This is a transcript of my short talk at the School of System Change’s Constellating Change series, Session 2: Structures and Rhythms, on 15th November 2023. Nati Lombardo of The Hum also did a brilliant talk around team rhythms. There are four more Sessions to come with some fabulous speakers, sign up here.

Big thanks to caitlinconnors, Laura Malan, Fran Cook, Sophie Walker, Gemma Drake and Laura Melissa Williams for being inspiring holiday pals. Thanks also to:

• caitlinconnors for talking me through how Bright Harbour approaches CripWork
• Geeks for Social Change for their blog post about working as a disabled-led company
• Chayn for the brilliantly transparent way they work.

You can read more about regenerative organisational design here, and more about my work with chronic illness and grief through my newsletter GriefSick.

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I’m going to be talking today about what we might be able to learn from how chronically ill people organise in terms of structures and processes. So firstly, a definition to help. “Chronic illness” means a health condition that is long-lasting or permanent. I’ve got ME/CFS which really affects my energy. I work part-time and need to be really careful of my hours and how I’m showing up at work.

I’m not alone. 40% of the UK population has a chronic illness (26 million people) and I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about the way that chronically ill people live their lives, and how that could be seen as regenerative, or healing, for themselves, for society, possibly even for the planet. And I’m wondering what that looks like in the world of work. I’m going to share three principles and a couple of examples, but I’m going to start with a story from outside of work.

So, I have a group of friends and we’re all sick and disabled. Most of us have fatigue or are neurodivergent. And when we go on holiday, we need to make that holiday work. Things need to be produced to make that holiday function, like a meal that we all need to eat. And there’s just something really beautiful in a group of sick and disabled people, a real easeful emergent way in which tasks get allocated. Somebody else might pick something up because I need to go to bed for two hours. And the way that it’s all produced is really generous and distributed and seamless in a way that honestly I’ve never really seen in work, but I’m fascinated by how it might be recreated.

So I’m going to share a couple of speculative principles and examples now.

Principle 1: Take inspiration from seasons and cycles

We are not the same every day. We are not meant to be. For example, half the population has a menstrual cycle that affects energy levels and mood in four distinct phases across a roughly 28 day cycle. In Northern Europe, where I live, our low-light winters affect energy and mood. Many of us are less “productive” during this time, and that’s a natural phenomenon.

And actually, hardly anything in the more-than-human world stays the same forever. There’s always expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction, growth and death. I see this as being related to the root cause of the burnout and overwhelm culture we have in a lot of the organisations in the West. I see that overwhelm culture having its roots in this need to be the same every time. This addiction, almost, to initiation and starting energy, which assumes that we have infinite capacity and resource and we can continue to grow and grow and grow. And a real fear of the energy of endings. Often, when I work with teams, and they want to start something, I say: “Great, and what are you going to stop? What are you going to kill? What are you going to end to make space for this new thing?” Because we don’t have limitless resource. We can’t keep growing; the planet can’t, and our organisations can’t either.

There’s a really interesting example from Chayn, which is a charity that supports survivors of gender-based violence. They have a Spring Wind Down and a Winter Wind Down every year. They’re based in the Global North, and around the Spring Equinox, which is about March 21st, they have a week of reducing their work and their capacity. They have two weeks in December and a week in January doing the same thing [read more here]. I think that’s a really beautiful example of working with the energy, cycles and seasons of the place that you’re based in.

Principle 2: Adopt “continuous handover” communication

You know how, when you leave a job and you need to do a handover, and you might need to have 10 meetings or write a really long document with: “Here’s a link to this, and don’t forget about this, and here’s what I was thinking about this”?

For me, because of my illness, I might need to not show up to work, sometimes at quite short notice. So I approach every day as a handover day. At the end of every day I am thinking, have I left enough for my teammates if I can’t show up tomorrow? And what this looks like at a team or an organisational level is moving from an oral to a written culture. That doesn’t mean worshiping the written word and having really long documents. It just means leaving enough documented for your teammates to be able to pick up your stuff. That could look like doodles in Miro, voicenotes on WhatsApp, or notes in Trello or Teams. It just means that people can pick up your stuff really easily. And what this tends to do is improve communication across the board. You get fewer meetings and fewer emails.

[Additional principle I didn’t have time to include in the talk: From jobs to roles and tasks]

Another helpful way that chronically ill people organise is to move away from jobs and towards roles and tasks. This means that I don’t have a strict job title, I have a role that might change quite fluidly, and broadly a set of tasks that I’m accountable for. But, as for who delivers those tasks, that might change based on who has capacity and energy that week.

This requires a team structure of flexible generalists who have some specialist skills. Everyone can do roughly 70% of everyone else’s job. If someone is off sick, there are plenty of people who can pick things up. This builds resilience into the team structure. It may not work for every instance, and is certainly a challenge to the specialism-first way of viewing capability and capacity that we’ve seen develop in in the past decade or so. It also may not work so well for teams that are actively developing juniors, who need time and space to practice the deep craft skills that will allow them to become more generalist again as they progress.

This way of working also requires everyone to have an adult-adult relational style, a good sense of their own capacity at any given time. It also requires adopting the stance of “equity not equality”. We’re not keeping track or score of who is doing more or less than their “fair share”. We trust that we’re all in service of the system and that resource (energy) flows where it needs to flow.

Principle 3: Underpinned by trust and radical acceptance

I know we’re talking about structures and processes here today, but I wanted to say upfront that all of this is underpinned by trust and acceptance and care, and that if you don’t have that, then trying to adopt new structures and processes is never really going to work.

This chronically ill way of organizing, with trust and acceptance, shows up in asking, always: “How can we accept each other, radically, as we are today?”

So maybe you’ve come to the meeting with your video off and you’re only writing in the chat, that’s great. Maybe you’re joining the meeting from your yoga mat. Brilliant. Look after yourself. Maybe you’re joining from the bath, with your video off, I hasten to add! That’s welcome too. How can we be more caring of each other? How can we slow down? Is the deadline really the deadline? Can it be moved? What is the urgency here? If I can’t finish something, it’s not seen as dropping the ball, it’s just how we are. And someone else is going to pick that up and it will come back around anyway. I see it as rejecting “all or nothing” or “perfectionist” culture.

Finally, I think chronic illness-informed organizing could potentially be better for everybody because none of us are machines and we are all in body/minds that fluctuate and change. A lot of us have caring responsibilities. We can’t all show up the same every single day in a rigid structure. The same process without fluidity is not going to work for everybody.

I think that chronic illness informed organizing could be regenerative organising, and I believe it could be the kind of organising that we need for a life sustaining society and a life sustaining planet. Thank you.

Interesting bits from the Q&A

Internal permission

Question: If a new person shows up in a team with health needs, how do you support them and that team?

It starts with, can you as an individual give yourself the permission to ask initially for something small? Maybe, can I change my working hours a little bit? Can I do more on these days and less on these days, for example, is it okay if every Tuesday I need to go to an appointment? What are the small ways that you can start to introduce this? That really starts with an internal permission. And I actually think, whether you are chronically ill or not, what if we could all give ourselves permission to make changes, to ask for what we need, to make tweaks in the workplace?

The way that we work now, it’s a default, but it was actually designed a hundred plus years ago. It comes from the way factories were originally designed, which are to reproduce the same thing again and again, eternally. It’s doesn’t really serve modern knowledge work, and lots of the work we do now. So, it was designed once, and we can design it again, which is not to say that there aren’t broader systems, societal systems and structures that make that hard. I’m not denying that. But what if there could be an internal permission, if we can start with ourselves, we can start by asking for what we need even in small ways.

Radical capacity-mapping

Question: if we’re accommodating chronically ill team members, how do we not make other healthy team members sick from picking up the extra work?

