Robust communities have a messy order: they have to evolve they cannot be designed along neat hierarchical lines. Whether you are planning a supplier ecosystem or a user group one marker for robustness is messy order: there is some organization but it’s not cleanly hierarchical.
The Messy Order of Robust Communities
“How Society is (left diagram), how many would like it to be (right diagram)”
Valdis Krebs (@orgnet)
I have used this diagram by Valdis Krebs several times because I find it succinctly communicates a key insight: careers, communities, and expertise is messy. It’s rare that any of them divide into neat boxes
Christopher Alexander: “A City Is Not a Tree”
This diagram reminded me of an article by Christopher Alexander “A City is Not a Tree.” [PDF] [Also available as Part1 and Part2] Here are the opening paragraphs:
“The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice. In order to relate these abstract structures to the nature of the city, I must first make a simple distinction.
I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities. Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.”
Christopher Alexander “A City is Not a Tree”
Christopher Alexander refers to the left as a semilattice and documents how it is found in the evolution of “natural cities” where the right is a right as a hierarchy or tree and symptomatic of planned or deliberately created communities. The latter tend to be lifeless as their lack of overlap does not conform to social realities.
The Shape Firms to Come
“Wirearchy is a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on: knowledge, trust, credibility, a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology”
Jon Husband, 1999
In 2017 I wrote about “The Shape of Firms to Come: Key Values and Architectural Philosophy.” I suggested eight key values that would be hallmarks of successful firms in the next few decades:
- Intelligence Amplification/Augmentation not Artificial Intelligence (IA not AI)
- Human Touch at Scale: Enable Customer Intimacy not an Instrumentality
- Tap Expertise Like Electricity: Rely on Recon Pull Over Centralized Command
- Focus on Learning and Teaching: View Customer Requests as Opportunities Not Costs
- Play a Long Game: Focus on Longer Term Possibilities Over Short Term Gains
- Play a Fast Game: Act on Good Enough Now Don’t Wait for Perfection or Certainty
- Embrace the Possibility of Failure to Prevent it, the Reality of Failure to Learn from It
- Act Entrepreneurially and Foster Ecosystems to Create More Value Than You Capture
These same eight principles can be applied by startups to find their niche in a crowded market or to scale up successfully against larger, more established competitors. These principles represent a messy order that acknowledges the dilemmas inherent in identifying risks and opportunities, exploring them, embracing them or minimizing them as appropriate, and balancing the long term against the short term. I think this observation by Alfred North Whitehead captures the ying-yang nature of order and change in a constructive dynamic tension.
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.”
Alfred North Whitehead in “Process and Reality in Cosmology” [Archive.org]
Max Dupree: Roving Leader Respond Quickly and Effectively to a Local Situation
Roving Leadership
“In many organizations there are two kinds of leaders—hierarchical leaders and roving leaders. In special situations, the hierarchical leader is obliged to identify the roving leader, then to support and follow him or her, and also to exhibit the grace that enables the roving leader to lead. […] The people who did respond swiftly and effectively are roving leaders. Roving leaders are those indispensable people in our lives who are there when we need them. Roving leaders take charge, in varying degrees, in a lot of companies every day.
More than simple initiative, roving leadership is a key element in the day-to-day expression of a participative process. Participation is the opportunity and responsibility to have a say in your job, to have influence over the management of organizational resources based on your own competence and your willingness to accept problem ownership. No one person is the “expert” at everything. […] Roving leadership is the expression of the ability of hierarchical leaders to permit others to share ownership of problems—in effect, to take possession of a situation.
Roving leadership demands a great deal of trust and a clear sense of our interdependence. Leadership is never handled carelessly—we share it, but we don’t give it away. We need to be able to count on the other person’s special competence. When we think about the people with whom we work, people on whom we depend, we can see that without each individual, we are not going to go very far as a group. By ourselves we suffer serious limitations. Together we can be something wonderful.”
Max Dupree in “Leadership is an Art” chapter on Roving Leadership
Effective leaders, hierarchical and roving, are still servants. They put the needs of the group, organization, or society before their own. As Simon Sinek observed, “they eat last,” after everyone else has been fed. Roving leaders bring specialized knowledge, skills, or expertise directly applicable to a challenge or an opportunity. Sometimes, they scan the horizon of areas they deeply understand to alert the group to an emerging risk or opportunity. And there is always a need to blend the multiple perspectives of roving leaders who may have conflicting diagnoses or recommended courses of action. Depending upon the urgency and severity of a challenge, a poor decision made before events overtake the group is preferable to one arrived at too late.
If this all sounds messy, it is, but it enables robust performance.
Related Blog Posts
- The Shape of Firms to Come: Key Values and Architectural Philosophy
- 7 Sets of Insights from “Organize for Complexity” by Niels Pflaeging
- Cultivate Formal Controls, Informal Collaboration, and Value Creation Networks
- Entrepreneurs and Traditionalists Help Society Avoid Stasis and Chaos
- Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last
- Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action
- Rock Paper Scissors
- Three Insights from Dr. Edward Baker’s ‘Scoring a Whole in One’
- Combine Clear Goals with Delegation Based on Expertise for High Impact
- Innovation Principles from Ken Iverson’s “Plain Talk”
- In Good Soil: Goal-Driven vs. Muddling Through Strategies
- A Conversation with Elzet Blaauw on Thought Leadership
Other Articles
- Christopher Alexander “A City is Not a Tree.” [PDF] [Also available as Part1 and Part2]
- John Husband “10 Points About the Future of Work“
Image Credit: “Overlapping Circles” (c) Valdis Krebs, used with permission.