James Priest

 TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:42

I don’t know much about who James Priest is, and I’m sure a lot of people also don’t so maybe could you take us on your journey and kind of how you got into this space that you’re currently in and what got you interested into organizational effectiveness and this whole? 

Speaker: James Priest  01:07

Sure. Well, I won’t make you enjoy my entire life history. But I was in England, you go to school, you leave school at 16, you go to college and then to university, and my mother had very big ideas for me about going to university. But actually, I was also a musician, I was a pianist. And for better and worse, I got involved with a band. And so I dropped out at the age of 18 and was a semi professional musician for some years which was a lot of fun. And somewhere inside, I had a niggling idea I should do something a bit more responsible. So I also found that a couple of businesses and I was actually, at that time, interested in nature, I worked a lot with construction when I was younger. I mean, as a kid with my father and living in a rural environment. And so I got into landscape design and construction. So I had a private business for private properties and also a commercial business. Anyway, I remember asking myself a few times, this can’t be it. And when I was 26 years old, there was a series of events happening in my life at that time. And I ended up getting introduced to… you could call it like as a kind of psychological or consciousness tool. So my partner at the time was having a difficult time with a few things and she reached out for help with that and I got really interested in the process that she got involved with, which was called voice dialogue. It was developed by a couple Hal and Sidra Stone from the States. Hal was a yogi analyst and Sidra was a psychologist. They got together, it was their second marriage in the 70s and they vowed to never repeat the same problems that they had in their first marriages. And after about six months, they started to see the same patterns emerging. And so rather than be dismayed, they decided to explore that. And at that time, there was a lot of exploration being done around this idea of psychology of selves or this idea that the psyche is multiple. And so and there was some techniques, you know, like facilitating different parts of somebody, or giving a part of space in the room and having a dialogue and so on. So they started experimented with this. And out of that came a method that’s gained a lot of traction today called voice dialogue. And around it was what they came to call the psychology of selves. Anyway, I’ll get to why this is relevant in the context of sociocracy soon. But the basic idea is, you know, everybody’s unique, right? So we’re all born with our own kind of unique tendencies and traits, but then the environment influences us, our familial environment and the culture in which we grow. So this nature nurture debate, it’s not really a debate both are relevant somehow. But if you look at or one way to make sense of human development is that we tend to lean into or identify with certain behaviors that appear to get our needs better met within whichever social context we’re in. And with some encouragement, sometimes from those around us, including kind of negative feedback, we can disown certain other aspects of ourselves, so otherwise we would quite naturally and freely express. So the basic idea is that by the time we reach adulthood, we’re a kind of adapted version of our full selves with some parts known to ourselves and given freedom to express, some part known to ourselves, but not shared openly or explicitly with the world, but a whole bunch of aspects or potential in us that’s also not developed. So anyway, I was really fascinated in this work. And the basic idea was by really giving space to these different identifications, like, the part of me that was really identified with pleasing people and was very unnerved if people seem displeased with me, or the part of me that needed to know the answer to everything and not knowing wasn’t really a safe space for me to be in and so on. So I took a deep dive into this because I was really fascinated by the question, Who am I really. And so this was when I was 26. And I made a decision during that year; one that I wanted to pursue more what was meaningful for me, and I was discovering a whole new bunch of meaning at that time. And secondly, I’d been very entrepreneurial up until that point. But I had this realization that actually, it would probably serve me better if I was more paying attention to myself and to life and listening more for where I felt a sense of pool, a sense of invitation. And that rather than coming up with a plan around what I was gonna do, is be more responsive to the moment instead.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:34

Is that awareness that you’re talking about? Just higher awareness or is it something else?

Speaker: James Priest  06:39

Well, awareness is a precursor to greater consciousness, right? But I can behave like an idiot, I can be aware I’m behaving like an idiot and I still behave like an idiot, right? So awareness helps, without awareness, and it’s very difficult to intentionally change a thing, right. But in and of itself, it’s just a stepping stone. So it’s really, it’s consciousness work I guess. You know, it’s the journey for me was deeply insightful and a bit addictive in a way. It’s like I was just discovering the identifications through which I viewed the world. And as I peeled off layers, I discovered more aspects of myself. And one really interesting facet of that was their perspective on Judgment. So, you know, we can negatively judge people and feel repelled somehow by people, but we can also positively judge people, you know, when we put them on a pedestal somehow, we fall in love with them, you know. This kind of thing. And they saw judgment as a torchlight that helps us to identify identifications that we had, and also in the mirror of what we projected onto others to see aspects that were also essential to ourselves. But my point was this led to a really big, really big turnaround for me in my life and this pivot towards listening for invitation, and pursuing what was meaningful, you know, kind of not just in my head but also in my heart in terms of getting a sense where I could best contribute. And that led me into working for nearly a decade with at risk teenagers, I trained as integrative counselor, I developed a private practice. And early on in that period, so I was around 27, I was introduced to sociocracy as a concept and that a very low resolution introduction to the sociocratic circle method, in the context of working with an organization to support them in transforming some conflict into a more creative opportunity for them to learn. And so that’s where my first induction into organizations came, but it was more by accident and through invitation because I was already starting to work within that field. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:01

And I’m assuming, like that whole approach and idea behind sociocracy resonated with you because of that change. Like what was your first reaction when you learned about the higher level of sociocracy?

Speaker: James Priest  09:20

Yeah, well, so back then, there was a single web page in English, about the sociocratic circle method. Everything else was in Dutch, a lot of it was difficult to find. And I had a hand typed document, literally typed on a typewriter with correction ink, you know, describing from somebody to kind of own account of what the sociocratic circle method was. So with that kind of single page document, we experimented with selecting people by consent and consent decision making, organizing in circles and linking within the organ and in combination with some other practices as well nonviolent communication was something I was introduced to at that point. But also this perspective of judgment as a kind of torchlight, you know, as a kind of indicator of where we’re polarized somehow. Over two years, I saw a radical transformation in this organization. And I was really impressed by the efficacy of these different patterns basically, from the sociopathic circle method. But the other thing that really struck me and this goes to the heart of the history of sociocracy. So Gerard Edenburg developed the sociopathic circle method. He was a student of Case Bucur, who founded a school in the 1920s in the Netherlands, with his wife, Betty Capri, that’s of the Capri family. They were so disenfranchised by the mainstream education system that they decided to create a school. And part of the idea was very much influenced by Quaker practices around engaging the kids in the decision making along beside the adults that were involved as well. So it kind of became the self-organizing system back in the 1920s and that schools still around today. But the Quakers, it’s an interesting kind of Christian sect, they had this idea that was seen as quite heretical over recent centuries that God, or authority wasn’t just some external entity that you bow to, but that there was a bit of God in everybody or they talked about the light within it. So another way of looking at that is just looking at distributed intelligence, the idea of collective intelligence, when we’re orientating in complexity, no one of us is smart enough to navigate complexity alone, and that we need each other. And yet, it’s so challenging sometimes as human beings to be able to come together and cooperate and collaborate in a way where we can arrive at agreement together, because we so often get caught in polarization with one another because of these judgments, right? And we’re judging one another, because we’re seeing behaviors in another that reflect something that in a distant past for us somewhere have demonstrated some kind of threat or meant that we might not get our needs met, you know. So we kind of, we’re standing on one foot, if you like and banging into each other. So this was what really fascinated me about the sociocratic circle method and especially consent decision making, because what I saw was, where I was working on the interapsychic level, in my own process, but also with other people as well, to create this more integrated organization interapsychically. The consent decision making process was an optional agreement among stakeholders to come together and to show up and to bring each perspective but not with the idea of fighting to see whoever would win but to kind of transcend that binary conundrum towards a more both end perspective on the world, where the essential value of different points of view were kind of synergized towards the emergence of a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s the thing…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:26

Maybe I want to pause here because I think this is really important and I know, we might go a little bit off topic, but this is like key to everything in my opinion in a sense you know, you’ve touched upon a couple of points. One is the consciousness and understanding like I don’t know, sometimes it’s referred to as cognitive growth or adult development. But there’s a tight correlation in my opinion between that growth, that transcendence maybe, if you want to call it and how we see the world or our perspectives, our worldviews, right. So a lot of times, you know, the conflict is between these views or maybe how we judge or what we’re… Could you maybe talk a little bit more or what is your perspective on the maybe some of the, you know, there’s a lot of over the last, I don’t know, 60, 70, 80 years on cognitive growth and adult development stages; what is your thought on that and how important is it when it comes to looking at the world that we currently live the complex world and how our approaches to dealing with that complex world environment?

Speaker: James Priest  14:47

Well, so the term adult development I mean, it’s a loaded term for many people and for a myriad of different reasons. I think it’s fair to say and most people could probably agree with this. If you look at the evolution of species, we’ve been maturing, we’ve been learning, we’ve been developing in different ways and accruing wisdom through the hard earned lessons of those that came before us, you know, and then applying our interpretations of that to orientating in the world today. And I think it’s fair to say that if we don’t screw things up so badly that this place becomes uninhabitable for us in the future, then there’s a long runway still for us to continue to develop and grow. And I’m personally very curious about that and excited about that potential, even though I don’t think it’s guaranteed for the majority of us to carry on down that road, you know. So what was interesting for me about the work of Hannah Sidra, and this is just very personal to me was it wasn’t about like becoming an adult, it was about bringing consciousness to all of the different aspects of me, which included different aspects of the child in being, you know, aspects of the elder in me, aspects of the feminine and the masculine in me, just whatever I kind of discovered as I was peeling off those layers. And so you mentioned about transcendence. I think transcendence is a bit of a tricky term as well, you know, people can kind of use it as an excuse to avoid the hard, concrete knocks of life. And, you know, sure, there’s a more kind of spiritual side of ourselves, it’s beyond the kind of concrete and the mundane, but at the other end of the scale we’re physical beings and we’re very much here in the world, you know, and that comes with responsibilities and very real consequences, including inevitable death, you know, for now, at least. So how Hannah Sidra’s work, it wasn’t about transcending things, it was about integrating, it was more about expanding ourselves to be as honest as possible with ourselves and with who we are. And so it’s a kind of surrender into being. And the challenge with that is, there’s a good reason why we identify with certain behaviors, right, all of us; it’s to avoid being too vulnerable. And so, but the behaviors we learn and become habituated in our earlier life, can sometimes even end up bringing about the very things we’re trying to avoid in later life. And the more vulnerable we get, if that’s happening out of consciousness, then we tend to double down and identify even more, when what we need to do is kind of disidentify from those habitual ways of behaving, and be able to tap into other ways that compliment; it’s not to replace, you know, but it’s more on a pole, it’s not opposites, but just complimentary ends of a pole. So if I’m totally identified with pleasing everybody else all the time, I’ve got no way of caring for myself, because I’m not in touch with what pleases me and what would be needed for me, you know. But if I’m embracing both sides, and in a moment, when there’s a demand or need from another, perhaps, or a situation that might work, I can also tap into what my own needs are right now and what’s going to be important for me. And in holding that tension between opposites, it enables me to make a more kind of intentional choice rather than running on my habits.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:36

