corp

you can't heal a company

lemme be more precise:

you can't take the outline of a company, understand it as a body, and then say "I'm gonna heal that body" and then do it by talking to that body at body-level

but you can declare a new definition for "body"

what if "body" meant "networks of fully trusted nodes, like local members-only DMZs, places that are already in natural health", and the outline of that body is the border of that network?

what if you looked at the company through that definitional lens instead, and saw it as a mass of already-healthy bodies? but being honest about that - knowing that not all of those networks will be visible, and not all of the groups you would like to identify as a body (by this definition) will qualify

knowing that sometimes a trust-network will look like a single person whose work-self trusts their home-self, or a single person whose individual-contributor-self trusts their manager-self

the org chart cannot be assumed to correlate to this novel map

critical and helpful quirk: individual agents in the company are inevitably - and often - going to be members of multiple such trust-networks, and occasionally trust-networks that are in direct conflict with each other

if you are one such agent, your primary project is to unify your conflicting memberships. this is strategic, and can be done strategically, deliberately, step by step. "mergers" is a whole thing in business already. this is about you merging your trust-network memberships. as a result, the networks involved gain a frictionless bridge in the form of you.

then, just .. let the clock run, and see what you get

this is incremental health-development at an organizational scale

if you have broad nominal authority, your primary project is to empower multi-membership agents to be after this primary project, and to trust them. (abandon your timelines, but not your projects: trust-network-membership-reconciliation at the level of the individual agent can only happen through the work; it cannot happen instead of the work.)

I write this as the ceo of a company whose sole organizing principle is "recursive health". the company grew out of a single project whose own top priority was its own health. you can't size up my company and draw a health-circle(tm) of your own and go "okay how do I draw the rest of the owl". you gotta start from what's already healthy, being incredibly honest about it, and then ... well, yeah, invite those complex trust-network-bodies to identify themselves, and tend to them, not to whatever you were using as your previous definition of the body corporate

does it help that any element of risk is by definition outside the scope of this exercise? that instead you can adjust the scope of the project such that it is already complete now in a way that will just keep on being complete, just deepening in its completion over time?

trade-off, stated starkly because this trade anchors the whole thing: this approach definitely results in comprehensive health over time. it definitely doesn't give you any other guarantees about what you're going to get. pick one: (a) health, or (b) the idea that you might (might) achieve a certain shape, or even just a shape you can understand from where you are now

secret entrance: any trust-network can start this kind of thing at any time without any external agent's permission or buy-in. a trust-network being what it is, adoption of this strategy is by definition safe to float and consider, because you are already trusted in the place where the conversation would happen.

hint: if this sounds stressful, your trust-network map isn't accurate yet. keep looking. :) there's always a place to start. the place might be small (prob should be, actually), and in that place it is already done. by definition. this is not a hand-wavy trick, this is the whole strategy.