For me, working in a chronic illness or a disability-informed way means taking a much more radical stance on team capacity. If one of your team members has less capacity, for whatever reason, it, it could be illness related, it could not, then the capacity of your team has gone down. It doesn’t mean that all of that person’s work goes onto another team member. The capacity of your team is decreased and the workload needs to be decreased accordingly.

I’m quite firm about that and this is part of having a really good planning process. What’s going on this week? Where’s everyone’s capacity at? Do we need to push that deadline and give that client or funder good notice that that’s going to happen rather than telling them the day before? What needs to be adjusted for the real, actual capacity in the organisation and the team right now?

All change work is loss work

Question: what does “all change work is loss work” mean?”

I’m talking about everything here, but also in organisational work, I believe that all change work is loss work. I’ve been training in grief tending for the past couple of months (and hopefully the rest of my life), which is a method of holding space for grief collectively. I’ve been learning a lot about grief and loss through that. And actually, even before that, for the last couple of years, I’ve really noticed that in the change work that I do with organisations, that we don’t often name what we are losing through the change, even if the change is really positive; we’re still letting go of things.

Maybe “letting go” is a better word than “loss” in the organisational context. We’re stopping, or letting go, or letting some things compost, or letting some things die, in order to let new things emerge and grow. I have found that change work goes a lot better if we acknowledge that. So I might not use the really emotive language I’m using at the moment with teams around grief and loss and death, but I might say: “in the process that we’re doing at the moment, we’re adopting this new way of working, it means we’re letting go of this way of working. And actually, this way of working that we had before might have brought us a lot of helpful things or been really comforting or comfortable or known in some way. And maybe we want to make space to name what we are letting go of and how we feel about that”. I might do that in a retrospective, and bring some questions to that. In organisations that have a particular type of culture, it’s possible to create more of ritual space that’s a bit more explicit.

Writing is famously difficult. I have visions of a prolific publishing schedule, but a glance at my Medium or Substack shows a far more meagre output. It turns out that writing is much easier with body doubling (working on something individually alongside others, borrowed from the ADHD community), someone to facilitate (or host) you, and regular accountability. These are the three magic ingredients of Blog Club that make writing, if not joyful, then a little less painful.

Blog Club is a fortnightly writing group that I stewarded for the first two years (despite only rarely attending for health reasons). I have recently handed over Stewardship to Connie van Zanten. It’s a good time to reflect on small but powerful experiment in accountability and distributed delivery.

How it works

Format

• 1 hour, every other Friday morning at 10am GMT over video call
• The hour consists of: a 5 minute check-in, 50 minutes writing (screens on, sound muted), ending with a 5 minute check-out
• At the end of the check-out, someone volunteers to be the Host of the next session in two weeks time.

Roles

Steward: The one accountable person for Blog Club. They make all decisions about Blog Club (but can and should ask for advice from Writers where needed) and are responsible for making sure it happens every two weeks. This role involves 5–10 minutes of effort every fortnight to keep things ticking over.

Host: The facilitator of each Blog Club. This rotates every time. At the end of each session, the Host asks the Writers who will host next time. The new Host sends the calendar invite for the next session. Once you’ve attended one Blog Club to see how it works, you can Host, and newbies often Host immediately after their first session. We include clear Hosting instructions in every calendar invite (see below) to allow this role to be easily distributed. Charlotte Fountaine came up with the word “Host” for the session facilitator, which sets a really welcoming tone.

Writers: The participants of Blog Club. Their only job is to turn up and write. You really feel the generosity when you participate as a Writer, knowing that the Steward and Host for that week are holding all the administrative duties, leaving you to focus solely on your writing.

What interests me about Blog Club

The body doubling and accountability really works

The reason that Blog Club has lasted for two years, despite minimal steering and effort, is because it works. The accountability of body doubling while you’re writing feels both like you’re being gently “watched” and supported to write. When I was well enough to attend most sessions, I wrote and published consistently. The feedback from Writers is consistently that the format really works.

It combines governance by benign dictatorship and distributed delivery

As the first Steward of Blog Club, I had a strong vision for it from the start. I knew the day, time, format, roles, purpose and tone of voice needed to make it work (the “container”). None of this was co-created or up for discussion, I simply decided it, hopefully in a benign dictatorship sort-of-way, and then attracted people for whom this appealed.

Aside from the container set by the Steward, Blog Club has distributed roles and responsibilities (delivery), as Hosts elect themselves and run the sessions, rotating each time. The fact the container is set and held by the Steward allows the distribution of roles between Hosts and Writers to work efficiently and autonomously without input from the Steward, even within a group that has no interaction or social ties outside of Blog Club. If day, time, format and roles were constantly up for discussion, Blog Club would crumble under the weight of a weakly tied group attempting to make decisions by consensus, which I observe all the time in my work as an organisational designer.

It’s easy to transfer roles

As described above, Hosting is an easy role that anyone can perform after having attended one Blog Club session.

It was also surprisingly easy to transfer Stewardship from myself to Connie. I’ve never met Connie, but all it took was a short email exchange and she was all set up and ready to Steward. Connie now holds all decision-making rights about Blog Club.

It’s a writing club, not a social club

The social etiquette of the Club was also set by myself. One of our members once asked me to arrange a Blog Club meetup. I said no. This is a writing club, not a social club. This may sound harsh, but I am a fan of clearly demarcated, intentional spaces. Blog Club is for writing only, something that many of us struggle to accomplish, and we need a dedicated, supportive space for that. There are plenty of other spaces for socialising and building communities with deep social ties. Of course, there is nothing stopping people from picking up the connections they make in Blog Club and deepening those connections outside of Blog Club. If that has happened, that’s wonderful. But I love that this is a space with no obligations beyond turning up every two weeks, if you want, and writing for 50 minutes.

I initially toyed with setting up a Whatsapp group for the Club but I’m glad I didn’t. There’s something about the formality of it exisiting only over email and calendar invites that means that people don’t send superflous messages. No one wants to spam 50 people.

What works and doesn’t work

What works

• Having one accountable person who is the decision-maker, the Steward. There is zero effort required from Writers in co-creating the Club
• Extremely light duties for the Steward
• Separating the Steward and Host roles. Due to illness, I couldn’t attend Blog Club as a Writer for 12 months, let alone Host, but I continued to Steward during that time
• The simple format — 5 mins check-in, 50 mins writing, 5 mins check-out. This means that anyone can Host, as long as they’ve attended a minimum of one Blog Club session
• Having all the information in the calendar invite so the Host can pick it up easily
• Email and Calendar, no Whatsapp/ Slack/ Discord
• It’s every two weeks, not every week. Every week feels onerous, like an obligation. Every fortnight feels like an event, a treat. I run most of my life on a fortnightly rhythm — it’s the sweet spot between regularity and spaciousness
• The casual nature of it. We usually have about 4 people attend each fortnight, there are a few regulars but often it’s newcomers or people who haven’t been for months.

