I visited my local bookshop this weekend. I noticed the Mindfulness section had grown since my last visit. Hmm. The next thing I noticed was the section’s expansion was largely accounted for by adult colouring books. In fact, about 80% of the total mindfulness shelf space seemed to have been allocated to colouring books. This doesn’t feel like good news to me. I’m sure it won’t be, either, to the mindfulness community.

I know the devolution of any new idea to its lowest common denominator is a fact of life. The usual trajectory seems to go something like this. Someone announces a new idea to the world. If it’s any good, other people endorse it. These people don’t understand the idea quite so well, but they can see certain attractions. They recommend the idea to others, via these summarised attractions. More people pick up on the idea. They understand it even less, so they simplify it even further and, if they chose the right simplification, the idea goes viral. The idea originator is torn. On the one hand, they’re about to make a lot of money. On the other, the original idea has been reduced down to a meaningless catch phrase. The publisher says, don’t worry, use the money to set up an institute. Or maybe a university. Life is sweet. And nothing changes. No-one, in this case, is any more ‘mindful’, and societal stress levels have gone up and not down.

What I think is so startling these days is just how quickly this lowest common denominator tailspin kicks in. The whole of Devon, going by the shelf-space in my local bookshop, is colouring in pictures of enchanted forests. The line between mindful and mindless has become razor- thin in less than a year.

Forget the meaningful intent of ‘being mindful’, instead we now get colouring books. And a revisionist interpretation of ‘carpe diem’ that now tells everyone it means ‘enjoy the moment’. We literally couldn’t have travelled further from what the poet Horace originally meant. ‘Seize the day.’ As in, do as much as you can today, because you many not have the opportunity tomorrow.

The problem is that sounds like hard work. It was meant to be. Today, though, there seems to be a strong aversion to hard work. Life is stressful. I get that. Great to ‘live in the moment’ and colour-in butterflies for a couple of hours, but please don’t expect to feel better at the end of it. The bills still haven’t been paid, the kids have wasted yet another evening playing Mortal Kombat XL, and tomorrow’s school lunches still haven’t been made. Still, your stress levels are lower, right?

If they are, it’s a temporary phenomenon. That beautifully coloured picture of the enchanted forest proudly taped onto the fridge door is living testament to your increased fragility. Your decreased ability to cope. Your wilful blindness. Whenever we choose the easy option we make ourselves more vulnerable to the bad stuff real life throws at us. By extension, when we see broad swathes of society deciding to take the self same low road, we make the world an awful lot more fragile too.

Still, not to worry, eh, we’ve got National Colouring Book day to look forward to. August 2. Be there or be mindful.

“You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I’m telling you that’s a pretty illusion.” Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky

“Anyone can be tough for a season. It takes a special kind of human to rise to life’s challenges for a lifetime.” Chris Matakas, The Tao of Jiu Jitsu

We’ve been doing a lot of psychometric analyses of innovators in the past few months. Trying to establish whether there is some kind of universal ‘DNA’ of the successful. Turns out there is. At least on one or two dimensions. Talent is one. Having talent helps. But grit, it seems, helps more. Having both is better still.

And that’s where things seem to go astray. For the most part, it seems talent and grit form a relationship that is strongly either/or. People with natural talent tend to assume that it alone will help them to get on in life, and so they tend not to score highly on tenacity, persistence and all those other human attributes we integrate together to define ‘grit’. People with less natural talent, on the other hand, if they want to get on in life, usually do so by compensating for that lack of talent through large amounts of grit.

According to our measurements in and around the shady world of innovation professionals, we estimate the following split between the four different combinations of high or low talent or grit:

Although we can’t definitively make a causal link between innovation success and where people sit within this 2×2 matrix, the evidence makes it pretty clear that the small proportion of contradiction-solving people in the high-grit-high-talent quadrant are the ones that generate the highest level of success.

Instinctively, I doubt whether many people would argue with the basic idea. That’s what ‘solving’ contradictions is all about: if we achieve the best of both conflicting attributes, good stuff happens.

The surprising part is perhaps why so few people end up in the quadrant. 3%? How could that be?

Maybe it’s a case of emergent behaviour? The world gets precisely the right amount of innovation because it has exactly the right number of high-talent-high-grit individuals? But then again, with 98% of innovation attempts ending in failure, maybe if organisations need to do better, they need to encourage a higher proportion of their people to get into the top right quadrant?

