TEN

Coordinating with Clarity

The Spectrum of Agility

Imagine a world

in which agility and resilience will be prioritized over certainty and efficiency. Imagine leaders who will be skilled in the art of flexive intent, with great clarity about where they intend to go but great flexibility about how they will get there. All office workers will have license to act, innovate, and coordinate within the envelope of clarity provided by purpose and emergent leadership. Distributed authority hierarchies will come and go based on who is in the best position to make which decision at what time. Scenarios, simulation, and gaming will allow people to prepare in low-risk ways for the highly uncertain future. Economies of scale (where bigger was almost always better) will yield to economies of organization, where you will be what you are able to organize.

Braided Agility
Illustration by Yeti Iglesias from Mexico.
After reading this chapter, consider how you might illustrate your story about the Spectrum of Agility.

Marina Gorbis refers to organizations as a kind of social technology, which “is not preordained but designed.”¹ Coordinating with clarity means being more than an office shock absorber; it means developing readiness for the future.

As illustrated in figure 17, the Spectrum of Agility moves from Stable Structures to Shape Shifting. It implies a shift from centralized to distributed, and from certainty to clarity. Agility is the ability to get there early and respond in coordinated ways with speed, strength, balance, and grace.

FIGURE 17:
Spectrum of Agility

Stunning agility was evident in the rapid development of a vaccine for COVID-19. Dr. Melanie Ivarsson, head of development at Moderna, led the team that developed the mRNA vaccine. She faced a VUCA challenge during the global pandemic: collaborate with competitors to develop a vaccine that many viewed as impossible within a rapid time frame. There were mules everywhere, including people who resisted the very idea of a miracle vaccine.

The entire world, the entire eco-system learned to work entirely differently and that made all the difference. . . .We did not compete with each other. . . . The collaboration among all the companies was unprecedented.²

Her ability to organize a shape-shifting team with agility, to do something that had never been done before, led to a groundbreaking world-saving vaccine. In the VUCA world, internal rigidity will be a greater threat than external change.

Future-Ready Officing

Traditional offices were designed with rigidity to pursue certainty. They were production lines for knowledge workers, with human touches occasionally along the way. Rigidity can be comforting at times, but certainty is brittle—and brittle breaks. The COVID-19 crisis broke the certainties of the traditional office.

The office used to be hierarchical and centralized. In the future officeverse, however, everything and everyone that can be distributed will be distributed. Attempts to centralize resources and control decision-making will constantly be disrupted. Because of extended periods of office shock, the unexamined assumptions about centralized offices and officing will be up for grabs.

The future will be an incessant carnival of surprises that will be intensified by a new generation of gamers entering the officeverse. Organizing to create better futures in the face of uncertainty will be daunting. Acting and thinking full spectrum will require new metaphors and mindsets to develop agility and thrive. We will need to organize, personalize, and game our way to an agile resilient office with better working and living.

Organizing for Future-Readiness

The COVID-19 crisis exposed that what companies formerly perceived as their own private supply “chains” were in fact fragile and increasingly open supply webs. Supply webs encompass vast amounts of information across organizational boundaries. They require increased communication and coordination. Supply webs are one example of how the traditional way of viewing and managing organizations is being disrupted. Supply chains were designed for just-intime efficiency. How will tomorrow’s supply webs be designed for agility and resilience—rather than efficiency alone?

In the officeverse, organizations will require flexibility and empowerment, rather than command and control. They will need to respond quickly to market fluctuations and delegate decision-making to people or teams in the best position to act.

We call this way of organizing shape-shifting.³ As illustrated in figure 18, such shape-shifting organizations are entangled social and digital networks where hierarchies come and go on the route to achieving shared purpose. They grow from the edges, where diversity flourishes and innovation is easier to get going. Shape-shifting organizations cannot be controlled, but they can be guided with flexive intent organized around purpose and clear leadership statements of direction. Leaders in shape-shifting organizations are always looking for mutual-benefit partnering opportunities for engagement, to help them accomplish what they cannot accomplish alone.

FIGURE 18: An Archipelago of Agility. Informed by DAO network mapping, shape-shifting organizations will continually ebb and flow as individuals and their fluid.