What doesn’t work

• Hosts are encouraged to send out email invites immediately so that the next Blog Club is in people’s diaries with two weeks notice, but this often falls by the wayside, with invites appearing late, which I think harms attendance. This is one of the trade-offs for the Host role being so autonomous, and the Steward role so hands-off
• The same people tend to volunteer to Host. I don’t know if this is a good thing (they are the only people that want to Host) or a bad thing (people don’t feel confident enough to Host, suggesting there’s an inclusion issue)
• It’s quite anonymous as no one person consistently attends every week. I have no sense of how diverse the membership of Writers is, for example
• Sharing our writing with each other. This happened at the beginning but stopped fairly quickly, as least as a whole group activity. It’s possible that people are sharing in pairs or smaller groups, in ways that the Steward doesn’t have sight of. I wonder if sharing as a whole group would create more demands (to read each other’s writing) than the group is set up to handle? We would also need a Whatsapp/ Slack/ Discord group to make this work, as there would need to be a mechanism for feeding back on pieces without sending a lot of emails. Perhaps this is the trade-off for having a focused writing group, where we’re about writing and publishing (getting it done) rather than critiquing each other’s work (improving our writing)?
• I have transferred Stewardship from myself to Connie, but it’s unclear to me whether I have transferred Source to Connie. The Source of an initiative is the person that has the first idea, and holds the vision and integrity of the work. They tend to know intuitively what will and won’t work to keep the soul of a project intact. I suspect Connie and I need a deeper conversation about this.

How to join

If you want to join Blog Club, sign-up using this form. If Fridays at 10am GMT don’t work for you, there are loads of other online writing groups. Or maybe you could start your own?

This post is an update of my organisational design primer from 2020. Last updated October 2024.

Organisational design is a jumble of disciplines and capabilities, which, depending on who you talk to, includes some of the following: organisational development, learning and development, systems design, user-centred design, Employee Experience, agile working, digital transformation, culture design, community management, internal comms, organisational psychology, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Justice, leadership and team coaching, HR, and Operations.

The sources below reflect the jumble above and my own opinions about how organisations should organise (regeneratively), covering more the how (practice) and the why (beliefs) rather than the what (artefacts, such as operating models, which I’m not keen on). I’m also not much of a viewer or listener, so my resources bias towards written.

My definition of regenerative organisational design

Regenerative organisations heal and improve their ecosystems, rather than simply mitigating harms. Their users, partners, employees, communities (and the planet) are healthier for them existing. Truly regenerative organisations are difficult to create in our current extractive systems and I believe it’s a North Star worth aiming for.

Life pushes back against a story that excludes it — Meg Wheatley

Regenerative organisational design puts life and liberation at the centre of organisational change efforts:

• Creating the conditions for organisational health and enticing life-giving patterns to emerge
• Fostering communities that can repair and self-heal
• Developing entities that are able to end with grace, improving the health of their ecosystems.

For a deeper dive on regenerative organisational design (than a primer can provide) I’ve not found anything better than Regenerative Leadership.

Exploring what regenerative organisations could look like

• In search of a practical framework for Org Design by Stephanie Gioia of either/org and the OS Canvas by The Ready
• The Ecological Organisations Framework by Anna-Marie Swan
• Living Systems Theory and the Practice of Stewarding Change by Michelle Holliday and Michael Jones. See more of Michelle’s work on Thrivability here
• Regenerative Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue by Pablo Muñoz and Oana Branzei. Their definition of regenerative organising: “the process of sensing and embracing surrounding living ecosystems, aligning organizational knowledge, decision-making, and actions to these systems’ structures and dynamics and acting in conjunction, in a way that allows for ecosystems to regenerate, build resilience and sustain life”.
• The Regenerative Organization Canvas by Victor Lopes Mascarenhas
• Some great links and examples in this post by New Constellations, including weaving seasonality into organisational rhythms and this library of regenerative business models
• 7 patterns for radically better organisational development in the UK nonprofit sector by The Patterns for Change Team
• The dimmensions of resilient organisations are structural, ideological, strategic and emotional, by Maurice Mitchell. Written about the non-profit sector in the US, but just as relevant to the UK
• 10 questions that contain the mindsets and practices of your future organisation: psychologically safe, decentralised, equitable, agile, complexity-informed, ecologically-minded.

Designing better processes and patterns

• either/org: an inspiration library for common organsiational patterns or designs, with a liberatory lens
• Beyond The Rules: organising and governance for an economy designed for life, including practical toolkits and templates for re-orienting organisational processes (such as employment contracting) towards equity and regeneration. Convened by Dark Matter
• An example of a regenerative process: returning to work after a period of furlough, illness or caring responsibilities
• An example of using user-centred design and horizontal organising to re-design an internal process (in this instance, appraisals).

Concepts that I wish were org design memes

• Organisations are complex systems: 7 implications of seeing organisations as complex systems by Sonja Blignaut
• Organisations can be regenerative, not extractive: The Pluriverse of Regeneration by Sahana Chattopadhyay and The Ecological Organisations Framework. A big leap forward would be for organisations to learn how to end well, which The Decelerator can guide us towards. Or perhaps we can apply permaculture principles to organisations?
• Aim for organisation healing (not organisational resilience, coping or recovery) through empathy, relationships, collective effort and leadership
• Chronic illness-informed organising is regenerative: taking inspiration from seasons and cycles; adopting “continuous handover” communication; from jobs to roles and tasks; underpinned by trust and radical acceptance
• Build imaginative capacity with future generations, nature and ancestors if you want leadership that’s fit for the 21st century (by Moral Imaginations)
• White supremacy culture gives organisations these characteristics: fear, one right way, either/or and the binary, denial and defensiveness, right to comfort and fear of conflict, individualism, progress is more and quantity over quality, worship of the written word, urgency
• Horizontal organising over hierarchical organising. See also Outlandish’s Playbook for how to organise as a sociocratic cooperative, Sociocracy 3.0’s resources, and Greaterthan and The Hum, who both offer brilliant trainings around self-management
• Build developmental capability if you want cultures of trust and safety (by Darananda)
• Strategy is memory by Little Futures (by Tom Critchlow and Brian Dell). This short blog post doesn’t really relate to regenerative practice, but it’s my favourite thing ever written about strategy, and I’ve read a lot of strategy books, so I couldn’t leave it out of a post about org design.

Unusual organisational design-related thinking that I love

• Sahana Chattopadhyay’s newsletter, Pluriversal Planet: “my way of inviting us to step into a world that is counter-hegemonic, abundant, diverse, and inter-related”, centring voices from the Global South
• Microsolidarity by Richard D. Bartlett: “Microsolidarity is a community-building practice. We’re weaving the social fabric that underpins shared infrastructure”
• Edges & Echoes, a newsletter about what Earth-centred holistic organisations could look like by Kate Swade and Lynne Davis
• Corporate Bodies, a newletter exploring how and why organisations are so weird by Kate Swade and Mark Walton
• Group Hug, a newsletter about facilitation, community and organising
• Kool-Aid Factory: a series of zines about the ways organizations coordinate
• OD for Life: a network of Organisational Development practitioners, mostly based in Europe
• Millennial management science by Venkatesh Rao: exploring “the centrality of lore, as in folklore, the lore of a fictional extended universe, or more pertinently, the water-cooler lore of an organization, in the framing of the traditional concerns of management and organizational theory”.

What resources would you like to see on this primer?

This is my updated user manual, my V1 from 2020 is here. It’s been interesting to see what’s changed in three years. I can see a lot of progress, which is encouraging. For example, in 2023, I do not identify as having imposter syndrome or perfectionism anymore, and I don’t really struggle with direct communication these days.

User manuals are really useful for developing your team culture and ways of working. Sharing your user manual doesn’t mean that you can expect all of your individual needs and preferences to be met, but they’re a great starting point for discussing shared ways of working in a team.

Read more about the origin of user manuals here, see an example here from @jukesie. Hat tip to NOBL and Hello Brave for some of the question prompts below.

Conditions I like to work in

• Remotely! Covid isn’t over. There are currently 2 million people in the UK with Long Covid, which affects approximately 10% of people infected and your risk increases with every infection, even if you recovered after previous infections
• Sometimes I’m happy to meet during the summer in well-ventilated spaces if I trust the group will disclose any symptoms beforehand. You won’t catch me maskless in a busy indoor space during the winter…

The times/ hours I like to work

• For consulting projects, 9.30am — 3pm, Monday to Thursday. I am offline on Fridays
• For coaching and advisory clients, 2–5pm, Monday — Thursday
• For synchronous work, I’m better in the morning.