If that’s the case, what are the problems that needs to be solved?

As is often the case in these kinds of situation, it is instructive to look at extreme cases in order to really get to the heart of the problem. In this case, I think a really good extreme involves the music industry and famous musicians. Particularly solo artists.

Example one, Van Morrison. I love Van Morrison’s music. Or at least I love what he released before 1991. And, if I’m really being honest and look at the stuff I repeatedly listen to, before 1982. He’s a man with an enormous amount of talent, but it was only when he combined it with grit that he produced what – I think – is truly great music. During the 1970s he was, and no doubt, f you read interviews, felt massively mis-served by the music industry. He was the archetypal ‘musician’s musician’ gaining lots of critical plaudits, but very little apparent reward. He was angry at the world and he managed to direct the anger productively into the music. Then he got successful. The plaudits grew. He took his foot off the accelerator. Still the plaudits kept coming. He could virtually do no wrong in the critics’ eyes. The more half-hearted the music, the better they seemed to like it. So why try? The grit disappeared.

I’ve seen him five times in concert. Two times he was absolutely spell-binding. Three times he gave the distinct impression he wasn’t interested. Contractual obligation was the only thing keeping him on the stage. Needless to say the two times I stayed to the end were in the grit-and-talent years.

Example two, Stevie Wonder. Again massively talented. But only during the period 1972 to 1976 do I feel like he was really trying. Those were the grit years. Grit for a slightly different reason than Van Morrison. Wonder, from the age of 12, had always been a commercial success. His problem was that he wanted to travel his own path, not the one his record label wanted. He could’ve towed the line, but he had a bigger vision, and, after his 21^st birthday, he put his foot down. Enter the grit. And a run of four consecutive classic albums.

Check out http://www.i-sim.org/icsi2017/Keynotes&Tutorials.html a global compilation of every recording artist’s reviews ever, and notice just how far ahead of his other albums they are. After he’s proved is point, he again appears to take his foot off the pedal. Life gets easy and there’s nothing to fight against anymore.

It’s possible to do just about the same search for every other major artists. Check out their ‘best’ albums and they’re always from a ‘grit’ period. Rolling Stones? Threw away the grit after 1978. The Who? The grit disappeared in 1978. Eagles? 1976. The Beatles? 1970.

Actually, the Beatles appear to offer up an interesting new angle on the talent-and-grit story. The grit part stemmed first and foremost from the competition between Lennon and McCartney: if Lennon wrote something good, McCartney felt compelled to better it. And vice-versa. After they were unable to be in the same band together, neither of them produced anything truly great ever again. There’s a case to be made, too, I think, that McCartney was the talent and Lennon was the grit. Either way, the Beatles offer up the thought that talent-and-grit can be a collective affair. A lot of great songwriter pairings – Morrissey/Marr, Page/Plant, Goffin/King Strummer/Jones – seem to prove the point. Two points: two or more different individuals can serve up a talent-and-grit whirlwind if the conditions are right, and secondly, they tend not to be able to sustain it for very long. Fighting the talent-and-grit contradiction requires hard work.

Very few individuals manage the sustainability feat either if the music industry serves as any kind of model for the world. Prince, maybe? Miles Davis? Keith Jarrett? Maybe they’re the people we need to go study more deeply if we really want to solve the contradiction.

Most Suggestion Schemes fail. Most fail dismally. The wasted effort is sad. But not nearly so sad as just how predictable the failures are. We’ve had a few jobs in recent times to advise enterprises on the introduction of a new Suggestion Scheme. Or (worse still) a Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank type innovation competition. Mostly, our advice has been either ‘don’t do it’, or ‘if you insist on doing it (or, more likely, if your boss insists you do it), make sure you present it in such a way that participants know it is merely a bit of fun, and that you’re ready to receive some ‘shooting the messenger’ flak from your boss.

We’re over-simplifying, of course. Answering questions like should we have or not-have a Suggestion Scheme comes attached to a minefield of dependencies. Ditto how many people to involve; what you want them to do; when you want them to do it; what you need management to do, etc.

