This post is the third in a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). 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.

In this series:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling (this post)

And to come:

Leadership as connectingLeadership and participationLeadership and identityLeadership as reconciling

How do teams respond to surprises – to new information, to novelty? To the members of the best teams, it seems to come so naturally:

Filter (or Ignore) – decide whether this information demands any kind of consideration or responseAdjust – make any immediate changes to plans or designs that may be warrantedShare – share with other team members as appropriateStrategise – develop options for a more considered response, if one is neededReconcile – compare notes with the team as a whole so that effort won’t be duplicated and any overall response will be coherentStructure – clarify expectations at some appropriate level of detailOrganise – the team organises around its modified commitments

There are a couple of interesting things about this process. The first is that each step represents an opportunity to contain or expand the response, each decision an exercise of discretion. Share freely, add to the noise, and risk overwhelm, or withhold what may turn out to be something vital? Given that we’re dealing with novelty, that question won’t always be easy to answer, and given the possible consequences, it seems fair to recognise that in even the most self-organising of teams, it may represent a leadership challenge.

The second is that if you start this process with step 4 (Strategise), and squint a bit, it kinda describes the team’s delivery process! Small wonder then that the self-organising team handles surprises so naturally. There are limits to that of course, but larger surprises need not break the model. Rather, it needs to work at different levels of scale. From the perspective of (for example) a team of teams, each team encounters novelty every day, some of which will be relevant to others, and so on up the organisation.

That’s easy to say of course, but the higher the level of organisation things get escalated to, the harder it gets, particularly that final step, organising around its modified commitments. To change commitments is hard enough; to reorganise is more difficult still, to put it mildly. Or do we have that the wrong way round? What if leaders could relax or unmake commitments sufficiently for responses to be self-organised? Whether the response is organised or self-organised may seem only a matter of perspective, but if organisations are going to respond well to change, it’s an important shift to make.

And don’t underestimate the importance of that reconciliation step. There are many ways to achieve it, ranging from lots of one-to-one conversations that iterate until a suitable level of coherence is achieved, to getting everyone together in one room and hashing it out. Different mechanisms will suit different situations, different corporate cultures, and perhaps even different national cultures (I have heard it said that the one-to-ones of hoshin kanri work rather better in Japan than they do elsewhere), but to focus solely on practice would be to miss the point. Organisations can live with incoherence for only so long.

Postscript

In the original draft of this article, I was reluctant to suggest that one can rely on established processes of reflection and inquiry to deal with the issues raised. This is not to say that they aren’t important (they really are), but because it’s too easy to make unsafe assumptions about their effectiveness. To recognise that they aren’t effective enough, deep enough, or frequent enough is the beginning of leadership! More shockingly perhaps, no formal process can ever suffice. We’ll explore that issue next.

Posts in this series appear first as LinkedIn articles. You can read and comment there:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling (this post)

To come:

Leadership as connectingLeadership and participationLeadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

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