This post is the fourth 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 Leadership as connecting (this post)

And to come:

Leadership and participationLeadership and identityLeadership as connecting

Few issues are as fundamental to organisations as this one; it’s right up there with the need for sufficient reserves of decision-making and communication capacity being available at every level of organisation for it to notice and respond to new challenges. And like that one, it goes under-recognised. It’s that bad decisions – both operational and strategic – will inevitably be made for lack of context. The left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Operational decisions lagging changes to policy or to its underlying strategic intent. Strategy decisions made in ignorance of current operational or customer realities.

Why is this inevitable? It’s because if organisations can be said to be optimised, it’s for what they know, not what they don’t. Not that I am complaining: as per the first article in this series, Leadership as structuring, structure does matter. Actually it’s structures plural, but you get the point: there’s no organisation structure in the world that guarantees that information always and without fail gets to where it’s needed quickly enough.

Those bad decisions can be very costly. So what does a leader do to preempt them? Broadly under the heading of “make the organisation both more trusting and more trustworthy”, there’s a clue in the opening paragraph. Use your limited personal reserves – i.e. what’s left when all the routine things have taken their share – in the following three ways:

Develop the knack of being available and present at the right times and in the right places. Follow your intuitions about what you should be curious about, whether that’s a potential source of risk, a more positive kind of possibility, or simply something that you’ve neglected for too long. For each of these, remember that they bring opportunities for a trust-building kind of transparency also; the need for context works in both directions.Not to supplant the first but to help it, develop the mechanisms by which exceptional conditions bring the right people together quickly. “Routines for the non-routine”, you might say, of which Lean’s andon cord, aka stop the line [1] is a great example.Develop these behaviours in others.

A more trusting and trustworthy organisation wastes less of its precious reserves. It increases its capacity to have the right people coming together at the right time, with all the potential for adaptation, innovation, and resilience that may follow. On its own, it causes people to connect, but that process could often use a little help. It’s a beautiful thing to connect people that would otherwise not be connected, and leaders are uniquely well placed to do it, regardless of whether they see themselves as connectors. Do it once, and your future self may come to thank you. Keep doing it, and you’re changing the organisation. Have others do it, and you take it to a whole new level, developing a new kind of organisation.

It begs a question though: individually and collectively, how do you develop the necessary intuition, the knack of being in the right place at the right time? No magic involved, it’s a learning process like any other. Every time you retrospect and reflect, who struggled for lack of what context? What conversations should we have had? Who had the context we needed? Inside or outside the organisation, what relationships need developing? Action at least one of those insights, rinse, and repeat.

It’s possible to take that idea to another level too. What if you could do that not only retrospectively, but proactively? Rather than expand on that thought here, let me finish by sharing a post I had the opportunity to share recently on the Kanban Zone blog:

Thinking More Organisationally About Process (kanbanzone.com)

[1] Andon (manufacturing) (en.wikipedia.org)

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

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

To come:

Leadership and participationLeadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

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