Not all revolutions are equal. The Industrial Revolution, the foundation of so much of the structure and dogma of our Organisations today, was fundamentally about the exploitation of resource and labour, in service of productivity and effect, and in this endeavour it created many of the structures of Organisation and system that we still utilise today - not least of which is the pyramids of power, wealth and control, that loom over our everyday experience of work.

I’ve been working on two key research projects around High Performance Culture this year, and now starting to draw out structure and ideas to prototype in a programme in 2026. This first sketch map captures some of the Leadership Capabilities I’m considering for this new work. Some will be familiar from previous iterations of my work, whilst others are new.

Tomorrow I deliver the opening keynote at the Learning Network Connect conference: I am extremely grateful and excited about the opportunity to do so, and fully intend to confuse myself as fully as possible as I prepare. My session will explore the intersection of technology and humanity, drawing on the published work of ‘Engines of Engagement’, and the as yet unpublished ‘

Scale is held in many systems: of power, influence, structure, impact, cost and so on. But not all systems scale in the same way. You can scale a car park by simply buying up an additional acre and staking out spaces, or you can add an upper deck, or ten more decks. But scaling people is different: you can create a larger team without creating a larger tribe, or trust structure.

Adaptation comes in different flavours: to reduce pain, or increase opportunity, to reduce the cost, or deliver efficiency, to do what we currently do but better, or to learn how to do something new. In any of these cases, there tends to be a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’, a point at which we experience pressure, and a point at which we are reconciled at the end.

Emergent technologies create effects within existing systems, but also ones that bleed between systems, or fracture the boundaries of those systems. Waterwheels provided a general purpose type of power generation, which scaled up what could be done with an individual quern stone for making flour by hand, but also enabled the exploitation of a resource in a new domain - namely water power.

Today just sharing a few #FragmentsOfThought as I have been looking into future models of Performance Management and Recognition. These fragments cluster around a central theme of the Socially Dynamic Organisation framework - that we are moving from a one dimensional, to a multi dimensional view. We come from a legacy where Organisations were one dimensional: physical, structural, codified, owned, directed, all within formal models of power and authority, recognition and control.

I’m down to the last couple of images for ‘The Unreconciled Self’, and as ever they are the last thing to be completed. This one is for the ‘Delamination of Citizenship’, in which we consider how our ‘spaces’ are proliferating, and our legacy structures are eroding. I’ve been really pleased with how the images have a unity about them - recognisably from the same book, but I hope diverse in their expression and exploration.

Unsurprisingly, I find myself in a new landscape, sketching another map. If you know my work at all, you will know that this is a familiar approach, using landscapes as a way of exploring ideas, and the research on ‘High Performance Culture’ is no exception. Throughout this year I’ve been shaping up the work on ‘Culture Weaving’, as well as prototyping frameworks around High Performance.

Right here, at the end of the writing process, I find myself thinking about changing the name of the book, again! And not for the first time has this happened to me. Sometimes a title is what inspires you, and guides you, through the writing process. But when you get to the end, and turn around and look at what you have created, you realise it has grown beyond the name.

There’s a chapter in the new book that explores belief systems, and structured religions, which are under the same types of disruption and pressure as our structures of culture, government, defence, organisation, and so on. Today I’m just #WorkingOutLoud to share the incomplete illustration from that chapter. All of the images play with the idea of the landscape, and our connection to it, with ‘small’ landscapes within larger structures. Some of the illustrations are really coming together beautifully now, others still works in progress!

The cliffs where I live are inherently unstable: unlike other, more reliable cliffs that are formed of granite, or even chalk, ours are primarily made of sand, and bonded by little more than mud and optimism. As such, they have a distressing tendency to slump and collapse in the winter storms. This would not be an issue except inasmuch as we have laminated the familiar structures of a seaside town on top of them, and under them: a promenade, hotels, car parks, children’s playgrounds, and a couple of cliff lifts.

