A refreshing switch from enterprise to small scale

During my first weeks of work that I had started recently, my family and colleagues were empathizing with me asking about how I found the company. I came up with two metaphors that I feel are describing my thoughts quite accurately. To give you the context I started my career in small startup companies, spent the last decade with enterprise size companies, and joined a small company a month ago.

Boeing vs light plane. Joining a small company of 40+ persons after working in enterprise size companies feels like switching from piloting a Boeing intercontinental to piloting a light recreational plane designed to carry two persons. It feels light, agile and lean - every manoeuvre is possible! A decision made in seconds? Yes! Talk to a person responsible directly? Yes! Find a spot for a meeting today in calendars? Yes! Talk to the CEO? Surely, yes! :) This feels absolutely amazing! 
Also, activities like planning a workshop for the product team a week ahead is possible. Defining the strategy for IT department, nominating chapter leaders is doable darn fast! And so on.

City habitants vs villagers. Another change when changing the scale so rapidly is the change in interactions with people. Interactions are direct. There are no line managers, hierarchies, etc. Awesome, easy. Yet the most significant change is in how people present themselves. What do I mean by that? Enterprise makes people feel and behave as if they were anonymous, similarly to how I find habitants of big cities. One interacts with a shoal of anonymous, similar people. One cannot have time to distinguish them by investing in building individual relations. In a small scale the interaction is of a completely different nature. It resembles the interaction between habitants of a small village. Firstly, everyone knows each one - there is no anonymity. That's how I like it! There is no thing that your colleagues will not know about you. Also, personal characters are fully visible. I say the characters are sharply cut from wood by a talented artist. Everyone has a personal cut. The same applies to me, too!

Overall, this change of daily experience feels refreshing to me. Real people and high decision power to create reality every day! Sounds awesome, doesn't it?!

Myth Busters Series: VUCA SUCCs (sucks!)

I need to admit I have long felt uncomfortable with the VUCA world framing. At some point I discovered more people not quite happy with it. (e.g. see the post of Dr Claudia Gross here.)

Historically, the VUCA term was originally coined in geopolitical context to frame leadership theory during the post-cold-war era. Its first application was in the context of military leadership at United States Army War College. (Wikipedia will introduce you to the story best.)

But then VUCA was quickly adapted by management consultancies which transferred the term into the business world. Equally quickly it became a buzzword in the context of transformation, a buzzword aiming to create a sense of urgency for a change. 

I never felt comfortable with how VUCA is used in the business context. Here goes why.

First, it brings wrong metaphor of military leadership, battlefield, etc. Companies are not battlefields for me. The framing in consequence implies focus on operational context, which is important at a battlefield, while I believe companies currently need strategic awakening. All the effort to make companies operationally excellent forgets that it is direction of development that matters in the first place. Speed of operation will build up as a consequence of people's deep connection to the direction.

Second, I saw VUCA being used as a technique for creating an artificial sense of urgency by consultants and managements of organizations. And there is little worse than that - after a few times of using this technique employees grow cautious of the intentions behind the technique and grow immune to similar "change marketing" statements. They become untrustful and thus reserved to enrolling in successive transformation efforts.

Anyway, enough on the old VUCA. It's neither a good metaphor nor a good starting point.

What is true for me in the business context is the following: Simple, Unequivocal, Consistent and Certain (SUCC). Let me bust the myth of VUCA and demystify its individual components one by one while introducing their SUCC counterparts. 

Volatile? - Our efforts are rather persistent and Consistent - we have been very determined in implementing the technological layer between us and the natural environment. And yes, we have been consistently yet unconsciously suffering from the effects of this separation (see Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke)

Uncertain? - our future is Certain - we are going to cause the extinction of humankind and the planet or at least cause irreversible changes to those.

Complex? - our world is pretty Simple. We are all, i.e. individuals, societies, governments and institutions, slaves of the economic system we have created, (see the lifetime works of Professor Stefano Zamagni), The economic model is based on our atavistic, reptile-level assumptions and principles. And yet we are not capable of changing it.

Ambiguity? - our world is Unequivocal. We have been destroying the planet and ourselves being stuck in the mental frame of exploitation. What also is unequivocal is our lack of capability to accept and understand the results of our actions. 

This bias in our collective understanding, the blind spot, the degenerated least common denominator of supremacy of humankind which we agree to be the cornerstone of the collective understanding, is exactly the root cause of why we have been hurting ourselves and everything around us.

All right, so how do we use the new SUCC acronym? I suggest we stop the destructive self-deception and replace the false VUCA business world framing with the VUCA SUCCs demystifier.

This is not to celebrate our SUCCess in this very focused and determined effort of our worst collective ego to exploit the world as a defense against the made-up threats of VUCA. What I mean is to stigmatize VUCA once and forever.

Stigmatize it with what calls us so strongly on individual level, with what everyone of us feels, senses and experiences through listening to our inner voice - how this VUCA journey SUCCs (sucks)!

From now on I am always going to use these two acronyms together - VUCA SUCCs.

#goodcompanies 

UNMESS book by Morten Elvang

UNMESS book by Morten Elvang is the best piece on lean portfolio management I have read since the release of SAFe LPM.

I had a chance to read the book on my way back from #XP2023. I like it a lot. For precise language, for funny bits of dialog with the reader, for jargon vocabulary one can only learn in the field, for the 5 questions, 3 interactions, connections to #cynefin and for the dancing metaphor.

Introducing the Collaborative LPM, the author managed to cross the "framework / process feel" which is present in SAFe LPM and navigate me as a reader through Complex area of Cynefin. CLPM fits there naturally as it is aware of the nature of complexity in this quadrant and applies the style of action recommended by Cynefin. This is a powerful promise to me. I'd really like to see CLPM in action!