Simone Cicero:
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations podcast, where we meet with pioneers, thinkers, doers, and entrepreneurs. And we speak about the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in the rapidly changing world we live in. I’m Simone Cicero and today I’m joined by my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, hello.

Simone Cicero:
And today with us, there’s also Alicia Juarrero, president and co-founder of VectorAnalytica with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Miami, where she is also currently a research associate. Alicia is also the author of a very important book called Dynamics in Action. And we’re going to talk about today with Alicia about complexity and organizations. Hi, Alicia. It’s great to have you here with us today.

Alicia Juarrero:
Hello. I am pleased to be here.

Simone Cicero:
Let’s start from very, I would say general question. I think we rarely had on this podcast, people like you that I would say, have such a profound understanding of complexity. And I’m curious to ask you, I think an opening question that may be helpful in kind of framing the conversation today. And my question is about this very idea of organizations, organizing. And I’m curious about what do you feel, in terms of, I would say, the legacy of this idea and this concept and this word. Sometimes I feel like that we have an idea of organizing that is very much imbued, I would say, of taylorism, and rationalism, and mechanistic thinking. When we speak about organizing, can we really have, I would say a conversation that connects the discourse of organizing that we had so far and project this into the future, including much more complex aware positions? Or maybe we really have to kind of freshly restart, I would say from a new ground, when we think about organizing. What’s your feeling?

Alicia Juarrero:
When I think of organization, I think in terms of organisms, of biological organisms, that is a much earlier concept of the term organization. I think the reason Taylor borrowed the word organization, and industrial organization, is because an organism is different from an aggregate, or a clump, or a mass. A sand dune, to me, is a mass, a clump of grains of sand. But what Aristotle who was probably the first person to use that notion was thinking about was that living organisms hang together in a particular way that is very different from say the grains of sand in a sand dune, or a pile of rocks that a construction site leaves behind. And the problem comes with that notion of hanging together. What exactly is, I’m going to use the word the mechanism, but I don’t mean mechanism in a mechanical, in a machine, Newtonian like sense.

What is the internal logical principle, if you will, that makes an organism or now we understand better an ecosystem hang together in a particular way, so it’s that the — I think it’s the interdependencies between the different components that makes an organism or a social organization, different from a pile of rocks. So, I would like to keep that term because especially from a philosophy of science point of view, it gets us away from a mechanistic understanding of systems and of societies and of reality in general. I think since the scientific scientific revolution of the 17th century, we have tended to think of the world in machine terms, which is of course what Taylor had in mind. But yet I think subconsciously he was aware that there are some entities in reality, living organisms, ecosystems, social organizations that hang together in a particular way and that when you start unraveling that hanging together, it falls apart. So, it’s the hanging together that gives it a coherence. It’s not the actual components that matter so much. So, I’m perfectly happy keeping the notion of organization.

Simone Cicero:
That’s really interesting. I never realized that organization comes from organism. That’s a very good refreshing perspective, I think, to keep in mind. Basically, we have been thinking about organizations in an industrial way very much in connection with this idea of bureaucracies, I would say, this idea of hierarchies. And for example, you can say I’m the boss, let’s say somehow, simplifying this concept, I can enforce some of my ideas into you and letting you execute on those. Instead, when we think about organizations from an ecosystemic perspective, increasingly in our work, we tend to deal with this idea of organizations that want to be a bit more directed from the outside, so outside in. To do so very often, we have been challenging this idea of silos, to embrace more an idea of cellular based organization.

So, unit based organization, where units are unbundled, it’s much more difficult to enforce, I would say, a certain decision, one on each other, there are different mechanism to interact and give signals, let’s say, between cells. So, how does it feel, from your point of view? Is it unbundling the organizations into cells and making it much more difficult to enforce those decisions or direction from the top somehow, a way to make organizations more complex, aware and more, I would say, able to deal with the increasing complexity that we’re seeing?

Alicia Juarrero:
I think you’re absolutely right in pointing out the importance of ecosystemic approaches. Once again, I think what that suggests is that the biological metaphor, the biological model, is better than the mechanical model. A cell is not like a grain of sand, again, in a sand dune. A cell is defined functionally, pretty much, because when an organism begins, it begins as an undifferentiated fertilized egg. But then it starts differentiating. And the important thing here is that it will become a bone cell and not a muscle cell, depending on its role in the organism, on where it is developing in that particular fertilized egg.

