I completed this image today, which I had previously shared uncoloured. It’s been hanging around I finally needed it as a rather simple illustration for one of the new Pioneer Map capacities, ‘Boundary Leadership’. The image is intended to illustrate the subdivision of the whole ecosystem into microcosms. I’m leaning into the Pioneer Map work, although I cannot tell yet whether this is the settled piece, or a transitional idea.

My original Social Leadership work defined Social Authority at the intersection of formal and social systems, but latterly I have been exploring both a broader and deeper perspective. Broader, with the new work that stretches out the liminal and wilderness spaces, and deeper because the two systems become many systems. Across my work I have been using the new language of space: the Citadel (owned and controlled - the legacy Industrial model), the Cultivated (the social and tacit space, and the location of my historic work on Social Learning and Community), the Liminal or Edgeland (which is a boundary adjacent space where all rules and power blur - a contextually available space that we may visit or trade with, but is not always available or on demand), and the Wilderness (which can be traded with if we walk out to it, but cannot be seen, measured, owned or controlled).

I feel that aspects of my work are racing ahead of me. The ideas seem to be coming together, and then tumbling forward into something new at a great speed. Sometimes before I’ve backfilled in the detail. On the one hand, it’s invigorating - and not unusual - periodically you’ve done the groundwork, and it just takes off - but it’s also risky, because you build a house of cards.

Mention an Agent and it conjures up a variety of images: the Secret Agent, surreptitious meetings in late night cafes, with a cigarette dropping from her mouth, the Holiday Agent, harassed by passengers at the arrival gate, searching for a missing tourist, or the FBI Agent, toting sunglasses, solving crimes. To be an 'agent' implies an importance, a holder of some kind of authority and purpose, some type of access or permission, some level of separation and power.

This writing is a new iteration of the work I first sketched out last week, which talked about ‘Three Dimensions of Change’. Having lived with that for a few days, and spent some time illustrating around the ideas, I now find myself repositioning it slightly, to talk about three fundamental ‘Logics’. Each is a system of understanding and operation, and each is related, yet different.

There are so many ways we can go. Layer upon layer of our foundations have been fractured, opening up space to reimagine what our Organisations can be, in almost every dimension, and direction. But the abundance of choice is held within structures of power, identity, certainty, familiarity, ownership, and cultural context that are harder to escape. Whilst technology and evolved social context permit new expression, that expression will not easily be realised within the existing structures unless we knock down some walls - some certainty - to make space.

Data collection is underway for the ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ first prototype, and the first three results are in. I now have initial data from two large and very well established financial service Organisations, and a global health entity. Today I am #WorkingOutLoud as I interpret this (and I’m starting with ‘Accountability’, which is the most contested dimension!). As a reminder: ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ is a book and research project that explores a proliferation of models of Organisational Design and Capability, in the context of the Human plus AI future.

I find myself wondering what ‘The Learning Organisation’ means in our current context. I’ve always considered it to mean ‘the Organisation that is able to learn, from it’s people’, as opposed the the one that ‘Does learning to people’, but perhaps now it is something different again. And what it becomes may be ‘less’, not more. The ‘Learning Constellations’ research, run across 22 large organisations, gave a clear picture of a shift, away from ownership, structural technology, and control, towards a focus on collaboration, application, and more rapid experimentation.

AI transformation is being driven through multiple pressures, in several dimensions. In the first dimension there is the AI adoption that is planned, strategic, sanctioned, structural, and permitted. In the second is the diffuse, distributed, hidden, diversified, social, and tactical use, driven by people in need, and often around the edge of the system. This tension between the formal and social, the structural and tacit, has always been present, but the pace of innovation and adoption today is exceeding the ability of the formal structure to refactor the change into the established model.

Heading to London to run the first Leadership workshop and diagnostic based on the 'Sketches of the Future Organisation' work. This work has come together over an eighteen month period, but I wrote the bulk of the book in a focussed two week stint in the Spring. As is often the way, you wander in the landscape, feeling lost for a long time, and then it all comes together.

The Sketches of the Future Organisation work explores the space between where we stand today, and the various distant promises of the future. Across four axes, it maps possible future states of the Organisation, looking at the architectural structure, how decisions are made, the value architecture, and understanding of complexity. Not a definitive set of measures, but the first four as a foundation.

If you walk into any room that holds people, be it a boardroom, a team meeting, or a gardening workshop, you will find that power is already present, and in motion. Some of it is visible: the person who controls the agenda, the budget holder, the one whose silence changes the temperature. But much of it operates beneath the surface, in currents that are felt before they are understood.

