Month: January 2014

This past week I've come across several pieces concerned with either new or emerging forms of organization design. What follows are some examples:

The latest MIT Challenge is 'The Unlimited Human Potential Challenge'. This makes the point that:

'The Social Web and other digital technologies and platforms offer a robust set of alternatives to industrial-era forms of organizing. We now can imagine organizations

• where coordination happens without centralization
• where power is the product of contribution rather than position,
• where the wisdom of the many trumps the authority of the few,
• where novel viewpoints get amplified rather than squelched,
• where communities form spontaneously around shared interests,
• where opportunities to "opt-in" blur the line between vocation and hobby, where titles and credentials count for less than value-added,
• where performance is judged by your peers
• where influence comes from sharing information, not from hoarding it.'

Challenge organizers are 'seeking the most progressive practices and innovative ideas for unleashing human capability to produce radically new approaches to organizing, competing, and creating advantage.'

This sounds tremendously upbeat and worth going for and they have an example of someone who is thinking in this direction. Her idea is:

The Mesh
'For Lisa Gansky, that future is all about sharing. The Sharing Economy, what Lisa calls "the Mesh," is taking root around the world in the form of thousands of businesses and organizations that understand and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile, location-based technology, social networks, and an evolving ethos of community and citizenship.

The Mesh isn't just about offering consumers more choices, more tools, more information, and more power-—it's also fundamentally transforming what it means to win, the nature of competition, and how value is created. Just as in kindergarten, sharing is not an optional activity. The Sharing Economy is infiltrating every realm of endeavor with inventive solutions in sync with the values of community, connection, sustainability, generosity, quality, and simplicity.'

The Mesh idea of everyone sharing is great but contrast it with Eric Schmidt's view (he is the Google Chairman) that:

New technologies were creating "lots of part-time work and growth in caring and creative industries [but] the problem is that the middle class jobs are being replaced by service jobs."
He went on to say that governments needed to invest in education systems to improve skill levels and human cognition. "It is pretty clear that work is changing and the classic nine to five job is going to have to be redefined. Without significant encouragement, this will get worse and worse."

If there is job replacement (very likely in my view) and all sorts of new skills are called for what would things look like in a 'Wirearchy'? Wirearchy is 'an emergent organizing principle that informs the ways that purposeful human activities and the structures in which they are contained is evolving from top-down direction and supervision (hierarchy's command-and-control) to champion-and-channel … championing ideas and innovation, and channeling time, energy, authority and resources to testing those ideas and the possibilities for innovation carried in those ideas … through connection and collaboration … taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.'

So how do we take individual and collective responsibility rather than relying on those with traditional hierarchical status to be responsible? Maybe we'll learn something from Tony Hsieh (CEO Zappos) bold move into Holacracy. John Bunch, the Zappos person leading the move into holacracy explains what it is on the Zappos Insight blog:

'The HolacracyOne refers to Holacracy as a "distributed authority" system, but I think it goes further. It is a system which incorporates: distributed accountability, authority, and leadership.

First, it distributes accountability. It allows each person to understand clearly who is expected to do what throughout the organization.

After that understanding is gained, Holacracy distributes authority. The authority distributed is to make whatever decisions each role filler deems will best fulfill the accountability, or responsibilities, of each role.

Distribution of accountability and authority, taken together, enable something very powerful: distributed leadership.'

But will a distributed leadership system work in a 'micro-multinational' start-up which is, according to the Economist article, 'in a constant feedback loop very different from the old start-up model of 'build it and they will come'. Now start-ups 'should start with a "minimum viable product", or MVP, a sort of trial balloon to gauge the audience's interest. They should always test their assumptions, aiming for "validated learning". And if their strategy does not work, they should "pivot": in essence, throw in the towel and start again with a different product.'

A one person start-up might cope with this fine but how about if they are in an 'ecosystem', a term for economic clusters, that some describe as 'made up of "domains", including markets, policy and culture. [And] others describe as collections of actors that play certain roles, such as providing talent, finance and infrastructure. Yet others talk about them as a set of "resources" entrepreneurs can draw on.'