Now, why am I talking about that? Because a team in an organization is a team visa vie a particular purpose within an organization. Yes, it has a certain, I want to use the term standalone-ness, or if I dare, autonomy, or I don’t even want to use the word independence because it is interdependent with the context in which it is located. Thinking in terms of cells is extremely important and it brings me back to the notion of hierarchy that you pointed out. You’re absolutely right that what we do not want nowadays is to think of hierarchies, much less social organizations, firms and so on, in the sense that you have a dictator who issues edicts from above, and expects those edicts to be enforced. And I think the term and force is very apropos, because it’s almost like an injection of energy from the outside and it pushes the people in the organization to do something. That is exactly what does not happen in an ecosystem.

In an ecosystem, first of all, the ecosystem does not pre-exist the components. The ecosystem is co-generated by the engine interactions between the components. So, the constrained interactions, the constraint interdependencies among the different divisions of an organization, the different cells, the different teams, the different divisions, the different so on that create the ecosystem that we call a firm. It’s the interdependencies between the plants and the animals, between the fungi and the atmosphere that create an ecosystem, which in turn issues orders, if you will, but not forcefully the way you described dictatorial manager, correctly so. But rather, how does an ecosystem control? An ecosystem has a distributed form of control. So, the idea would be that the manager represents that distributed constraint regime of the organization that regulates and modulates and guides and directs the actions of the individual components. A cell in a liver acts completely different than that — Let me give you a different example.

There are neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that exist in the intestine, as well as in the brain. In the intestine, that dopamine and serotonin acts completely different from that very same chemical as it acts in the brain. So, when we think of a social organization, from a complexity point of view, we have to think of at least three levels of organization. We have to think of the focal level you’re interested in, for example, a team, the context in which that team is embedded, the division it is embedded, the department it is embedded in. And then you also have considered the components of which that cell is comprised, the members of that team, the resources they have available, and so on.

So, again, I am always going to think of a social organization along the lines of a biological, ecological entity, because it seems to me unless you’re going to think that human beings have a non physical aspect, which I will reject, I think we are human beings, and their organizations are the next iteration of a dynamic process that creates increasingly complex systems and processes. So, therefore, for me, looking at biology is a very good model. So, I’m not doing armchair philosophy, thinking off the top of my head, like some philosophers in medieval times who just sat down, and were thinking and hoping that the thought represented. No, I want to ground my ideas on reality, and I think biological reality is closer to us.

Simone Cicero:
When we make this parallel, I would say between the biological systems and the organization, it’s really fascinating. And for example, I can think of an organization where we have to somehow make happen also processes that help these units, these cells to specialize, as you said, later on, in their development into some kind of, I would say, tissues or organs. So, maybe in the evolution, you can have several cells kind of performing the same type of function, and then sometimes aggregating them into organs. When we think about organism, normally, we have a much different perception of life and death. So, a lot of the things that happen in an organism is transient. For example, the data for single piece is not a big deal. You know, it’s, in general, even in ecosystems, death is enabling more life to some extent, right?

And instead, when we think about organizations, this is really normally perceived in a much different way. So, when we think about organizing from this point of view of cells interacting with signals and specializing and so on, for example, how do we deal with this idea of a boundary in organizations, right? That doesn’t really fit into this vision of organizations as an interactive cell. So, how do you deal with this idea of boundaries? Should it be something that we transcend when we think about a complex, friendly way of rethinking organizations?

Alicia Juarrero:
I think you do have a parallel regarding things that live or die. Because for example, a tissue will persist, despite the deaths of individual cells. And I would think that in an organization, you want the team to be able to continue to function despite the replacement of individual team members. So, then the question is, what is it that holds the team or the tissue together, and allows it to persist over a long period of time, and continue in its function, despite the replacement and sometimes removal, deletion of a particular component? I think that is extremely important. You also bring up an incredibly difficult problem with the question of boundaries. Once again, we tend to think of boundaries on a mechanical model. We tend to think of a boundary as the edge of a physical concrete material object. So, this part, physically, concretely, materially ends here, and that’s the boundary of that part. But when you think about once again, an ecosystem, an ecosystem, which has a lot of different layers, the different layers are separated, are bounded by, for example, rate differences.

So, the principles, the decisions that a CEO makes will be much longer lasting, they will be more strategic compared to the decisions that a team leader must make to get that team to perform what it’s supposed to do. So, components usually operate at faster rates than the embedding context in which they are located. And I think that is true for ecosystems, I think that is true for firms. The boundary of each layer of organization in a system has a sui generis rate at which it goes to completion. And so therefore, I don’t think the metaphor is that far off. And so thinking of boundaries more in the sense of what is coupled to what, how fast does that cycle go? So, thinking in terms of network theory, rather than in a traditional sense of physical boundaries, I think is much more useful.

