It’s been a busy week as i’ve kicked off the new ‘Culture Explorer’ programme, as well as presenting a big session on the Socially Dynamic Organisation. So at the end of it, i feel tired, but also excited: i am feeling strands of my work coming together, and have been productive with new illustrations around some of the new ideas.
I drew the Island for the Explorer programme, and use it to talk about how we are ‘separate’ at a tribal level, the ways that we belong, and how we trade with other islands. Do we just tell stories about them, or send envoys to discover a truth? This work is taking place in an Organisation that is merging, changing, so it’s an easy analogy, but it’s true in most contexts: we belong to a subset of the whole, and our knowledge of the ‘other’ is held in stories, often more so than experience.
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/10/18/workingoutloud-on-culture/
At the heart of it, this work is about bringing people together, and letting them discover a shared language to explore their culture - and to give them an experience as they do so. ‘Experience’, shared with others, comes out as one of the best ways to forge trust, as well as to find purpose together.
I have also been talking about language in terms of protest: this is part of my ongoing 2022 research into Change as a Social Movement: if you have been following this work you will know that i’ve been interviewing around people involved in social movements that have ‘tipped’, such as the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, the slaver, in Bristol UK.
This piece is imperfect, and a good example of #WorkingOutLoud - in my head what i want to say is clearer, but i don’t think i’ve yet found the perfect expression of it. Illustrating, and writing, like this, allows me to develop the fragments of thought into something more coherent.
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/10/17/change-as-a-social-movement-the-language-of-protest/
The article explores how we find visual language to accompany protest, a unique identity of each movement, and how those visual signs are shared, often over great distances, both through trusted tribal connections (through hidden social collaborative technologies) but also how they can ‘jump’ through visual imagery.
The book, ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’ is one of the vertical pillars of my work: alongside ‘The Social Leadership Handbook’ it represents a core idea of the Social Age: we lead at the intersection of systems, and we need to evolve our organisations to be more reconfigurable to need, guided, not just governed, and deeply fair.
In that work i describe how our Organisations today have a post industrial heritage which leaves them organised into vertical Domains, and how those Domains bleed out into broader structures of society, like education, habitation, and legal systems.
For an Organisation to be Socially Dynamic we need to move to a model of social interconnection: not simply connected within Domains, but interconnected to a greater extent between them: this then ties into and amplifies the notion that we can disaggregate a broader number of features - such as ‘task’ and ‘role’ and even ‘leader’ and ‘power’. This dis-engineering of the legacy Organisation provides the space and curiosity to build the new.
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/10/19/domain-connection-to-interconnectivity/
In similar vein, this illustration consider the evolution of the formal Organisation: to change, to adapt, we need to change both aspects. We need lighter weight formal Organisations, structurally strong, but holding diversified strength, not simply Porcelain strength (an idea i explore in detail in the book), but also with parallel social structures.
This illustration imagines the Organisation in building blocks, and how we swap out the ones on fire, but it’s also a cautionary tale: we cannot build a Socially Dynamic Organisation simply through formal structure alone, no matter how diverse and varied the blocks we use.
I was pretty exhausted yesterday so only drew the illustration, but i will revisit this piece when i return from holiday in a weeks time.
The Landscape of Quiet Leadership
Quiet Leadership has been one of the joys of the last 18 months: i had never intended this work to be so significant, but it’s really taken off. I have now guided fifteen cohorts and thousands of people through this work, which explores leadership in the smallest of actions.
I am using some time this year, in a project in the NHS, to evolve a second chapter of the work. The original work considers humility, kindness, fairness, and grace. The new chapter talks about interdependence, belonging, values, and being in practice.
The first session was great fun, and i look forward to carrying this work out to a wider audience next year.
My Spaces
If you are just coming to The Captain’s Log for the first time, you may be reading this on SubStack: i love this new magazine platform, and am cross publishing here from the main MailChimp list.
I have three other SubStack publications you may enjoy:
Social Leadership Daily considers leadership in the smallest of actions, sixty seconds a day
.
Learning Fragments is a super nerdy site, where i deconstruct my own work on ‘learning’ and am building out new frameworks and ideas.
And The Identity Project, which shares extraordinary stories of everyday people. This is one of my current research projects, and i will be building this work out further next year:
https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/10/20/evolving-the-organisation/
With best wishes
Julian
Share this post