The Learning Constellation I’ve been working flat out on the structure of an event I’m running this week for senior learning leaders: it’s called the ‘Learning Constellation’, and really it’s a scaffolded structure through which to consider central themes of transformation. I’m using a lot of…

Social Leadership: Holistic Perspective It’s almost time for me to pick up the Social Leadership work again. The second edition of the Social Leadership Handbook was published in 2017, and since then my own work has considerably broadened the landscape, and my understanding of Social Leadership…

Context & Evolution of Learning in the Modern Org The context of learning within our modern Organisations has shifted dramatically, in a relatively short space of time. The change has occurred at both the broadest level - the question of ‘what learning is’ for an Organisation - down to the most…

Value Architecture and the Social Contract Today I’m facilitating a large group event, with people from over forty different organisations, on Strategic Workforce Planing and future Organisational Design. It’s based around a series of deliberate provocations, and I’m using two in the group work.…

Organisation as Ecosystem: Seasons Through this year I am building out a body of new writing on ‘The Organisation as Ecosystem’. The backbone is a series of walks in the New Forest, the National Park on the south coast of the UK. I am walking it, with River, through the seasons, and much of the…

Recording ‘Unreconciled: Being Human in the 21st Century’ I spent today recording the audiobook for ‘Unreconciled’ or, more accurately, recording half of the audiobook. The day went well, with my voice holding up (mainly due to Arthur brewing me endless mugs of ginger, honey, and lemon), and it…

Safety and Shelter: Research Kickoff In our shifting cultural context, some people feel that they have lost something: aspects of their identity, safety, or support. The new ‘Safety and Shelter’ research project, and accompanying free programme, explore this, by collecting stories of identity and…

WorkingOutLoud on Organisation as Ecosystem We can see the world in clear detail, with out own eyes. But that’s not the only way to see it. We can craft, borrow, and share other lenses. Different ways of looking can help us to find different ways of understanding.  Back in 2019 I first started…

The Power of Eclectic Connection I was fortunate to spend time last week in the company of eclectic practitioners, convened within a common landscape. The DLD conference in Munich invites scientists, social activists, musicians, performers, economists, ministers (both ecclesiastical and…

The Boundaries of Safe Thinking I’ve been at the DLD conference in Munich this week, a real treat, to hear so many diverse perspectives, and meet a broad array of people, from the deeply technical to the deeply creative (all, sometimes, within the same human). Old friends and new, and a chance to…

The River: Fixed and Fluid. Ecosystem Notes. I’m considering the flow of the river. Always downhill, but rarely straight. Rivers themselves are a perfect exemplar of the forces that shape our broader ecosystem: erosion, deposition, traces, movement, incremental change, balance, flow. Water is…

Ecosystem Lenses Viewing the Organisation as Ecosystem is one way to move beyond a purely structural perspective. Through this lens we perceive a landscape that is both fixed and fluid, but which is primarily described through language of interconnection, interdependence, light and shadow, through…

The Stolen Week It has felt a little like cheating, but I managed to keep myself largely offline last week, delaying the start of 2026, providing space to work on the final amends and illustrations for the new book. I completed four new illustrations, and some tweaks to two key sections:…

The Post-Structural Organisation Building out on the new work I shared yesterday, on the notion of the Meta-Tribal Organisation, I thoughts I’d share some further thinking in this space. Fundamentally it’s part of a broader conversation about scale: the relationship between features such as power,…

The Meta Tribal Organisation I’ve positioned the notion of the Socially Dynamic Organisation at the heart of my work: it’s the current organisational design principle I favour most strongly, and I’m considering a second edition of this book next year. So I’m a little surprised to find myself very…

Fragments – The Planetary As I put the finishing touches to the new book, I am reminded how far it has come. Last summer I wrote the initial essay, ‘The Unreconciled Self: A Planetary Philosophy’. It was around ten thousand words long, and I was rather pleased with it. Today, the manuscript sits…

Delusions of Culture Our understanding of how the world works is partly held in our ability to view it through the conceptual frameworks that we construct. These are abstractions, not absolute truths, and hence can, at time, delude us. Some of these we make for ourselves, others are constructed…