Shape-shifting organizations have no fixed center, with hierarchies that come and go based on who is in the best position to make which decisions at what time. The most productive shape-shifting organizations will have not only great clarity of direction but also great flexibility of execution. The choices on the Spectrum of Agility help the knowledge worker to synchronize individual talent for agility and resiliance with the organizational need for shape-shifting in pursuit of improved decision-making. The harmony of finding your best position on the spectrum will increase your value to the organization and improve its agility and resilience.

Shape-shifting organizations will be characterized by:

   Leaders who lead through entangled social and digital networks.

   Leaders who come and go across the mesh, not above it.

   Leaders who have the ability to calm situations where differences dominate and find common ground.

   Leaders who are strong, yet humble.

Shape-shifting organizations will be like fishnets or other interwoven network structures that have the flexibility and strength of braided cord. As described in the book Braided Organizations, shape-shifting is accomplished by an “intertwined network of contributors with different capabilities, not controlled via formal hierarchy, who work together to invent ways to accomplish common purpose.”⁴

In braided shape-shifting organizations, a magnetizing purpose draws people together from the futureback. Braided working weaves collective intellgence to get things done through shared governance. As shared purpose evolves, members shift their roles and responsibilities as required to move forward. Leaders tap into distributed resources to assist in navigating complexity. A constant flow of information permeates ever-changing boundaries.⁵

Braided working in a shape-shifting organization is exemplified in companies like Blinkist. Founded in 2012 in Berlin, Germany, as of 2021 the subscription service connects eighteen million readers worldwide to the biggest ideas from bestselling nonfiction via fifteen-minute audio and text clips. When Niklas Jansen and his co-owners decided to go international in 2017, they faced a real issue: How to create a more responsive organization that puts the emphasis on empowering individuals to operate with distributed power? Jansen and his People Team noticed that it was not more structure that was needed, but less. Self-managed and self-empowered teams revealed a third need: transparency.

Where most traditional organizations would aim for more processes and policies, the Blinkist team shifted to fewer:

We started to see the best organizational systems are somewhat invisible and ended up with a really clear purpose and focus—staying truly focused on the customer and employee problem, inspiring us to keep learning.⁶

Taking inspiration from the world of information technology and targeting operating systems, Blinkist’s People Team created the Blinkist Operating System. Every team figures out their own way to work in pursuit of innovation and speed. Pushing decision-making down to the lowest possible level still influences the long-term thinking in the company but, says Jansen, behavior, purpose, and culture are still the central focus.

As Blinkest illustrates, agile is more than a mere working methodology. Although agile methods are necessary, they are an insufficient condition to ensure the organizational flexibility required to adapt to changing market demands. Even with the promising yet emerging Web3 and DAOs, if leaders do not have flexive intent they may not succeed in changing the established systems. Coordinating with clarity will require personal agility to ensure that braided working happens in shape-shifting teams.

Leading with Readiness

In the book The New Leadership Literacies,⁷ Bob describes how leaders will need physical, mental, and even spiritual (though not necessarily religious) agility in the future. Think of this individualized agility as creating and sustaining positive energy in the face of turmoil. Agility is a combination of energy and animation, an ability to engage with ambiguity and flip it into something positive.

Leaders who are fluent in this new literacy will walk into a group—in person or virtually—and radiate authentic positive energy. They will have a disciplined personal approach to their own physical, mental, and emotional fitness. They will balance their energy levels throughout the day and night, moderate peaks, and drops. They will create space for others to live happy energetic lives.

Over the next decade, the media for distributed work will get dramatically better. Today’s platforms have established the basic connections, but there is so much that will be improved. Digital media will amplify our personal agility in remarkable ways.

For example, a Duke University neurobiology study⁸ found that paraplegics who have been told that they would never walk again are using brain-machine interfaces with a virtual reality interface to control their legs. The goal is to regain mobility, strength, and independence. This is an example of personal physical agility at a very basic level. The future will be a mix of superminds and super bodies, requiring a high level of mental and physical agility to adapt to any situation.

As command-and-control structures give way to shape-shifting braids, people will be able to step outside the confines of traditional fixed organizational structures and cultivate the crowd’s collective intelligence for inspired action. Agile resilient offices will not be easy though. Periods of confusion will cloud the path to achieving breakthroughs. People must learn to maintain their own emotional stability, mindful not to succumb to drowning in attempts to analyze everything. Staying buoyant will be essential, and gaming provides a way to practice.

