Complexity Cogitators Podcast

• Is the word system the best way to describe an organization?
• When trying to understand or map decision making mandate, the word falls a bit flat.
• Recently we discovered the word polity...

• How do you best describe an organization's direction?
• Is it even useful to have a geometric metaphor for something that doesn't exist in a coordinate system?
• And when discussing an organization's strategic intent, is it useful to know that serving a potato is a perito front?

• What is an enabling constraint?
• Why is it so difficult to talk about direction in organizations?
• And how come some thoughts around diversity in organizations are still controversial?

  Today, we have Anders Wengelin as a guest. Anders is CEO and management consultant at Friktion, a small consultancy specializing in nonlinear methods and approaches to change and transformation in organizations.

• What does it mean to accept and navigate a paradox?
• How come it is so difficult for organizations to accept that adding more details to a plan only increases the likelihood of it being wrong?
• Luckily for us, Eric Wenzel wrote a book called A Course in Paradoxical Thinking - Why Transformations Cannot Be Managed and So Must Be Managed.

• Is Team Cognitive Load something you should actively manage for?
• Is it an organizational design criteria worth optimizing for?

Does philosophy or philosophical work deserve attention in organizations?

Or is there no inherent value in naming some of the inevitable work we all do in organizations, as philosophy?

• What does an Engineering Manager actually do?
• As it is a very common role in organizations, should it not be relatively easy to create a role description or role definition?
• In this episode we will at least try.

Is everything strategy?

No, everything is not strategy.

But more than we traditionally believe.

It is also easier than we think, but more complex than we want it to be.

Still inspired by nomadology from the minds of Deleuze and Guattari, we set out on a conversation to explore the question - how do you set and express boundaries within which the war machine can move and operate freely while still living up to the state's demands for legibility, while also enabling and incentivizing collaboration?

• What ever happened to the agile revolution that was supposed to come?
• Or did it already happen and quietly got absorbed into normality for software development companies?
• In today's conversation, we are applying the lens of nomadology, a concept by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to, perhaps, say that what happened to the agile movement with a capital A was completely natural.