Adam Zeiner

The untangling of the military from modern organizations is accelerating, and its influence is waning.

First off, we need to stop thinking about systems maps as deliverables. They’re research tools — stepping stones on our path to understanding complex problems.

And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.

This matters because services designed and optimised for the current system can have the effect of further entrenching it — by introducing additional forces and interests to ‘keep things the way that they are’. This isn’t to dismiss their value — systems change is slow and uncertain, and in the meantime it’s essential we deliver the most effective... See more

That typical hierarchical org chart does not depict the relationships between different parts of the team.