Fortunately, we know what a lot of those dependencies are these days. Thanks to a longstanding programme of research to decode what works, what doesn’t work, when it works and when it doesn’t.

First up, a couple of universals. If it’s the first time an enterprise is considering having a Suggestion Scheme (alarm bells should already be ringing!), then what we know will happen is a massive backlog of frustrations will be unleashed. Lots of suggestions will arrive. The flood will continue for a while, but after it peaks there will be an initial sharp decline followed by an ever-slowing trickle down to an embarrassed zero. Something like this…

…which, if it looks like the first half of the Hype Cycle curve, is probably no coincidence. A trigger followed by a ‘peak of over-inflated expectations, followed by a ‘trough of despondency’, followed, if matters aren’t corrected, into a lonely, curled-up-in-a-corner death.

Second universal: the Law of ‘Try Again’. When the dust has settled on the previous failed Suggestion Scheme attempt (and very likely when there has been an (in-)appropriate change of personnel) it is time to try again. The resulting idea-count curve will look the same. Only the peak will be lower, and the death will come sooner. This trend will continue in a patter of ever-decreasing circles each time there is a new iteration.

There are many reasons why Suggestion Schemes fail, but two stand out. The first relates to the amount of time it takes for management to respond when a person submits a suggestion. Here’s another curve…

…it too looks a lot like the Hype Cycle. The vertical axis this time is about motivation of the person that’s just taken the brave decision to submit an idea. What the graph basically says is that if that person doesn’t get some feedback on their idea within a week, their motivation is effectively disappeared; if they don’t get feedback within a fortnight, their idea-submitting motivation has dipped below zero. Which effectively means they now see the Suggestion Scheme for the joke that it is. Not that it was ever funny.

The second reason for failure flips us to the management side of the equation. No-one – managers included – comes to work intent on doing a bad job. No manager sets out to de-motivate the people that work for them. The reason it ends up happening is because few managers understand the vonClauswitz ‘critical mass at the critical point’ rule. Which, in Suggestion Scheme terms means, if you need to respond to the suggestions that arrive into the Scheme within a week and there are only so many people able to provide that feedback, then that is the critical mass. If the critical mass isn’t capable of handling all the suggestions in a timely fashion, the critical point can’t be ‘every employee’. It’s only possible to launch the scheme, in other words, to the size of population that management can reliably respond to within a week.

This in turn requires us to think about a final ‘universal’: Innovation Capability Maturity. The type and size of Suggestion Scheme an enterprise might consider deploying, also depends crucially on the Level of Capability of that enterprise.

There are currently five distinct Levels in our Innovation Capability Maturity Model (ICMM). Each requires a different Suggestion Scheme strategy, with different objectives:

Taken all together, the very likely connection between ICMM Level and the number of employees productively engaged in Suggestion Scheme activities will tend to look something like this:

Which means a Level 3 organisation like – all-time classic Suggestion-driven culture – Toyota will have everyone engaged in submitting and implementing improvement ideas. Versus a Level 1 organisation (i.e. most organisations on the planet), which really ought to have a much lower (‘critical mass at the critical point’) proportion of people asked to submit suggestions. But then also versus what we might expect to see in a Level 5 enterprise (of which there are probably, realistically, two or three on the planet), where there’s a living realisation that questions are much more important than answers, that important questions require a lot of time and effort to answer, and that the real trick in life involves understanding and embracing complexity – understanding how the world works at a ‘First Principles’ level, and looking for non-linearities in which small inputs create non-linearly spectacular outcomes.

Welcome to the machine.

In seat 32F, Geoff Knight opens his snack-size bag of peanuts, tips a small pile of nuts into his hand and drops them into his mouth. The camera zooms in on a tiny, sub-micron shard of peanut debris that accidently finds its way out of Geoff’s mouth. The camera pans around, tracking the shard as it swirls upwards towards the overhead lockers.

45 seconds later, in seat 14A, four-year-old Holly Payne starts tugging on her mother’s arm. The first signs of anaphylactic shock begin to kick in.

Two minutes later, the cabin-crew are scrabbling around looking for the emergency epi-pen before Holly’s throat closes up completely. For a moment it’s touch and go whether Holly is going to make it or not. Some of the crew look frightened. Next time, they vow, we’ll make sure no-one eats nuts on the plane. Handing out pretzels and telling passengers not to eat nuts for a couple of hours is a tiny sacrifice. Who wouldn’t abide if they knew the stakes?

This is how fragile we have become. The bottom – hopefully the bottom – of a long, slippery slope of best intentions delivering worst possible outcomes. Doing incredible harm by mandating the opposite.

40 years ago kids ate dirt. I remember a friend of mine telling me how his parents had caught his little sister eating what they thought were raisins off the kitchen floor. They turned out to be woodlice. They stopped the child from eating any more, but the main thing my friend remembered was how they’d also burst out laughing. Partly because their daughter was eating woodlice, but also partly because they didn’t know exactly how many.

Eating woodlice is probably not such a good idea. If we eat them and they make us sick, that’s a precious feedback loop: now we know not to eat them again. If we eat them and we don’t get sick, it was probably okay. Natural systems are full of these kinds of feedback loops. They’re an important aspect of sustainable self-organising systems. They’re also an important way of making those systems more resilient. Natural systems need to be stressed. If we remove the stress, we make them weaker, and more fragile. During the last 40 years, by making the world a lot cleaner, more sterile place, we’ve made ourselves a lot more fragile. Allergies at epidemic levels; asthma at epidemic levels. We’re literally sanitising ourselves to the edge of oblivion.

Don’t get me wrong, I have massive sympathy for Holly Payne and her parents. Having a child so allergic to such small quantities of peanut dust (it’s a true story, by the way, albeit I changed the names) must be a living nightmare for them. But the answer to their tough problem really isn’t to start banning peanuts on aeroplanes for everyone else.

I don’t mean this in a selfish, ‘I like nuts, so why should I stop eating them?’ way. I’d be very willing to help arrange for Holly to walk around in her own hermetically-sealed flying suit with it’s own dedicated ultra-pure oxygen supply if needs be. What I’m trying to get at is that attempts to ban nuts on planes – or anywhere else for that matter – causes harm to all of us. The reason we’re not all – yet – allergic to peanuts and other ‘contaminants’ is that we get to breathe un-cleaned, un-conditioned air that’s full of all sorts of microscopic harmful crap. That’s the stuff that keeps us all resilient and healthy.

I’m in the US at the moment. It’s the day after President Trump’s first big press conference. The media is in heaven. The polarization of the nation seems to be heading in to over-drive. Was Trump’s performance the first signs of a personality in meltdown? Or was it a double-bluff master-class in deflection and chaos-building? I thought I’d let our PanSensic tools have a little look-see.

Here’s what emerges when I plugged a transcript of Trump’s words into the software. First up a basic sentiment analysis:

Not too much ambiguity there. Trump might have said he ‘enjoyed’ locking horns with the press, but I think this picture tells another story. For the most part, in lay-person terms, he lost it.

Then I plugged the transcript in to our Archetypes tool. This is the tool to gauge emotional maturity. Even without knowing the in-detail meaning of each of the elements the tool is measuring, hopefully the labels are somewhere close to self-explanatory. I thought it would be interesting to see if anything might have shifted between the 20 January inauguration speech and yesterday’s press conference. Turns out it has:

The Innocent-Warrior has turned into an Orphan.

I don’t think that’s good news.

Okay, I know it’s difficult to read anything of any long-term significance from the analysis of one speech, but then again, it was an important speech. A speech intended to set the tone for the next four years. I’m talking about Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20.

And the reason for being intrigued by the ‘only America first’ speech is how something had changed compared to what President Trump had been saying through the course of the election campaign. 

Here’s the results of our Mental Gears analyses. On the left-hand side is a composite of the various different speeches the President had made through the campaign, and on the right is the equivalent Mental Gear profile result when we analyse the inauguration speech.

Spot the difference?

No more ‘Scientific’ (Orange) calculation and desire to look at options, and lots more (Blue) Order. Which means goodbye ambiguity, and hello ‘with-me-or-against-me’ absolutism.

As I say, I’m not sure if anything significant can be read into the shift. If I was going to read anything significant into it, I’d say that the ‘allegiance to all Americans’ comment in the inauguration speech actually means something closer to its polar opposite.

I just had the major misfortune of acquiring a copy of the latest Antifragile bandwagon-jumper book, ‘The Anti-Fragility Edge’. So bad was it that it prompted me to compose my first ever Amazon review, in a no doubt vain attempt to warn people away from the dangerous, counter-productive monstrosity I believe it to be.