And what happens in a more established company if they are trying to compete with these pivoting micro-multinationals? Here we can look to Tesla and Adobe for possible learning (about what to do and not do). These two companies have changed their business models in order to compete more via 'continuous feedback' but as an unintended consequence appear to be alienating their customers – much as Netflix did when it changed its business model in 2011. In Netflix's case, however, it seems to have managed a bounce-back perhaps because 'It went beyond its original capabilities and developed skills to win in online streaming. Specifically, Netflix decided to compete with content providers like HBO and develop its own content.'

This sounds good, but read on and you'll find that this commentator on Netflix puts its success in overcoming customer disillusion down to Reed Hastings, the CEO, explaining 'What makes Hastings so special is that he has been able to maintain the tireless reinvention that is required of a startup in the context of a publicly-traded company. A big part of that is that he is a founder -— like Amazon's Jeff Bezos – who has been able to go the distance of starting a company and running it after it went public.' So not really distributed leadership then?

Or maybe the Netflix bounce-back is due to their 'travel light' talent management approach which apparently makes the human capital side of organizations more agile. Basically it is centred 'on "temporary" relationships between individuals and organizations. Responsibility for an individual's career and skills shifts from the organization to the individual. Employment is "guaranteed" for only as long as an individual has the skills the organization needs.'

I'm not sure that 'travel light' is a new form of organization design as it seems to bear a close resemblance to the old fashioned 'hire and fire', with strong implications around Schmidt's point reported by the BBC that the jobs problem will be "the defining one" for the next two-three decades.

Schmidt said given the constant development of new technology, more and more middle class workers would lose their jobs, and those that had jobs would have stagnant wages resulting in global economic damage because according to Business Insider's report 'the middle-class folks whose wages are stagnant are the global economy's biggest spenders. And when they don't have money to spend, their lack of spending hurts not just them but all the companies that depend on them for revenue.'

Further 'The stagnation in middle-class wages is not just a middle-class problem. It's an economic problem. And it's one of the main reasons that global economic growth is so lousy.'

This brought me to thinking about what Frans van Houten, CEO, Royal Philips advocates – A circular economic system which 'would ensure that products were designed to be part of a value network, within which the reuse and refurbishment of products, components, and materials would ensure the continual re-exploitation of resources.'

Apart from the delightful understatement that 'building a circular economy would require a fundamental restructuring of global value chains' (not a small piece of organization design work) Van Houten notes that 'At the same time, consumers must be open to using products that they do not own. 'Because the circular economy is inherently systemic, it can succeed only if all stakeholders co-design, co-create, and co-own products and services.'

So here I am at the end of the week considering the viability of 'The Mesh', Wirearchy', 'Holacracy', 'Micro-multinationals', 'Ecosystems', 'Travel light' talent management, and a circular economic system comprising value networks and inherent systems.

Maybe it's time for a cup of tea and a scone consumed while I am considering whether they're basically all saying we (individual and/or organization) need to share more, keep learning and developing skills, pay close attention to what's going on, and respond appropriately to our changing context. What's your view? Let me know.

During the past week someone alerted me to the Oxford Futures Forum. I'd not heard of it before but I'm constantly looking for perspectives and insights on what the future might hold. Since all organizations I work with are looking to be 'agile', 'scalable up or down', 'adaptable', 'future fit', and similar words/phrases – it would be good to know what they think they might be facing in order to meet the future. When organizational members say 'agile' they are generally neither talking 'Agile' or 'Lean' in terms of specific methodologies nor why these two techniques might go together. They are talking about a more nebulous organizational capability required in turbulent situations. It is described in an article Journey towards agility: the agile wheel explored as 'proactivity, adaptability, flexibility, speed, learning and skills to provide strategically driven and effectively implemented waves of change. This [agility] is a dynamic capability, and can be defined as "the organisation's capacity to gain competitive advantage by intelligently, rapidly and proactively seizing opportunities and reacting to threats" (Bessant et al., 1999).