Intersections I’m working on a new illustration, showing the interrelationship between formal and social systems within our Organisations. It was going to be for the new book, but I realise that I already have two images incorporating arrows, so either one of them has to be relegated or I’ll…

Social Connection I was emptying out a box of toys at the weekend: ones from my own childhood that are coming down from the attic for a second round with my own children. At the bottom of one box I found three photos, each one from when I was eighteen, and each one carefully labelled on the back.…

Unreconciled: Evolving with Feedback We’ve had feedback from what may be our final round of beta readers for the new book, ‘Unreconciled: being human in the 21st Century’. It’s been a really helpful mixture of things, from direct suggestions, through reflective comments, and just people adding…

Social Leadership: the Maths of the Social Orbital dynamics - the ways that we understand the motion of spacecraft and satellites, is notoriously complicated. Or more precisely, seems to be complicated because it’s counter intuitive. In orbit, to catch up with something ahead of you, you slow…

The Exploitation of Labour Not all revolutions are equal. The Industrial Revolution, the foundation of so much of the structure and dogma of our Organisations today, was fundamentally about the exploitation of resource and labour, in service of productivity and effect, and in this endeavour it…

Sketch Map of High Performance Culture I’ve been working on two key research projects around High Performance Culture this year, and now starting to draw out structure and ideas to prototype in a programme in 2026. This first sketch map captures some of the Leadership Capabilities I’m considering…

The Intersection of Technology and Humanity Tomorrow I deliver the opening keynote at the Learning Network Connect conference: I am extremely grateful and excited about the opportunity to do so, and fully intend to confuse myself as fully as possible as I prepare. My session will explore the…

Structural and Meta-Tribal Organisations Scale is held in many systems: of power, influence, structure, impact, cost and so on. But not all systems scale in the same way. You can scale a car park by simply buying up an additional acre and staking out spaces, or you can add an upper deck, or ten…

Leadership for Multiple Futures Adaptation comes in different flavours: to reduce pain, or increase opportunity, to reduce the cost, or deliver efficiency, to do what we currently do but better, or to learn how to do something new. In any of these cases, there tends to be a clear ‘before’ and…

Delaminated Leadership: Emergent Technology Emergent technologies create effects within existing systems, but also ones that bleed between systems, or fracture the boundaries of those systems. Waterwheels provided a general purpose type of power generation, which scaled up what could be done with…

Fragments: The Multi Dimensional Organisation Today just sharing a few #FragmentsOfThought as I have been looking into future models of Performance Management and Recognition. These fragments cluster around a central theme of the Socially Dynamic Organisation framework - that we are moving from a…

Illustrating the Unreconciled Self I’m down to the last couple of images for ‘The Unreconciled Self’, and as ever they are the last thing to be completed. This one is for the ‘Delamination of Citizenship’, in which we consider how our ‘spaces’ are proliferating, and our legacy structures are…

WorkingOutLoud on High Performance Culture Unsurprisingly, I find myself in a new landscape, sketching another map. If you know my work at all, you will know that this is a familiar approach, using landscapes as a way of exploring ideas, and the research on ‘High Performance Culture’ is no…

What’s in a Name Right here, at the end of the writing process, I find myself thinking about changing the name of the book, again! And not for the first time has this happened to me. Sometimes a title is what inspires you, and guides you, through the writing process. But when you get to the end,…

Planetary Philosophy – Religion There’s a chapter in the new book that explores belief systems, and structured religions, which are under the same types of disruption and pressure as our structures of culture, government, defence, organisation, and so on. Today I’m just #WorkingOutLoud to share…

The Cost we can Bear The cliffs where I live are inherently unstable: unlike other, more reliable cliffs that are formed of granite, or even chalk, ours are primarily made of sand, and bonded by little more than mud and optimism. As such, they have a distressing tendency to slump and collapse in…

Quiet Leadership The next Quiet Leadership journey kicks off in a couple of weeks time, and in preparation for it, I’m creating a couple of new images. Set against the backdrop of the Organisation as Ecosystem, this work explores aspects of humility, kindness, fairness, and the gracefulness of our…