The best ways to communicate with me

• Slack for bigger group projects, WhatsApp for small, quick projects with fewer than five people
• Email or Whatsapp for general getting in touch. I rarely check LinkedIn
• Call if it’s urgent, voicenotes are great. I will never listen to a voicemail
• All my notifications are turned off and I don’t have Slack on my phone.

The ways I like to receive feedback

• I will always ask for your permission to give you feedback. If we don’t know each other that well, I prefer if you ask my consent before giving me feedback. If we have a strong, trusting relationship, dive right in!
• For feedback on work and performance, I like real-time feedback (e.g. straight after a workshop)
• For feedback on anything relational, I prefer a scheduled meeting.

Things I need

• Accountability. I need to know when we’re going to speak next, so I have a deadline to work to and someone to avoid disappointing
• Intentionality about asynchronous versus synchronous work. For example, for deeper design and content creation, I like to create a v1 and then come together as a group to iterate towards v2, rather than trying to create synchronously from scratch.

Things I love

• Connecting people to each other
• Reading and sharing useful stuff
• Amplifying great work, giving credit and attribution where it’s due
• Coaching and mentoring people to help them accomplish the things that matter to them
• Working in the open.

When working in a team, my real strengths are

• Holding people through the uncertainty of a change or transformation process
• Holding team members accountable to their intentions and the people they serve, challenging with respect and care
• I can simultaneously hold the short and the long-term, the tactical and the strategic, connecting everything to a team’s vision
• Translation. I am good at helping people from different disciplines and worldviews to connect and collaborate.

Things I struggle with

• Waffle. Especially if I’m in delivery-mode, I find it excruciating when people don’t get to the point. I need to work on this

Things I’m trying to get better at

• Embedding anti-oppression and regenerative practices in my work
• Writing (see: personal newsletter and GriefSick).

Other things to know about me

• I am chronically ill, which mean I have to manage my energy carefully and design how I work. I have strong boundaries and I will protect them, even over pleasing others. You can read more about my health here
• I am very interested in grief, how it connects with health and how grief shows up in organisational culture. I am trained in grief-tending and write GriefSick to explore and bear witness to chronic illness grief
• I get upset if I perceive that the people I’m working with don’t prioritise the people they serve and their employees, and aren’t trying to understand how societal dynamics show up in organisations (for example, ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy and white supremacy)
• My values are Care, Growth, Freedom, Courage, Purpose, Justice, Belonging, Flair.
• My strengths are: resilience, independence, curiosity, creativity, empathy, loyalty, focus, analysis.

Written by Emily Bazalgette and Phoebe Tickell

This blogpost outlines a call for municipal imagination in the UK, introduces the term, and talks about the Camden Council and Moral Imaginations partnership, working over the last 12 months to build municipal imagination in Camden. Together, we have been building the case for municipal imagination and put it into action by training 32 council officers in the tools and practices of collective imagination, and create the infrastructure to support the ongoing support of this collective capacity.

We are learning a huge amount from this work and will be sharing more over the next few months as we move into the second phase of the project. If you would like to follow along and learn with us, please sign up for updates.

“I was doing an event recently where someone asked me how you say “no” when you open up citizen expectation — what we have found when you invest in imagination is that you find new ways to say “yes”.” — Cllr Georgia Gould

Moral Imaginations has been working with Camden Council since April 2022 to build imagination capacity. On 13th February 2023, Councillor (Cllr) Georgia Gould, leader of Camden Council, gave the London Society’s annual Sir Banister Fletcher Lecture about the future of London and the role municipal imagination has to play in that future. In this post, we build on Georgia’s lecture and focus on:

• Why we need municipal imagination (or collective imagination)
• Why imagination is a core skill for public servants
• How Imagination Activism can help build imagination capacity
• A call to build municipal imagination in the UK.

A call for municipal imagination

Municipal imagination pairs bottom-up imagining with policies and action to make imagined futures a reality. It is a form of collective imagining that happens when people across a locality come together to collectively imagine the ways things could be different, whether they’re a resident, part of a community, a politician, charity, businesses or council officer.

Elements of municipal imagination are already happening at different scales and in different forms, for example, Let’s Talk Islington, which engaged over 6,000 local people to understand residents’ perceptions and experiences of inequality and their priorities for Islington. The group employed creative methods like puppetry and collective documentary-making to gather insights to feed into the council’s Islington Together local plan. Other examples include Camden’s own Think and Do and Barrow’s New Constellations, where local residents convened with council officers to creatively chart futures for their place, using a futures-guided approach to identify values and visions of the future.

“Often there is no lack of imagination in our communities but a lack of hope that those ideas will be heard which is why imagination has to be an essential part of our government toolkit… when you resource [imagination], start to bring people’s ideas to life even in a trial or a model, the energy unlocked is extraordinary and things happen” — Cllr Georgia Gould

Imagination is a core skill for public servants

As Georgia outlined in her lecture, we need a step-change in order to address the situation we’re in, with Councils opening up warm banks, giving out nappies and food banks sourcing food that doesn’t require cooking as people struggle to turn on electricity. Staying the same cycles of fear and resource competition will keep us stuck, with the same sticking-plaster solutions that are currently failing. We need new approaches to solving problems.

The imagination to address these challenges exists within communities. Georgia gave examples of Camden’s Imagination Activism, including the birth of the The People’s Museum: A Space for Us in Somers Town:

“In Somers Town, a proud radical working class community next to Kings Cross, there is a sense of being done to, of gentrification, of history and identity disappearing. Residents came together to create the local People’s history museum of Somers town to tell their stories and preserve their shared identity and they are now buying back art lost from the community…” — Cllr Georgia Gould

Now, the challenge is for councils to match their institutional imagination to the imaginations of their residents, and for everyone within localities to step into collective, municipal imagination, together. To make this happen, it’s time for an investment for councils to build imagination capacity within councils and their localities.

Imagination activism: shifting perspectives, building new systems

In Camden, Moral Imaginations has worked in partnership with Camden Council to develop a programme that can help unleash imagination and put it into action. It builds on the work Camden has already to done to engage residents and do things differently, centring relationships. And it builds on the work Moral Imaginations has done to centre imagination practice as a core way to change systems, through the idea of “Imagination Activism”. Together, we asked: what if imagination activism could help support Camden to meet the imagination of residents?

Imagination activism is described as a new kind of activism that focuses on shifting perspectives using active imagination, and bridging that to build new systems. This is different to traditional forms of activism that focus on fighting the old. Phoebe Tickell of Moral Imaginations developed Imagination Activism in 2022 to address the “imagination gap”. At a glance, here are some of the key concepts:

• Imagination is a muscle that requires working out, just like a physical muscle, or it risks becoming atrophied
• Many good ideas are never put into practice, creating a gulf between idea and action. We need new ways of bridging this gulf, and different ways of organising to make change happen collectively, adaptively and inclusively
• The opportunity to imagine new worlds and then act to bring them into being is unequally distributed — those with the most resources (for example, tech companies) are currently the ones imagining and building our futures.

In Imagination Activism training, we use practices to shift ways of seeing towards empathising with future unborn generations, more-than-human world and ancestors (the Moral Imaginations Three Pillars Model). From this shifted place of perspective and time, different worlds become possible and different systems can be created.

By imagining a different future, fuelled by a deep sense of connection to self, others and planet, activists can sustain themselves through hope and inspire others to create the kind of flourishing world they imagine. Imagination Activism training also provides the tools to make change happen, equipping people with self-management and horizontal organising practices. In this way, Imagination Activism strengthens the pathway from imagination to policy-making, action and systems change.

Training Imagination Activists in Camden

In late 2022, Moral Imaginations ran an 8-week Imagination Activism training programme for staff across Camden Council, from repairs, to planners, to social workers. It was a big departure for council officers. We heard that, at first, it is hard to envision the future — it feels blurry and intimidating. But with the right conditions and support, from trainers, guest speakers and the peer support from officers on the programme, imagining the future becomes easier and easier over time, as does taking action to bring those visions to life.

Rather than a traditional training, it was an activation programme to unleash the imaginations of council officers, and equip them to build an internal movement of imagination-led change. Each Imagination Activist went on to activate 10 others in the organisation, creating a ripple effect reaching the 3000 employees at Camden council.

The 32 activists were supported to go out and share their learning and tools with others in the organisation, creating an internal marketplace for these skills. Imagination activism sessions have been run at internal away days, community conferences, team meetings, and leadership strategy sessions.

Alongside the training, Moral Imaginations and Camden worked together to create a scaffolding for the unleashed capacity of the imagination activists. We ran briefings for managers, to prepare them with what to expect from the participants of the course, and how to support them to exercise their tools and ‘imagination muscles’.

This was combined with the establishment of a community of practice and internal ‘imagination fund’, regular ‘what if’ spaces held for the entire organisation, collaboration with the resident-led Think and Do to organise sharing spaces with residents, and later this year, the entire senior leadership of Camden will take part in an Imagination Leadership training, as we work with Camden to integrate imagination into their leadership model.

This scaffolding work is essential if imagination is to continue to blossom at Camden, and makes sure we deliver on the promise of the benefits of the training. Just like a seedling needs a healthy soil to flourish, imagination needs the right conditions to grow — which means that the activation programme is half of the work, the rest is less visible, but just as important.

“We are seeing extraordinary results [from Imagination Activism training] with small numbers and so much could be unlocked if we grew this. Imagine if this was how we invested in all public sector staff, if we gave them the tools to build relationships and solve problems?” — Cllr Georgia Gould

A call for municipal imagination in the UK

With budget cuts, a cost of living crisis, and increasing demand on services, the pressure on local councils is mounting. Pair this with the ongoing attack on the arts in education, the onslaught on our attention through digital dependency and targeted algorithms, and the decline of the average person’s leisure time, and it’s not hard to see that imagination is in danger.

At the same time, the best solutions often come from the bottom up, and as local budget cuts increase, investment in the time, space, permission and practice of imagination becomes more crucial.

Since the date of the Camden training, we have been invited to work with Essex Council and Hounslow Council on their Future Neighbourhoods 2030 programme, equipping council officers with tools and practices to support their future-facing work with residents. Last month, we collaborated with Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge Council in the organisation of a day-long form of citizens assembly, The Interspecies Council, that employed imagination tools to bring the voice of the nature into decision-making around the River Roding, supported by Defra Futures and the UK government’s Policy Lab.

Meanwhile projects also building imagination infrastructure like The River Don Project in Sheffield or the Regenerative Futures Fund in Edinburgh are launching off the ground, all in the last 4 months. These are by no means the only examples, but signals from our ecosystem and our own work that municipal imagination is starting to stir, open its eyes and see the others in this movement.

There is a rising interest and opening to these methods and techniques and a growing appreciation of their role in creating just, participatory and sustainable futures. Whether this will establish as a movement will depend on the role of communicators, funders and movement-builders, and the the longer term outcomes of this work.

To dive deeper:

• Listen to Cllr Georgia Gould and Phoebe Tickell, Founder of Moral Imaginations, talk about their Camden Imagination Activism work on Rob Hopkins’ podcast, From What If to What Next or read about it here
• Watch Georgia’s lecture video or read the lecture transcript to hear more about why London needs collective imagination, democratic renewal, collaboration and humble governance, and why cities are the future.

Municipal imagination: a movement whose time has come was originally published in Moral Imaginations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I started TMR with some assumptions and hopes:

• A fortnightly cadence is achievable and sustainable long-term
• Writing a fortnightly newsletter will encourage me to practice writing regularly
• I will write for myself, about the things that I’m interested in, and the newsletter will find its audience. I won’t try to identify an audience and write for them
• I will gain about 200 subscribers in Year 1
• I don’t know what the newsletter is about, or really why I’m writing it, I’m just going to try it and see what happens
• TMR will be a pro-Black newsletter.

Below, I take each assumption or hope and reflect on what I’ve learned from publishing for two years.

Fortnightly cadence

It turns out it’s very easy to write a newsletter every two weeks when:

• You launch it during a national lockdown
• You’re living alone in small coastal village in Devon for three months where the most exciting event was that time a dead seal washed up on the secret beach
• You’re single
• Your health is temporarily good (I have a chronic illness).

It turns out it’s much harder to write a newsletter every two weeks when:

• You’re allowed to see friends
• You’re living in London
• You have acquired a partner
• Your health is consistently very bad.

For the first year of TMR, I published roughly every three weeks, not two, and then took an extended break for 14 months (publishing nothing in the second year). A free newsletter doesn’t have any obligation to stick to a publishing schedule, and I am all for cutting my chronically ill self some slack, but 14 months was too long a break. The reason for the hiatus: I was waiting for my life to reach a stage of “calm” that meant I could focus on writing and publishing. But, as someone who has been chronically ill for 7 years, I’m realising that perma-chaos is my new normal. If I wait for the perfect conditions, and an empty to-do list, I’ll never write again. I think a monthly cadence is (mostly) achievable.

Practicing writing regularly

“Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you” — Ira Glass on the Taste Gap

My intention was to write a blog post for every edition of TMR, as a way of improving my writing. In the first year, I published 17 editions and wrote a blog post for 9 of them, so roughly 50% of editions. It takes me a long time to write a newsletter containing a blog post — about 8 hours. It’s hard to carve out a whole day every month.

I am also a perfectionist about my writing and feel a responsibility when I land in 700 people’s inboxes to have something of worth to say, elegantly expressed. I compare myself to the blog post-style newsletters I love and feel disappointed about the quality of mine (see the Taste Gap above). But then I remember that I’m comparing myself to professional writers. I am not a professional writer. I am someone who did an English Literature degree and then spent 12 years writing PowerPoint decks. My writing is not as good, and that’s to be expected.

Writing for myself

My advertising and design training taught me that with any product, service piece of communication or content, you should first define your audience and their desires or needs. I decided not to take this approach with This Might Resonate (I’m in good company, ian leslie of The Ruffian takes the same approach). Writing undertaken as a creative endeavour is fundamentally different. My aim is not to persuade or help users achieve a goal. My aim is to entertain and connect. This requires authenticity, vulnerability, courage and truth: being myself in order to find resonance with others.

I write for people like me. People who love newsletters and curation, who enjoy spending some time on a Sunday reading the internet. People who appreciate a newsletter that’s more British in outlook than most of the offerings out there. People who possibly work in design and tech but are a little bored of reading about it, and feel themselves itching for lateral thinking. People who are curious about themselves and others and feel like there is more to learn and understand.

Audience size

I thought about 200 people would sign-up, but I had about 200 within the first week of launch, which surprised me greatly. Subscriber growth then naturally slowed — I now have 700 subscribers.

TMR has subscribers in 32 countries (shoutout to my 1 subscriber in Japan). It blows my mind that jottings from my kitchen table in Hackney can reach that far.

Discovering the “why” along the way

Emily Bazalgette on Twitter: "Me: what do you reckon my newsletter is about? 🤔Partner: I think you just want to put wholesome vibes out into the universe 🪐🦄🔮🌸 / Twitter"

Me: what do you reckon my newsletter is about? 🤔Partner: I think you just want to put wholesome vibes out into the universe 🪐🦄🔮🌸

I didn’t know why I was writing TMR, other than that people suggested I should. I’ve discovered the “why” through doing. For me, it’s about the joy and pain of writing, the pride at delivering a consistent product (when that happens…). And it’s about connection. Sharing little things you notice, and the pleasure of that resonating with other people. It’s also about possessing a corner of the internet to be a more rounded, complicated person.

During my 14-month hiatus, I realised that TMR is good for my emotional and spiritual health. The newsletter is a jolt of creativity, an assertion of visibility (what the newsletter really says is: “I believe I have good taste and here are my recommendations”). It’s a small thread connecting me to versions of myself that might have existed if I’d never got sick, who might be producing this kind of content more intensively, more professionally, at scale. I want to keep this thread intact. Maybe one day I can weave something more expansive with it.

A pro-Black newsletter

I wanted to go beyond diversity and make This Might Resonate a proudly pro-Black newsletter. My definition of pro-Black in the context of a newsletter is to include a piece of writing by or about a Black creator in every edition of This Might Resonate, and to ensure that I frequently include content by Black creators that isn’t about race.

For my first five editions, I tracked the (assumed) gender and race/ethnicity of the authors I included. After five editions, I was confident that my reading and curation was diverse enough, so I don’t track anymore. It’s a joyful commitment that requires attention but is in no way onerous. Don’t listen to anyone who says this stuff is hard.

Unexpected lessons learned

Visibility has unexpected results

From people asking me how to start their own newsletter, to subscribers becoming consulting or coaching clients, to speaking opportunities, TMR has delivered results that I couldn’t have predicted. I will try to remember this the next time I’m worried about making myself visible (I talk about professional visibility more in this interview by Lauren Currie).

Authenticity over virtue signalling

I try to write and include what’s true, not what will make me look good. Sometimes there are links that I’m tempted to include to virtue signal how progressive I am, or to pretend I care about a certain issue. What I actually care about is brilliant writing and unusual stories.

A newsletter is rejection-acceptance training

I don’t often get unsubscribes, but every one feels like a knife to the heart, because it’s a personal newsletter. I need to remember that I unsubscribe from newsletters all the time for reasons of inbox sanity, never in judgment.

What’s next? Questions I’m holding

• Should I make more of an effort to gain subscribers? Does a subscriber count matter to me? If so, why? What would more subscribers give me? What if I stayed at 700 subscribers forever? How does that make me feel?
• What if this is remains a hobby with no outcomes whatsoever?
• How can I make space/ increase accountability for writing the blog part of the newsletter, and reduce my perfectionism around writing?
• Should I take advantage of Substack’s new community features to explore a community around the newsletter? TMR is so eclectic, it’s hard to imagine what would bring people together… I also hold complicated feelings about facilitating community which is likely playing a role in my reluctance to consider this
• Should I include an option to pay? I think it would be an interesting experiment, and definitely brings up some icky money stuff I have going on. I think people might pay for original, good writing, but my assumption is they wouldn’t for simple curated links.

For more newsletter reflections, see like Patricia Mou’s lessons learned from 25 editions of her newsletter:

vol.25: 12 lessons I've learned from 25 newsletters

If you liked my reflections, subscribe to This Might Resonate.

To develop supportive, people-centred, equitable and humane organisations, we need to accept that (many) organisations are complex systems. This means embracing organisational development (OD) practices that work with complexity, rather than seeking to flatten it. Before we explore these complexity-informed practices, it’s worth examining the “flattening” approach and why it is so persistent.

OD as artefacts to soothe uncertainty

Let us examine the traditional organisational development tool, the Target Operation Model (below). These models are not really about developing our organisations. They are artefacts to soothe uncertainty because the true complexity of the organisation overwhelms us, particularly in the West, where we don’t have established cultural practises that help us to navigate complexity and uncertainty. Confronted with it, we try to separate the interrelated elements to create a story that’s easier to understand. This approach doesn’t work because, in complex systems, relationships are fundamental, stability is undesirable and nonlinear effects abound.

We cannot develop organisations effectively without leaping into the messy reality of our organisations as they actually are. We need to be brave, experiment, and know by trying.

OD in complexity

In a complex system, to know by trying, we need to probe, sense and respond.

“One can only really understand a complex system by interacting with it” , Dave Snowden

The Children’s Society is a charity that supports young people. In mid-2019, I held a coaching space with the Senior Leadership Team for 6 weeks. One of the areas we experimented with during that time was “work/life balance”, a constantly shifting, relational experience, created by the interactions between the following actors:

• individuals within a team
• the team’s interactions with other teams within and outside the organisation
• the system the organisation operates in, for example, the commissioning model that funds many charities creates many behaviours that can affect wellbeing and work/life balance
• individuals and their family and wider networks, influenced by societal dynamics, for example, who does the “second shift” at home?
• structural elements, for example, childcare policies.

Given this complexity, the “OD as artefact” approach was not going to work. We needed to dive right into the complexity. Each week of the coaching programme, we followed the same cycle: creating organisational probes to experiment with shifting patterns, coming back together to sense-make, responding based on what we’d discovered.

We launched lots of probes, but the most impactful was one of the smallest. It was a line that Clare Bracey added to her email signature:

It took off immediately. People quickly spotted it and asked Claire what it meant and where it came from. They spontaneously added it to their own email signatures. All across the organisation, this small action started conversations and opened up spaces to talk about organisational culture, how people related to each other, what’s acceptable and what work boundaries look like. Even The Children’s Society’s external partners noticed and wanted to talk about it.

Of course, one of the reasons the probe took off is because it’s a small, easy action. But, for something so small, the impact was so disproportionate (a good example of nonlinearity) that I believe it was working deeply, despite its superficial simplicity. It was a signal from the emergent organisation, where people could talk openly about boundaries and needs, to the dominant existing system, where, like many organisations, boundaries and needs are not respected.

Three practices for knowing by trying

Hold space

If you wish to facilitate organisational development, your role becomes one of holding space, or creating enabling constraints, rather than determining answers.

Investigate your relationship with uncertainty

To do this well with others, understand your own relationship with uncertainty to embrace “unknowing”. What drives your behaviours, when do you try to control people or events, can you tolerate saying “I don’t know” in that important meeting?

Launch many “safe-to-try” prototypes

Because you cannot predict the effect of a probe, or an experiment, you will need to launch lots of them, and they need to be “safe-to-try”, meaning: if they fail, they will not irrevocably damage people or the organisation. Think email signatures, not a policy banning “political” conversations at work.

The probes will work together in ways you won’t always be able to unpick and understand, just like a symphony is a relationship between the orchestral players, their instruments and the sounds they make. Together, those interactions create a beautiful experience. Human, supportive, people-centred, equitable, humane organisational development is a symphony of small, safe-to-try probes. Launched by people brave enough to experiment and know by trying.

Thank you to Sonja Blignaut and Dave Snowden, whose brilliant work informs this post.

If you want to see these concepts explored through an extended pasta metaphor (frankly, who wouldn’t?), watch the 10-minute video at the beginning of this post. To understand user-centred design, a different approach to knowing by trying, read my post about prototyping a new appraisals process for a charity.

Emily Bazalgette helps people and teams to be intentional about how they work and develop through organisational design and coaching. She has over 12 years of experience supporting governments, local government, funders and nonprofits. Emily is driven by helping people to organise, collaborate and find belonging in nourishing ways, and believes that we can design equitable, adaptive, regenerative organisations. Alongside consulting and coaching, Emily advocates for people with chronic illnesses. Chronic illness has brought her creativity, adaptability and resilience, gifts she feels lucky to be able to bring to her organisational design consulting and coaching practices.