This morning I was reflecting on the development of parts of my creative voice - about how my journey through watercolour, acrylic, pen and ink, and oil, has had a common structure. I have started with confidence, and learnt a humility. Mastery has been an evolution of voice: discovering a new vocabulary, a new way to express my thoughts, but each time it has been something I have only been able to find by letting go.

Much of my work, under a methodology of #WorkingOutLoud, is a mechanism to build out a vocabulary of practice. To write broadly and to find the words that stick. To rehearse ideas and see where patterns emerge. To play with language really, which is a good idea, because we should not take language too seriously. Our ability to express our ideas is not simply a mechanism by which we select the ‘correct’ words: rather it is the ability to weave or scatter words, to imbue them with a certain meaning, or to use them to create scaffolding within which others may do so.

There’s a charming story in the news today, about two men who have established a vineyard on a south facing patch of derelict land adjacent to Denmark Hill Station in South London. As part of a community improvement initiative, and with the support of the rail operator and franchise owner, as well as local civic society, it is essentially a story of that which is unclaimed, liminal, and abandoned, being bought into production through direct community action.

Organisations are more than simply physical structures: more than just a building in our local landscape, more than an employment contract, more than a factory or production line, more than cloud computing, a competitive business models, or heroic leaders. Instead, I find that they are best viewed as more than one thing, existing across more than one dimension. Our challenge is to build out understanding of this complex reality, whilst avoiding the temptation to collapse it down to a simple and certain perspective.

The new ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ work is really taking off nicely, and I have ten Organisations kicking off the diagnostic work in a first prototype over the next six weeks. This will allow me to generate their own ‘sketch’ to position within the landscape that the research maps out. It will show how they view their future value architecture, decision authority, and architectural shape, as they adapt to a human plus AI future.

There is a general permeability to many boundaries that were historically watertight. The boundaries of our Organisations, the boundaries of our identities, the boundaries of knowledge and ignorance. As it becomes easier for things to cross, to intermingle, to flow, there is an erosion of the foundations that sit beneath the monolith. For example, the Social Contract, which sits between the individual and Organisation, cannot easily be renegotiated if the individual is flowing out of reach of the Organisation, and if the Reputation story bestowed by Organisational hierarchy is suddenly subservient to Social Authority generated within our Community.

This is early stage #WorkingOutLoud - so feel free to skip it if you are seeking clarity... Yesterday I described the condition of ‘Normative Overhang’, where a value system has been projected past the point where it is structurally supported. When this occurs, it leaves us feeling as though we stand on solid ground, whilst in reality the ice beneath our feet is rotten.

Over the last few months I’ve sensed an emerging social consensus about the use of AI in expression, characterised by both social pressure, and emergent tooling, that encourage AI use to be declared, or which give end users the ability to ‘detect’ AI use. An example is SubStack, which has just released an ‘AI check’ feature, whereby readers can click a button to see whether text is AI generated, assisted, or fully human.

Fundamental to the Organisational capability we seek is the notion of being reconfigurable to need. A model of Organisational capability, resilience, innovation, engagement, and design, that can thrive within our evolved social and technological context. A model of an Organisation that is restless by design, adaptable through structure and interconnection, and acts in service of output, not as a nesting site for power.

Some things hold a universal 'truth', whilst others present us with a diverse range of features, any one of which may prove 'true' within a given context. Light and dark are true, as is the way our bodies respond to the length of day, and the wavelength of the daylight we experience within it. But also true is that we can buy daylight bulbs that simulate the sun and 'trick' our bodies into behaving in certain ways.

Often my work involves a pause, in this case to ask myself why I am struggling to resolve what should be a simple question. What is my experience of the relationship with AI, and why does it matter to me so much? I share this as my own reflection, not as insight or a generalised truth, it forms part of my broader current enquiry into the social context of AI, and the ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ work, which really relies on me finding an answer - any kind of answer - to act as a foundation.

Find a thread and pull it: see what unravels. I’ve been thinking about ‘belonging’ recently, as it’s one of the words that comes up quite often (alongside ‘trust’, ‘belief’, and ‘authenticity’) when describing leadership in the evolving Organisation. Which makes sense, if we are using a lens of ‘togetherness’, of strength through unity. But that’s not the only lens to use: in the new ‘Sketches’ of the Future Organisation work, several of the ten archetypes, the ten illustrations, play with ideas of disaggregation, including ones that simply stop trading in certain currencies.

