Nollind Whachell

I remember a while back telling someone that what I wanted to do was to try to help businesses be more human. At the time I thought if anybody heard me say that, they’d probably think I was somewhat strange. But I guess we’re living in strange times now because more and more people are thinking it as well.

Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World is a book that covers this subject extremely well. While I’m still in the process of reading it, I’d have to say that this book comes the closest to synchronizing with my years of thought and research on trying to change the way organizations work. Above all else though, it’s an amazing feeling to know that you’re not alone and others are out there thinking and pursuing the same visionary things that you are.

That said though, that’s when reality returns and slaps you in the face again. That’s because while this is my life’s work (there’s no question of it now), what frustrates me the most is that even though there are a diverse variety of books on this subject now, I’m still not really seeing a change in the way businesses work locally within my own city.

The solutions we need to move forward, to grow, and adapt are not technological innovations, they are social innovations.

Don’t get me wrong though. Vancouver is booming as a digital tech hub and the game development scene is still thriving even with some closures and layoffs earlier this year. But that’s not what I’m talking about. The solutions we need to move forward, to grow, and adapt are not technological innovations, they are social innovations. And for that to happen, we need to rethink the very behaviours, values, and beliefs of our organizations and of ourselves.

But that’s exactly why things aren’t changing. As I told someone else a while back, many business owners and managers would rather let their company die than give up their centralized command and control way of working because they’ve habitually become accustomed to it. In effect, even though it’s slowly killing their company like a cancer, it’s still feels comforting and risk averse to them, so they still stick with it, grandly naval gazing off into the distance as they sail off the edge of the Old World to their doom.

What we need now aren’t people playing it safe. What we need now are courageous explorers. That’s the type of people I’m looking for and the type of people I want to work with in helping to navigate and reach this New World. The obvious question though is does such a company of people like this exist within Vancouver? Or at the very least, are there companies that do want to be this socially innovative in Vancouver but just don’t know where to start in transforming themselves?

A while back I read a highly insightful book by Bernard Stiegler entitled Taking Care of Youth and The Generations that discusses how current marketing practices today are impeding the social and cultural development of young people, thus preventing them from fully maturing as adults. What I find interesting is that I actually believe that we are undergoing a similar crisis within organizations today in that current business practices are impeding the social and cultural development of organizations, thus preventing them from also fully maturing as well.

To understand the cause of this problem though, I think we need to understand the developmental differences between a child and an adult. From my perspective, the goal of raising a child is to help them reach an adult state of freedom and responsibility whereby they are able to act independently on their own in a sustainable manner. In effect, to reach a point where they are no longer dependent upon their parents to support them but they can fend for themselves within the world on their own.

For the most part though, I’m not seeing this same sense of development being applied to organizations. If anything, instead of helping their organization to reach a state of independence, most entrepreneurs are doing the exact opposite, often micromanaging and maintaining their parental control, thus causing the organization to continually flounder in a dependent and child-like state, always needing the support and guidance of their founding birth parent.

We need to learn to let go and allow the organizations that we have founded and birthed to fully grow, mature, and think on their own.

Yet if we truly want to create innovative organizations of the 21st century then we can’t continue with this same approach. We need to learn to let go and allow the organizations that we have founded and birthed to fully grow, mature, and think on their own. Then and only then will they be able to take the next step and carry us into a new world and a more natural way of working together.

Once of my greatest frustrations in pursuing my passion, purpose, and vision in life is not being able to easily articulate what my passion, purpose, and vision is to others (even though I understand it clearly myself). By this, I mean easily encapsulating it with just a few words like a job title, that someone within the business sector will easily understand.

The reason I can’t easily do this is because what I’m pursuing doesn’t even exist yet as a defined job role, since it’s still in the process of emergence. But there in lies the conundrum, how can you market yourself and your abilities to others when you can’t easily articulate what it is you do?

To get around this issue, I’m continually scouring the Web and reading books to find information that might relate to what I’m trying to do. Luckily I have found a variety of books whose authors are all articulating the same thing but just in different ways. That being that we are in the process of change, of trying to figure out a new way of not just working but of learning as well. Why? Because our old ways of learning and working are failing us and at a rapidly increasing pace.

Yet again, even though all of these authors are effectively talking about the same thing, there isn’t a unifying word from any of them that I’ve found that clearly communicates what they are all trying to do (as words like “Chief Culture Officer” just didn’t cut it for me). Well that all changed today. In reading a Fast Company article describing social intrapreneurs, the word “systempreneur” came up and I realized that this was the simple word that I had been looking for all along.

What needs to be done is to change the entire system from the outside and inside, all at once.

Throughout my entire life, I’ve always strived to be an intrapreneur, trying to bring out a social change from within an organization or company. However, while sometimes I made a difference and brought about some good, for the most part, it really didn’t add up to much because the overriding corporate culture and societal system negated any sort of real substantial and permanent change.

More and more as time passed, I slowly realized that making these piecemeal attempts from within companies was a complete waste of time. What needs to be done is to change the entire system from the outside and inside, all at once. This, in a nutshell, is what a systempreneur does and what all of these authors have been simply trying to articulate. That there is a rising emergence of individuals who are striving to bring about a systematic change to our societal institutions, thus allowing us to learn and work in innovative new ways.

There’s an awesome article on systems thinking written by Pegasus Communications Inc. entitled What is Systems Thinking? that articulates the primary problem that so many companies face today in finding innovative solutions for their product or services. It helps us to understand the clear distinction and role of customer relations and product / service design and how these two seemingly separate teams can effectively work together as a cohesive whole alongside their customers.

Systems Thinking as a Perspective:
Events, Patterns, or System?

Systems thinking is a perspective because it helps us see the events and patterns in our lives in a new light—and respond to them in higher leverage ways. For example, suppose a fire breaks out in your town. This is an event. If you respond to it simply by putting the fire out, you’re reacting. (That is, you have done nothing to prevent new fires.) If you respond by putting out the fire and studying where fires tend to break out in your town, you’d be paying attention to patterns. For example, you might notice that certain neighborhoods seem to suffer more fires than others. If you locate more fire stations in those areas, you’re adapting. (You still haven’t done anything to prevent new fires.) Now suppose you look for the systems—such as smoke-detector distribution and building materials used—that influence the patterns of neighborhood-fire outbreaks. If you build new fire-alarm systems and establish fire and safety codes, you’re creating change. Finally, you’re doing something to prevent new fires!

This is why looking at the world through a systems thinking “lens” is so powerful: It lets you actually make the world a better place.

Today, many companies see the event and some even see the patterns. Very few see the system solution and even fewer execute that solution properly.

Customer Support as Firemen

In our digital world, there are many online products and services that we’re using today. In the process of using them, problems appear, just like a fire breaking out in a town. And who comes to our rescue like firemen but the customer support people of that product or service. This is the point though where many companies stop because of a lack of perspective and awareness. In effect, they see the event and may even see the greater pattern causing the event but they fail to see the greater systematic problem and how to fix it.

To clarify this further, especially in relation to customer support, imagine a town repeatedly having more and more fires within it and the townspeople asking the mayor “What are you doing about this problem?” His response? “What problem? Our firemen are addressing the fires very efficiently. We’ve even been awarded the best fire department in the region!” Again this is the typical mindset of most companies today in that they see Customer Support as the final solution to the problem. But it isn’t.

Customer support is about customer relations. It’s not about just solving singular “events”, because you can’t always solve them all, its about employing people who have the perspective and awareness to see both the events and the patterns arising from them, so they can relay this information back to the entire company, particularly the development team, where it can empower them to make the right choices for change.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe it was even Joel on Software, or was it 37 Signals, that emphasized this by indicating not to keep a feature list but instead to watch for patterns and when those patterns arise sufficiently to then deal with them in a systematic way. That’s great when you have a team of people who have the perspective and awareness to see the systematic patterns arising from those events. But most support teams don’t as they have been trained behaviorally from a corporate cultural standpoint to just to focus on the event only and to deal with it as quickly as possible.

Development Teams Help Prevent Fires

Thus the end result here is that we need companies to see customer support as not the final solution, because again they can’t solve all of the problems, but instead primarily as a liaison group to communicate information which in turn empowers the company to make the necessary changes internally via their development teams. That’s where the real problems are solved. By the development teams upgrading and innovating their products and services which in turn makes them more usable and functional, thus reducing the problems encountered.

The key emphasis here though is that for all of this to work, you need individuals in all areas of the company who have an understanding of systems thinking to help them see their work as not just a slice or component of the whole but rather an integral and interdependent part of it. Only then will get you customer relations teams and development teams working symbiotically together in unison with their customers as collaborative members of the design and development process as mentioned by John Thackara in his book entitled In The Bubble.

From Designing For to Designing With

The relationship of the Dutch to dikes demonstrates that looking after technology is as much a matter of social organization as it is of engineering. People are too often described and thought of by designers as users or consumers when we really need to think of them as actors.

Some companies, like Valve Software, are understanding this and are light years ahead of others, as not only are they designing their products in close collaboration with their customers but they are even giving their customers the tools to empower and extend their products in ways that the company can’t even conceive. Thus the customer evolves from just a consumer to a collaborative creator and essential participant in the design process of their products and services.

The following is a newer maxim of mine. “We must work at living what we have learnt through play.” What I’ve realized recently is that it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and start living this maxim as it implies.

You see in my last post, I got really excited when I realized that there are many people out there all effectively working on the same thing as I am, that being figuring out the dynamics of this new emerging type of organization with its unique “natural culture” as I like to call it. Well with that high immediately came a low that slapped me abruptly in the face. If there are and have been a variety of notable people working on this (some for decades), why isn’t it more prominent within the business world today?

I mean there have been some companies who have integrated some of these new principles but for the most part, they are pretty unique. For example, people like Ricardo Semler have done amazing things in terms of changing the way we work, yet even when he openly shares this knowledge, even giving speeches to large corporations on the subject, it’s evident that it’s not making a noticeable impact within the typical business mindset. In effect, today when someone creates a new business, more than likely they’ll automatically create a hierarchical organizational structure and implement managers to “control” people without questioning or researching to see if there is a better way.

What I’ve come to realize now is that it’s pointless talking about this anymore. Why? Because words can only take you so far. What really changes hearts and minds are the visible actions of others, so that people can see these principles and culture put into practice itself which then can be utilized as an example to others. So I need to help create these new types of organizations so that people can see and understand how they work from the inside. Even more so, I need to try to create a variety of them in different areas of life, so that each individual can find one example that relates to their particular perspective of life, thus allowing them to understand it better.

While creating some of these living examples will be easy, because they will start as online communities, others that are more business-like will take more time because it means starting my own business or finding a business that is pliable and courageous enough in accepting this culture. Again while I have some business ideas that I could implement, they are going to take a lot of time to grow and I need work in the interim to sustain myself while I build up these examples.

Another major problem that I see is that the two initial examples that I’d like to start with, that I’ve already tested in the past, are going to be difficult to start because I don’t have the social object to build them around that I once had. For example, I’d like to use this natural culture in building a community around a video game and another one around a web development platform. Right now though, the MMO gaming scene is all but dead because there is nothing out there as yet that I’m excited about which is critical if you want to build a community around it. Same applies to a web platform. I used to love Squarespace but this is no longer the case, so I’m looking for another platform that I can get excited about again.

All said and done though, it’s time to go back into stealthy action mode and follow an “actions speak louder than words” mantra that I used to relay to newbies when teaching them online about Threewave Capture The Flag.

“Let your rocket do the talkin!”

Just viewed a couple of videos by Don Tapscott that are remarkable close to what I, myself, have perceived through my own systems thinking and observance of cultural patterns.

Institutions are failing. They can’t handle the weight of the complexity that is overloading them. We are effectively living in the past, utilizes approaches from many years ago that no longer work today. We’re at a turning point, a transition and transformation from the old world view to a new world view that is being born as we speak. We need to stop trying to iterate on the past and instead leap courageously into the future.

We’re not leaping blinding though. There are many people around the world with the foresight and vision to see this change and embrace it openly. They’ve been working for years to prepare this bridge, each in their own way, and to help people to navigate across it into this new world view.

I find it somewhat ironic that Don initially indicates that we’re creating this global machine or computer via the Web. Actually the reason that things have gotten so bad as they have is because things have become too machine-like. In effect, we’ve lost our humanity, our human nature, somewhere along the way, in exchange for efficiency and desired perfection that is failing us dramatically because of our inability to adapt and change our “programming”.

We’re not machines and we’re not perfect. And that, strangely enough, is a good thing because it our imperfections that make us human. It is our frailties, our vulnerabilities, that make us human to each other, thus making us want to reach out to one another and connect. But it’s apparent that Don himself even realizes this at the end when he indicates the emergence of a networked intelligence, a collective mind, that allows us to learn, grow, and adapt collaboratively in ways we’ve never dreamt possible before.

So what’s happening here though? What are the core components of this cultural DNA that is effectively changing mankind, helping it to evolve to its next stage of evolution? Open, sharing, and caring are the core trinity elements that I’ve seen, as Don seems to attest to as well. But it goes further than that. It’s how these elements are utilized together as a sort of cultural vaccine that rewires an organization, effectively transforming the people within it into a neural network for the emergence of a collective mind, thus allowing them to collaborate in an almost symbiotic nature. (And yes I’ve seen this level of collaboration within a team before using this same cultural DNA and it’s simply amazing to experience.)

But really what’s the composition of this cultural DNA? Well that’s what I’ve been working on for years and, yes, I believe I’ve finally cracked it. The hard part, as usual, is articulating what I intuitively know. What I can say though is that I’m calling it “Natural Culture” because from my perspective it’s a culture that restores the human nature within organizations and kickstarts it to life, transforming it from a machine into a living collective entity that can finally sustain the life within it.