Interview (in Polish): KRYZYS WARTOŚCI w nowoczesnym świecie - jak się ODNALEŹĆ? | Piotr Trojanowski

W dzisiejszym dynamicznie zmieniającym się świecie, gdzie technologia i biznes ewoluują w zaskakującym tempie, często zapominamy o podstawowych wartościach i równowadze między życiem zawodowym a prywatnym. W tym odcinku "Kryzys Wartości w Nowoczesnym Świecie", zgłębiamy tematykę holistycznego podejścia do życia i pracy. Rozmawiam z Piotrem Trojanowskim o tym, jak zarówno liderzy biznesowi, jak i każdy z nas może odnaleźć harmonię i sens w codzienności. Poruszamy kwestie sztucznej inteligencji, transformacji biznesowej i znaczenia pełni człowieczeństwa w nowoczesnym świecie. Dołącz do nas, aby odkryć, jak możemy razem budować bardziej świadomą i zrównoważoną przyszłość. *W filmie poruszymy tematy* Redefinicja Sukcesu: Jak nowoczesne spojrzenie na sukces wpływa na nasze życie zawodowe i osobiste. Rola AI w Biznesie i Życiu: Zrozumienie wpływu sztucznej inteligencji na decyzje biznesowe i codzienne życie. Zmiany w Edukacji i Biznesie: Jak adaptować się do przewidywanych rewolucji w szkołach i firmach. Wyzwania Transformacji Biznesowej: Przejście od status quo do innowacji i autonomii pracowników. Społeczne Skutki Technologicznej Ery: Dyskusja o nowym układzie społecznym w obliczu zmian technologicznych. Holokracja i Nowoczesne Organizacje: Eksploracja nowych modeli organizacji biznesowych. Równowaga Pracy i Życia: Jak znaleźć balans między karierą a życiem prywatnym w świecie pełnym presji. Duchowe i Emocjonalne Aspekty Biznesu: Znaczenie wartości, duchowości i emocji w podejmowaniu decyzji biznesowych.

The Joseph Pelrine's Mentoring Codes

About a year ago Joseph Pelrine shared his thoughts and reflections on mentoring in this LI post. 

After a year I find myself coming back to it regularly. The mental frame is generous, developmental, and resonating. I copy it here to spread the word and, honestly, for easier reference for myself. In the same spirit of easy referencing I dared to coin the name for this frame.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further due, here is the copy of the original post of Joseph. 

The Joseph Pelrine's Mentoring Codes 

Some thoughts on mentoring. During a recent conversation with a young friend, I was saddened and shocked to hear that they were looking for someone to mentor them, but all the people they asked demanded lots of money to do so (n.b. they work in a completely different field, so I can’t help them). 

I guess I’m stupid. I could have earned a lot of money from the people I’ve mentored. But I don’t work like that. For me, 

helping others is a social norm and a moral responsibility

My mentoring doesn’t come free of charge, though. I ask for 4 things from the people I mentor: 

1. Make me proud of you. Always strive to do your best. You won’t always succeed, but I’ll help you learn from your failures so that you get better. 

2. Don’t go dark on me. Stay in touch with me and let me know how you’re doing, especially if you’re not doing well. Sometimes we can pick up subtle clues to potential problems that will help us get better. 

3. Look for opportunities for us to work together. Even though I’m not asking you for any money, I don’t mind if your company or your client supports our work financially 

 

4. Pay forward. I’ve only gotten to where I am because my mentors gave freely of their knowledge, and only asked of me what I’m asking of you. As Edith Piaf (supposedly) once said: "when you've reached the top, send the elevator back down for the others".

p.s. Joseph has remained our guru since the dawn of resonate. 

Leadership and management by Henry Minzberg

I am throwing at you a few thoughts on leadership and management that I selected from the interview with Henry Minzberg. There is more in the interview and I encourage you to spend more time on it. 

Quotes:

The trouble with leadership is that it implies an individual. When you say leader, you do not mean a group, you do not mean a community, you don't mean several people, you mean someone. And it's hyper individualistic. And what we need is a community shift not leadership.

Leadership for me is also an intrinsic part of management. They are not separate. In order to manage you need to lead. In order to lead you have to manage. Managers who don't lead are boring. Leaders who do not manage don't know what's going on. So those two things are intricately tied together. But we need to get to the community shift - we need to get to this idea that organisations are great because people are truly pulling together. By paying CEO 300 times more than an employee you are not sending this message, you are sending an opposite message.

