A weekly journal of practical ideas
New essays and research-backed guides, published weekly, free to read, written to help.
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
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
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
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?

The dimension of Tempo describes the pace at which our efforts can move, or need to, and whether…

Why a fast cycle of trying and adjusting needs a slower, protected cycle running alongside it, or nothing…

Coordination isn’t imposed from outside a system — it’s a rhythm two or more coupled parties arrive at…

Why organizations drift out of step with the society that created them, and what it actually takes to…

Purpose, constraints, networked autonomy, and accountability, read through impedance and reactance rather than control.
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.