Whether it is the execution of an ambitious strategy, the adoption of new approaches to developing products or services, or the creation of a new business function, organisational stability is no longer feasible and organisational change is becoming a continuous challenge. And yet, in the majority of cases, such attempts routinely fall far behind the stated expectations and successes are rarely reproducible at scale.
Here are some challenges that matter in such a venture:
⁃ Goals with long timespans and hence long feedback loops
⁃ Necessary conditions are difficult to anticipate and reveal themselves often late in the process
⁃ Attaining situational awareness and finding feasible Adjacent Possible options requires (inter-)acting in the context (via multiple parallel experiments)
The other aspect that makes change hard is encapsulated in the myth that “people resist change”. The problem change initiatives encounter is that people resist change when it comes along as a grand plan from above and is imposed on them, because, by its nature, such grand plans are ignorant of the context in which people find themselves and, more often than not, that they experience constraints that invalidate crucial assumptions that are built into the change model.
What if there is a lens that could complement the perspectives we already have (e.g. Lean, Agile, ToC, Wardley Maps, DDD, etc.) through which we could better understand our context, the various entanglements of how the work happens, and that would allow us to both co-create change plans with the people who are impacted, as well as finding better options to pursue the desired outcomes? We believe there is such a lens and we will share our experiences with working with that lens.
