Manifesto

The street is just a silly example that illustrates the complexity of our society. We manage it all, using physical, digital and social technology. Management is a social technology. At the fundamental level, management is about how we make sense of the world around us, how we make choices, and how we change things, at all level of our lives.

Much of the management practice is associated with organisations and consultants. Today, management is a vast set of concepts, some as old as our modern society, full of great ideas, horrible ideas, buzzwords and experts. But management is disintegrated, much of the concepts are outdated and struggling with the new global digital world.

We live in a world of pyramid-like power hierarchies. When we consider the complexity of even the basic systems we manage, it becomes evident that power hierarchies have reached their use-by date. As we sense-make, choose and take action, we realise that at a minimum leadership is situational. Multiplied by various contexts within which we need to operate it further requires the distribution of leadership. But power is real, some people have it, and some don't. Future of management requires deep empathy regarding who has power, how to share power and how to let go.

To begin with, we need to dismiss the separation between managers and leaders. We have separated these concepts within the management discussion as a way to escape the complexity of having to operate what we have and change for the better at the same time.

Leadership requires us to grow understanding through collective intelligence, choice-making by looking at a diverse set of viewpoint and potential pathways and taking action we can change through as well as learn within. Power hierarchies have taken us this far, but no further.

We associate management with the world of business. One of the prevailing concepts of the 20th century was shareholder value, or increasing money on money returns for investors. But businesses are a social technology, invented to co-ordinate groups of people and resources to deliver value, to even broader groups of people. Our narrow shareholder view needs to expand to include broader stakeholders, and our management practices need to reflect this shift at all levels.

If we are to tackle some of the most challenging topics we face today, everything from climate crisis to pandemics and social justice, we need to expand our concept of value. This expansion can't be translated into monetary value but has to be rooted in stakeholder experience. Our sense, choice and action practices require understanding who the stakeholders are, from people to commons and how these agents are given a voice and included in sense-making, choice-making and our actions.

Management of systems is greatly influenced by how we conceptualise the design of those systems. When we try to describe value chains, customer experience or impact, we typically conceptualise them as linear processes, that have a start, series of steps and an end. As we expand the power of the practice of management, we need to change how we conceptualise and design the very things we are trying to manage. We need to move from viewing linear systems to circular systems, where steps happen at the same time, have many agents interacting, have feedback loops and can at last attempt to reveal complexity we are managing. For us to understand broader stakeholders, be it, people, ecosystem or commons, we need designs capable of encapsulating complexity instead of generating unmanaged externalities.

The practice of management in terms of sensing, choosing and taking action needs to not only good at looking at existing systems but designing new systems. The value of circular design is as much about the circular concepts as it is about to design itself. Design is a critical part of the practice of management. Most managers and their advisors are not versed in design, especially circular design.

Management of dynamic, complex contexts requires conscious management of uncertainty. While we have so far externalised much of the uncertainty or negative impacts, we need to proceed with a much more deliberate focus on not only reducing harm but ultimately about regenerating wellbeing of people, communities, our culture and ecosystem within which we live.

The first step in building regenerative relationships with each other and broader ecosystems we operate within requires practising open lucid ignorance. We need to be aware of uncertainty and ensure we can move forward while minimising harm. The balance between innovation we so desperately need and ensuring we don't merely kick externalities down the road is one of the central challenges of management.

This last value, the value of regenerative relationships is the soul of #newmanagement.

Concepts articulated in this manifesto are a starting point only, and a call to sense make and experiment within the ecosystem of the contexts within which we operate. The model proposed here is not something to implement exactly. Do not create sense-making teams or collective intelligence workshops. These are guideposts, a set of shared values. How we implement these should be as diverse as possible.