Meeting the context challenge

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One of the great challenges of organisation is ensuring that people have the context they need in order to make great decisions. The challenge is universal: were we to divide the organisation into thinkers and doers (a truly terrible idea but bear with me a moment), the thinkers need to know what’s really happening out there, and the doers need to know where the thinkers are headed (there’s a pun there surely). Without that essential context, and to quote my first attempt at some blurb for book 5:

Decisions made in good faith become bad decisions, taxing the organisation’s already limited capacities for communication and decision-making.

Furthermore:

With profound implications for every level of organisation, your organisation’s ability to adapt depends on leaders engaging with that key challenge

Let me offer four ways forward:

Optimise communicationDistribute authorityBuild a more trusting and trustworthy organisationOptimise attention and presence

That list is by no means exhaustive. In a very real way, any decent attempt at process or organisational improvement can be seen as an attempt to increase the organisation’s capacities for meaningful communication and decision-making – but I will suggest that you need all four of these. And if that’s not enough, I’ll mention three upcoming opportunities to discuss these ideas further.

1. Optimise communication

Even on its own, this is a big, big topic. It includes the content of communication, its language, its timing, its quantity, its structure, also the means, routes, and directions of transmission. Consideration of its sources and destinations brings in things like intelligence-gathering, sense-making, and strategising. That then leads to structural concerns: if everyone hearing every last bit of detail from every part and aspect of the organisation would result in overwhelm, who should concern themselves with what, and at what level of abstraction? Put like that, organisational structure might need to be less about functional capabilities and more about information.

2. Distribute authority

This then follows. Turn the Ship Around! author L. David Marquet puts it well: instead of moving the information to the authority, move the authority to the information. Localised decision-making concentrates communication; what comes out (if it needs to come out) is more distilled.

There is more than one way to understand Marquet’s principle. You can interpret it as one of leadership style – i.e. a willingness to delegate – or you might take it as an invitation to design a more optimal organisation structure and information architecture. Those interpretations are fine as far as they go, but things get much more interesting when you see it as a principle for adaptation. Follow through on it over time, and your decision-making capacity will distribute itself to meet your organisation’s business context according to where its informational and decision-making requirements are the most challenging. What you get is fit, and with that the sense that the organisation’s structure expresses something of its understanding of its business environment. In the jargon, it models it.

3. Build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation

The above notwithstanding, I’ve been through enough reorganisations to get more than a little cynical about reorganisations. I will resolve that paradox in book 5 with Organising without Reorganising, a whole chapter on techniques for “organising at human scale”. Here, the advice to build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation follows in a different way from the preceding.

The more that different organisational scopes trust each other, the less they try to manage each other, and the less information they need to exchange. The more confident we are that exceptional conditions will be raised to our attention, the less bandwidth we need to devote to monitoring. The less noise, the less wasteful drain on both of those critical capacities for communication and decision-making. So much opportunity there!

That may seem obvious enough, but preliminary results from Olivier Bertrand’s PhD research on our data suggest something intriguing: trust may need to precede trustworthiness. If I trust you, that increases your freedom to deliver, increasing your trustworthiness. If that sounds difficult, just reverse the roles! From whatever direction it comes, where you resent being over-managed, wouldn’t you rather be trusted?

4. Optimise attention and presence

Now for the bad news. If you thought that you could design the perfect organisation that made all these issues look after themselves, think again. The relationship between your organisation and its business context is an unequal one. There is no combination of formal structure and process that guarantees success; the numbers just don’t add up (it’s why Stafford Beer had to follow his famous book Brain of the Firm with The Heart of Enterprise, the latter to make that key admission). Bottom line, there is simply not enough communication and decision-making capacity to go round. Thankfully, the advice is not one of despair but of pragmatism. You can’t be everyone all at once, but at any given time, you can be somewhere, and you can make it count. Develop your instincts for what most needs your attention. Strive to be in the right place at the right time, even if that is only to be available and fully present to others. Calibrate your communication, focussing on intent and avoiding unnecessary prescription, creating space for competence and innovation. Nurture those same expectations in others, so that regardless of formal expectations and outside the normal routine, the right issues are engaged with at the right kind of level, the right conversations are had at the right times with the right people, and initiative can be rightfully celebrated, together with all of its accompanying learning.

You need all four

Don’t get me wrong: the formal stuff does matter. If organisation structures are getting in the way of doing the right thing, deal with that issue (which doesn’t necessarily mean dismantling them, rather that you take the issue seriously). If people are reluctant to make decisions on their own authority, you’ll need to deal with that issue too. If bad processes are consuming more decision-making capacity than they deserve, that’s typically a straightforward and highly rewarding issue to tackle. More tricky perhaps is a reluctance to let go, but nothing builds trust quite like delivery, and all of these measures help achieve that.

But don’t think that it will be enough. Your organisation needs attention and presence, yours and everyone else’s. Using those to the maximum is what organising is all about.

If you’d like to discuss these issues with me further, there are three opportunities coming up shortly:

18 February, Online, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET, 11am ET, Agile Strategy Meetup Group:
Meet Mike Burrows on strategy 24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025

That first event (which is free) focuses on strategy, where the context challenge is most acute, strategising being constrained in ways it may not recognise. That second one (which isn’t only for facilitators and trainers), explores deeply the deliberate avoidance of premature prescription by putting outcomes before solutions, to quote Agendashift principle #1. And it’s always a delight to be welcomed back into the Kanban community, where (as has been my assumed role for a long time) I try to complement its process perspective with an organisational one.

Also, if you know where to look – Agendashift Academy or the Agendashift Slack if you are a member of either – I am available for “office hours” on Zoom at 2pm UK time on Thursdays, except for the 27th when it clashes with TTT/F. Feel free to raise these topics or any other!

Related A first attempt at some blurb for book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (linkedin.com) Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May 2024) Four weeks until the February TTT/F

(Comments are closed on this post but it is shared on LinkedIn here)

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