My fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is now out, and it’s time to spill the beans on why a relatively short book took me so long. It wasn’t because I was working on book five at the time (hard as it was, I resisted that urge), but because my first conception of it was quite different to how it turned out.
My initial attempt was essentially a condensed version of the 2021 Agendashift 2nd edition. Series editor Gervase Bushe wasn’t satisfied with that, and to be honest, I shouldn’t have been either. What’s the point? Gervase insisted repeatedly that I had to be more up-front with my theory of action – i.e. the Why not only of the approach described in the book but that of each step in the process it describes and of the tools and techniques it employs. To do that justice, we re-framed and restructured it more than once, and I ended up adding a whole new chapter. To achieve that within the word count budget (30,000 words), swathes of less interesting material were cut. A couple of times I came close to giving up, but it is a much, much better book now.
I should have seen it coming! Here’s the beginning of an email conversation that I reproduce in the book’s introduction almost verbatim:
Gervase: I’d like to get a statement of your theory of action for creating generative conversations. Complete this sentence: In order to design events that produce generative conversations among a group of people you have to…
Mike: In order to design events that produce generative conversations among a group of people you have to sustain their motivation to ask and answer questions not previously considered in their context, and to which the answers may be both many and potentially surprising (including to the event’s designer, who neither mediates in every conversation nor prescribes their conclusions). The strength of that motivation comes from a combination of purpose, context, trust in the process on the day, and confidence (or at least hope) for what will follow.
Gervase: Interesting. Now, to sustain their motivation to ask and answer questions not previously considered in their context, you have to…
That conversation was how the book was born, and in the end I properly embraced the process. The irony is how slow I was to see that I was getting a taste of my own medicine! As well as the title of my third book, Right to Left is one of Agendashift’s and Leading with Outcomes’ core patterns. It means “working backwards from key moments of impact and learning”, where done is “someone’s need was met”, and really done is “we’ve accounted for the learning”. That learning is maximised by the way the work is framed and discussed, right from the beginning and all the way through the delivery process. In short, making explicit the theory of action of both the work and how it will be carried out is very much part of the approach.
In a similar vein, coincident with the book’s publication I’ve been fortunate to have done multiple runs of facilitation and training in quick succession. Between a private Adaptive Organisation workshop, two runs of Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F), and two runs of Leading in a Transforming Organisation, by the end of next week I will have done Foundation four times and different forms of the Adaptive Organisation material three times in the space of just a few weeks. What an opportunity for experimentation! Accordingly, next week’s training in London (see below) won’t just incorporate the usual round of small improvements I make before and after every training, it has been reworked quite substantially. Not just streamlining and mistake-proofing it, but repeatedly reinforcing the sense of where we are headed and why. Less “trust the process before we deconstruct it”, more a sense of engaging purposefully together.
Of course there’s always an element of risk when you make changes, but somehow I doubt that I will come to regret these. And let me say that just as I am grateful to Gervase for helping to make Organizing Conversations what it eventually became, I’m grateful also to Markus Hippeli, my host earlier this month in Berlin, whose thoughts prompted the latest rework. Markus, I shall let you know how we get on 🙂
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