Gameful Engagement for Readiness

Gameful engagement has evolved from something purely recreational to a powerful organizing tool. Gaming requires personal agility and nimble thinking along with a willingness to reconnect with play. Gameful engagement is emotionally laden attention, which is very similar to the definition of a good story. In a game, however, you get to be in the story.

As neuroscientist Andrew Huberman describes, play is a biological need that is regulated by homeostasis, just like food and water.⁹ Play allows the brain to test contingencies in different roles to shape your personal-play identity.¹⁰ Play and tinkering in low-risk environments triggers neuroplasticity for developing new capabilities. Online gaming environments can help to improve skills like creating organizations or cooperating with other individuals and teams. Thinking futureback, what we think of as gaming today will be the most powerful learning medium in history.

In the future an agile shape-shifting organization will be a blended reality of both physical and virtual communities. This combination will demand an experience that has social effects and provides all participants with more agency in accomplishing tasks. In effect, the agile organization will need a new kind of office.

Gameful cooperation enables us to experiment with co-creating impossible futures. Accelerated by a new generation of gamers growing into leadership positions, gameful¹¹ literacies will influence ways of collaborating, and organizing, in every industry. Whether online or face-to-face, gaming is redefining how we connect and what we do together, which will redefine the future of an organization. Since these platforms will operate as both safe havens and combative spaces in continual flux at any given moment in time, organizing people will also be hyperfluid, expansive, and sometimes fickle.

The player networks in the book and movie called Ready Player One show how a complex and messy assembly of players can call gaming networks their new social home. Whether in a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game like League of Legends or in a multiplayer online Battle Arena like Fortnight, or a sandbox game without boundaries like Minecraft, these places “capture the social experience.”¹² In these platforms, players create squads, sports teams, or parties to cooperate by real-time communication. Driven by an intent to win, such player networks increasingly resemble purpose-driven communities in the physical world.

In the world of gaming, agile cohorts can be built rapidly to create pop-up communities centered around core values. To encourage a positive culture, gaming companies have codes of conduct to “create communities of positive play”¹³ by “providing an inclusive gaming environment where everyone, anywhere . . . can have fun while feeling safe and respected.”¹⁴

Voluntary Fear Engagement

Office shock will come loaded with surprises, some of which will be frightening. Astronaut Kayla Barron said, while aboard the International Space Station, “It’s more important to be brave than fearless.”¹⁵ In the officeverse, where technology empowers multiple identities, you will be able to write your own story. You can experience what it would be like as a human working for robots, like in the popular VR game Job Simulator.¹⁶ Players can try out jobs and learn what they like and don’t like, experience discomfort in low-risk ways.

Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, for example, there were prescient war gaming scenarios about terrorists pirating commercial aircraft and flying them into buildings, but nobody in leadership positions imagined that those scenarios were possible—so they weren’t taken seriously. There was little imagination and preparation for this scenario until after the attack.

Voluntary fear exposure—think of it as gaming with possible futures—allows players to experience frightening scenarios in low-risk ways to become more future-ready. Futureback thinking is a kind of voluntary fear exposure. War gaming allows players to experience being killed without having to die. This technique is a therapy used by psychologists to help people confront their fears. It is a safe environment in which to experience interaction with something that in real life may be terrifying, for example, fear of flying or fear of spiders. But it can be used through gaming to create a new and unanticipated world of the future to experiment with and experience new ways of working and living.

Simulation and gaming are excellent ways to practice in low-risk ways. As futurists Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan said: “It is better to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality.”¹⁷

Dunagan proposed the idea of a Global Simulation Corps for youth service to allow young people to game possible futures—including impossible futures—to prepare for the future.

Simulations are models of reality that help people prepare for possible futures, and the most ambitious of these attempts to model large complete systems—even entire economies or ecosystems.¹⁸

Thinking futureback will help develop clarity of direction about where, when, and why we work, but we need to stay very agile about how we get to that future. We will have to prototype our way out of the noisy and threatening present.

