I have a great many things on the go right now, some of which, like the ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ work, is being pulled into practice before I’ve even finished writing it. I’ve always tried to segment my work into parallel spaces. At the bottom is the everyday writing on the blog: #WorkingOutLoud, sharing rapidly iterating ideas and, more importantly, finding the vocabulary with which to do the thinking. Above that sit my Guidebooks, I think nine so far, which are all research based, but quite practical, and intended to iterate fast – almost semi disposable. I call these my ‘second reflective space’ (the Blog is the first one). Then, above that, are the main books, like ‘Unreconciled: being human in the 21st Century’, which can take a year or two to write, and supposedly adhere to more normal conventions of publishing.
My current dilemma is because ‘Sketches’, which was supposed to be a 10k word Guidebook, is currently approaching 40k words, and spiralling out into the new ‘beyond skills’ work too. I don’t say this for sympathy: I could not be happier. It feels like a convergence in my practice, a somewhat fierce energy, but keeping the wheels on is a challenge! More than ever, in the Age of AI, I am struck by the value I find within the imperfection of my work, and of incorporating failure into my practice. All too easily I think we become deluded that we must strive for perfection. Some things are of greater value when rough, and in motion.
I’m pleased with the new body of work, ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’, which will be published as a Guidebook later in the summer. This work explores a broad pattern of change and the potential expressions of Organisational Design that may emerge in our response to them. Behind the writing, I’m building out a four part diagnostic framework that is standing up well in my first prototype: this considers [1] structural/formal to distributed/relational, [2] Value Architecture, and how it is shifting, [3] Decision Authority, from fully human to fully AI, and [4] Expressions of Complexity, which is reasonably well defined, but the least complete part of the work. Underneath this, I’ve reviewed my full body of published work to map out around fifty relevant human social features that relate to different expressions of Organisational Design. I called them ‘skills’, but really all that has done is frustrate me further. They are not skills. And It’s led me to lean into trying to find a better language – something I’ve been intending to do for a while, but have failed to engage in. Today I am sharing some thoughts on this, but this is very early stage #WorkingOUtLoud, so don’t expect anything too coherent.
The stance I am taking is as follows: we talk about ‘skills’ as that is the most legible feature we were able to define, with the tools available to us at the time. But today we have different tools, lenses that allow us to discern things more synchronously, in more granular detail, that only emerge in practice, in dialogue, in flow. And most of what I am exploring sits in this space. So ‘skills’ as we knew them are real, but human social systems and related organisational effectiveness can be understood in new ways. We have the ability to make legible what was previously hidden beneath the surface.
‘Skills’ are discrete: something that you either have, or lack. They can be isolated, defined, trained, measured, and signed off. There is an implication of linear acquisition, which aligns nicely with our human tendency to reductional approaches to understanding things, and replicating ability. There is a sense that they are portable across multiple contexts, and inherent to this is the idea that the ‘skill’ lives in the individual. By contras, my work considers things that sit in the relationship between the individual and the system context they are currently operating within, as well as the shadow systems they inhabit across multiple parallel social domains (a core idea in the original Socially Dynamic Organisation work, and a deeper feature of the new ‘Sketches’ work.
A skill is hence something that we can extract from context and still have, whilst most of what I am describing is not like that.
To put some detail around this, I am exploring a four part categorisation – the names/definitions are not quite there, but I’m developing it carefully.
The first category describes ‘Orientations’, a cartographic perspective, exploring the way that you habitually face into the terrain. As an orientation, this is learnable and improbable. But it’s not a discrete ‘skill’ as we would have previously understood it. It’s a developed relationship with a landscape that shapes the way you move through it.
Three examples from the Array:
Narrative Orientation – knowing whose story is dominant, whose is silent, and where you are in the narrative landscape at any given moment. This isn’t a technique for storytelling; it’s a developed sense of position in narrative terrain that shapes every move you make within it. You can’t acquire it in a workshop and carry it away. It forms through sustained time in contested story environments.
Boundary Sensing – detecting that a boundary exists and understanding its character before deciding whether to cross it. Not a decision framework, but rather a perceptual relationship with edges. People with a developed Boundary Sensing orientation notice boundaries that others walk through without registering. It forms through accumulated experience of thresholds, not through instruction.
Paradigm Sensing is about detecting signals of systemic shift before the evidence is conclusive, working productively with anomalies that don’t yet make sense. The developed Orientation here is toward the edge of the familiar map: a habitual way of facing toward what might be becoming obsolete rather than away from it.
The second category is descried around the kintetic/momentum. Rather than being things that you possess, these Social Age Kinetic Capacities are things that you exercise. Hey map the ability to do things under real life conditions, and especially adverse conditions. These capacities may be deep, but have a limited volume – like kindness – and must be recharged. We can develop them, draw up on them, and exhaust them, requiring us to rebuild or recharge them.
Three examples from the Array:
Kindness as Leadership Act, which is about active, effortful care under power asymmetry. Not niceness, which is relatively costless, but kindness that requires something from you every time. It can be developed, drawn on extensively, and genuinely exhausted, which is why leaders who are deeply kind over sustained periods of difficulty need conditions for recovery, not just rest.
Held Tension explore the idea of sustaining productive disagreement without forcing premature resolution. This is something you do, not something you have. It requires continuous active expenditure. Under sufficient accumulated pressure, even leaders who are theoretically committed to held tension find they can no longer do it: not because their values changed but because the capacity is depleted.
Failure Fluency is about moving through failure with dignity, learning, and forward momentum intact. This feature only exists in motion, and only in conditions of actual failure. The capacity can be built through deliberate practice, through #WorkingOutLoud approaches that make failure a regular feature of the work rather than an exceptional event, and depleted through environments that punish failure even implicitly.
The third category is around Relational Capacities: these are things like trust, belonging, narrative, dialogue, which exists only in relationship phenomena (but latterly recognising that the ‘other’ may be AI).These are the Social Age Relational Capacities, or possibly Fluencies, which can deepen through reflective practice, and through the acquisition of further individual skills, but simply having the skills does not make you fluent.
Three examples from the Array
Trust Taxonomy Fluency is knowing where any relationship sits on the spectrum from Trustless through Functional to Invested Trust, and moving it deliberately. The fluency only exists in relationship. You cannot be Trust Taxonomy Fluent in isolation. Individual skills (listening, consistency, transparency) contribute to it, but the fluency itself is co-created and lives in the space between.
Community Cultivation is about tending to community over time: nurturing coherence, managing tension, knowing the difference between a community that is growing and one that is quietly dying. The capability doesn’t exist without the community. You can have every relevant skill and still not generate the relational conditions within which Community Cultivation becomes possible.
Co-deliberation is about thinking through complex questions together, in a deep and meaningful way, where the outcome is not known in advance and all parties can be changed by the process. This cannot be performed unilaterally. The Relational Capability here is in the quality of the space between participants, and that quality is co-created, not produced by one skilled facilitator.
Finally, the fourth category is perhaps the hardest: these are the Social Age Threshold Capabilities, intersectional, boundary conditions, these exist at the intersection of self, system, and context. They are not portable, but rather are fully embedded within context. These are both individual and systemic. They only operate in relation.
Three examples from the Array
Ethical Trespass is to cross into unfamiliar communities or thought-frames to understand from within, without needing to endorse or belong. The capability is constituted by this crossing, at this boundary, in this moment. The same act at a different boundary, with a different community, is a different capability. You can develop threshold readiness – Boundary Sensing and Liminal Cartography – as orientations, courage as a Kinetic Capacity – but the Threshold Capability itself only becomes real when you’re actually crossing.
Transition Stewardship – accompanying people through the uncertain middle, where the old has gone and the new hasn’t yet arrived. This is fully embedded in the specific transition, the specific people, the specific moment of in-between. It doesn’t transfer to the next transition intact; each one is constituted freshly by its particular conditions.
Unreconciliation as Stance is about holding contradictory identities, truths, and possibilities simultaneously without forcing resolution. This exists at the intersection of self, the specific contradictions in play, and the context that makes those contradictions live. It isn’t a general capability for tolerating ambiguity: it’s specific to these contradictions, now, and the conditions that make them unresolvable.
We should remember, when considering our historic understanding of skills, that we didn’t discover that human capability comes in discrete, measurable, portable units. We built measurement tools that could only see discrete, measurable, portable units, and then we called what we saw “skills.” The instrument created the phenomenon it appeared to observe.
As I start the countdown to the publication of ‘Unreconciled: being human in the 21st Century’, I’m sharing a series of extracts from this new book. This section, ‘Metamorphosis’ comes at the end of a chapter in which Sae and I explored the context of the Social Age, and the progress we have made. It’s really a kicking off point in the book, but also a point of fracture. From here we travel deeper into these ideas: that technology has changed what it means to be human.
‘Unreconciled’ is our second major collaboration, following on from the success of ‘Engines of Engagement: a curious book about Generative AI’ in 2024. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a collaboration strong, and of course there is not ‘one’ answer to that question. But certainly for me it’s a combination of shared curiosity, with divergent lenses. Whilst Sae and I have common interests and knowledge, we also have very divergent lived experiences, cultural heritages, and perspectives. It is both the differences, as well as the similarities, that bring out the strength in the work.
If you would like to learn more about ‘Unreconciled’, including details of launch events and some special ‘campfire’ sessions, you can sign up to hear more here.
Metamorphosis
Humans have navigated paradigm-changing progress before: the invention of writing, the printing press, and the steam engine to name a few. We’ve survived, even thrived, through these disruptions. So, isn’t there cause for hope? Shouldn’t we rest easy, knowing that the arc of humanity is resilient and be confident that this storm too will pass?
It’s natural for our minds to grab onto patterns and to expect tomorrow to follow the rhyme scheme of yesterday. It’s a hopeful comparison that salves our anxiety, so much so that our minds are loath to accept instances that refuse to fit into our neat mental categories of expectation and experience.
In this we may be complicit in failure.
The tide of progress we ride today is fundamentally different from those we’ve navigated before.
To begin with, our current era isn’t driven by a single change, like coherent ripples upon the surface radiating out from a solitary pebble tossed into the pond. Rather, we’re experiencing the disruption and fundamental alteration of many things – a distributed unease, a swirling change of nearly every single thing at once, pervasive change across many pillars of our truth.
This affects all of the details, all of the processes, down to the foundations and contexts within which they’re held. Change to everything, everywhere. Change as abstraction, fracture, redundancy, rebalancing, and theft. Change to the system. Change in ourselves.
We’re confronted with new ways of being across all levels of the human condition, and there’s no master plan or blueprint, no consensus or means of arbitration beyond markets and politics.
We’re all well aware of the most obvious shifts, such as ubiquitous technology and pervasive connectivity, rapid industrialisation and globalisation. We’re also experiencing deeply personal forms of change.
With the panopticon of radical connectivity, our identities have become more curated, faceted, and atemporal. Meanwhile our communities have grown unbounded – nearly unconstrained by distance and time, or in some cases, by consequence or fact.
Our social identities have been liberated from our embodied selves. Our cognition and communities have fragmented and reformed into a distributed model. The mechanisms of the creation, ownership, and control of knowledge – foundational principles to our structures of power – have shattered, scattering the pieces like dust across the digital landscape. And now, at the intersection of generative AI and our evolving conception of humanity, something new is being scribbled into the margins of our stories.
I argue for emergence. These are the fundamentally ‘new’ – not merely incrementally evolved – characteristics of the Social Age. This era is wholly different from societal evolutions in the past. It’s uniquely defined by the breadth and scale of change, the permeation of change into everything big and small, and the resulting emergent properties – the conglomerate effects that arise from the complex interactions of these many changes.
The Social Age hasn’t made us ‘more of what we were before’. Rather, we’re becoming something new.
We’re transcending the human condition into something transhuman or perhaps post-human. A change not merely to our surroundings or to our ways of living but fundamental alterations to the essence of humanity.
We’re not merely changing; we’re in the midst of a new kind of evolution, a fractal sort of spiralling change, distinctly different from the ‘sum of its parts’.
We’re already in motion: look at our world again, from orbit. A patchwork of physical states, defined by their contours and ruled lines. Overlaid by webs of fragile connections, many parallel layers of belonging, forming a laminate identity, a fractured self. A silicon self. An Anthropotechnic self, increasingly interlaced with AI and biotechnologies.
Perhaps it’s all inspiring and full of promise, but it also carries discomfort and loss. Regardless, we mustn’t – and truly can’t – go backwards, any more than we could reclaim our innocence or ignorance of the past. Our only path is through the maelstrom, likely becoming lost within it for a time but ultimately wayfinding to a new story.
This is our opportunity to rewrite the scripts of citizenship and belonging, identity and society, and perhaps to even redefine the principles of humanity. That is, it’s our opportunity and obligation to define what it means to survive and thrive as inheritors of the Social Age.
I’m walking down parallel paths right now: one path is the ‘Ecosystems’ book that I’m writing with my seven year old son – very gentle, reflective work on the fixed and the fluid, and our interconnection – and the other path is my work on ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation‘, which is highly experimental work across multiple dimensions, considering structures of value, decision authority, structure, and complexity, within the social context of AI.
And yet both have a common feature: they are ways of understanding a broad landscape through granularity. They are both a consideration of the micro and the macro, both questions of scale and effect.
The book with River documents our own journey: we started walking in January, on the frozen ground, with our thermos, and have continued to walk through the same landscape as the seasons have turned. Through this work I rapidly exhausted my vocabulary and understanding, meaning that to complete the journey I am forced to develop a new granularity. ‘Moss’ can no longer be singular, and ‘evergreen trees’ must become different species. There are only so many ways you can talk about footprints, sticks, and puddles. The embodied experience of walking – and the forced re-conceptualisation of seeing the landscape through River’s eyes – acts a a lens for me. Whilst the writing is gentle, it’s really an exploration of something transformative: our own evolving relationship and interdependence, and the ways we ‘read’ the landscape. This is about landscape as geographical feature, and narrative one. The story of self and the story of place.
By contrast ‘Sketches of the Future Organisation’ is different in almost every way. Instead of taking a year, I wrote the thirty three thousand word manuscript last month in two weeks, and it draws together broad threads of my work: taking ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’ (a book about Organisational Design, and how we build systems that are dynamic, fluid, reconfigurable to need), as well as ‘Engines of Engagement’ (AI as technology of disaggregation and unbundling, the erosion of trust, truth, and identity) and ‘Unreconciled’ (being human in the age of AI). This work is really a way of exploring the gap between today (which we are certain about) and the varied distant views of the future that are being sold to us. It’s a visualisation tool that charts individual and collective perspectives on Structure (formal to relational), Value Architecture, Decision Authority (human autonomy to AI autonomy), and Complexity. But it is also a way of reading the landscape, and of knowing ourselves within it.
Granularity is itself an interesting notion, making me pause to think about a range of systems, from Lego, to quantum gravity, the soil, to our own identities, and the nature of crowds and social movements. The relationship between the individual, the collective, and exhibited features.
My own work over the last three years has been to revisit the landscape of my own practice, but seeking somehow a unifying language across it. This is to change scale again, from the granular to the systems perspective, or perhaps I should say the vista or near horizon view. The result of this has been a more unifying vocabulary emerging across my work: of motion, interconnection, and boundaries. Leadership as motion, organisations as ecosystems, dynamic interconnection, and dependency.
Unreconciled will be published in June, the new Sketches Guidebook, I am not yet sure: the work is tumbling along at a great pace, and I’m using is with quite large communities, and it’s rapidly iterating. I’m sharing extracts on the Blog as I write and adapt it, but certainly I aim to produce a working publication rapidly, by the summer, in my Guidebook format, which version up fast!
#WorkgingOutLoud with a reflection on Granularity in my practice.
My new book is published in June, and I could not be more excited to share it out into the world. Co-authored with Dr Sae Schatz, my long term collaborator and co-author of ‘Engines of Engagement: a curious book about Generative AI’, this new work sees us walking deep into a new landscape, considering identity and belonging, citizenship and belief, and how technology is changing what it means to be human. As we start our countdown to publication, I’ll be sharing extracts from the book, as well as some insight into our writing deliberations and debates (at times quite heated debates! The fires that forged this work). This first extract is from the introductory chapter, ‘A Tour Through The Unreconciled Self’. You can sign up to receive details of the events and offers around publication here.
Humans are increasingly disconnected from the Earth. We’re losing our senses of place and context as we shed our once local and rooted existence for an abstract, global, and technologically mediated way of living. Our changing lifestyles aren’t inherently corrupted, but as we drift further from our natural foundations, our sensation dulls. Things slip out of our reach.
We lose some of the texture and nuance of lived experience, growing clumsy and myopic. And we find that our evolved biology and historically constructed structures of being are no longer entirely fit for purpose amongst our rapidly changing surroundings.
We’ve trodden heavily into fragile spaces. As humans evolved over time, and lately with increasing
speed, we’ve destroyed swathes of the natural world, building in their place an artificial environment. In so doing, we’ve constructed a much more ‘human’ narrative but have also, ironically, grown detached from the essence of what it is to be human.
We’ve torn ourselves from the Earth. We’ve industrialised without recognising the full cost or understanding who will ultimately pay it. We’ve written a debt for our children and spread it across our cultures.
Progress isn’t a villain, and even if de-evolution were an option, we shouldn’t seek a way back. Our contexts have evolved; it’s too late – and of little interest – to turn around. We’ve constructed levels of comfort and power too appealing to surrender. After all, I’m rather fond of my indoor plumbing, electricity, and abundant food supply.
I value global connectivity, satellite navigation, and modern medicine too much to let them go. And I celebrate the scientific progress that’s placed these things into my hands.
Since the dawn of humankind, and accelerated since the First Industrial Revolution, our understanding of almost every domain has deepened, broadened, expanded, and globalised.
Consider, for example, that over the span of just a few hundred years, we’ve advanced from musing over bodily humours to articulating germ theory and genetics, then to advancing synthetic biology, and finally to globalising and commercialising our knowledge into worldwide industries:
biotech investment indices, genetic data brokers, at-home DNA testing, on-demand biomanufacturing, and personalised medical therapies delivered by genetically engineered viruses. At the same time, we’ve transformed our domains of knowledge. We’ve shifted from leather-bound encyclopaedias to pocket-sized digital archives, from systems of codified expertise to devolved structures of social sense-making, and from ‘belonging’ as a primarily local feature to an entirely globalised one.
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog