Heart of the Art

Times are hard. The reality of 'delayering' is that there are less people around, particularly less senior people, who can help us change our organisations for the future. As they have left our organisations a lot of 'tacit' knowledge is lost, you know, all that knowledge that actually means stuff gets done.

Our people are anxious. Early retirement and voluntary redundancy has meant jobs feel at risk. Everyone knows there is more change to come. Things won't get better soon. The organisation is crying out for a story, a sense of direction, that gives it back its purpose. That story must be their story, it must resonate with their lives and their experiences. We need to design with our organisations what we will be in the future.

The challenges we face are bigger than one organisation can solve. However well we run our piece of it, it remains just that, a piece of the problem and the pieces must fit together to be meaningful. Complex problems demand clumsy solutions, cobbled together, drawing on a variety of expertise. We need to give up on the search for an elegant answer that we beautifully control. We become powerful in this world of reduced resource through the paradox of generosity. By giving things away we become truly rich. We learn to hear what really works and learn to move in step with the possible. As we do this our influence grows, we know what's going on.