organizations are Products too!
Why organizations drift out of step with the society that created them, and what it actually takes to…
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The Missing Return Path
Why organizations fail in full view of everyone who works there, and a system for building the return…
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Impeding the Flow of Value in Self-Managing Systems
Purpose, constraints, networked autonomy, and accountability, read through impedance and reactance rather than control.
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Leadership is just a form of Membership
Researching for a book, I recently interviewed a Scrum Master who had done their thesis on Leadership. When…
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.