Emily is proud to have been part of the Patterns for Change project, read more about how the Patterns were developed.

Know by trying: Experimenting in complexity was originally published in Patterns for Change on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Designing a new appraisals process with employees
• Low-fidelity and live prototyping of an internal service, including what didn’t work
• Some out of scope things we got excited about (people development-as-a-service, culture change in internal teams and self-management)

I led the project with With You’s People and Culture teams in early 2019. We Are With You (formerly Addaction) is a national charity that supports people who have issues with drugs, alcohol or mental health. The project was a team effort with Alice, Marina, Ricky, Lizzy and Eben.

The project brief: How might we have better and more frequent appraisals, so that our people keep developing the capabilities we need to deliver brilliant services for our clients?

The challenge

In early 2019, We Are With You had recently launched their bold strategy, which relied on good people development: staff with the ability to adapt and learn new skills to improve recovery services and scale reach and impact. However, We Are With You’s existing appraisals process (“Individual Performance and Development Plan”, or “IPDP”) was not supporting people to develop:

• One appraisal conversation per year was not frequent enough to support development
• There was variation in the quality of appraisals. Some were two hour face-to-face conversations about career progression, others were short exchanges over email
• IPDP had a ratings system, linked to pay, but humans are unreliable raters of other humans (many companies are ditching performance ratings). The collection of IPDP ratings data involved the People team chasing a lot of very busy service managers, which was time-consuming
• The IPDP form was long, 6+ pages, and designed in a top-down way, with requirements from We Are With You’s Head Office that didn’t make sense in a local service context. We heard things like: “It’s not nice that [the forms are] pre-written” and that IPDP comes from “the system”, “from above”. I even observed that people’s body language became closed and agitated when they talked about IPDP. It was clear that this process had to change.

What I did

Reframed the brief

I reframed the brief from: “how might we have better appraisals” to “how might we have better conversations about development?”. An appraisal is not really a process, or a series of documents. An appraisal is a human conversation about a person’s longer-term development, how they will get there and what support they need. A We Are With You Service Manager put it well:

“[An appraisal] is not about what it says on some piece of paper. It’s about the overall view of that person: are they being a good employee, are they a good drugs worker? Do they have team spirit, how far have they come? Have they taken on new projects, what are their successes?”

Desk research to create early prototypes

Organisational design is often hypothesis-led design, because there’s a lot of existing research into what works, organisations tend to experience similar problems and you can’t understand a complex system like an organisation unless you interact with it. Starting from scratch with open discovery is often inefficient. Combining the evidence-base and We Are With You’s needs, I defined “good conversations about development” as:

• Manager-as-coach, with ownership of the conversation belonging to the person having the appraisal
• The conversation results in stretch goals with clear success measures, linked to organisational objectives and outcomes for service users
• Taking a creative approach to designing development opportunities (rather than defaulting to expensive formal training)

Our hypothesis was that both the people having an appraisal and their managers would need support to move from an annual IPDP conversation to a more frequent, coaching-led conversation. We guessed that two artifacts might be useful to support those conversations:

1. A short guide to having good conversations about development
2. A shared notes template for both parties to capture notes from the conversation

To embed greater ownership by the person having the appraisal, I made the following design decisions:

• Keeping shared notes in a Google Doc for transparency, replacing the previous workflow: the manager writes up notes in a Word document and emails a copy to the person they manage for their signature
• Including questions in the guide and the template that prompt the manager to ask for feedback from the person they manage, so the feedback is not just 1–way
• Removing the spaces for manager and practitioner signatures from the appraisals notes, which signaled command-and-control culture, not a trust-based culture

Low fidelity testing of materials with practitioners

Practitioners have challenging roles and make up 75% of We Are With You’s workforce (read more about their incredible work here). Any materials we created needed to work for them, first and foremost. Shadowed by Ricky (HR) and Lizzy (Comms), I visited two We Are With You services to do some prototyping with practitioners. I asked practitioners about their existing workflows and approaches to development. Then I stuck the printed prototype materials up on the wall and practitioners scribbled on them to tell me what was helpful or not helpful. The materials broadly met practitioner needs relating to appraisals, but we also uncovered many problems that a new way of delivering appraisals couldn’t solve (see Designing People Development-as-a-Service below).

Live testing of materials with practitioners and their managers

After iterating the prototypes based on the feedback from practitioners, it was time to up the stakes. The only way to know if you’ve created a good product is to observe people trying it out in a live situation. I recruited some practitioners who had their appraisal coming up in the next two weeks, and, along with their managers, asked them to have an appraisal using the materials. I then emailed them a Google Forms survey to probe whether the materials prompted better conversations about development. I also did a few follow-up calls to get some richer, qualitative feedback. I decided not to observe the appraisals themselves — they should be safe spaces.

The feedback pointed towards better conversations and a useful guide:

“The meeting felt very staff member focused and brought out some good ideas and discussions”

“A helpful addition, some different ways to ask questions I would normally ask”

Much of the positive feedback related to the fact the guides were short and written in plain English (rather than any “clever” design decisions I had made). When organisations do the hard work to make something simple it signals that they respect and value their employees. End-users deserve good design, and so do staff.

But the feedback also revealed that I missed something basic (a place to add the appraisal date) and that the way I framed objectives didn’t align with practitioners’ existing mental model of development (SMART goals):

“Just a note from completing the new process. There isn’t a place to sign or date the document”

“It needs to be laid out in a ‘SMART’ way that makes it clear for staff to understand”

I iterated the materials based on the pair feedback and helped We Are With You’s People teams to develop a testing plan to assess the effectiveness of the materials post-launch. Early anecdotal feedback is that people have been having better, richer conversations about development, prompted by the new process. [Update: We Are With You are still using the new appraisals materials, and finding them useful, 2.5 years after the project]

You can make a copy of the materials and create versions for your own organisation here.

Some out of scope things we got excited about

Designing People Development-as-a-Service

Through the research, we uncovered many unmet needs around development. For example, first-time managers needed much more support.

What if We Are With You’s People team offered “People Development-as-a-Service”? What would that service look like? What products would it offer? What needs could it meet?

Cultural shift from processes to services

What if we enacted a culture shift within internally-focused teams, from managing processes to delivering services? What if this document’s title was: “Addaction’s guide to developing people and teams?”, rather than “Managing the IPDP Process?”

From managers to self-management?

The principles and practices of self-management are useful (you don’t have to implement full holacracy). What if we re-designed performance management more along self-management principles? What if people don’t need managers at all and can self-assess their performance through greater personal accountability, seeking continuous feedback from peers and clients? Is this approach viable, feasible and desirable in legacy frontline service delivery organisations?

See Optimi’s work on accountability questions, a technique used by many self-managing organisations, including frontline service delivery organisations, like Wellbeing Teams.

Most of work is “conversation design” most of the time, for which good questions play a critical role. Questions disrupt our default ways of thinking, communicating and designing. Questions are conversational and cultural interventions that invite and entrust. Offering a solution collapses options. Offering a question opens up the space for possibilities and plurality.

These ten questions contain within them the mindsets and practices of your future organisation: psychologically safe, decentralised, equitable, agile, complexity-informed, ecologically-minded. If you want to change the mindsets that underpin organisational behaviours, consider starting with good questions. You might find your conversations take on radically different qualities.

1. “What’s one thing that brings you energy and joy?”

This is a check-in question. Check-ins create better meetings, enabling everyone to be present and feel heard, which fosters psychological safety.

Ask this question when… you kick off a meeting, before you jump into any discussions.

2. “Who is not in the room?”