Like very context. Yeah. I mean, like, when you said that moment, that moment is all about context and having that awareness or consciousness about like, Hey, you know, which way am I pulling and being conscious about what you’re doing in that specific situation. Is that what it’s kind of what you’re describing?

Speaker: James Priest  18:54

Yeah, and it’s, you know, one way I find this simple to be able to grasp it conceptually. It’s just about developing beyond the kind of binary view of the world. It’s, you know, developing the capacity for nuance, recognizing the essential value in different points of view, both not just outside of ourselves, but within ourselves among those different aspects of our inner contradiction, if you like. But fundamental to that is the fact that if we go up against a habituated way of behaving and perceiving the world, then it’s inevitable that we will be confronted by the vulnerability that that behavior sought to help us avoid. And so that’s the challenge, right? Because, you know, we could we can go out there and be all powerful in the world and cause effect all over the place but what we often run from is the fact that we can be affected by things right. And so we’re strategizing to make sure that we’re only affected in positive ways and we avoid the negative ways. And that’s what this you know, kind of family of identifications is helping us to achieve. So my point is to acknowledge vulnerability is on the one hand, a vulnerable thing to do but at the same time, it’s a pre-condition towards transformation, and being able to realize a more integrated version of ourselves. Because if I’m consciously holding the baby, so to speak, then all of those internal parent aspects of me that were trying to take care of it somehow relax a bit, because it’s like, okay finally there’s somebody’s home, you know. And in the absence of that, they’re just going to keep running and doing the things that they’ve always done. Let me see if I can help us both to make a segue towards the modern day in sociocracy 3.0 right, because S3 is a menu of human behavior patterns that have emerged through human collaborative endeavors across time. And they’ve prevailed and evolved because of their usefulness in certain contexts. And in organizations today, we’ve got people like you and me, all of us who’ve gone through our own developmental journeys, all of us unique in our own rights, but also influenced by whichever familial social cultural context have got their hands on us somehow. And we’re trying to work together towards some kind of common objective in an organization. So much as our habitual ways of doing things work, there’s not really any need to look at doing anything different. I mean, why change if everything is good enough as it is right? We’ve got enough to think about without changing things as well. But what happens for all of us of course is that we bump into situations where despite our best efforts, the results we see are sometimes different to what we expect or wish to see. And that’s a vulnerable moment, right? Especially if we’re working so damn hard, and bringing everything we know and have to that situation and it’s still not good enough, you know, individually and together somehow. So one way, I like to help people understand S3 is these behavior patterns were there long before S3 was, but if you’re struggling with your current habitual ways of dealing with things, and you’re banging into situations where it’s just not good enough, and you’re prepared to acknowledge the vulnerability that comes from that somehow, and you were looking for alternatives, then there might be some patterns within the menu of S3, that are going to be helpful for you. At least to consider to enrich your current approach. But also as a contrast, which in its own way will help you become more conscious of your habitual ways of doing things before. So I’m saying this to try and tie that whole story together psychology of selves and meeting sociocracy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:03

Exactly. And like, you know, the way that I see it is, and maybe the first let’s come back to S3 and your journey like as far as maybe fast forward to early, I think you said it was 2014, 2015 of the S3 or sociocracy 3.0. So maybe let’s just bring everybody back and some people might not be familiar with what S3 is. So maybe describe now on your journey how you get started with S3 and then I would like to tie a lot of what you said into S3 and also back to that consciousness and our willingness. One of the challenges that I see is people seeing some of these approaches or these patterns as maybe too far-fetched or not, you know, not maybe for my environment because of that precondition, like you said, like we’re so used to certain things. But let’s come back to how did you get started with S3 and you co created that right?

