The Fabric — an ongoing serialisation. New chapters as they're written. What organisations never quite notice they are missing.
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“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.” Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer So far Part One asks why operating models keep disappointing. Chapter 1 set out how they fail and why the usual explanations do not account for it. Chapter 2 showed that
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So far "The purpose of a system is what it does." Stafford Beer. Chapter 1 made a single argument: operating model redesigns keep disappointing not because they are badly designed, but because they are aimed at the wrong layer. The formal model specifies structure, process, governance and incentives.
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Chapter 1: The operating model that disappoints "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." Paul Batalden. The story in the opening chapter is not unusual. Change the institution, sector, and decade, and the pattern repeats. A new operating model is commissioned. Significant effort goes
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I have worked in and around large organisations for most of my career, and I have learned not to expect too much when I walk through the door of a new one. The politics settle in quickly, the early optimism fades, and within a few months the organisation reveals itself
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What this book is and isn’t This book is not for everyone, and it is worth saying that at the start. It is not for the expert in systems thinking who has read Beer and Senge and can cite the relevant literature without pausing (I can't, by
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In September 1945, a farmer in Fruita, Colorado took an axe to a young Wyandotte rooster and missed the jugular. The bird survived. Not for a few minutes, not in some diminished twilight state, but for eighteen months. Mike, as he came to be known, ate, drank (via eyedropper into