But again, it brings out the point you’ve raised a couple of times already, how do we change the way of viewing complex systems to think of boundaries, for example, in terms of rate differences, or centrality of conductivity, that sort of thing that network theory talks about, rather than physical boundaries. What’s located physically in a particular location, for example. It’s not just the fact that they’re predetermined. It’s how they work. It’s the fact that there are differences in rates, and so you have to look for differences in rates. So, if a team takes as long to come up with a solution as the CEO does to come up with a new strategy, you’ve got a problem. Because the team is not operating as the faster component embedded in the system that it needs to service, that it needs to subtend that organisms, that entities function.

So, it’s kind of like you’ve got a hide and seek for a child and the child’s looking for one sort of thing, something physical, whereas you’re trying to have them look for an experience. Well, you see what I mean? That’s what I mean by a boundary that’s not a thing, a boundary that is probably processed based. And the boundaries between processes, since they interact, have to do with the differences in their rates, the rates at which they go to completion.

Stina Heikkila:
When you think about nature and that sort of metaphor, and we try to compare maybe you were talking about biology and like natural systems to an organization, and this maybe becomes a very philosophical question which would fit with you as well. In society and in organizations, I mean, we try to be directional, right? So, we try to have a purpose, a direction, a strategy, and then orchestrate the whole network toward — [crosstalk]

Alicia Juarrero:
Nice word, very nice word, orchestrate.

Stina Heikkila:
So, the question is yes, does that work and how —

Alicia Juarrero:
Very much, very much.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. So, I’ll hand it to you there.

Alicia Juarrero:
No, no, no, go ahead. Finish your — [crosstalk]

Stina Heikkila:
Just to understand like, is it contradictory? Because you have — I know that we say they’re sort of more distributed. Does that mean that this strategy decisions also have to be distributed? Or can you orchestrate this whole complex system in a shared direction? I guess this is — and is that even a goal that you want to have,

Alicia Juarrero:
I think so. Many, many years ago, I wrote a paper where I suggested that from a point of view of complexity theory, managers have to be catalysts. They have — and or call them orchestra directors. Correct, not forces. So, the purpose and the directedness comes from the level above. The level above decides what the purpose will be, and then sets the context that will facilitate the accomplishment of that purpose. And the role of the entity, embedded level, is to carry out that purpose or to align in the service of that purpose. So, when you speak of platforms, and you speak of contracts, and you speak of micro enterprises, the same must be orchestrated, they must be coordinated to achieve the purpose of the overall corporation or entity in which they are embedded. Correct?

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah.

Alicia Juarrero:
And it is the CEO, it’s the C suite, that must set the overarching picture. But now in turn, and you never run out of a higher level in which you are embedded. The role of the CEO, as they or the C suite in general, or the board of directors in general, as they are setting policy. Or the policy makers of a community, of a state, of a county, of a province, must keep in mind the real world and the context in which they are now living. A CEO suite that sets policy disregarding the context in which that corporation is operating right now, in the real world, is as bad as the team that’s doing its own thing, disregarding the task that was set to it by the manager.

Unfortunately, you almost never run out of embedding context, but at least you have to keep three in mind. So, if you’re the team leader, you’ve got to think of the team members and your manager. So, you’ve got three there, how the team works, visa vie, its components, and its embedding context, which would be the department. The department head has to keep in mind three levels, their department, how they work with other departments, the components of that department, plus the division in which they are embedded. So, again, I hate to say it, but I think the biological model works very nicely. It doesn’t completely work, but it works very nicely for a lot of things.

Stina Heikkila:
If you have some deviance then, you have a team that said no, we don’t want to work, we don’t think this purpose is right, we don’t think this strategy choices, right. We want to do our own way and we want to pursue our own sort of objectives.

Alicia Juarrero:
There are two different questions, I think, in that question. One is, if the embedding context is the one that sets the purpose, that purpose must be described in such a way to recognize that perhaps the manager is not a programmer, for example, and therefore, if the manager starts micromanaging and telling the programmer exactly how to program, then that’s a problem of the manager. They are violating their boundary, they are violating the level at which they’re supposed to operate. So that presumably the manager would be able to explain to the development team, look, this is what we want to accomplish.