The first problem is that Nassim Nicholas Taleb ignited what looks set to become a pretty big fire when he gave the world the word antifragile back in (was it really that long ago?) 2012.

The bigger problem, looking at the four years that have passed since the book first appeared is perhaps that Taleb is, to quote a different favourite author, ‘too far ahead of the crowd for people to recognise he’s part of the crowd’. And that includes – on the evidence of The Anti-Fragility Edge or any of the other handful of books that have tried to cash-in on the antifragile meme – all the early-adopters required to turn the initial spark into a proper flame aren’t up to the task at hand.

This is somewhat ironic when I think about what antifragile is all about: making systems stronger by subjecting them to adversity. Having your good work misinterpreted and mangled by people who clearly don’t understand what they’re doing, could, in some weird parallel world be the exceptions that prove the rule. Maybe, Nassim Taleb, is sat in his lab thinking, these terrible books are the very stressors that my beautiful Antifragile baby needs in order to become the global phenomenon it deserves to be?  

Sadly, I don’t think the world works that way. Nor does antifragility. At least not at this point in its evolutionary history.

One of the key ideas behind subjecting systems to adversity, is that you need to know just how much adversity. It’s a classic Goldilocks and the Three Bears scenario: too little adversity and the system doesn’t need to shift and so doesn’t evolve; too much adversity and you kill it.

In TRIZ terms this need to find ‘just the right amount’ of adversity represents a classic contradiction problem. Antifragile needs adversity and no adversity.

Solving the contradiction means knowing exactly when and how to separate the two contradictory requirements. And, when it comes to the rise – or otherwise – of an important new idea, one of the best ways to understand the separation dynamic is to bring the Hype Cycle in to play. What the Hype Cycle tells us is that there are clearly different stages in the evolution of the new idea. During some of the stages, the system is very vulnerable and needs relatively little adversity, and then during others, the system is much more accommodating and actually needs lots of adversity in order to reach a meaningful maturity.

The big problem with the current crop of bandwagon-jumpers is that they represent exactly the wrong kind of adversity at the wrong time. The Anti-Fragility Edge, for example, purports to be a ‘How To’ book. In theory, this is a good idea. Taleb’s book is a ‘what’ and a ‘why’ book. If antifragile ideas are going to take hold, someone will have to hold the hands of the fragile and guide them towards greater levels of antifragility. No ‘how to’ book, no widespread adoption. But if the ‘how to’ book that people locate is a really bad book, all it does is kills the idea before the idea has a chance to get off the ground.

In the long term the dire post-Taleb antifragile literature will no doubt fade into historical insignificance. In the meantime, the fact that they’ve appeared when they have means the only impact they will have is to delay meaningful action. And my guess, given the enormous operational-excellence-driven fragility of most of the enterprises on the planet right now plus the even bigger narcissist-driven instability heading in all our directions, is that this can only be a bad thing. Predictable, maybe, but bad nevertheless.

In the end we never got a chance to publish our Brexit analysis. Time moved on and other things seemed more important. Like the American election. Which turned out – per our prediction – pretty much the same as Brexit. And which also triggerred much hand-wringing and self-flagellation by the media, political commentators and losing-candidate voters of the world.

Now I find myself reading the media’s post-mortem analyses of 2016 and fighting off a gnawing sense of depression. Not because the world is heading towards crisis and catastrophe – we worked that out a few years ago already – but because of the media’s deepening misunderstanding of how the world works.

The search for the ‘root cause’ of the Brexit result bumbles along fruitlessly, with six months of incubation seemingly doing nothing to bring any clarity. A lot like the drunk man looking for his car keys under the streetlight. The media demands a root cause because they’ve been taught there must be a root cause. There must be something or – preferably – someone to take the blame. The problem is, like the drunk, we’re looking for something that isn’t there. But we look anyway because it’s easier than thinking.

At least the end-of-year media analyses allowed me to update our collection of previously mooted Brexit ‘root cause’ candidates. Of which there have now been a lot. Some more ridiculous than others, but all ultimately doomed to pointless either/or debates in pubs up and down the land and on Question Time. Do we blame Gove? Or Johnson? Or Churchill (!)? Or deGaulle (!!)? Wrong question, dummy.