Gaming for the Future

At Institute for the Future, we use scenarios and gaming to probe impossible futures, focusing on the importance of surprise. As we think futureback about offices and officing, how can we prepare ourselves to be surprised and hone our agility? Scenarios, simulations, and games allow us to prepare to be surprised, to think the unthinkable. Scenarios allow us to probe impossible futures and experience them in low-risk ways. Simulations and games allow all people to be inside their scenarios, to practice leadership in low-risk ways. Scenarios use characters and dialogue to bring the future to life. As in world building, character development and dialogue are critical to making the scenarios vivid and engaging.

Virtual simulations are being used increasingly for skills training and encourage lifelong learning. For example, VR simulations prepare members of fire and rescue services for safely fighting fires and rescuing endangered citizens,¹⁹ including learning CPR.²⁰ Cybersecurity simulation training is a way to accurately test how your organization responds to simulated cyberattacks. Police officers at the Mountain View, California, police department apply state-of-the-art neuroscience research to a combination of virtual reality and biometric devices to “give officers individual ways to improve the ways in which they respond to calls.”²¹

Gaming in low-risk simulated environments allows us to learn how to organize in anticipation of the surprises and futures that we may perceive as impossible.

Gameful engagement will empower profound learning experiences. From prototyping store designs to troubleshooting industrial systems to training on-the-ground workers, play in this playground will trigger neuroplasticity at a scale never before possible. Gaming will be the nuclear core of building agile mindsets and organizations.

Develop Your Own Flexive Intent

We suggest the term flexive intent²² to describe how to coordinate with clarity. By flexive, we mean pliable and responsive—not rigid or brittle. Imagine a fishnet lying on a dock. Pick up one node in the net and a temporary hierarchy is created. Put that node down and pick up another node and another temporary hierarchy forms. By intent, we mean being clear about direction. Intent is commitment to a direction of change and possibly an outcome.

In the VUCA world, leaders must be very clear about their intention, but very flexible about how that intent might be achieved on a day-to-day basis. Flexive intent opens opportunities to adapt the course of action in response to ever-changing circumstances.

Synchronizing with others—characterized by a common language, shared stories, heightened empathy, and communal resilience—will move members of an agile collective to synchronized action to co-create better futures for working and living.

Office shock is an opportunity to rethink your organizational purpose for employees, shareholders, and stakeholders of all kinds as well as your collective purpose for society at large. Look inside and outside your organization. Partners will want win-win opportunities, so the critical success factor analysis (see chapter 11) will help you decide first what is most important to your organization. Expect that different organizations will have different critical success factors, which will make coordination between partners more challenging, but more important for achieving shared success.

Mazzucato recommended that the European Union launch concrete, ambitious, targeted, inspirational missions.²³ Missions are inherently futureback. They are projects targeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with a focus on social impact. Denmark, for example, prevented any companies that use tax havens from receiving stimulus money. France required that airlines could not get stimulus funding unless they showed that they had reduced their carbon footprint. The European Union has a mission to have one hundred carbon neutral cities. To achieve these missions there will be many projects. Projects must include new social contracts with inclusive and sustainable conditions. What Mazzucato calls “missions” are based on a futureback view of what needs to be done and are good examples of flexive intent.

In the future, command and control will be out. Flexive intent will be in.

Your Choices on the Spectrum of Agility

Making choices on the Spectrum of Agility, and mobilizing for collective action, will be dependent on coordinating with clarity. With greater agility, people in shape-shifting organizations can focus on the cross-pollination of ideas that not only strengthen interconnections and sustainability but also require a fundamental shift in mindset, behavior, and culture. This spectrum requires close synchronization between the individuals in the office and the organization to achieve the agility required for better decision-making to lead to better futures for working and living.

As you think about your own personal story across this spectrum, consider these questions:

1. How might you illustrate your story about the Spectrum of Agility?

2. How have you thought about moving your personal behavior away from the efficiency/effectiveness model and toward a model of increased agility and resilience?

3. Gaming skills will be well developed in the digital-native members of the workforce, but what about everyone else? How will you and your organization use gaming to increase your own resilience?

4. How will the lessons learned through gaming be translated into actionable tasks and processes?

5. As a leader in an organization, how will you enable distributed authority?