Coaching has been deeply impacted by AI, both as a practice and a marketplace, with pressure being exerted in two directions. From a technology perspective, we have seen a proliferation of technologies that enable anyone to prompt or access ‘coaching’ like features, at low or no cost, as well as a host of AI enabled startups offering packaged ‘Coaches’ that are either stand alone or increasingly embedded within diverse other platforms.

Last week I was working on the idea of ‘Texture’ and ‘Flow’ as part of a conversation about Coaching in the human and AI future. But as I built out these words, I realised that the language has a greater utility across my broader landscape. So today I’m #WorkingOutLoud with a #fragment of thought about this. The two dimensions of ‘Texture’ and ‘Flow’, are not direct alternatives.

Ours is a world of statements and certainty. Bold headlines and packaged TED talks, statements of value and truth, a certainty of structure and belief. The world is known to us, within our power, under our control, and whilst we experience change, we cling to the notion that it will be reconciled back into the containers that we hold so tightly.

Today we started our year long enquiry into the Future of Work. We did not start with AI, or Culture, Change or Design. Rather, we started with togetherness, and a conversation about what it means to belong. Not particularly to be nice, but rather to understand what it meant to us all, and to consider whether ‘belonging’ will be a casualty, or ascendent trading currency, of the Future Organisation.

I’ve had a highly productive day, and have completed a reviewed manuscript of ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation: Human, AI, and the Space Between’. It’s an odd parallel, coming alongside publication of ‘Unreconciled’, as these are two entirely separate books. ‘Unreconciled’ took me two years to write with Sae. ‘Sketches’ came together in two weeks, and it shows. It’s practitioner work: building on my original Socially Dynamic Organisation work, but wrapping in swathes of the new work from the last two years, it is very much a matter of finding my way.

The language of ‘Coaching’ is endemic, and highly valued, in many Organisations, but as both a practice and product the thing it describes is changing. Assailed by AI, subject to cost cutting, and in something of a mid life crisis of identity. Today I am gathering my thoughts as I prepare to host a generative enquiry with a couple of friends next week, working with a group of leaders who are interested less in what coaching ‘was’, and more in what it may become.

How AI and humans work together at scale is a subject - THE subject - at the heart of much Organisational hand wringing and effort right now. Closely followed by how we continuously adapt roles, skills, and operating models, in line with the potential pace of change. Both of these questions are important, but both may be occluding a more fundamental perspective.

The broadest landscape of my practice is coming more sharply into focus: after two years of sustained work, I feel that I am finding the edges, and developing the language, although with the caveat that you should treat this summary as very early stage #WorkingOutLoud. It’s a sketch at best. Increasingly I am positioning leadership at the intersection of social systems, structural features, and emergent technology.

Across my main published work there are somewhere around 1.5 million words. That breaks down as approximately 350,000 in my major books, 150,000 on Social Leadership Daily, and nearly 950,000 on the Blog itself. It does not include my main unpublished works (‘The Change Handbook’, ‘Music and Learning’, and ‘Social Age Guidebook’, which would add another couple of hundred thousand, not does it include the current ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’, or several other SubStack sites).

My new book, ‘Unreconciled: being human in the 21st Century’ will be published on Monday 29th June, and pre-orders are now open for most online retailers around the world (Amazon stocks it everywhere, and you should be able to order from your local bookshop too!). Delivery times vary between platforms, but I hope that will settle down next week. This is my twenty second book, and for the first time it will be published simultaneously in both hardback and paperback.

Rather a self indulgent day today: It’s graduation day for my doctorate, and whilst I’m unable to make the ceremony itself, it still feels like a chapter marker. A transition point. Not as some ‘success’ particularly: this is my second time around. In my twenties I moved straight from my Bachelors degree in archaeology and material science into a PhD on the psychology and neurophysiology of storytelling in digital environments.

Crystals can only arrange themselves in a finite number of ways. Two hundred and thirty of them to be precise, originating from seven different crystal systems: cubic, tetragonal, orthorhombic, hexagonal, trigonal, monoclinic, and triclinic. These seven systems define the geometry of the smallest repeating unit - the unit cell - and from that, everything else follows. Our Organisations do something similar: from their Industrial and human foundations we can track familiar patterns, a taxonomy of structure, although the reasoning for this is more varied.

Next month I’m starting a year long journey with a group of senior leaders across a range of global Organisations, exploring the human and AI future of work. We will bring the best contemporary research, the full range of lived experience and knowledge within the group, alongside a broad mix of external and non standard perspectives to challenge and support us.