And then it would be the team leader to decide, given that that is the purpose we need to — that that is the goal we need to achieve, then, well, what do you think? Should we do it this way, should we program it this way, should we use R, should we use Python? Should we use C++, should we deal with it, which is better for these purposes, and so on? But if the team member says, no, I don’t think that’s the goal we should be pursuing, then you fire that team. Then the team that’s not respecting their boundaries, that’s almost like a cell that’s gone rogue. Correct? And that becomes cancerous, right? And then that organization really has a problem in the very same way that a body has a problem when a cell goes rogue.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, and I think — I was making that comment to someone in the background that we’re talking to a lot of people from the decentralized autonomous organization space DAOs, I don’t know how familiar you are with this, that kind of movement. But where you can see that those who maybe want to pursue a different objective or want to do things in a different way, they can fork and they sort of create their own route away from maybe other protocol, let’s say.

Alicia Juarrero:
So then the manager has to realize, I wish I could remember exactly how you phrase it, they fork into — Do they want to do it differently? Meaning, do they want to program it differently? In which case, well, maybe the manager should listen to that idea coming from the level that is an expertise on programming. But no, do we want to achieve a different purpose? Do we want to do something different? No, then that’s exactly what the manager needs to suppress and stop. Kind of like homeostasis will stop the rogue cell, hopefully. If it doesn’t, then it’s a failure of homeostasis, you know, when an individual each level then becomes specialized to its particular role.

Simone Cicero:
Last week, I was talking about this idea of having heteronomy-based organization. So, as I said before, organizations that are very much outside in, defined from the outside, let’s say. And you talk about how you achieve in an organization, a certain coherence. You seem to hint that hierarchies, at the end of the day, are good if they act, as you said, as orchestra director, not as bureaucracies enforcing blind commands to the air. So, I get that you can achieve this coherence with this kind of network driven properties, conductivity, as I said before, and these kinds of stuff. So, for example, contracts as we said before, this kind of contract templates can act as a network based mechanism that can ensure coherence. For example, I don’t know, in an organization, you can have somebody doing investments from the board, and through contracts and creating policies that let these cells coordinate to achieve a certain purpose, by the way, that is the organizational purpose.

And then you said also that very interesting point, I don’t remember the right, the exact words, but essentially, there is always an embedding context, right? So, as we move outside of teams and divisions and organization and then society, to some extent, don’t we end up at some point in a context where we may have to question the very idea of having a certain purpose? So, for example, if we think about the biosphere, right, many of the problems that I mean, at least, that’s an assumption. But for sure, many of the problems that we have today at a global scale are driven by these kinds of inputs that we have at the species level to progress, to create more technologies and so on.

So, when I talk about being outside in, this has been often a discussion in our conversations, kind of helping us to connect with the idea of having organizations that are much more, I don’t want to say sustainable because I don’t like the word, but in tune, let’s say with the environment. And to some extent, these kind of attuning to the environment as being connected with the idea of becoming purposeless, maybe much more driven just by these inputs of vibing, or to some extent, continuing to generate some kind of variable interactions, but much less about somebody deciding, even a board using network-based mechanisms to ensure coherence. But question the very idea that there should be someone setting a certain purpose for the organization.

But then when you move at the societal level, then the question that we always deal with is, yeah, but the system needs to work. So, there should be some kind of, I would say, distribution of roles, and some kind of ideal state of society that we want to reach. Right? And this makes me connect also with this very idea of, what does it mean to be a good society and all these culture wars that we are living between, the more progressive and woke, if you allow me to use this word, ways to see societies. Versus a much more, I would say, adversarial idea of society where you have multiple polls that just want to protect their interests, let’s say. So, how do you connect this conversation we had so far, with the very idea of purpose, vision of society, good versus bad, this kind of moral, let’s say, vision of what should be done in society, through organizations?

Alicia Juarrero:
I think values are parameters that appear as emergent properties of societies. I don’t think you have morals by yourself. That said, the question of how an individual relates to their society, how the society relates to their environment, the ecos, the biosphere, how they relate with one another. I don’t claim to have the answers to that. I think, for example, the notion of interfaces is very important because it’s the question of how we negotiate the relations with the society and individuals negotiate the relations of the societies in which they live. Societies negotiate the relations between them and the biosphere in which they live. And there must be a process of co-adjustment for all to survive and thrive, not just to be sustained, but survive and thrive. Otherwise, if the biosphere disintegrates, if it’s cohesion, if it’s coherence disintegrates, we will die.