Speaker: James Priest  24:17

Yeah well or co-discovered it maybe is a more humble way of putting it. So well, I played around with the sociocratic circle method for many years since 2001. Around 2008, 9, I started to get the idea that in the future there would be more of a place for sociocracy inspired thinking in the world. And so I got involved with a start-up organization called Sociocracy UK around 2010. We were looking to help raise awareness around sociocracy and the sociocratic circle method in the UK. And I was a bit of an evangelist for the sociocratic circle method at that point. I thought it was pretty cool and I think mainly, I was so excited about it because I was so naive about organizational development in general. And I didn’t really know about much else. And I personally had such a good experience with it, and because of its overlap with these other areas that I was much more experienced in you know and entrenched in. So by 2014, I was in the nonprofit and social sector. I think I was the most booked sociocracy trainer in the world that year. And you know, I can’t profess to have been like the world’s greatest expert, but I was just seem to following that invitation, I just seem to keep finding myself in the right place and I was really passionate about it. And then I met Bernard Bakubrink, in a workshop organized by Lily Davids who’s the other co-developer of S3 and now my wife as well. And he was an agile coach, he worked as a CTO, he had a background in software development. And he came to the workshop and I spoke to him in the break and he said, I’m here because I’m interested in what sociocratic thinking can bring to help get over this hurdle in many organizations where there’s a huge investment into agile operations, Agile product and service development but you kind of hit this where the front somewhere up the system, and on the other end is the business end. And it’s a really kind of uncomfortable and often unproductive and wasteful kind of situation. And he was looking to sociocracy for ideas about how to bring agility, not just a more agile perspective to the whole system and a more lean approach rather than a lot of the waste that can come with unnecessary decision making hierarchy within systems. So fast forward three months, he sent me an email with a link to a web page called a web page, it was like 140 PDF pages with illustrations of his first draft of an interpretation of his understanding of sociocracy synergize with aspects of agile and lean. And what he wanted to do was create a set of free learning resources for the tech industry sharing these ideas. And I took a look and I didn’t know very much at all about agile and lean back then, and I read it and I thought well, he’s got some understanding but doesn’t know so much about sociocracy either, I better go see this guy. So I went back to Berlin and we spent a week together with the idea of creating these resources. And at the end of the week, we had like, five times more on our backlog than we’d had at the start. So I decided to go back there a few weeks later. And it was during that second visit that we realized that there was this potential for really like creating resources that can really help people to learn some of these different patterns that we were seeing. And the pinnacle moment was a moment when Bernard asked me, based on all of my experience with the sociocratic circle method over the years, how many organizations did I know of that had kind of stay true to the method, you know, and we’re just running the whole system over the years? And I said, Well, I don’t know any actually. And just to be fair, I think there’s a few but there’s not many in the world today. And so he said, Well, what do they do then? And I said, Well, they take what works, they adapt things, if they think that’s valuable, they discard the things that don’t seem to be relevant to them and they synergize all of that with everything else that they’ve done already for better or worse. And he said to me, then I think we should tell the world about that. And that’s how S3 was born, we decided to rip down the sociocratic circle method, many frameworks and methodologies coming out of the world of agile and lean and look for key patterns there that we could articulate in a manner where we give people the option to kind of take these building blocks, you know, rather than having to take frameworks and methodologies as a whole.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:22

And that’s so key. I mean, like, you know, in like, I’ve been doing these interviews for a couple of months now. And like every person that I respect their opinion in Agile outside of agile, right, it says, you know, we’re foolish to think about like frameworks will solve our problems and we’re selling people are buying, the companies are buying them. I do a lot of training in that aspect. But going back to your story, how many organizations do you actually know that apply these frameworks and have not modified those? And I think the future of… it’s kind of like you said, it’s something that I listen to you said, like, you know, this is like wisdom of life. S3 is a remix. It’s like, you know, it’s something that we’ve known, it’s not necessarily completely new. And I feel like the future of organizational change, organizational human then is based on these patterns and exactly what you just described in that scenario; it’s like you take what works, you evolve it, you change it, and there’s no recipe for it. Yet, you know, in our world, there’s lot of demand for that give me a recipe. And I want to bring this back to that consciousness, how much our need for predictability, unease with complexity and uncertainty is driving desire for recipes and frameworks, because there is I think connection between why frameworks are so popular methodologies, and why they’re so successful, versus these pattern based custom approaches seems to be what really reality is all about.

Speaker: James Priest  31:12

Yeah, well, maybe you can kind of come back a bit on your own question there. So for you why is it so unsuccessful from your perspective?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:22

Yeah, so maybe I’ll share my thoughts on that. I think each context is different. Right? So and I talked about, like having a recipe without ingredients for that recipe, right? It’s great if you have all the ingredients but if you don’t have all the ingredients, you get to make something that’s somewhat tasteful with what you have. And a lot of times if you think about scaling frameworks, if you think about even Scrum, you know, if we look at, you know, the most popular framework in the space at least I’m working, people can’t even implement Scrum which is a pretty basic framework, how could you, you know, some of these frameworks that have a lot of different patterns, practices, principles embedded in them. On the surface, they look [inaudible 32:10] you know, CEO or somebody that’s responsible for implementing change looks most likely they’re like oh yeah, this looks good. But if we don’t fully understand complexity, in my opinion, it’s easy to buy something or to see the value in it and then when you actually try to implement it, it’s like oh shit, you know, what do I do now and how do I get out of this situation? Because it’s not working. Because going back to what you said, ask any agile coach or transformation, not necessarily just transformation, how many the same question that Bernard asked you; how many organizations do you know that implemented Scrum across the company and they’re truly doing that year after year? Most of them will say they tweaked it, there’s no.. So that’s my response to it. Patterns, principals based approaches and what S3 stands for, is I think future of where we’ve going into and dealing with complexity and I think probably S3 is going to evolve but it’s those type of approaches or pattern based approaches that have much better chance against complexity, rather than what we’ve seen the last 10 20 years with framework, agile and lean frameworks.

