Yes, it’s true. Or so I’ve found it to be. Sometimes, despite anything a facilitator can do, the human system you are working with will fail to achieve any useful outcomes. And here’s something for you to ponder – sometimes it’s your role to enable them to fail. Sometimes they need to go back to the office, or the beach, or the store, realizing then or there, or months later, that they failed. Perhaps they need to fail in order to realize that there’s a larger, systemic dysfu

We’ve mapped and tracked any number of systems as a way of coming to understand the world around us. From circulatory systems to computer systems; from biological systems to solar systems and beyond. We can do, and have done, the same with human systems. It helps us to understand, and it can help us to predict. A human system? Simply put, a human system is any group of two or more people focused around a shared intention. They might come together for an hour, for a blues impr

Note: Once upon a time, this post was referred to as “the three rules.” But that was the wrong language entirely. In the course of...

Much of the work that we do is, by its very nature, emergent. And to define my terms, because words are tricky things at the very best of times, let me tell you what I mean when I say “emergent.” What I mean is that it is impossible (underline, highlight, italic, bold), impossible, to describe the entire solution at the beginning of the project. In fact, many elements of the solution are unknowable until we are mid-flight. The simple truth is that we trust that the simple tru

One of the things that fascinates me is how unique we believe ourselves to be, and, systemically speaking at least, how similar we really...

How does change happen? And, more appropriately, how might change happen, if it were done effectively? Organizational change, historically, has been like rain. It stops and starts, as a sometimes-necessarily-funded-evil of a software project implementation. Ask a change manager, where do they live in the organization? They are part of the Project Management Office, a project function whereby one step of every project is to “change” the people in the organization. We design th

I love working with my clients. To a person, they are exceptional, dedicated, caring. They understand that their human system (their employee base) is inherently wise, and they trust in the wisdom of these people. (And after all, what would it say about them if they hired a boatload of uncaring idiots to work for them??) So I was sitting with a client, a while ago, and we were doing final prep for a workshop I was to lead with his team. And at a point, I turned to him and sai