For the philosophers of work amongst you, here’s something to think about before you get into debates over concepts like Agile or Industry 4.0. They don’t much matter.
Charles Lambdin kicked me off with an excellent thoughtful article. Such a dense article requires more time than I can give it to understand it properly. So I hope my superficial reading has not misunderstood or missed points.
I love his quote from Aidan Dunphy: “uplevel out of the recursion”. It’s what our book Open Management is about. Rise above the treeline. “It’s always a people problem” so any rational thinking tool is not going to solve it. Humans are complex systems. As a group, they’re an essentially infinite complex system, ineffable.
There is no one point of reference for a group of people. We all have our own, and most people don’t have them clear. So we can only talk about fuzzy clouds of points of reference. It’s not a quilting point done with a sharp needle, it’s a wind blowing in a vaguely inferable, and variable, direction. The winds around here are usually from the north. Yesterday was a westerly. Today is so calm it’s hard to say anything.
Problems can only be solved with humanistic thinking tools like play, emotion, dance, gut, exploration, failure. They have in common that they lack determined facts, and that they fit what we know about responding to complexity. The concept of “Open” is just naming a direction for the social wind.