Speaker: James Priest  33:29

Yeah, yeah, well, I would agree a lot with what you’re saying. To be fair and to pluck out that grain of gold or truth in some of these bigger systems for organizational transformation that we see. S3 is a menu of kind of micro methods if you like. You could break it down and say well, to be fair, you know, there’s just several micro frameworks and several micro methods. So one way to look at this situation is around scope and scale, right? It’s like, how many of these micro methods and frameworks are there under the hood of this meta framework? And what’s the need that pulling in any of these things helps to address? Because you know, I’ve spoken to people in organizations who opted for holacracy for example. And they went all in according to the recommendation of holacracy one and had a terrible time. I’ve spoken to people in organizations who went all in and now they’ve kept what works, changed things didn’t and thrown out a bunch of stuff and it’s even different throughout the organization. You know, different people emphasize different aspects of or use different aspects of holacracy more or less. But then you’ve got these other people in organizations who say, man, best thing we ever did. You know, we pulled in holacracy by the book, it was really difficult in many ways, but it really, really helped us and we like it and it helped us deal with the challenges that we were facing. So I think it’s rather than kind of falling into that binary conclusion that no, anything of this size framework is bad. One, we’ve got personal choice and of course in an organization of scale, it’s not just one person’s choice, it’s everybody’s of course. And then you’ve got need and context. And so I don’t want to throw large frameworks out as being antiquated, you know, and of yesteryear. I think in most cases, they’re going to be a stepping stone. Now we can look at Scrum as a stepping stone. It’s like, it’s gonna make you learn how to collaborate, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:50

Exactly. But like, for instance, this is where also you’re gonna trip. So in S3, a lot of it has to do with decentralizing and how authorities distribute it, right? So like, if you have Scrum, you can implement scrum but without changing the authority you know, and accountability. So who makes the decisions? Then that falls apart. So my part in all this, yes, context matters and there’s, you know, it is some of these frameworks are great stepping stone. I tell people safe is a great stepping stone. Like if your organization for government, specifically, it’s a great stepping stone. And you’ve been in public sector, you probably I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here in United States is a very messed up situation. So for them to do anything in that step is great. But like, if you don’t fully understand the reason why in complex environment, we want to decentralize, why we want to create guide reins for like, you know, in a sense for allow people to figure things out, then it’s almost like misunderstanding and not fully being able to depict these patterns. I think ultimately, what we need to do is be able to depict and take these even these patterns are part and say, how do we create new patterns for our context are based on this? What have we learned right?

Speaker: James Priest  37:15

Absolutely. Yeah. And this is maybe, you know, if we look at a holacracy implementation, I spoke with John Bunch recently. He was responsible for bringing holacracy into Zappos not responsible for arriving there but he was responsible for helping a lot of people learn how to how to use holacracy. And he was saying, and I spoke to many people at Zappos over the last couple of years, they were mostly happy with where that holacracy implementation took them. Even several of the people who left at that time came back later into Zappos again. But it was always intended as a stepping stone somehow. What it did is it kicked everybody in the ass. And of course, not everybody liked it and there’s a whole moral question and this is the conversation around imposition, you know, of transformation versus invitation based change as Daniel Messick calls it and so on. I think that’s an important conversation to have. But my point is that choosing something like that and running with it can be a great stepping stone. And one of the arguments you hear Brian Robertson give, one of the arguments you hear advocates for the sociopathic circle method is, if you don’t implement the whole thing, then you can’t know if the thing is mesocratical for that whole system to remain coherent and do what it says on the on the tin. And I think that’s, that’s a fair argument. And if we zoom in to the micro, if you look at particular patents from S3, some of the process patents, you can show them. But there’s a bloody good reason why those process patents include all of the steps that they do. And it’s not about a rule that says you can’t ever change them. But as you were saying, what’s important is do we understand the principles that are behind these patents, do we understand why these patterns were the particular patterns that emerged and prevailed over time? Why were they useful for our ancestors? Why didn’t they evolve in a different way and look at something different today? And I think that’s one of the challenges at the other end is a pattern based approach, people interpret these things through the lens of their current paradigm, misunderstand a ton of things, take a low resolution slice of these patterns, and implement them according to how they think they are and kind of missed the mark, you know, because they interpreted things in a way that wasn’t actually as they were intended to be and they haven’t got the experience yet. They know enough you know, to think they know but they don’t know enough to realize what they don’t know yet. So, yeah. So there’s an argument there for installing constraints of some kind, you know? Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:04

And I think it’s all good like you mentioned earlier, it’s about experiences, right? So I think frameworks and all of these approaches are more prescriptive. They’re fine as long as people come with that mindset of, we’re going to evolve and change these and contextualize, and we’re going to learn from these, rather than just, hey, this is a recipe, this is what we’re doing. And I think one of the challenges is that we’re been so conditioned, right, over the years to think certain ways, to assume that you know, this is… and it’s really hard to get out of that paradigm that we’re currently in and consider another paradigm. I was talking, I don’t know how familiar you’re with Kuhn cycle, the guy to actually come up with it. So the guy that came up with the term paradigm, if you want, look it up but in a sense, I feel like you know, we’re entering or a maturity of a current paradigm and entering a new paradigm, which I think, again, is where we’re going to look at complexity differently and embrace complexity and look at it from a patterns and practices and leverage everything that we’ve learned, like you said, from maybe came across them bashing agile and Scrum but there’s a lot of good stuff. It’s just that most people don’t have any clue what are the things… why Scrum, like if you read the scrum guide or if you look at Scrum, let alone any of… they have no fricking idea what it is. It’s just like, oh, it says on page 10, it says this, so therefore, I shall follow it. Like, that’s just blindly following things without fully understanding why they are there so.