The new Social Leadership work is building out quite nicely, and I’m finding a more unified language across whole swathes of my work. I find myself describing it in two contexts: evolution of existing leadership roles, and the emergence of an entirely new layer of Organisational leadership. Not two layers that need to be reconciled, but rather two that will exist in parallel.

I’m writing in the tropical glasshouse at Hortus, Leiden. When they last renovated the structure, the roof was raised, and a classroom space constructed, and that’s where I’m sat right now. I’m not sure I’m supposed to sit and work here, but such is the nature of work in the context of the Social Age. Itinerant, but not adrift: my work throws out anchors to academic practice, qualitative research, organisational effectiveness, capability building, philosophical enquiry, and grounded practical action.

The adaptation of our Organisations - as well as our broader societies - will take place at the intersection of social context, formal structure, and technology. Social context is multi layered, often conflicted, constantly in motion, and unknowable by any individual or system in it’s entirety. Formal structure can be owned and controlled, but of itself does not provide capability and effect, unless interwoven with social context.

Throughout this year I’m writing a book with River about ‘Ecosystems’ - it’s an exploration of that which is fixed and fluid, within ourselves and our landscapes, and more broadly about our interdependence and language of belonging. Today I’ve been mainly in airports and stations, so just sharing some of the writing I’ve done in a rather disjointed way.

Things act upon each other. Imagine ‘Time’. For most of us, it’s something immutable, quantised, finite, and usually in short supply. But the existence of unified time is only a relatively recent phenomena: only when the railways were built and required a ‘time-table’, was it really necessary to have time run at a similar pace between cities and towns. This need - alongside other industrial advancements that allowed for the relatively cheap manufacture of reliable clocks that could be bought from a catalogue for every station - carried us into this age of unified time.

Understanding AI as a technology is an excuse that lets Organisations off the hook: they are able to rationalise it as procurement, deployment, training, and resource. Instead, we should recognise it for what it really is: a social context, augmentation, or even alteration of consciousness itself. We risk using the wrong tools and frames, resorting to governance and risk management, when in fact we should be more strongly focussed on cognition, behaviour, collectivism, knowledge, power, structure, and effect.

What does it mean to ‘belong’? Can you belong in endless places? How does ‘belonging’ work, when ‘place’ has ceased to be geographic, and when even our identities have become something more fluid and diffused? My new book, ‘Unreconciled: being human in the 21st Century’ is out later this month, and in the run up I am sharing extracts from the work, alongside further commentary and reflections.

I clearly remember hiking the South West Coastal Path in my mid twenties, mainly for the injury I picked up to a tendon. It was nothing dramatic: no stumble or fall. Just the very deliberate choice to wear the wrong boots. The Coastal Path is beautiful, stretching at that time almost six hundred miles almost from my front door. But it was unlike many of the other expeditions I was making at that time: no mountains, no moors, no remote and isolated campsites.

As Sae and I count down towards the publication of ‘Unreconciled: being human in the 21st Century’, I’m sharing some extracts from the book, alongside some notes and reflections on how the work came about (you can sign up here to receive updates on publication, as well as special events around the launch). Today I’m sharing part of the chapter on ‘Place’, which explores how our sense of ‘place’ has become diluted, distributed, diversified, between the physical and virtual, but also how we have lost something.

Does the language of ‘Skills’ still serve us well? In this early stage #WorkingOutLoud, I lay out a position that says ‘yes’, but within a much more narrowly defined context. It takes the position that we now have the instrumentation and social context to understand capability in new ways - at the structural level - in more granular detail, and that with these tools and perspectives we can identify a broader set of capacities that exist not as discrete units, but within ‘motion’, ‘relationship’, ‘orientation', and at the ‘threshold’.

One of my favourite programmes to guide is around my work on ‘Disorientation and Imperfection as Lenses for Leadership’. I like it because it forgives the nature of my practice, and because it’s genuinely liberating for some people. The premise is that we are conditioned to believe that there is a right answer, that we can always win, and that ‘perfect’ is better than ‘imperfect’.

I have a great many things on the go right now, some of which, like the ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ work, is being pulled into practice before I’ve even finished writing it. I’ve always tried to segment my work into parallel spaces. At the bottom is the everyday writing on the blog: #WorkingOutLoud, sharing rapidly iterating ideas and, more importantly, finding the vocabulary with which to do the thinking.

I’m pleased with the new body of work, ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’, which will be published as a Guidebook later in the summer. This work explores a broad pattern of change and the potential expressions of Organisational Design that may emerge in our response to them. Behind the writing, I’m building out a four part diagnostic framework that is standing up well in my first prototype: this considers [1] structural/formal to distributed/relational, [2] …