It may not be sensible to assume that current turbulent situations will continue into the future but this does seem to be a generally accepted assumption. In 2012, for example, Accenture produced a report Corporate Agility: six ways to make volatility your friend' with a 12-point 'Agility Checklist'. The white paper is clear that 'in today's chronically uncertain markets, agility is an exceptionally powerful competitive weapon.' As an example, Troy Carter, Lady Gaga's ex-manager, talks about this uncertainty in relation to the music industry in an interview:

"Everybody should be nervous," he says, matter-of-factly, the Philly accent still detectable. "With the music industry we've always had technological change, whether it was disruption from eight-track to cassette, or cassette to CD, CD to download, download to streaming. The difference now is how fast it's happening. We're seeing new technology pop up every few months like this." Carter clicks his fingers. "I sit on the edge of my seat. I try to live around the corner just to get a sneak peak, to have some sense of what's happening. The industry [needs] to be very aware, concerned and curious about everything on the way." Among the changes he foresees: albums released solely as apps; unprecedented data harvesting; more African Americans in Silicon Valley; concert holograms; massively bigger audiences; and the triumph of the perpetually online, engaged digital star.

The thing that interested me about the Oxford Futures Forum is that the aim of its 2014 meeting is to 'join two established communities of thought and practice – the design research community and the scenario planning practice and research community with, among other purposes, those of:

• Forging and supporting an international community of future-minded practices aimed at stimulating actionable, impactful knowledge;
• Identifying and investigating academic and practitioner interests at the forefront of scenarios and design, and relating them to each other;
• Uncovering and pushing the boundaries of scenarios practices and theory, to clarify and extend their effectiveness through critical review and linking with other fields.'

The intent is not to make specific predictions or forecasts about the future. Philip Tetlock (a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley and a commentator on forecasting) remarking on these says that

'we found that our experts' predictions barely beat random guesses – the statistical equivalent of a dart-throwing chimp – and proved no better than predictions of reasonably well-read non-experts.'

So clearly there is no point in suggesting that organizations design themselves specifically to meet, for example, prediction no 5 in the World Futures Society top the forecasts for 2014 and beyond, that 'Buying and owning things will go out of style'. On this prediction the Society says that, 'The markets for housing, automobiles, music, books, and many other products show a common trend: Younger consumers opting to rent or subscribe to pay-per-use arrangements instead of buying and owning the physical products. Shared facilities will overtake established offices, renting units will become more common than owning a home, and sales of books and music might never become popular again.'

Rather, the Oxford Futures Forum in 2014 seeks to make use of scenarios to test out various future possibilities. The approach works for products, services and, I am suggesting, the design of organizations. As the Forum website says:

A designer designs things for future situations, and if paying attention to the context of the design, would consider scenarios as a plausible set of contextual conditions of these situations.
In practice these future situations unfold; scenarios help to explore how they may depart from how any designer imagined things would play out. In this way, designers and strategists are in the same situation, and can use scenarios in comparable ways.
From the perspective of scenarios scholarship and practice, scenario sets render explicit the assumptions a design and/or a designer have made of the future context. They ascertain if alternative plausible contexts need to be considered to ensure the design works as intended.

On this basis, think how working with scenarios could be effective in designing agile organizations. It seems to me that there's a big opportunity to use scenario work in organization design to a much greater extent than I've seen done. (Shell has a scenarios team but I don't believe it is using its work to think through the on-going design of the organization)

Supposing buying and owning things actually does go out of style, as a recent Economist article The Sharing Economy also implies – what repercussions would this have on any organization that sells products or services? We already know some of the clashes of interest that have followed the introduction of the taxi service Uber – should taxi companies have been working on this as a potential scenario a few years ago and have had a more agile response to it than litigation?

The 5th Global Drucker Forum held in November 2013, on the theme of Managing Complexity, picked up on some of the issues associated with this increasing unpredictability of what organizations face. And Roger Martin in his conference blog In the Flow: Networked for Complexity points out in a thought provoking piece.

'Hierarchical organisational models and process-driven working practices are struggling to cope with the chaos and complexity this paradigm shift [of industrial practices ceding to knowledge based work] has introduced to the workplace.'

In following a link in this article I found another blog that looks at one aspect of this paradigm shift asking the question 'How do traditional, regulated industries cope with social engagement?' The blog writer's answer to the question is 'Not so well, as it seems. In a series of two posts, we will explore the reasons that hold those industries back from becoming truly social (part 1), taking Pharma as an example. Between real constraints and irrational fears, various avenues of action exist (part 2) to seize the business potential of social engagement.'

