#WorkingOutLoud on the Citadel, the Cultivated, and the Wilderness The Future Organisation exists in three spaces: the Citadel, the Cultivated, and the Wilderness. Today I’ve completed the full manuscript (first draft) for a new Social Age Guidebook, ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation: Human,…

#WorkingOutLoud on the Socially Dynamic Organisation Continuing to share extracts from the new Guidebook, ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation: Human, AI, and the Spaces in Between’, which is a focussed two week writing project. I am nearly complete on the first draft, hopefully tonight. Then a…

#WorkingOutLoud on the Syntechnic Organisation I’m fully focussed this week on the Guidebook: ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation: Human, AI, and the Spaces in Between’. Last week I shared a few fragments of writing, and today I’m sharing one of the five ‘decision authority’ sketches. I’ll share…

Sketches of the Future Organisation: Human, AI, and the Spaces in Between I am #WorkingOutLoud for two weeks with a pure focus on a new body of work that sketches our illustrations of the future organisation. One of the sections in the book looks at the new Value Architecture work, and I’m sharing…

#WorkingOutLoud on Decision Authority in the Human/AI Organisation I’ve been working today to describe five expressions of Organisational Design that vary decision authority and governance conditions: it’s a continua from the almost fully human, to the virtually automated. This is early stage…

Sketches of Organisational Design I’m running through a series of sketches around Organisational Design Principles for the Socially Dynamic Organisation: these are all expressions of Post-Industrial structure, and each, in their own way, plays with aspects of boundary, permeability, configuration,…

#WorkingOutLoud on Organisational Design Ultimately our decision on the structure of the Post-Industrial Organisation may be less a matter of what we can imagine, and more a matter of what it will cost. Not simply in terms of money, but also the parallel currencies of trust, belonging, identity,…

The Meta-Tribal Organisation Continuing yesterdays conversation about alternative framings of Organisational Design, the ‘Meta-Tribal’ Organisation is an experiment in minimum viable coherence. It considers the primary structure of Organisation to be tacit, tribal, social, not structurally…

The Intertidal Organisation I find myself caught up between parallel strands of evolution. Documenting not one, but multiple concurrent prototypes of the Socially Dynamic Organisation, each founded upon a different configuration, and principles. I’m letting this work run wild, as it is carrying…

Strategic AI: People First? Our desire to keep people at the centre of our Organisations is noble, understandable, but ultimately not borne out by history or experience. It’s a recurrent theme in my conversations about Strategic AI, and certainly a self belief expressed across a number of the…

Social Leadership: The Modern Context What it means to be a leader has changed, in structure, location, and mechanism. We inhabit the remnants of the Industrial Organisation, within societies whose design remains rooted in feudal notions of power and effect, whilst seeking to adapt to constant…

Familiar Yet Different Adaptation to a hybrid human plus GenAI world will involve adaptation within existing systems, but also the re-imagination of those systems. Those who get stuck in the first framing will end up efficient, optimised, but failing, as context moves further away from their…

Shared Space Somewhere between the ‘Public’ and the ‘Private’ lies the ‘Commons’. Shared space, controlled within both legal and social contexts, open yet contested. This is the space of connection and convening, of protest and marketplace, of shared identity and imposed power. Our modern urban…

Health and Social Care: Evolutions Yesterday I had the pleasure of walking around Yeovil with a friend, exploring the traces, shadows and signs of change, and talking about the challenges facing the National Health System in the UK as it seeks to adapt to new medicines, new technologies, new…

Creativity in the Age of AI Organisations often hold ‘creativity’ in a special box: either one that is opened on special occasion, or one which is carefully hidden away in the back of a cupboard, and quietly dismissed. It’s as though we hold the idea of creativity in tension with ideas of…

Social Leadership: Choices I find myself wandering around a little, somewhat daunted by the idea of the new Social Leadership book, but also aware that I committed to get started this month. The reason for my hesitancy is unclear: over the last couple of years I’ve written quite a few primary…

#WorkingOutLoud#WorkingOutLoudon ‘Ecosystems’ Through this year I’m writing about ‘The Organisation as Ecosystem’, the backbone being an exploration of the New Forest, wrapped around a more philosophical exploration of twelve aspects of organisational ecosystems. Very early stage #WorkingOutLoud: it will make…

Human Plus AI: Core Tensions of the Anthropotechnic The narrative enquiry I recently ran across around forty Organisations illustrated broad insight around the patterns of adaptation required for an anthropotechnic future (humans plus AI), but also a clear articulation of structural constraint. In…

WorkingOutLoud on the Organisation as Ecosystem I’m sharing some of the new writing, on the ‘Organisation as Ecosystem’. I’ve worked on this through January and early February, and now, six weeks in, I am pulling together what is a first chapter of the book (or what may become a book). The…

Generative Inquiry into Design Principles for the Future Learning Organisation #1 I’ve been working with a community of around twenty learning leaders, from complex organisations, using the new Learning Constellation framework to consider three things: [1] where capability sits (between the…

Tensions I’ve been flat out today, writing up a research report from the Strategic Workforce Planning community event two weeks ago: I had around seventy leaders, from over forty organisations, exploring the question of ‘how we unlock the value of a human and AI future’. I used a series of five…

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…