So, we, I think, have come to realize that even an individual network cannot operate on its own. I think I have a bit too hyperbolically titled my book context changes everything, and I maybe shouldn’t have done that. But I tend to hyperbole. And I think the reason is that we have — which is another reason I like biology. Biology was the one discipline that refused to be shoehorned into the standard physics Newtonian mechanical model, which ignored context from Galileo on. Oh, you can forget friction, don’t worry about friction, in this ideal form, then the feather falls at exactly the same rate as a rock. Yeah. Well, you know what, nowadays you can’t ignore friction, meaning we can’t ignore the biosphere, we can’t ignore the damage we’re doing to the environment, and so on.

So, context, I think, is hitting us in the face in a way that we must recognize. And we have to recognize it in the role of a firm visa vie, the community in which it lives here in the United States because of the neoliberal mindset. The idea that, well, the only obligation that firm has it’s to its shareholders so it can pack up and leave and leave the community in which it has lived and all these people in that community depend on that corporation for their livelihood, just pack up and leave. We have to realize that in the long-term when you look at those wider networks, and I think COVID has shown that to be a problem with, for example, the supply chain issues.

When you broaden your point of view, perspective, and you look at the wider context in which each of these are embedded, then you realize that we need to take very seriously how we, I don’t want to say design. I confess, I get very nervous with the idea of outside in, or design, you know, Fiat design. It makes me very nervous because we’re never outside. That’s what we used to think, we could be outside the biosphere, we don’t have to worry about what is happening to the biosphere. We’re never outside, but we have to keep all of these in mind simultaneously, and it is not easy. So, I’m sorry, I didn’t answer your question.

Simone Cicero:
No, but I think that’s really interesting. It’s really interesting, because you are kind of challenging one of the pillars of our thinking that has always been that of outside in, becoming outside in defined, right, as organizations. We have it as a recurring topic in today’s business, I would say jargon when you think about customer driven, ecosystem driven, these are things that we always use, these are concepts that we always use, and I think they are useful. But I think one point that you really brought up for me today is this idea of values as an emergent property. Also, this challenging of being outside in towards reflecting on the inside, the definition of yourself as — from the inside. So, for example, team that can self-define itself, or organizations or cultures, nations, whatever. So, from the discussion we had, I feel like we can look into a future where maybe conflicting interests between parties, between holes, I would say, will bring us probably to a situation where this idea of controlled environment, sustainability won’t work.

So, it may be that we end up with some kind of complexity related issues that are the biosphere scale that will kind of generate some kind of at least temporary collapse or some kind of very big issues that we may have to deal with. Simply because the nature of organisms is that of conflicting, I would say, get the resources until they don’t clash between each other and possibly create some issues at the substrate, the environment that they live, essentially they live in. So, let’s assume that we assume this kind of adversarial idea of society where everybody — [crosstalk]

Alicia Juarrero:
No, no, I’m not sure I want to do that. But go ahead.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah. But you know, just to clarify what I mean, if we trust, really, that complexity is there, we cannot control it, essentially, right. It’s an emergent process.

Alicia Juarrero:
But we can provide the appropriate enabling constraints, so that we can propitiate, so that we can assist and facilitate that emergence. So, we’re not powerless. We’re not completely powerless. We can provide — there are enabling constraints, catalysts, feedback loops. And the interesting thing about a catalyst, a catalyst is not a force. A catalyst is neither reactant nor a product. A catalyst does not impart additional energy. I’ll give you another example of an enabling constraint timing. Children learn on a swing very quickly that when they kick is as important as the strength with which they kick. But the timing of the kick is not a force. It is an enabling factor. And I know people don’t like the word constraint.

And again, we all suffer from our “Déformation professionnelle”. And mine is, what’s my alternative cause, the word cause and that gets me in all sorts of problems because all of science and all of philosophy, and Frederick Taylor and all of these people all thought of cause as energetic pushes. But enabling constraints are not energetic pushes. They are facilitators, a design of a system can be — I use in this notion, the notion of a roundabout. The design itself affects the way that the drivers and the pedestrians behave in that roundabout. But the design doesn’t impart any energy. So, there are enabling constraints that can facilitate certain goals that we want to achieve. I think that is very important.

And the other thing I want to point out is that I am fascinating in, at least in the United States in the last two years. There have been at least four books that have come out about fungus, fungi, and, for example, things like lichen, where there is symbiosis between kingdoms of fungi is not in the same kingdom, biology kingdom as a plant. And yet the micro resi that basically sustained the biospheres sequestration of carbon and nitrogen, that’s a symbiotic relationship. It’s not at all in competitive relations. So, I am wondering whether this notion of Darwin’s of red and tooth and claw, and another interesting thing in Darwin survival of the fittest, we tend to think of it as a competition in a race. The one that’s faster is going to win, and the others are going to lose.

