It gets complicated…

Think about which part of your organisation you identify with most strongly. Then the parts it relates to – peer units, subunits formal and informal, higher-level units, and so on – and the nature of those relationships – relationships of flow, service, accountability, belonging, strategic interest, and so on.

It gets complicated pretty quickly, doesn’t it! Now think about how you experience those relationships, and how that experience changes with each new priority, each new challenge, and with the passing of time and the deepening of your understanding. So not just complicated, but ever-changing.

Now begin to imagine how different colleagues new and old would answer those same questions. Especially as organisations get larger, no single person’s perspective can hope to describe it adequately. However you try to represent it, it’s at best a compromise, and a static one at that. Your organisation is not just complicated, it is by any useful definition of the word, complex, and we’ve hardly begun to identify all the relationships involved.

Beginning Wednesday 30th – just a week away now – the spring cohort of Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) will help you, with others, to make new sense of your organisation, and better understand its challenges and how to engage with them. At its heart is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a descriptive, relational, and complexity-friendly model, a lens on your organisation and framework for organisational inquiry and generative change. It’s the same model that’s explored in my new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation and you’ll get a free copy of the e-book edition of that too. Join us!

Save 15% with coupon code BLOG15, and contact me for other codes (government, healthcare, education, non-profits, NGOs – that kind of thing, also bulk discounts). Don’t stress over your ability to make all 7 sessions – that issue affects one participant already, and there are ways to catch up.

Today and further ahead

Every Thursday, at 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT it’s Office Hours, aka Ask Mike Anything (AMA), all welcome. Zoom details:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85069940421?pwd=7KSsYrub7wUx9EXe1JpGbeo6qyXDsY.1
Meeting ID: 850 6994 0421
Passcode: 864206

Further ahead:

08 May, Online, Business Agility Meetup, Berlin, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST, 1pm EDT:
Meetup: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric’s BA Community Webinar Series:
Webinar: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

The BLOG15 coupon code (etc) applies to TTT/F and the Autumn cohort also.