On the assumption that turbulence, paradigm shift and uncertainty are giving rise to new thinking, new types of work and new models in which to do work is it in fact possible for traditional well established organizations to change their design to meet this type of challenge and if so specifically how? I think this is where scenario work could give pointers towards answering the question.

Government is one type of organization that might benefit from designing via scenario work. During last week, I was working with some civil servants and we were discussing agility in governments, pointing out that policies, frameworks and other enshrined infrastructures make it very difficult to make government agile in the type of way spelled out as necessary in the World Economic Forum, Future of Government report. The report notes that:

Governments in the future will need to adapt and continuously evolve to create value. They need to stay relevant by being responsive to rapidly changing conditions and citizen expectations, and build capacity to operate effectively in complex, interdependent networks of organizations and systems across the public, private and non-profit sectors to co-produce public value. As recommended in this report, what is needed today is flatter, agile, streamlined, and tech-enabled (FAST) government.

It seems that these civil servants, and organization design practitioners in established organizations would be well advised to put resources and effort into developing scenarios which help them understand how to design the agile government and other enterprises now required.

What's your view on the value of scenario planning in helping design agile organizations? Let me know.

I have been invited to write a piece on the topic of 'Design and form: Organizational' for the 2nd edition of Elseviers Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. As I said in a previous blog piece on the topic 'The chapters are intended to summarize the state of current knowledge on the subject, draw links to other subjects, and explain major directions for developing new knowledge.'

Aiming to describe the current state of 'knowledge' of organization design and form is problematic as it implies there is generally accepted agreement on it. This is not the case, partly because 'knowledge' is context driven – what we know in one situation may not hold true in another, and partly because 'knowledge' is interpreted through the meaning-making processes of the 'knower'. An academic in the field of organization design and form will have a very different 'state of current knowledge' from the line manager struggling with the poor performance of his/her department, or the shareholder anxiously watching an organization's share price rise or fall.

Beyond this difficulty with the word 'knowledge' the word 'current' state' suggests that there has been a past state of knowledge that is 'true' and a future state of knowledge that could be predicted or at least guessed at, and a current state that is 'now'. Taking the idea that the state of past knowledge on the subject of organizational design and form could be articulated is similar to taking the idea that history can be told as a unified story. But as John Arnold explains in his book History, A Very Short Introduction

'Historians cannot tell every story from the past … there are many more things that could be said … Historians inevitably decide which things can or should be said.' He makes the point that 'history is true in that it must agree with the evidence, the facts that it calls upon … at the same time it is an interpretation, placing these facts within a wider context or narrative. … The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, unco-ordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom.'

So it is with organization design and form. Organizations are 'maelstroms' but until the early 1990s organizational theory was predominantly rooted in an (open) systems perspective (e.g. Katz and Kahn 1978) which led to a view that in order to function effectively they needed 'fit', 'congruence', 'alignment' and 'equilibrium' between various organizational components (e.g. Lawrence and Lorsch 1967). Common models underpinning this open systems theory of organization include Galbraith's Star Model, Nadler and Tushman's 1977 congruence model (see reference at end), and McKinsey's 7-S model.

Challenging the prevailing open systems perspective Gareth Morgan (1997) in his book Images of Organization presented eight images (metaphors) of organization: as machines (the systems perspective), organisms, cultures, brains, psychological prisons, instruments of domination, flux and transformation and political systems. Each one of these offers a multiplicity of ways and related theories in which to interpret an organization. For example, as he explains in his article 'Reflections on Images of Organization and Its Implications for Organization and Environment'.

'When you view organizations as brains, you find yourself thinking about information processing systems, learning capacities and disabilities, right and left brain intelligence, holographic capacity distribution, and a host of images that can take a brain-like thinking beyond the spongy mass of material that comprises an actual brain.'

It seems to me that the eight generative metaphors that Morgan presents are reasonable proxies for the 'state of current knowledge' about organization design and form. We can see each in the work of competing academics and practitioners. Each metaphor offers a path to theory construction and each a set of practitioner tools and intervention approaches. On this basis the state of current knowledge on organization design and form is fragmented: there are many competing positions and contested theories each with adherents and detractors.