Years ago I used to go around giving talks about what’s wrong with MBA programs. And finally people started asking: what are you doing about this? And I used to answer I am an academic, I am not supposed to do anything about anything, I am only supposed to complain.

I maintain that MBAs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences. The wrong people because at the beginning the assumption is they are going to create managers or leaders. Nobody has ever created a leader in a classroom. Nobody has ever created a manager in a classroom. Just as nobody ever created a swimmer in a classroom. You learn to swim in the water. And managers learn to swim by being managers. And only there they can be developed. So we need much more of an involvement and learning from experience.

To learn management, forget learning leadership, nobody learns leadership, start with people who understand management, and then emphasize not the science of management, of which there is little, but the art of management, and particularly the craft of management. Management is about experience. Sit around the table, share the experience, reflect on experience, and learn from each other.

Full material, thanks to Antoinette and Otti from goodorganisations.com is available on their website.


p.s. There is also an interesting continuation into how managers should approach their learning, based on example of strategy formulation following the leadership section which has a selection of beautiful and refreshing thoughts. E.g. Ikea strategy invention, analysis vs synthesis approach, etc. It starts right after the leadership section, approximately 1:30 hours into the interview.

Contractor's fate - characteristics of entrepreneurial approach to career

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

For those of you who are considering becoming a contractor or already are contractors and looking for peer stories this is a very personal glimpse of my experience after a decade of being a contractor.

• Energy (in)balance. It is hard to maintain the energy balanse. This job is really about radiating your energy. I need to cumulate the energy and then radiate it into the human system of the client. I invest in others, both in individuals in companies, I help them grow, I help them achieve success. Lots of people I helped got a career boost thanks to what we did together and thanks to my contribution. Some are grateful, some others are not, assigning success to themselves. Once the job is done the split of benefits is drastically unequal: career advances vs a time to leave for me.  I enjoy that I helped them yet also wish there was something long term in it for me. No, there is nothing long term for me except satisfaction. It is difficult to absorb some of the energy back to compensate for the energy invested. Only a fraction of clients calls again. 

• Yes, it feels lonely sometimes. I work with some of my best friends at resonate.company yet we rarely work together at the same client. Working together is exactly what made us friends and we knew we wanted to repeat this experience, but it is not so easy. So, the synergy effect suffers.

• Lifetime adjourning. It feels lonely also because I have initiated a lot of Communities of Practice within client organizations and enjoyed being the "founding "leader" and then I had to leave them. So, I know a lot of friendly people in companies, yet I have to adjourn to make space for them to grow and become leaders.

• It is you who needs to pull the trigger and leave. For hygiene I tend not to work with the same client for more than 18 months. The power of the external perspective I bring deteriorates with time and I feel I become trapped in the internal perspective as everyone else. At the same time diversity of your exposure to various clients is what makes you attractive and appealing for clients, so even when it is tempting to stay, you should leave to build your value proposition.

• Long-term sense of ownership. As long as there is plentiful of high energy emotions during client engagements, engagements are usually short term, in months, sometimes a year. There is nothing that extends for 5, 10, 20 years and you can say it is your child, your creation. No product, no business unit, no company. They all have new owners. Except for my company, the one I continuously create, of course. That is why I am a part of a bigger digital boutique together with my friends. Our company is something that will outlive me hopefully. And, except for other assets you create - a book for instance, or other acting in addition to your regular contracts. I authored a few books and that is what heals my sense of long-term ownership. As you can see, the long-term ownership becomes your own duty. You cannot rely on a ready to use logo that simply is there and invites you to build long-term ownership simply by identifying with it. By the way, this need for long-term authoring is sometimes perceived by sponsors of contracts as "not engaged enough". I find such framings very unjust, narrow, and missing the understanding. Contractor's duty to develop her own company deserves respect in the same way as a full-time employee's commitment to spend their lifetime in one company. They both look for fulfillment through contribution to something bigger than themselves individually.

• Yes, it feels great to be on my own! No boss, not an aspirational one, not a stupid one. Would I exchange it for a full-time job engagement? May be. It depends :) For sure it would need to be a full-time job with friends and with a high dose of autonomy. It happened to me that my old friends have hired me as a contractor to help them with some topics and it felt really good. I did not care what form the collaboration took formally: a contract or full-time position. It was of secondary importance as long as I could be collaborating and co-creating with friends. 

• Jealous full-timers? I meet lots of people who initially feel a bit jealous of the freedom that is associated with contracting. Many people never had the courage to try, which I fully understand - it takes a characterological profile and a mixture of courage, stupidity, and risk appetite. Sometimes it just takes a coincidence. In my case, it happened naturally, as my first job back in 1998 was remote and in a small company so it did have aspects of contracting. And, by the way, if it makes it easier for you - I never thought I would be a contractor. Some people still say I have the worst profile for a contractor ever. The truth is that I start every job with a thought at the back of my mind that it is going to last for a lifetime. Coming back to my point - being jealous says a lot about the person who is jealous, about some lack, about an unfulfilled need, about questioning whether her style of investing time and building career, and sometimes about the need to go wild. Let me say, that as a contractor I experience jealousy in the same frame but in the opposite direction - I am sometimes jealous about stability, long-term focus, and ownership, about personal development budgets, about weeks of paid holidays, about paid sick leaves, etc. Again, let's appreciate we are just humans trying to contribute and fulfill our lives, and let's respect each other.

My elevator pitch on the anti-patterns of Agile transformations

I was asked recently in a quite informal and time-bound discussion to share a few examples of known anti-patterns of Agile transformations. This topic has somehow become a topic of my high interest, as there is so many insights from multiple organisations in my mind. You can see a lot of resources at my website or in my mini book. I share the insights openly as I deeply care for transforming the workplace. And between us - after all these year of Agile, there is many highly appealing ideas beyond Agile that being Agile is currently a hygiene level not an avant-garde.

Anyway, I spontaneously came up with a kind of an elevator pitch, and listed these 3 anti-patterns without any up-front prep:

1. Big Bang approach - I witnessed transformations that started with a lengthly Design phase, say 9 months - 1 year of designing the new target state in a small group of executives and senior management. I believe than during this phase there is more value in actually de-freezing this stakeholder group than there is in the design. 

And then on Day 1 the master plan and the playbook are released to the wide audience and the expectation is to kick off in the new setup without significant glitches. After all we have done the prep work for you, right? All you need to do is just follow the script.

Nothing more illusional as you may know - on Day 1 people are surprised, confused, ask a lot of questions, there is disbelief, they feel betrayed. And indeed, it is an example of heavy up front process which is not verified in live so one gets unexpected feedback and the investment misses its goal.

I usually recommend to avoid Big Bang nature approach to transformations, and giving yourself a chance to include your employees in the transformation, invite them to co-author and co-own the workplace based on a shared purpose right from the beginning. Stating your goals vs throwing solutions. A classic, right? The smoother the experience and more inclusive approach is, the more and more you prove you are serious about Agile. After all, this way you show that the Agile transformation is your first initiative driven in an Agile way!

2. Horizontal approach

There is a tendency, backed up by The Conway's Law, to structure the transformation team in synch with the structure of the company leading the transformation and/or in synch with the structure of the company that is undergoing the transformation.

In many cases I have seen Agile transformations aiming to flatten the org structure, yet at the same time, the structure of the transformation team was significantly hierarchical. As a result I saw for example a setup in which an account leader who interacted with sponsors, there was a transformation leader who interacted reported to the account leader, there were Agile coaches who interacted with all parties within tribes and were supposed to report to the transformation leader, etc. And there was usually a gap between these layers, which resulted in suboptimal communication and information flow, and misunderstanding of intensions and goals.

I am a big fan of vertical setups in which the transformation team is actually a team, yes - a cross-functional team and it actually operates as a team, using itself an agile ways of working rather than reporting and splitting tasks, delegating work and reporting. Sounds as an obvious approach, but believe me it is still rather rare. In the vertical setup the transformation team acts across the whole hierarchy, meaning that individuals in the team operate in a Zoom-In and Zoom-Out mode. They Zoom Out to  see the whole landscape and plan the next steps and then each of them Zooms In according to what they agreed on to support the organisation and teams and individuals in going through the transformative change.

3. Put the old Performance and Incentive systems aside for the moment

During the first weeks of a transformations there is usually a hunger of information as employees try to re-model their behaviours according to the new value suit evangelised by the company. They need to understand their new or altered roles and responsibilities. Going further they also need to map what is evangelised as the highest value to incentive programs and performance management systems. And as you can image these programs are not yet existent and scheduled for later in the transformation backlog. And this topic distracts employees from the core change. Usually the lack of clarity or inconsistency within this particular area feeds directly into the resistance against the change. 

Honestly, the only approach I have seen that actually worked is to define an intentional target state so that people anticipate the governing principles and keep the old systems in place for the first 6 months in a frozen form, e.g. everybody gets the same scores of 60% for the next months before we work out the new systems. Of course it would be ideal to have these new systems in place as these are fragile matter, however these systems need to ensure "justice" and as such require wide consultations to reach the consensus. Remember that the procedural justice is what makes people to accept whatever is worked-out.