Speaker: James Priest  41:52

Yeah, and context is king, right? And one of the dangers is, the process becomes the purpose. Instead of asking, why do we need to change anything at all? And where are we challenged? What are our priorities, where our current approach is inadequate to bring about the results we expect to wish to see. Because, you know, one, if there’s a clear why then people can kind of contextualize why they’re doing what they’re doing. It also gives you something against which to measure outcomes and establish whether your attempts at improving things achieve anything useful at all, as well as monitoring the myriad of unintended consequences that are going to come as well, as you mess around under the hood of complexity and forget you’re part of it too. You know, so its keeping a focus on the need on like, what’s the situation that you’re trying to interact with, what’s needed there, taking an iterative and incremental approach to those interventions and monitoring closely outcomes so that you can learn, it’s bringing that agile mindset that people are so familiar with in terms of product and service development to the management of the organization as a whole as well. So that for me is fundamental in my message around S3. When someone contacts me and says, we’re interested in S3, my first question is, why the hell would you ever want to do that? You know, let’s talk about it. But it’s a serious question. It’s like, let’s look at where the issue is. Sometimes I say, I can have an hour’s conversation with a senior manager in an organization who’s just curious about S3, and all we do in the conversation is make sense of what’s happening right now that they can’t deal with well enough and lay them out in a coherent way and they go off happy as you like, because now they’ve got a clear why and I said, well get back to me, if you think S3 might help, you know?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:47

But just know you’re doing that instance to help them understand their context, and then they can decide what they want to do. You’ve said in one of the things that I’ve read or listened to that, you know, one single pattern, you know, S3 has a lot of collection of patterns is the principles; why is the principles one pattern that you highlight or is it still something that why are S3 principles so important? 

Speaker: James Priest  44:17

Yeah well, we think of principles as guidelines for behavior. They’re like actionable guidelines we can consider. If people value principles, then they become values, right? And so another way of looking at values is principles that people value. The reason we talk about them as principles rather than values is who the hell am I to tell you what you should value right? However, I can say, hey, look, these guidelines for behavior seem pretty useful actually on their own and together, maybe you want to check them out or something. So the principles are principles, they’re not patterns in themselves, although you could argue that each principle is a pattern because it’s an actionable guideline. But the pattern is adopt the seven principles. And that is when a group of people in an organization see value in those principles and decide to put them in place as kind of general constraints to delineate some sort of parameters within which action and decision making can take place. So they kind of guide and inform behavior. And why that’s important is, if you take a pattern based approach to organizational change, sooner or later, probably sooner than later, you’re going to bump into situations where the pattern isn’t good enough. And so when you start messing around with those patterns, especially if you don’t have a deep understanding of the ancestral lineage of those patterns, and why they evolved the way they did, you need some higher order of reference to fall back on, right. And so the seven principles provide some kind of guidelines, parameters so when you start changing things, having those in mind is going to help you to refine those in a more sophisticated way than you might do otherwise. And at the end of the day, Miljan, it’s not about using S3 patents for the sake of using the patents. Ultimately, it’s about becoming more sophisticated, informed, more conscious, and just being able to make smarter choices individually and together, to be able to navigate the myriad of challenges and opportunities that we face. And all of that comes down ultimately to the consciousness of human beings involved and their ability to make an evolve smart enough choices to be able to generate kind of outcomes that life giving rather than life denying and take the organization in the direction that it that it needs to go. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:47

Yeah, like this is just something that you mentioned that kind of resonated with me, like, you know, one of the principles is consent. And then if we look at the issue of like, how do we govern ourselves, right, in a complex environment. So and that concern, you mentioned Daniel Meswick, and you know, the whole idea of inviting. But in a context, if I’m a leader and I know I have a highly complex organization that I’m leading, that for me just to tell people what to do and coerce people into doing things is not a good pattern in the current environment, right? What are some of the things that I can do to design a system or influence a system that it’s maybe more decentralized because as a leader in that instance, I would know that, you know, decentralizing things, inviting people, creating good governance structure that is more fluid, right, is going to help me and everybody else solve our problems. If I don’t know that, if I go to, you know, Miljan as an agile coach and Miljan is saying, hey, you know, here’s safe or here’s this framework, and I’m blindly listening to what Miljan is saying, and I have no idea how the stuff that he’s selling me is gonna impact it, you know, I’m blind this situation. So my question is then, how many people in organization, how much work do we need to do as change agents to help leaders and people in organization understand how much of their business is actually understanding the patterns and the picking these patterns and breaking them down to understand how they can do their job better rather than listen to experts on what to do? Because I use the analogy you may have, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, like chefs and cooks; we need both chefs and cooks. But if we have too many cooks, and nobody that understand how to put recipes together, and our ingredients keeps changing, then we don’t have enough people to come up with something delicious with what we have. And a lot of times in organizations, our ingredients are all the things, all the practices, patterns that keep changing. So I’m coming back to my question is like; is there a hope organizations that are not investing in people to better understand, you know, what we’re discussing here, the patterns, the principles behind complexity management, I guess, or whatever you want to call them

