Only Requisite Agility can save us now
What the world needs now is *not* another management fad. Everyone is looking for the ‘new agile’ — some impressively deep thinking which can be simplified, commoditised, and sold. The smarter sharks in the ocean are preparing the accreditation programmes…
Yet we do need something. We face the ongoing and unpredictable elaboration of the universe, and time and time again, we are forced to revisit our understanding of the fundamental laws of organisation, and realise we have forgotten or mistaken them once again.
Acceptable ideas are competent no more and competent ideas are not yet acceptable.”
Stafford Beer
There is, as noted, no shortage of people offering to help with this dilemna — ‘when the student’s chequebook is ready, the teacher will appear’. Yet the most effective ways to offer help — for those who offer, contain the seeds of disappointment, in the form of some or all of:
- A panacea: a one-size-fits-all solution to all organisational ills (real and imagined) — the measure being how perfectly you implement
- A dogma: incontrovertible truths which must be accepted wholesale and honoured for eternity — measured by perfectly to continue to honour the truths
- The passionate denunciation of the old and inadequate in favour of the new and superior — measured by your enthusiasm in espousing the rhetoric
- The creation of dependency, an ongoing requirement for further support — the true measure of purpose of these approaches
What Requisite Agility seeks to do is to create the conditions whereby organisations are able to assess and develop the capacity and capability to survive, thrive, and succeed in terms of the only measures that matter — the experiences, the value they create in the environment, and inside the organisation.
This pulls the focus to the ability of the organisation to sense and make sense of its world, to turn that into action, and to adapt — strategically, operationally, and even internally.
What we are doing is avowedly trans-disciplinary.
- Instead of one fixed approach, it’s about fit of intervention and development to context, need, and purpose
- Instead of a gospel, it’s about active, multi-level learning and reflection
- Instead of condemnation of the past and the other approaches and elevation of the new above all others, it’s about learning and using what works
- And instead of dependency, it’s about creating capability
Join us from 18 June to 10 July — and we will learn to explore new realities and, together, create the days after the crisis.
I have three free tickets and a limited number of discount codes for those who’d like to email me — benjamin.taylor@redquadrant.com