The next Quiet Leadership journey kicks off in a couple of weeks time, and in preparation for it, I’m creating a couple of new images. Set against the backdrop of the Organisation as Ecosystem, this work explores aspects of humility, kindness, fairness, and the gracefulness of our action. It’s very gentle, very small, but very important too. I would imagine that I’ve delivered this work more than any other thing that I’ve created, despite it being almost entirely accidental in the way that it came into being.

At times we need to lay the groundwork before we take action: when it comes to thinking about things, this can be to develop the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks within which to do that new thinking. If we think with our old language, and our old schemas, we may end up thinking the same old things. In the Strategic AI…

Sharing a few fragments of thought as I prepare for the Fourth Prototype of the Strategic AI Workshop tomorrow: That there is value in actively searching for the areas in which we lack templates for action. Because they are also spaces of opportunity. And that templates for action can blind us through their comforting aura. That the rule sets of our actions are not universal, and that we may be out competed if we are unable to evolve our rules, or radically increase our competitive advantage.

You may have noticed that I ran a small programme called ‘Safety and Shelter’ earlier this year. It was a journey set in the landscape of Quiet Leadership - viewing the organisation as an ecosystems - focussed on those people who have lost something in our current geopolitical context, and considering our responsibility, as leaders, across our systems.

I feel that we are racing towards the finish line, although aware that the last mile can feel that it takes the longest time to travel. Yesterday I pulled out the two sections that formed the introduction to the book, and rewrote them as a single preface, which is much better: today I’m sharing the first part of that rewrite as part of #WorkingOutLoud.

I saw the first draft layout of the book today: still early days, but it gave me the chance to see it slowly coming to life. We played around with how the text callouts are handled, as well as simple - but important - decisions as to what the chapter headings look like, and even the colour of the book title.

To my surprise, a few years ago I discovered that Dame Jane Goodall, one of my heroes, was also one of my neighbours. It was when River was still a baby, and I was pushing him, around the time of the pandemic, along the beach, past one of the chines - the water cut valleys that cut through the cliffs here and act as havens for migratory birds.

Our legacy notions of Performance Management, rooted in fixed structures of task and role, and embedded in legacy ideas of hierarchy and power, is likely to be upended by far more fluid and dynamic models of performance measurement and resource allocation. The ‘future of work’ is not simply a shift in the containers within which we sit, with our laptops, but rather a more fundamental reconnection of the shape, nature, and mechanisms of effect of our Organisations today, and the structures of engagement and performance within them.

I had the strangest realisation at the weekend, as I was baking Meadow’s fourth birthday cake. Not just her cake, but also muffins and buns for all the parents and family. Quite a lot of effort, which would (I hoped) be entirely consumed by the end of the day. I really enjoy baking and cooking, somewhat to my own surprise, having only really discovered it since the children arrived.

I’ve been working on the illustration today for a piece I have not yet written about Performance Management in the Anthropo-Technic: it’s about how AI will disaggregate many of the structures of asymmetric performance analytics and undermine associated structures of power and control. I've just coloured it quickly to share, but you get the idea. More generally it ties into questions of how our organisations utilise labour, allocate tasks, hold recognition and reward, and quality assurance.

I’m working on a new research project and programme called ‘Creativity in the Age of AI’, which explores three things: [1] how we are creative, [2] organisational structures of creativity, or engagement with it, and [3] the evolution of our creative identity. It’s aimed at the creative industries, and specifically to consider how they will hold the value of creativity, and for individual practitioners, how their identity and role will evolve.

I’m a bit daunted by the number of illustrations to do for the Planetary Philosophy book, but experience tells me that the best approach is to just jump in. Not everything is going to be right, or make the final cut, but just thinking about things will not help. So instead, I’m working through the manuscript, and starting to sketch out illustrations against key sections or ideas.

I’m continuing to #WorkOutLoud on ‘Culture’ and aspects of ‘High Performance’, today sharing a few #FragmentsOfThought That culture may be difficult to define - or plagued by prolific, but conflicted definitions - but that we can more easily categorise areas of leadership capability. And that this may be enough. [1] To understand and explore culture as a locally sourced, and socially, co-created phenomenon.