All right, that's all I can do on a Sunday morning without harm to my family - please stay in touch and share your thoughts. I am open to share more. You can also purchase the mini-book I mentioned above for more throughout and holistic view.

Interview: What's on a mind of a Systemic Coach - Michelangelo Canonico

"Agile movement is in a confusion. We need to stop trying to change the world using the magic word of "agile". Step back, seek for renewal, open up the doors for other notions."

I had a really good time conducting the interview. It was designed to be a surprise interview to catch the instinct responses and for the interview to be as realistic and natural as possible. 

In this interview Michelangelo Canonico shares his personal experience with Agility, transformational engagements, systemic coaching, and even about constellations!

What's On a Mind of... a Business Strategist - Interview with Chris Daniel

The interview with Chris Daniel was conducted remotely by Piotr Trojanowski, on Aug 31st 2020. 

Part I: ON MY STYLE

What is the source of your satisfaction when coaching organisations?

Breaking status-quo. 

People do not call me when things are going smoothly for them, but rather when they face an obstacle that they are not sure how to cope with. I augment their knowledge of the field with Wardley Mapping, and they learn how to verbalise their strategy concerns and ideas which they already knew but could not efficiently express. Once that happens, once I see first complicated matters discussed, I feel content and my job is nearly done.  

How do you typically start your engagements?

It is usually an introductory call when we together try to identify the area which we will work on. It may be a problematic outsourcing contract, disrupting competition or internal inefficiency. This is a starting point after which we assemble a team that will work on the challenge. Those two steps, in my eyes, decide about 80% of the value the customer gets. 

On which aspects do you usually focus on first?

In the world of Wardley Mapping, we call it Landscape. Those are all those things that are around your organisation that influence it but you cannot change them (regulatory requirements, customers, shareholders, competition, providers). If you add forces that influence the Landscape, you get a pretty good understanding of the context of the work that you are supposed to do, and better alignment. 

How do you recognise the impact?

I could say that as a result of my work, important projects are launched or cancelled or money are spent or saved, but the reality is that you never know (nor can you know) what impact can be attributed directly to you, especially that you never get a chance to compare with alternative versions of reality.

I do my job in the best way I can. And I am ready to say I was wrong, I assume I am wrong, and if even with that assumption customers are willing to act in the way Wardley Mapping tells them, the situation can get only better.

What is the toughest issue for organisations to change?

Organisational knowledge. Organisations learn just like humans. 

They store knowledge in the form of processes, procedures and policies. Once such a thing is approved, and once people change jobs, we have policies that may or may not be relevant for a current situation, and nobody knows what the case is.

Managers avoid breaking stuff, so those artefacts sometimes live for decades unchallenged.

Please share a story from your experience

Anonymised answer because of NDA:

I was helping a customer who was pushed by the provider to migrate a particular solution to the cloud. The customer was not sure whether the migrations was a win-win movement, they suspected it was a move that helped the provider only, especially given earlier experiences they had with the provider.

After a not-so-long analysis, the customer figured out that:

(1) they did not trust the provider to meet SLAs during and after the migration. The impact on the customer would be unacceptable.

(2) the migration could be a win-win move.

(3) There was no action that could change the situation without inducing too much risk.

(4) Not changing anything was safe for the organisation.

(5) Other opportunities were more interesting.

Sometimes, this is perhaps the toughest conclusion - there is not much that can be done, so it is better to focus on things that you can change. This customer had plenty of other opportunities, the one that was analysed looked important, but it was not.

I found it to be an act of courage, and I have seen similar situations resolved without taking any actions. Waiting is an action, too.

Part II: DOMAIN OF BUSINESS STRATEGY

How would you explain what Business Strategy is?

The Business Strategy, for me, is about continuous learning what is your current situation, what resources you have available, what opportunities do you face, and in which direction you should move, all of that, of course, with a great degree of uncertainty.

What is the relation between a Strategy and Risk Management?

This requires a short introduction to Taleb works - peolpe in general (including risk specialists) put too much focus on Gaussian distributions. Real life risks are far less predictable than many of us think, and this is the reson why many risk management frameworks give us sense of protection without doing much. But if you accept our limits in how we measure and quantify risk, you get a pretty holistic framework that does not differentiates between Risk & Strategy. They are the same, because you can define a risk called 'Strategic Failure' and derive your entire strategy from it.