In a complex system, there is no such thing as a root-cause, and so any attempt to try and find one is a Sisyphus-like exercise in pushing dumb-as-a-rock thinking up the mountain, thus ensuring no meaningful progress gets made. Maybe that’s the point?

Personally, I’d rather try and make sense of what’s happening. Not that there’s anything I am likely to be able to do about the result. But at least, I’ll have a better idea about how I and the Systematic Innovation team can best find a place in the world that makes sure we’re more likely to thrive than dive.

Here’s what happened when I took all the ‘root cause’ candidates and shifted the focus to mapping the relationships between them:

I know, I know, you can’t see all the details. That’s not the point. The point is that the picture hopefully makes clear that there is no such thing as a root-cause. The only good news, if ‘good’ is anywhere close to the right word, looking at the rats-nest is that there is only one vicious cycle. The conspiracy of causes, in other words, all seems to converge on one downward loop of hell. Here’s what it looks like in more detail:

The main conclusion this picture perhaps suggests is ‘hello loudmouth, bye-bye truth’. Or, ‘welcome to the shoot-the-expert, post-truth, best-fiction-wins society’.

The other might be that we all begin to nurture and value the truth-curators once more. Or maybe, better yet, the people that write the truth-detecting software. I think the mist is clearing. I think my 2017 is becoming clear…

 “Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.”

I finally got a chance to read Joseph Campbell’s last book, ‘The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space’ while on a trans-Atlantic flight this month. If there are two kinds of people in life – lumpers and splitters – Campbell, like TRIZ-founder, Genrich Altshuller was one of my favourite someone-somewhere-already-solved-your-problem, ‘lumpers’.

Campbell’s major pattern-finding contribution was the Hero’s Journey – the result of a lifetime spent studying and revealing the underlying patterns of successful literature. As far as I can tell, he never understood the concept of s-curves and discontinuous change as we now know them in the innovation world, but the Hero’s Journey described the precise steps that discontinuous change requires.

The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space explores the underlying patterns between a different kind of discontinuous change, life transitions. And especially things like rites-of-passage transition into adulthood. These too, Campbell shows, are also Hero’s Journeys.

My favourite part of the book was the Pollen Path. And particularly Campbell’s description of how the Navajo elders mapped out the initiation journey of their young adults. Again, neither Campbell nor the Navajo elders knew about S-curves. Except, as we can see in the depiction of the Pollen Path, they absolutely did.

To the point that, just maybe, they add a few clues to the nature of discontinuous change process:

Firstly, the Pollen Path itself, which is all about the period in the Journey before you jump off your current s-curve and start the search for the next. Before you jump, make sure you prepare yourself with some growth-sparking, high-density nutrition.

Then, when you’re in the ‘Special World’ no-mans land between your old s-curve and the next – the place where, along the Pollen Path, you’ll find rainbows and lightning you’ll also need:

   * Food along the way (the corn ears hidden along the path in the painting)

   * Both male and female traits (the black and yellow characters on either side of the path)

   *  To stick to the middle ground and recognise that the cul-de-sac detours are precisely that (the go-nowhere offshoots from the path)

Sure enough. Nothing new under the sun.

I often find myself showing a copy of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin model when I need to explain some of the challenges of innovation. People seem to instinctively ‘get it’. Especially when I use this three-dimensional version of the model:

It’s great beauty – the thing that seems to resonate most with prospective innovators struggling to cope with their ‘Operational Excellence’ colleagues – is the cliff-edge between ‘Obvious’ and ‘Chaos’. The effect becomes amplified when we think about Operational Excellence as a way of thinking that seeks to ‘manage’ situations that are inherently complex through a strategy of simplification. Ever since F.W. Taylor, the prevailing logic has been that its only possible to scale businesses by segmenting work into small chunks that are easily trainable into new employees. Looked at through the Cynefin lens, Taylor’s efforts can be seen as a series of scientific studies to understand each given operation in a process, such that everything could be cropped down to a very simple set of instructions. Taylor worked out the optimum size of shovel so that a novice shoveller could become productive almost immediately after they picked it up. Taylor’s view when talking to the shovellers was, ‘I’m here to make your job easier for you’. When he was selling his process to the managers, on the other hand, he was effectively saying, ‘we don’t need workers with brains, I’ve done all the necessary thinking for them’. In Cynefin terms, Taylorism specifically, and ‘Operational Excellence in general can be seen as a management strategy that looks like this:

