Who Is This Book For?
Simply, this book is for anyone who has ambitions to develop themselves, their organizations, and the complex systems of which we all play a part! You are likely to pick up this book if you are dissatisfied with the way in which “development” seems to have become, somewhat ironically, stuck in a past world of corporate management. Here, command-and-control attitudes, albeit dressed up in modern language, remain the dominant relational paradigm with a narrow paternalistic perspective on how people need to be managed. As people, we can do much better than this. If you are concerned about your own and others unaddressed development needs in a system context, then this book, regardless of your profession, role, and organizational status is for you.
Why Read This Book?
Time pressures can make reading feel like a luxury. But what if a book can offer the possibility of giving you more time to focus on what is important about the work you are engaged in? We think this is such a volume!
The basic premise is that co-designing services in complex systems call from us a range of behaviors and ways of working that may be new to us. That is because working with such systems is often also new to us. However successful we may have been in our organizational contexts, system working presents new challenges that need new practices. Reading this book will help you think through a set of systems working practices that you can adopt in your work.
To help you apply the learning, we have structured this book as simply as we can. Each short chapter starts with an outline of the key idea followed by why it is important and then how to apply it in a system content. Each ends with thought-provoking questions for reflection and some next step actions to make the learning concrete.
The chosen topics originate in the authors’ extensive experience of co-design and research into system development. We have deliberately chosen not to be overly academic in this volume, preferring instead to focus on practices that we have used in our work and observed in others.
You will have noticed that the title for each chapter ends with “ing.” For example, we describe practice of purposing, culturing, and even languaging! For us the “ing” is about the action involved in making co-design a reality. A danger is to think and talk about the world as a set of abstract constructs. The “ing” serves to shift the focus to the doing with others. The focus is on practicing.
Our aim is that you find this book practical, engaging, relevant to the way you work, and stimulating. It is intended for all whose work draws them beyond their own organizational boundaries into the world of complex systems—which, in todays interconnected world, is most of us.
How to Read This Book
Some books are intended to be read from start to finish. This book invites you to pick and choose chapters when you have time and think they may have something to offer your work. Each chapter is provocative and offers challenges, so pick a time when you are in the mood! This book is intended to support your development. Open it when you sense the need to do something different. It is here to offer support and encouragement in the work of co-design.
We also think it offers value to groups of people. Use a chapter or two as a way of beginning a conversation about how you can practice individually and collectively. The book is a way of stimulating new forms of practice.
By understanding this book as a starting point, we hope that you will develop your own insights into practice. It is not the last word on everything to do with practice in complex systems. We invite you to join with us in the continuing exploration of new territories of practice. Such a spirit of exploration will bring benefit to all of us whose flourishing as people depends on healthy ways of living and working in complex systems.