This chaotic effect of week’s Crowdstrike-generated “Butterfly’s Wing” was instructive, as much for how much it surprised people as for its demonstration of how fragile our preoccupation with efficiency makes us.
Watching organisations react to an inevitable occurrence, which in this case fell to Crowdstrike to initiate (although it could have been any one of a number of players), is a little like watching children play football. There is lots of kicking the ball, running around and shouting, but not a lot of understanding of the game.
This was not a “Black Swan” event, any more than the pandemic was. All the elements were understood, and examples of near misses proliferated. Yet, as with the pandemic, it seems the cost of being prepared was put second to short-term priorities.
“But as Hallett predicted the arrival of another pandemic, possibly more transmissible and lethal, in the near to medium future, the Nuffield Trust health thinktank warned that neither the NHS nor social care services were “in a much more resilient state and in some areas they are weaker”.
In a couple of weeks, the Crowdstrike episode will probably be over. A few executives will find themselves spending more time with their families, and no doubt legions of lawyers will be kept occupied looking for those to blame.
But what else will change? No doubt software risk profiles will change, but will the bigger picture of complex interdependencies, mainly concentrated as they are into a few major players, each of whom could bring the system down, make it into the frame?
In his Substack this week, J.P. Caistlin made an interesting observation:
“ …the more pieces of optimization software a firm used, the more inefficiencies (or at least higher collective costs) it would see. To make matters worse, the more money a firm spent on apps, the more time its employees would spend doing things on apps, and the less time they would spend doing things that made the firm money.”
I could not find his original research (which I think was his), but I asked Perplexity.ai to go and see what it could find, and what it came back with broadly supports his observation.
The implication is that the more we spread our attention over different partners (in the case of organisations) or apps (as individuals), the greater the risk of distraction from what is going on around us.
We spend around $9 billion a year coaching people in organisations, but it seems that the reflective practice that is central to it is not applied by organisations, I wonder if organisations are uncoachable, preoccupied as they are with external shareholder interests?
What applies to organisations of course also applies to us. We are each our own enterprise, no matter what role we fill, and we face the same core challenge:
How Resilient is our Ecosystem?
All the indications, analytical and emotional, are that the complexity we find ourselves in is accelerating faster than our organisations’ ability to respond to it.
The pursuit of efficiency and productivity keeps us focused on the near term rather than on what is emerging at the edge.
When the energy of that edge is fed by ever-increasing interactions, personal, technical, and environmental, it promises to accelerate disruption.
This, in turn, means we need to pay attention to what is happening with those we quietly take for granted, just as Microsoft found themselves quietly taking Crowdstrike for granted.
Five questions
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
Marshall McLuhan
We might want to ask ourselves five questions of our ecosystems, (and so should our organisations):
What do we know?
In coaching, it is the Reality element of the ubiquitous GROW model. In many respects, it is the most challenging question, reluctant as we are to embrace the boundaries that delineate where we don’t. Increasingly, we have to allow for how much of our information comes from third parties - social media, AI, memes, and other sources we cannot identify, what their intent is in what they assert, and what biases are shaping it.
What if?
When addressing the Options element of the GROW model, we are spoilt for choice. Again, finding the boundaries where we realise we do not know matters, as does entertaining the possibilities that frighten and excite us. We enter the world of progressive realism—an idea borrowed from diplomacy that involves dealing with others as they are rather than expending effort into making them what we wish them to be.
Now what?
For me, one of the weaknesses of those who follow the GROW model by rote is that it bypasses the curiosity that goes with second-order thinking. It is a function of the near-term mindsets accompanying the performance paradigms that pervade our business cultures. Given the opportunity, it is the element that provides the time and space for unhurried reflection and allows those possibilities that frighten, excite and inspire us to make themselves known.
So what?
An extension of thinking enabled by space given to reflection on second-order thinking: third-order thinking - triple loop learning - what else might happen, what might that offer, and what might we see that signals it?
From “five why’s?” to “five what’s?”
What’s unsaid?
On the edge of every conversation is another, more challenging one looking for permission to enter.
…from a conversation during the week
We all know the feeling: things that need to be said but aren’t, ideas that are not fully formed but need the company of others’ attention to become complete. Insights that, unless expressed, will be submerged below the storm of busyness and politics. It is where the edge lives.
If we do not find the time and space for reflection, the danger is that we find ourselves carried on a tide of goal-driven busyness and rendered wilfully blind in the process.
Personally, I cannot get too excited about trying to change organisations through persuasion. Organisations have increasingly short half-lives, and in many respects, I think we need the energy of creative destruction to prevent us from getting stuck in the comfortable.
We can always create or find another organisation.
People, though, that’s another matter.
It is the idea of mobility, moving outside and between the Walls instead of becoming trapped inside them, that I now turn into the company of paid subscribers.
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