Foundations of Action At times we need to lay the groundwork before we take action: when it comes to thinking about things, this can be to develop the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks within which to do that new thinking. If we think with our old language, and our old schemas, we may end up…

Fragments: Strategic AI Sharing a few fragments of thought as I prepare for the Fourth Prototype of the Strategic AI Workshop tomorrow: That there is value in actively searching for the areas in which we lack templates for action. Because they are also spaces of opportunity. And that templates for…

Safety and Shelter: Research Project You may have noticed that I ran a small programme called ‘Safety and Shelter’ earlier this year. It was a journey set in the landscape of Quiet Leadership - viewing the organisation as an ecosystems - focussed on those people who have lost something in our…

Sharing the Preface from the Unreconciled Self I feel that we are racing towards the finish line, although aware that the last mile can feel that it takes the longest time to travel. Yesterday I pulled out the two sections that formed the introduction to the book, and rewrote them as a single…

WorkingOutLoud on the Planetary Philosophy I saw the first draft layout of the book today: still early days, but it gave me the chance to see it slowly coming to life. We played around with how the text callouts are handled, as well as simple - but important - decisions as to what the chapter…

Honouring Dame Jane Goodall To my surprise, a few years ago I discovered that Dame Jane Goodall, one of my heroes, was also one of my neighbours. It was when River was still a baby, and I was pushing him, around the time of the pandemic, along the beach, past one of the chines - the water cut…

The Future of Work: Fluid Performance Systems Our legacy notions of Performance Management, rooted in fixed structures of task and role, and embedded in legacy ideas of hierarchy and power, is likely to be upended by far more fluid and dynamic models of performance measurement and resource…

Baking I had the strangest realisation at the weekend, as I was baking Meadow’s fourth birthday cake. Not just her cake, but also muffins and buns for all the parents and family. Quite a lot of effort, which would (I hoped) be entirely consumed by the end of the day. I really enjoy baking and…

WorkingOutLoud on Performance Management I’ve been working on the illustration today for a piece I have not yet written about Performance Management in the Anthropo-Technic: it’s about how AI will disaggregate many of the structures of asymmetric performance analytics and undermine associated…

Creativity in the Age of AI I’m working on a new research project and programme called ‘Creativity in the Age of AI’, which explores three things: [1] how we are creative, [2] organisational structures of creativity, or engagement with it, and [3] the evolution of our creative identity. It’s aimed…

WorkingOutLoud on the Planetary Illustrations I’m a bit daunted by the number of illustrations to do for the Planetary Philosophy book, but experience tells me that the best approach is to just jump in. Not everything is going to be right, or make the final cut, but just thinking about things will…

#Fragments – Culture I’m continuing to #WorkOutLoud on ‘Culture’ and aspects of ‘High Performance’, today sharing a few #FragmentsOfThought That culture may be difficult to define - or plagued by prolific, but conflicted definitions - but that we can more easily categorise areas of leadership…

Rehearsal I’m sharing an important body of work on Thursday, and have spent much of today rehearsing, which is quite an unusual thing for me to do! It’s not that I’m unprepared, just that usually I do my rehearsing as I travel: under a methodology of #WorkingOutLoud, I write, share, perform, most…

Planetary Philosophy: The Book Blurb I’m just back from three really productive days working on the Planetary Philosophy book with Sae, up in the Bavarian alps (I know… it’s no hardship to write with those mountain views). And yes, I know I told you before that the manuscript was finished… well…

A Poly-Centric Expression of Leadership Within a holistic context of change, where the the overarching foundations of our certainty are disaggregating, we require a mobile and poly-centric view of leadership: in this frame we view that one set of leadership capabilities, within one structure, one…

Evolutionary AI: The Location of Denial I’ve spent the day here in Munich listening to powerful stories of transformation and change, as a whole industry is disrupted by AI. Faced by the fragmentation of certainty, we see innovation and rapid iteration. Whilst presented with energy, what is often…