What is the race as of today in the field of Business Strategy? Is it about who will make it to the 1% of the population that will join the Space colonisation vs those 99% who will not?

My this year's challenge is to focus only on things that I can change. The race, its fairness, prize & winners do not fall into this category, so I am afraid I will not answer this one.

How can one be a follower of the 3 Big leaders at the same time? I mean Dave Snowden, Simon Wardley, Nassib Taleb? 

I do not want to diminish the work of any person from the Big 3, and while I do appreciate their different attitudes, I think they are very convergent in their thinking. Moreover, to me things that they differ are the source of complementarity between them rather than conflicting them. I guess I should play the question back: "How can you follow only one"?

What is the hygiene level in the Business Strategy that all companies simply must obey?

Know your customers, who they are and why they are using your products and services. And I mean a true "why", not because of "we are the best". This is an entry point that allows you to think about how your customers may change over the years, pick up subtle change indicators and prepare accordingly. 

What is the delight level in the Business Strategy that all companies should aspire to? 

We have just started our adventure in Business Strategies and Situational Awareness, so many years may pass until we learn what the ideal is.

In other words, I have no idea, but I can only imagine that experimenting more seems like an excellent direction to explore. 

Part III: THE JOURNEY

When you take a retrospective look at the last decade of the Business Strategy field - what outcomes are most valuable in your opinions?

This is something vaguely defined as the position - how well is company positioned to exploit current market opportunities and how well can it spot and transition to other fields. This trumps everything else, but, unfortunately, is not immediately visible in the company balance sheets, so only unlisted companies may find this attractive.

From the perspective of shareholders, it is all about profits, not strategy. They "do strategy" on the portfolio level. 

How would you describe the state of the Business Strategy field at present, in the beginning of the 2020s?

It's 2020 and we seem to have just learned that the world is so complex that we cannot predict results of our own actions (Taleb, Snowden, plenty of others). We are still trying to figure out how to reconcile goal-oriented budgeting and planning with the exploratory, experimental nature of strategy. Some companies do that, some pretend doing it, and plenty of others does not understand what is the difference.

What the Business Strategy needs most to continue making an impact?

Leaders willing to take risks and field experts willing to speak up, but mostly the former. When the environment is supportive, experts talk.

How do you imagine a business-wise successful company that is a Good citizen of the world (in terms of sustainability of ecosystem and human disintegrity)?

I refuse to speculate, but I can identify a few first steps which will help any company - calculate your carbon footprint and make sure you have nothing to be ashamed of. 

My "virtual interview" with Dave Snowden

Earlier on this week, Gene Gendel kindly offered an open session with Dave Snowden with an opportunity to ask questions upfront. So I asked my three questions. And David spent a section of his session on answering those. I wish I could provide even more context to David, so that he understood fully where I was coming from, yet still the answers I got are enough food for thought to at least start a good discussion.

Here go my questions:

What systemic change can you predict in the ways of working in the decade of 2020s (after agile delivery, product & customer focus, business agility in 3rd millenium so far) ?

The one thing you can say is that there will be more fads. There seems to be this desire for some sort of a universal recipe to come out every two or three years which everybody picks up on. I think what some of us are hoping is that complexity... remember like Systems Thinking replaced Scientific Management in the 80s, we can see some evidence that Complexity Theory is now replacing Systems Thinking.

And by the way, I had a great privilege of teaching leadership with Peter Drucker on a series of executive seminars and one of the things we agreed on is that Complexity Theory and Scientific Management have a lot in common, and they both disagree with systems thinking. People condemned Scientific Management, but actually it empowered human beings to use their judgement. Scientific Management automated what could be automated but then it looked at apprentice models and lifetime employment for managers and supervisors [in which?] it recognised the need for human judgement. What Systems Thinking is being consistently trying to do since the 80s is to actually remove human judgement and reduce it to a series of spreadsheets and processes. 

And that by the way is the disastrous aspect of Holocracy. I mean Holocracy is a program written by somebody who does not want the responsibility of making management decisions and if you ever saw the need for management decisions going to the current crisis as a point where you have to do things differently. 

So in terms of predicting what will happen I am not sure. I mean I think virtual working has become easier but it is also creating more stress. For example if you spend too much time in Zoom, you are getting visual stimulation but the brain and the body aren't picking up chemical signals which they normally expect in a physical meeting so the stress levels go up. 

(...) I think it is going to be a mirage of different things as we come through. 

