Category: Governance Structures

  • At the Intersection of Systems of Governance and Levels of Development

    At the Intersection of Systems of Governance and Levels of Development

    Written at least partially in response to a question I was asked on LinkedIn An application of Conway’s law at the societal level. The original post is here and a discussion on Conway’s law can be found here.

    I recently posted on LinkedIn a list of questions I have been musing about regarding whether, as a society, we have allocated the right responsibilities to the right “teams”.

    In response, Jen Rice asked

    “How do we know what is right” indeed. And how can we recognize that what is right for me is not necessarily right for someone else, and come to a mutual understanding and find common ground? I appreciate Spiral Dynamics to help explain a lot of what we’re seeing: when different levels — say green vs. Orange, this particular conflict is everywhere — are unable to see from the other’s point of view. We’ll need to get a certain percent of the population and leadership at Yellow — integral — before we can achieve anything remotely resembling a healthy democracy. What do you think, Kate?

    I believe that “right for us” requires processes that embrace suffering and conflict as an inevitable part of the whole and that turn to relationship and restoration over retribution. 

    I believe that “right for us” processes include the more-than-human world and happen in the context of every relationship between beings.

    I believe that a critical mass of good-enough, interlocking processes will be more viable and workable than any attempt at unification.  I’m not convinced that the word “democracy” can be liberated from it’s cultural baggage.

    I have observed that one of the biggest developmental challenges my clients and colleagues who think of themselves as trying to move from orange to green have struggled with is the need to integrate the gifts of the lower levels that have been pushed into their shadows.

    I believe that processes for helping children maintain the felt-sense of belonging to the whole cosmos is a crucial element of any project to reintegrate humans into their habitat in a life-sustaining way.

    And, I believe that since we are in the larger system, we can’t see it, and therefore can’t direct it, predict it, or control it. I suspect that many of the visions people hold of what Yellow (Teal in Laloux’s levels) might look like are radically wrong and that view from Integral sees gifts in the struggles between the lower levels that those of us in the processes of development can’t see.

    I am not willing to guess at a relationship between Yellow and democracy, but I sense that Yellow systems must be hyper-locally customized and participatory with deep ecological awareness.

    For me, the questioning is what the present moment calls for. The system many have taken for granted is being broken. What is the opportunity here?

  • Function Follows Forming: A Short Introduction to Conway’s Law

    Function Follows Forming: A Short Introduction to Conway’s Law

    Conway’s Law is shorthand for the insight that there is a corellation between a company’s internal structure and the results it delivers to end users. It is named after the computer scientist Melvin Conway who described the principle in 1967z

    [O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

    — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

    The core insight is that the structure of a system mirrors in important ways the structure of the processes used to build the system. The question of causality is separate from the question of existence.

    Studies have been published that confirm the correlation between communication systems in software development processes and communication systems in the software.

    Companies frequently use Conway’s Law to help them organize development teams by designing the software architecture and changing the structure of the organization tasked with building the software to match the design.

    The correlation appears to be manipulable from both directions. Change the software design and the design processes will adapt. Change the design processes and the software processes will be adapted.

  • How Should Modern Society Self-Organize?

    How Should Modern Society Self-Organize?

    Originally posted on my LinkedIn profile.

    The radical restructuring of the US government that we are witnessing has me contemplating.

    • What have we been delegating to national governments that we should be doing in our neighbourhoods?
    • What have we been delegating to corporations that we should be doing through government?
    • What have we been delegating to corporations that we should be doing through charitable organizations?

    And other similar questions.

    • What legislation and regulation do we need to support proper delegation of the right tasks to the right places?
    • What funding money will put enough money where it is needed?
    • What regulation and legislation do we need to support such structures?

    And those questions beg the question: How do we know what is right?

    Ken Wilber, in his best work, describes a universal moral compass as the maximum amount of the pie distributed to the maximum number of people.

    From a developmental lens, the human being matures from caring only for oneself to caring for the space-time context one lives in and for all beings.

    What governance structures should be in place in households, schools, childcare, civic society, and workplaces to maximize the likelihood that children (who take care of themselves by making grown-ups like them enough to take care of them) develop the habits of caring for the greater good and then are enabled to use them to become successful in adulthood?

    What governance would be needed to prevent so many children becoming adults who need therapy?

    What corporate governance would support the greater whole?

    To be fair, I have been asking these questions in some form off and on since I was taught to debate at the age of 10, and went to law school where I did a deep dive, but I have been somewhat distracted over the past 22 years raising 4 complex, quirky, brilliant kids mostly in an adopted country, so it’s the vigour with which these questions are presenting themselves that have changed.