Speaker: James Priest  49:39

So you’re asking is there any hope for organizations…?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:43

Is there any hope because nothing is working yet. Is there is there anything going back to your question? Like it is working; maybe I’m being a little bit more sarcastic than that. But there’s a lot of failure when it comes to if you look at you know, transformations and all of these there’s a lot of waste. So there is lot more of what’s not what working and what’s blindly being applied than what’s working. And I’m generalizing, and maybe, you know, going to extremes. But is there a hope for organizations if they’re not focusing on, on investing in their people and people understanding?

Speaker: James Priest  50:18

Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe I could break that down into two questions. Is there hope? And if whomever has the authority to make the decision is failing to invest in people as a whole within that system, what is the future look like for those organizations? And I would say that, especially in complexity, right, if we’re in a clear or complicated environment, then maybe you can just have ultimatums who just get on and do stuff and if they don’t, then you fire them and find someone else instead. You know, I mean, that was kind of the rhetoric of the old worlds. But these days, mostly speaking, that’s not going to be good enough because as you say, we’re facing the complexities of the world, and you just, you need to be able to harvest collective intelligence throughout the system, you need people to be able to move fast for themselves, you need people free to create value as much as possible for themselves, every unnecessary dependency eliminated, and any unavoidable dependencies clearly marked with clarity around who’s going to take responsibility for those and people who are highly skilled in being able to make and evolve agreements that are good enough and safe enough to be able to proceed in an iterative and incremental way, and who appreciate complexity, who are able to embrace failure, you know, unexpected outcomes as all of them as kind of stepping stones towards learning and developing and being able to apply that hopefully to improve over time. So you know, and I could probably go on for another five minutes, just laying out these different aspects that are so vital today. And I agree with you, because that’s really bloody hard and you know, we are not good at doing that generally, you know, on a even a moderate scale. We can struggle just in our marriage or something, you know, with just one other person. So dealing with this at that scale is not easy. So why would investing in people be important? Well, one because there’s a whole bunch of skills around organizational management, that most people in organizations need to learn. If you decentralize organizational management, then when people take responsibility for that, they need to know enough about how to deal with the challenges and opportunities they face to do that in a coherent way within the system. But secondly, who wants to break their back facing all of those challenges if they’re in an environment that’s not nourishing and fulfilling and meaningful for them. And also, engagement is way down in the world. And we’ve disengagement comes, people just kind of, you know, talking the talk and doing whatever they need to but organizations need people who are in there with their heart and soul, right. And for that, that needs to be an environment where I’m nourished, where I’m energized and motivated to be. So the whole whether, if let’s say, I’m an owner of a company, and all I’m interested in is maximal profit, and I speak the rhetoric of caring about people but don’t really give a damn about them but I just want profit, and I’m dealing with a complex context; it’s irrelevant, I still need to think about the people. Whether I want to or not, I have to because if I don’t, they’re just gonna leave, they’re gonna start up my ultimate competitor and eat my ankles out, you know. And on the other end of the scale, you know, we’ve got people who are deeply inspired around creating human organizations. But that can go too far as well, right on the other end. So it’s all about the people but what about the organization and the reason it exists to start with? So on that side as well, there’s this need for deep investment into learning how to manage organizations effectively; not just centralized but that distributing the wisdom of organizational management to everyone throughout the system. And as you said, having a dynamic system where we can continuously move, shift around and redistribute power to influence in ways that help everybody ultimately to create the value for themselves.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:40

Exactly. It’s not just about like, you know, I think it’s that balance and like, you know, one indicator that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing is like if this pendulum is swinging too much, one way or the other, so like, a lot of times people say, oh, you know, like hierarchy or command and control is bad; you know, this is good, like, I think it’s just our ignorance and not fully understanding the full spectrum and then being able to say like, okay given the context, what could we experiment with? What type of things could we try out and see if it’s truly working? And, you know, embracing that principle empiricism and saying, can we at least what we can see and know and experience, figure out if this is actually working or not? And that’s at least been my experience. What do you see as a future for S3? Like, what do you you envision? I’m assuming there is going to be if I had to guess, there’s going to be a similar pattern based approaches in the next 5 10 years. I’m curious if you think that that’s going to emerge or if you’ve seen it already emerge? And what is your vision for S3 in the next maybe 5 to 10 years?