The way Darwin and that period of time thought of fittest is that you go to a tailor to be fitted for a new suit of clothes. It’s like a fitting. Oh, I have to go to a fitting. I’m being fitted by my tailor for a new suit of clothes. What that fitting is, is a process of co-adjustment between the actual constraints of the cloth and the actual constraints of the body in the movement. I think that thinking in terms of enabling constraints to facilitate new symbiosis between teams, between a team and another team and another division, so I’m not sure I want to buy the premise completely.

Simone Cicero:
No, but I think one thing I want to double click here is we spoke a lot in this podcast about ontological convergence. And we use it to explain the fact that so far, we have had so much competition in the market. While now it seems like things such as the blockchain, for example, are emerging in a way that they create enabling constraints for more collaboration. So, for example, this idea of protocols that are emerging, right, these kinds of layers that you can use to historicize the information and transaction so that you can agree on a language, let’s say, seems to be an enabling constraint that is emerging from society to increase the level of collaboration between organizations and so on. So, what do you think about that?

Alicia Juarrero:
I like that a lot. That to me is sort of saying, all right, here’s a new code that will enable the interface between two systems that previously were competitive to translate the requirements and specifications or whatever, from one to the other. And I think nature does that all the time. The genetic code is a translation mechanism between structure and function. And protocol does that, a new code does that, I think symbolic language does that. So, I think that is the way to look at organizations from the point of view of complexity. Absolutely.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I think that’s the enabling constraints. And I know you explained that very well in a video that we will put in the show notes also how that works. And thinking in terms of managers taking that role, not applying a force, but providing this catalyst function that you were talking about. So, I think there’s a lot to think about here for our listeners. So, before we wrap up, we wanted to ask you Alicia for a couple of breadcrumbs, as we call it. So, it can be anything that you think that our audience should read, watch, listen to, think about, whatever is sort of on your mind at this moment that you really feel like you I want to share.

Alicia Juarrero:
I am very much thinking in terms of this idea of interfaces because of exactly the question that Simone asked about boundaries. And again, if we used to think of boundaries as walls, that meant impermeable structures, whereas Paul Cilliers, who was an early — he’s passed away, he’s from South Africa, an early philosopher of complex systems. He talked about boundaries for complex systems being like the eardrum in the ear. They are active sites, they are not walls. They are active sites where the outside gets negotiated and transduced into a new format in the inside, and how that works. So, I’m thinking, think in terms of the interfaces between a society and the culture in which, affirm in a corporation the culture in which it exists, the culture and the biosphere in which it exists, or the team and the members of which they are composed, and so on. I think that’s a very good key that will let you start navigating your way through this bramble bush of complexity.

Because you know, the nice thing about machines is they’re so clean. They’re so cleanly organized, but they’re also brittle, they do not scale, they do not adapt. The messy living thing is more likely to adapt. Ask yourself, what would nature do? If nature were running the organization, what would nature, instead of the machine builder, how would it modify itself so it has a potential to adapt? There’s a wonderful paper, and I strongly recommend it, and it’s for somebody in the business community, his name is David Woods. And the paper is called graceful extensibility. And it’s available online. I don’t have it with me exactly. But he talks about how you make your fitness space, such that it is flexible enough that it can be adapted, if the environment around you changes.

So, how do you promote adaptability and evolvability? Otherwise, even if your current procedures, and so on are wonderful, they’re doomed to die, because the world is going to change around you. We used to think the world isn’t going to change around us, the world will definitely change around us and will change faster than we think. And so always have to think in mind of what the breadcrumb is. Look for a breadcrumb that will increase my adaptability, not my adaptation right now, my potential, my capacity to adapt, my capacity to evolve. Those are my two breadcrumbs.

Simone Cicero:
Alicia, again, it was great chat. I hope you also enjoyed a little bit as we did.

Alicia Juarrero:
I did, I did, I did. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
So, thank you. Thank you so much. Your background, your unique background, I think, helped us to really think in terms of, I would say, the overlap between the artificial, the organizational and the natural. And I think this podcast, this episode is really full of fantastic insights to ramble on for the next weeks and months. When it comes to our listeners, listeners, you can check the show notes of this episode, like always, by going on website boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, where you will find Alicia’s episode plus all the notes and all the links to the breadcrumbs. Well, we’ll catch up and listen to me. Remember to think boundaryless.