The Service Excellence Network
Understanding Complexity
Dave Snowden is one of the world's leading experts on complexity and this short introduction to his Cynefin framework is well worth watching.
The Flow System Guide
The 3 authors introduce the Flow System guide, an extension of Lean to cope with complexity. Nigel Thurlow established the Toyota Agile Academy, and created Scrum The Toyota Way.
Building New Habits
BJ Fogg is the founder and director of Stanford University's Behaviour & Design Lab and introduces his system for changing behaviours using tiny habits.
Modern Service and Knowledge-Work organisations differ from traditional bureaucratic and industrial organisations in a variety of aspects, some of which are:
1) They are predominantly social organisations and rely on the organisation's ability to cohere a 21st century, well educated, independent minded workforce, to align and apply their skills and expertise to help achieve the goals and objectives of the organisation, while also meeting their own personal goals and objectives.
2) They are inherently complex organisations as distinct from simple or complicated organisations. Simple and complicated organisations have processes , behaviours and technologies that broadly obey the laws of cause and effect and as such, can be engineered and reengineered. Complex organisations are networks of people and other organisations that are constantly adapting to the multiple complex ecosystems that they inhabit. As complex systems, at best they can constantly be nudged in the direction aspired to and require scaffolding that constantly encourage more of what's deemed to be "good" and less of what's deemed to be "bad".
3) Industrial organisations have solid, tangible "scaffolding" in the from of production processes that remain behind, intact when people leave the building at the end of the day. When people then return, they can pick up from where they left off with the high degree of coherence that "hard" production processes provide. Service and Knowledge-Work organisations have few and/or weak "scaffolding" and when people leave the building, the production processes leave the building with them. While most of the people do reassemble the following day, they form a very different ecosystem and network of interactions than those that they left behind the previous day. This weakness of "coherence scaffolding" is one of the biggests challenges facing service and knowledge work organisations who aspire to have an achievable mission, vision, strategy and goals.
Bureaucracies have traditionally relied on command and control, hierarchical structures that simplify and standardise work tasks to provide the necessary "coherence scaffolding". This no longer works for modern economies where workforces are serving modern consumers and citizens whose expectations are increasingly becoming more challenging. .