I think the attempt to move software development methods into business practice is doomed to fail. It will work for marketing and HR which has so short lifecycle projects, but the idea you can use Agile methods in strategy could only be devised by somebody who has never been in corporate strategy. And I have yet to find any of the people who advocated to spend any time in corporate strategy whatsoever, which is deeply political in its nature - it is not short-cycle like [method?] development.

There was a really bad paper which came out lately which said all the big tech giants were Agile and therefore they had succeeded whereas the other guys weren't Agile so they failed. And that is another example of retrospective coherence. There reality is that the big tech giants were the first into their markets, so they were apex predators. And an apex predator survives no matter how incompetent they are until the market conditions shift again. So there are massive inefficiencies in Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, it is just that they dominate their spaces so you do not notice the inefficiencies and this habit of trying to fit success into whatever your framework is, it's got to stop. If somebody adopted Agile consciously and then reported success I would believe it, but saying "this company was successful and I re-describe them as if they were Agile - that's [snake on sale?]". So I don't buy that.

How humanity should handle the "technical debt" of our civilization? i.e. unsustainability of the global ecosystem (extinction of species, climate change, exploit of resources, growth of population) and of human condition (life - work disintegration, mental condition,etc).

We are not going to do it without at least partial extinction. Let's get real on it. The global warming is serious and the major economic power in the world is not taking it seriously. And there is no way, I mean COVID is just a minor to what is probably going to come in my lifetime. I used to worry about my grand children, then I worried about my children and now I am worried about me, and I am 66. We are going to see catastrophic failures of the ecosystem which will make COVID what it actually is which is a chance to get it right for the worst thing coming. And I think that is what we have got to be careful to be honest - I mean we will survive as species, but what survives becomes key. So the technical debt is going to be recovered catastrophically. It does not mean that something good can come out of it. 

What is your view on the evolution model of the Spiral Dynamics, Clare Graves, Don Beck ? Is the business world / society model ever to become "Teal"?

This is one of the worst books ever published by the Agile movement. The other one is Lean Startup. Lean Startup and Reinventing Organizations are both by cult-like figures. They are both based on completely inaccurate use of cases. Lean Startup goes and studies a bunch of successful companies, identifies the things they did in common, and says "If you do these things you too will be successful". He did not study companies who failed. We did that when I was at IBM with Dorothy Lenner at Harvard. And we found that all companies that failed did exactly the same things as the companies that succeeded. What you have got is a market with high amount of entrepreneurs so some are bound to succeed. So it is not that his advice is bad, but it is not going to cause a relationship. The second, but the worse one is Reinventing Organizations. It is even worse because where you have got a guy with religious ideology who only reports the aspects of the cases supporting the ideology. He reports on use of Holocracy at Zappos and kind of like casually mentions, but does not really emphasize the fact that huge amount of people who were fired. He reports on self-organizing communities, but every single one he does was draconianly imposed by a centralised manager. It did not emerge naturally. So he is highly selective on the cases. He is also involved in this evolution model. I feel really sorry for Claire Graves. Spiral Dynamics originally evolved as an explanation of how societies progress, if you go back to the original theory. And it is very Western, liberal culturally specific view of the historical progress. It is neo-colonial in its nature. If you buy into this particular view of history, it is very good description of history: it talks about the stages you go through. You cannot take a framework designed to handle large movements in history and apply it to individuals or organizations. It does not move across. It also has the implication than the higher levels are better then the lower levels. I remember about having an argument about it with Beck at a conference, and I remember him saying "you do not understand my arguments because I am torquoise and you are just an angry blue or angry green" or something. And it is a classic: "I am in the elite so I do not have to account for myself". That is how cults work. Wilber is particularly bad at this - he does not tolerate dissent. I remember having badges made which had proud to have brown on them. And the next day I got accused of "why are you doing this - brown is not one of the Spiral Dynamics color". And I said "Well, that's exactly the point". The idea you go through this linear progression is just a very bad framework. And self-organization is something that only happens within constrains and it is only appropriate within certain contexts, and it is not a universal goal or achievement. I do not know of any examples quoted in this book where you could not tear his conclusions apart if you did just two days of ethnography in the organizations. The cases do not back up the theory in practice. And I will make this general point, and sorry to people in the Kanban movement and everything else: hierarchical models of maturity are very dangerous in a complex system, because they instantiate past practice, they do not actually enable new practice. And they focus people on achieving what was retrospectively seen to be good rather than what may be good in a more uncertain future, and so they only work in an ordered system. 

I strongly recommend watching the full webinar here as Dave touches on many interesting aspects.