Speaker: James Priest  56:01

Yeah, well, you know, we’ve been continuously on the backfoot in a way. The last years, Lily and I especially we’re really busy traveling around the world, helping people learn about S3 and in a way, we were a bit of a bottleneck to helping people learn about S3 exactly because of that, because so much of you know, this yourself as a learning facilitator or trainer, there’s a lot that you can tell people face to face where you don’t really need to be there. What would be helpful is engaging media and learning resources that can help people access that for themselves. And then you’ve got those aspects of practice, you know, applying learning in practice, where it’s great to have people with more experience who can be there and kind of offer feedback and live as you apply these things on the go. So since COVID, we decided let’s double down on resource development. And that’s something that we’ve been doing a lot of. There’s a ton of things we want to do with S3 in terms of just like integrating and evolving things on the basis of objections that people have raised over the past years and insights that we’ve had. And also just to flesh out our articulation of many of these patterns, because it’s no small task. You know, there’s a 74 patents and some of them, you could write an entire book about just one in and of itself, you know so. So that’s something that we’re working on right now. And so part of what we’re aspiring toward is, we’re developing e-learning, we’ve got an e-learning program coming out in July; the foundations program and from there, we’re going to break that down into micro learning. We want to try and apply the spirit of S3 to itself in terms of how people learn. So what’s your entry point? What’s your specific need that you’re facing, either individually or as an organization as a whole? And what’s the minimum necessary aspects of S3 that will be valuable for you to explore so that you can learn about that for yourself, start experimenting, and then connect with others who have some experience around that, you know, so that you can keep your system open and learn as you go? So that for Lily and I especially, but Bernard Lily, and I, in terms of just developing the guide, is definitely going to keep us busy for the next years ahead. Yeah. And besides that, I think that for me is this, like you say, there’s so many pattern based approaches coming up out there in the world, we’re not interested generally in like reinventing the wheel or integrating those into S3. We’ve got the kind of niche in terms of areas that we’re interested in focusing on. And then we’d recommend people elsewhere to look at other pattern based approaches for different aspects of organization or complimentary approaches, you know, that compliment S3. Yeah, so for now, I think that’s where we want to go to

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  59:02

Do you think it’s gonna be more collaboration between pattern based approaches and people that stand behind those and communities that support them versus right now, you know, if you look at the scaling agile, like everybody’s at each other’s throats, or at least talking crap about the other, you know, this framework sucks, our framework is better. Do you see I mean, maybe that’s a human nature. But if I had to guess there might be more opportunity for co-creation and collaboration across these different patterns based communities.

Speaker: James Priest  59:40

Yeah, well recently, I’ve been trying to have more conversations with people who are more familiar or favoring holacracy for example. There was a conversation with John, you know, because I was really curious. I wanted to help share his story with the world around what happened at Zappos because I just find him such a fascinating and wise guy to speak with. But I’ve had conversations as well with holacracy practitioners and with Emmanuelle, with Rendanhay recently and we said let’s try and get together and look at the kind of common roots of which all of these different approaches are emerging. And instead of getting into arguments about what’s better or worse, just looking at each of them in their own merit and seeing, you know, some people like them for different reasons. So let’s look at why and what the common needs are that they solve and what are the unique value propositions of each of those two. So I think that that’s possible. Certainly, I’m very much heading in that direction, and see the merit in those conversations. I don’t think at the end of the day, it’s about any of these frameworks, actually. It’s not about holacracy, it’s not about safe, it’s not about Scrum; it’s about stepping stones that help people to develop more conscious and intelligent ways of interacting with the world you know, and that’s…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:01:10

Well ultimately you know, making our lives better right. It comes down really to making the lives of everybody better and not just, you know, and going beyond that constant is also human ego, maybe, you know, making better place for the entire planet rather than just and which goes back to the, we talked about principle, not principles, but you know, principles around like satisfying the customer and just, not customer, the stakeholders, and that whole ego-profit driven kind of environment we currently live in. Maybe to conclude here, what is something that I didn’t know to ask or what is one message that you would leave us with as we conclude here?

Speaker: James Priest  1:02:10

What comes to me, I don’t know if I can say it in an eloquent way, but clumsily is, you know we’re maybe as a species, we’ve always been a kind of important moment in our development. But I think in recent times, we’ve never been so able, as we are now to make or break the world. And we’re so interconnected and interdependent on one another, I don’t see how that can really go back the other way. So we stand in this moment with such enormous potential to achieve things beyond anything we can even imagine and we also stand here together with the potential to destroy, I wouldn’t say destroy this world, because the world is gonna be just fine without us over time. Right? But you know, for us personally, there’s certainly the potential that we could mess things up.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:03:13

It’s getting easier and easier to fuck it up. Right? 

Speaker: James Priest  1:03:16

Yeah, exactly and with bigger and bigger consequences and harder and harder to undo some of those consequences over time as well, right? So this whole question of how do we cooperate and collaborate together in more effective ways, I don’t think it’s just a nice idea, I think is absolutely fundamental to the well-being of those who will follow us that we right now invest our energy diligently and with some priority into figuring out more sophisticated ways to organize together, to communicate together and to interact with this world. And I don’t think we should underestimate the potential for negative consequences that flow out of that and I also don’t think we should underestimate the absolutely extraordinariness of what we’ve achieved as a species to this point. Just look around you what we’ve managed to manifest and the potential and I would argue that that is well worth preserving and that this experiment is one that’s worth running into the future and to explore those vistas of possibility around what it would look like for us to realize our fuller potential during the time that this world will support life like us, you know, and to make the most of this opportunity and finally, to be able to look our children in the eye at the end of our lives and feel proud about what we’ve left them and to be able to say listen, you know, there’s a lot of mess and there’s a lot of things we didn’t do so well but I really did my best here you know, and we’re doing our best here and to feel proud and at peace with that. I think that’s an important reflection worth having for all of us.