Previously: Leadership as structuring

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

You don’t have to be in management for long to learn that half the job involves representing the scope for which you are responsible to those to whom you are accountable, and vice versa. Those who are successful at it are those who can speak the language of both. If you work in IT, for example, it can be good for your career to be seen as “the acceptable face of technology”, as I was once described.

It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. The boardroom and the frontline team each discuss progress, issues, and performance very differently, but somehow they are related, and thus they need to be translated through the organisation’s different levels of scale, and in both directions.

Despite the allure of the hierarchical work breakdown structure (WBS) and the all-knowing management information system (MIS), it would be a serious mistake to think that translation is equivalent to aggregation. For one thing, there is such a thing as overcommunication! The team may care little that a team member discovered and dealt with a minor issue in the course of their work. Likewise, a team-of-teams need not be informed of issues its member teams should reasonably be expected to contain, so long as its wider goals are not impacted. Does the board need visibility of every small increment of progress, every minor issue? Quite the opposite: the organisation’s capacities for communication and decision making are finite. We organise to contain what can be contained, in a sense to manage complexity so that we are not overwhelmed by it.

There is therefore a relationship between this “leadership as translating” and the topic of my previous post, Leadership as structuring. (See also [1] to explain my fondness for those ‘-ing’ words.) Structures of various kinds need to be optimised to contain that complexity – neither so flat that the centre cannot hold, nor so deep that too much gets lost in translation. At the same time, every organisational scope must learn to share appropriately. That’s another optimisation problem, and one that requires those who do the sharing to empathise with their audiences, to speak their language, even to share their goals. You leave that to your reporting system at your peril, so work on those skills!

This post was inspired by my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

While we’re here, some upcoming events:

27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric’s BA Community Webinar Series:
Webinar: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 05 June, Nottingham, England:
Mike Burrows: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

[1] Verbing the nouns of business agility (January 2025)

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]