What Taylor didn’t understand, and what most Operational Excellence people still don’t usually understand (at least until its too late) is that their efforts are optimizing systems to the edge of chaos. Nearly all of 430 Fortune500 companies from 1950 that no longer exist, disappeared because they fell off this cliff. They ‘always did what they’d always done’ because it was efficient to do so. Within their bubble at least. The only problem was that the world outside that bubble had moved on. They hadn’t understood that in a complex environment like ‘the market’, if you always do what you’ve always done, you can only legitimately expect that you will probably get what you’ve always got.

As more and more enterprises become aware of complexity, they slowly begin to realise that Operational Excellence is a temporary, stop-gap answer. One of the strongest signals of this awareness is the current vogue for ‘Design Thinking’. Especially with the management community… designers, good ones at least, inherently understand complexity and ‘do’ design thinking naturally. Managers for the most part don’t. Until they’ve spent a week at a D.School and ‘see the light’. Divergence and experimentation are the order of the day. Most Design Thinking educators might not know that they’re doing it, but when we look at Design Thinking through the Cynefin lens, we see that it is attempting to reverse the killer effects of Operational Excellence. Design Thinking is about embracing complexity:

It’s not clear to me yet that Design Thinking will help save the day as far as many enterprises are concerned. Partly because it has typically been presented in a stand-alone faddish manner, and partly because when new users attempt to dig below the surface, there’s not an awful lot of usable content. Not to mention that an awful lot of it is a crude re-badging of Edward De Bono’s work (clue: look at all of the ‘Big’ Design Thinkers – they’re all British and were all raised at a time when, if you were interested in creativity, you inevitably found yourself reading The Mechanism Of Mind and its surrounding family of books).

I think Cynefin has a role to play in helping to solve this ‘save the day’ problem. Especially when we connect the Cynefin model to the evolutionary S-Curve.

Operational Excellence, in S-Curve terms, is all about climbing the current curve. Combine this idea with the different stages of Operational Excellence as emerge from th Cynefin model and the S-Curve climbing journey looks something like this:

At the start of a new-S-curve, Chaos reigns. Lots of prospective innovators are trying to find a new solution and most will fail.

Eventually one or two ‘lucky ones’ will prevail. They’ll find ‘a’ solution that is good enough to attract one or two brave early customers. There are no processes or protocols, so provider and customer need to be engaged in a mutually beneficial dance to evolve the solution to a point where it becomes worth the investment of everyone’s time and money. ‘Fail fast, fail forward’, and other complexity-consistent strategies are brought into play. Thought of in terms of the Hype Cycle, this period of evolution is all about peaks of over-inflated expectation and troughs of despondency.

And then, if everyone pulls together well enough, the solution finds itself transcending a tipping point. Now it is useful enough that an increasing number of customers want the solution. Sales and Marketing teams get involved, and in order to help them sell the beautiful new solution, brochures get written and a sales process crystallises. ‘Understanding’ of how to sell and how to produce economically means the prevailing management strategy devolves to ‘complicated’.

Some time later, usually when the growth hits an inflexion point and the sales team start missing their targets, the focus shifts towards efficiency. Cut the bottom line. Along comes Lean and SixSigma, Value Stream Maps to try and squeeze every last drop of ‘waste’ from the system. The management strategy devolves further into the ‘obvious’.

…And keeps going, all the time things feeling more and more like a game of corporate whack-a-mole. Every time we try and improve one part of the system, it seems to have an adverse effect on some other part…

…the enterprise teeters ever closer to the edge of Chaos… no-one is able to improve the system any more, and those that are smart enough to understand what’s happening start to leave the stalled ship and go looking for lifeboats. Their chaotic search for the new solution is now on. The descent of the beautifully optimized old enterprise into chaos, on the other hand, is now merely a matter of time. The long established management team asleep at the wheel, safe in the knowledge that the operational excellence goals have been met, and their bonuses paid in full. It won’t be long ’til they’ve optimized the whole shebang full circle back into chaos.