Culture - design or emergence?
You cannot "design" a future-fit organisation
“Anybody who thinks they've got a solution or they have a plan or a design or anything like that — they’re an idiot. You can’t. Dynamic systems don’t operate like that. You have a thing called emergence. We know this. We know the science on it and emergence is the only thing that can deal with these kind of complexities. All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence.” — Tyson Yunkaporta 1
I recently published an article about the work of one of my influential former colleagues, Dr Peter Scott-Morgan, author of The Unwritten Rules of the Game — McGraw-Hill’s Business Book of the Year 1994.
Someone recently read the book and asked me if I could join up the dots between Peter’s work and my own — and how the work Peter and I did together around 30 years ago led me to the different framing I use when helping change catalysts create future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
That’s what I aim to do in the 13-minute Future-Fit Culture Frequently Asked Questions video below.
The article on Peter’s influence on the field of organisational culture change that sparked the question addressed above is here:
The above video also cites this previous article on the pivotal role of Key Influencers and how they are where to focus for the greatest leverage for systemic culture change:
Tyson Yunkaporta is a member of the indigenous Apalech Clan whose homeland is in far north Queensland, Australia. He is also a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, and in June 2020, published the bestseller ‘Sand Talk — How indigenous thinking can save the world’. The above quote is at 38:45 in Alexander Beiner's interview with Yunkaporta on the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel.