Sublime

Thorsten Borek and his team at Neon Sprints in Hamburg, Germany, have created a simple framework to understand the problematic people who show up to collaborate (or not, as we’ll see).

The second book he bought was Drift into Failure by Sidney Dekker, which he passed out to all his IT infrastructure and operations people. Dekker’s book forces organizational managers to rethink blame and accountability in complex processes. When something goes wrong, it asks, “Should you blame the person? Or is it the system?”2*

This process is so fundamental to collaboration without hierarchy that many self-managing organizations train every new recruit in conflict resolution.

Impulsive-Red Organizations don’t scale well for those reasons—they rarely manage to keep in line people who are separated from the chief by more than three or four degrees.

Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. .

How organizations deal with failures or accidents is particularly instructive. Pathological organizations look for a “throat to choke”: Investigations aim to find the person or persons “responsible” for the problem, and then punish or blame them. But in complex adaptive systems, accidents are almost never the fault of a single person who saw

Like Steven Spear describing the Toyota environment as a community of scientists in The High-Velocity Edge, an organization that only Plans and Does can never really improve.