The most effective start to a meeting I’ve ever seen was a product owner kicking off the first Show and Tell on a new project. The product aimed to expand the choices for young people after leaving school. The product owner asked everyone in the room to raise their hand if they’d been to university. All 30 of us raised our hands, bar one person. We were a homogenous group of people when it comes to educational experiences. There were hardly any people in the room with lived experience of making different choices after leaving school.

We often make decisions without seeking advice from people who will be affected by it or who are subject matter experts. The people making decisions in organisations are often from over-represented groups. It helps us all to become more aware of who isn’t in the room.

Ask this question when… you’re deciding who to invite to a meeting, to ensure the right people are in the room. Or, at the start of the meeting to highlight the likely blank spots in your perspectives.

3. “What do you intend to do?”

David Marquet is a former nuclear submarine Commander in the US navy. He realised that when leaders give instructions they create dependence, but asking “what do you intend to do?” prompts people to exercise their autonomy and distributes decision-making.

Ask this question when… someone tries to ask for your permission, sign-off or advice on a course of action.

4. “Can you tell me more about why this solution is important to you?”

It’s normal for humans to jump to solutions, and sometimes we need help to articulate the actual problem, so we can explore more options. It is more effective, and kinder, to ask this question than to rubbish someone’s solution.

Ask this question when… someone has requested a specific solution, rather than expressed a problem or need.

5. “How might we reframe this idea as a hypothesis?”

Help people to understand that their ideas are guesses based on assumptions. No one can predict the future and we all make assumptions about how people behave or will behave. If you reframe those ideas and plans as assumptions and hypotheses, they become tangible and testable. Read more here.

Ask this question when… everyone gets excited about a new product/ service idea. Especially if someone wants to build an app or some other piece of hype technology.

6. “What is the user need?”

Powerful but still underused. Read Ann Shipman’s post about how the Government Digital Service use this question.

Ask this question when… everyone gets excited about a new product/ service idea. Especially if someone wants to build an app or some other piece of hype technology.

7. “How will this affect future generations?”

We should also be thinking beyond user needs, as Cassie Robinson.’s writes. How do our actions now affect communities, our society, our planet?

Ask this question when… when making a decision, designing or planning.

Read more: Wales developed an act using ancestor thinking in 2015. The Long Time Project, Designing for future needs by We are Snook, How to be a good ancestor by Roman Krznaric.

8. “Is it safe-to-try?”

Fear often gets in the way of good decision-making. Explore if the decision is safe-to-try and reversible if it doesn’t work. If it is, proceed. If it isn’t, can you break the decision down into smaller chunks that are safe-to-try? Once you’ve tried it, you’ll have data to evaluate if it was a good decision or not. As always, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

Ask this question when… you’re going round in circles because there are lots of unknowns and “what ifs”.

9. “Does anyone have any objections?”

This is the secret to fast decision-making for low-stakes issues. Asking: “what does everyone think?” results in ten people spending an hour debating the phrasing of one sentence in the new expenses policy. Asking: “does anyone have any objections?” will focus attention on the truly important implications. Caveat: if you don’t have a psychologically safe group, people will not feel able to raise objections and will instead subtly sabotage the decision after the meeting.

Ask this question when… You need an agreement to proceed on a low-stakes issue.

10. “What will we stop doing?”

Everyone loves to start something new: a new project, a new product. New things feel great. Love of newness and fear of endings drive a lot of organisational dysfunctions, like having too much work in progress. This is often a root cause of poor well-being and burnout. Whenever you want to start something, agree on what you will stop to make space for it. If you’re willing to kill an existing project to make space for the new one, then it’s worth doing.

Ask this question when… You’ve decided to do something new.

Further reading: the magic phrases of sociocracy.

I welcome suggestions for

• Better products – cheaper, more usable, more beautiful, more inclusive, more ethical
• Streamlining my stack: “The anticipated productivity gains of each shiny new tool are often outweighed by the noise they create”.

Task + knowledge management

Still figuring out an efficient knowledge management process, this situation is a hot mess.

• I’ve finally found the perfect recycled notebooks, by Papersmith: “Designed in Hackney and made by a family-run bindery in Buckinghamshire, these British-made notebooks combine top-quality production with eco-friendly materials. The inside paper is recycled, FSC-certified, and printed with vegetable-based ink”. I was using Port West before (which are 100% recycled, cover and inside paper) but they’re too slight, I like a chonky notebook!
• Recycled post-its and sharpies (I have yet to find a “sustainable” alternative to sharpies)
• An ancient LAMY fountain pen + refillable ink cartridge + ink well (I’ve bravely quit my favourite plastic gel pens)
• Google docs (meeting notes)
• Trello (kanban)
• Pocket (save articles)
• Notion (wiki).

Document creation + storage

Google Workspace (docs, presentations, spreadsheets, forms and basic surveys)

ChatGPT (for research and first versions of docs/ blog posts etc)

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Collaborative project work

• Google Workspace
• Miro, Google Jamboard, Google Slides (digital whiteboards). I tend to use Miro when collaborating with small groups of design/ digital folk, and Google Jamboard/ Slides for client workshops. Digital whiteboards are not accessible, we need to solve this for remote work to be inclusive
• Airtable (a spreadsheet crossed with a database)
• Typeform (fancier forms and surveys)
• Otter.ai (interview transcription). Interested in fireflies.ai

Synchronous communication

• Zoom
• The sweet relief of an old-fashioned phone call.

Asynchronous communication

• Gmail/ Google Workspace
• Whatsapp. Tried and failed to move to Signal, behold: network effects
• Slack.

Visual design for people with no design training

• Canva (graphic design)
• DALL-E (AI image generator)
• Procreate on iPad (sketching)
• Noun project (icons licensed under the commons)
• Unsplash (stock photos licensed under the commons)
• Blush (customisable, inclusive illustrations).

Brand + comms

• Squarespace (website)
• Namecheap (domain)
• Linktree (signposting people to your best stuff)
• Substack (newsletters: This Might Resonate and GriefSick)
• Medium (blog)
• LinkedIn (since the demise of Twitter)
• Twitter (RIP)
• Buffer (schedule social media posts)
• TikTok and Instagram (for GriefSick).

Time tracking + billing + accounting

• Trialling Harvest
• Xero (billing + accounting)
• Dext (easy expenses, integrates with Xero).

Money

• Starling (business bank, integrates with Xero)
• Transferwise (international payments)
• Stripe (card payments for coaching clients and my advisory offer, integrates with Xero)
• Interested in co-op and collective approaches to money e.g. We Guild, Squad Wealth.

Miscellaneous

• Firefox (Chrome destroyed my laptop battery, major bummer)
• Cal.com. It’s not as pretty as Calendly, but it is free
• Grammarly (spelling, grammar, style)
• Simplify (makes Gmail more usable and more beautiful)
• Signature Hound (create fancy email signatures for free)
• LastPass (password manager). Got my eye on Bitwarden (free and open-source)
• Freedom (blocks certain websites for productivity’s sake *cough* Twitter *cough*). I’ve blocked the same website on my iPhone by doing this (it’s very easy!)
• Twitter’s Alt Text reminder feature (to turn it on, go to Accessibility settings > receive image description reminder)
• Toucan (Chrome extension that translates words on webpages into another language to help you learn — in my case, Spanish)
• Researching workflow automation through Zapier and IFTT.

IRL infrastructure + hardware

• Companies Made Simple (registered office address)
• Co-working space tbc re: global pandemic
• Macbook Air + iPhone + external keyboard
• Yeti microphone (for giving talks/ recording podcasts)
• Researching options for monitor, camera and mouse.

Thanks to Tom for writing his post, which prompted me to finally publish this! Tom has recently updated his post in his newsletter, with some interesting new tools.

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