The value of recognizing that there is no unifying theory (or practice) of organization design and form (in the same way that one can recognize that there are different perspectives and interpretations of history, even given the 'facts') is that it 'shows the inherent incompleteness of any particular point of view.' As Morgan remarks holding only one perspective as 'a way of seeing becomes a way of not seeing; and that any attempt to understand the complex nature of organizations (as with any other complex subject) always requires an open and pluralistic approach based on the interplay of multiple perspectives.'

The idea of 'multiple perspectives' of organization design and form is brought alive by the use of metaphor and storytelling – the latter much as historian John Arnold demonstrates – to present, interpret and make meaning of a variety of states of current 'knowledge'.

This approach was demonstrated in the Organizational Design Community's 2013 Annual Conference. As Alan Meyer reported participants there (I was not present) 'faced the challenge of making organization design knowledge actionable'. In his useful article Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge And Action on the conference, he comments 'my overall assessment is that design oriented scholars are in the process of shifting from one integrated set of assumptions to another somewhat more amorphous set of assumptions.' He arrived at this assessment by listening to conference participants telling their various stories.

He presents three tables that illustrate the shift in assumptions. The first table considers established versus emerging assumptions about organization design, the second table shows established and emerging assumptions about design knowledge, and the third presents established and emerging assumptions on organization design action. Meyer's conclusion is that seeking to make design knowledge actionable is nudging the community away from a set of assumptions based on linearity and equilibrium (open systems theory, and toward a new set of assumptions based on emergence, self-organization, and non-linearity (possibly multiple theories).

The inherent danger of moving from one set of assumptions towards another is that the emerging assumptions become the new 'way it is', leaving no room for competing and equally valid approaches. In table 2, for example (about design knowledge) one of the established assumptions presented is that 'design knowledge achieves validity through nomological rigor, operational definition of variables, and documentation of causal relationships between carefully measured variables, as demonstrated by statistical analysis'. The emerging assumption related to this is that 'design knowledge achieves pragmatic validity through communication in clear and evocative language, should often be elucidated in narrative form, and benefits from illustration in pictorial diagrams'. It is easy to imagine that quantitative information becomes abandoned in favor of qualitative information.

As Gareth Morgan illustrates through metaphor and John Arnold (the historian) tells us we are dealing with 'maelstroms' when we work with organizations. Recognizing the limitations of past and current interpretations of 'states of knowledge' we might consider thinking not in terms of emerging assumptions – unless are going to question them, but rather taking a path that Chris Rodgers talks about as he aimed to 'clarify my thoughts on how to reframe the dominant – yet limiting – either-or perspective that dominates much conventional management thinking.' He has 'since developed a view of paradox that seeks to accommodate the positive aspects of contending ideas, views or values … and which acknowledges the potentially negative aspects of otherwise well-intended policy shifts.' (I mentally substituted the word 'assumptions' for 'policy' here).

Rather than thinking that one metaphor, or theoretical approach is 'better' than another, or one story is the 'truth' and another isn't it would make for richer approaches to organization design and the ongoing development of the 'state of current knowledge' to work with the paradoxes and the range of interpretations available.

These derive from what Ralph Stacey describes as 'complex responsive processes of interaction between people taking the form of conversation, power relations, ideologies, choices and intentions'. The social processes are inherent in each of the eight images/metaphors of organization, and in any account of history. They foster a range of interpretation about 'what is' (or was). None of the metaphors is 'right' but all of them have merit. Being aware of, and arguing about, the merits of each creates possibilities of changing things and is likely to give rise to new generative metaphors and new theories of organizational design and form.

What's your view that the eight metaphors and their related theories are useful and describe the current state of knowledge of organization design and form? Let me know.

NOTE: Morgan has suggested another metaphor he would put in if he had the opportunity: Organizations as Media.

References
Galbraith, J. (2012). The Future of Organization Design. Journal Of Organization Design, 1(1), 3-6. doi:10.7146/jod.1.1.6332
Meyer, A. (2013). Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge And Action. Journal Of Organization Design, 2(3), 16-22. doi:10.7146/jod.2.3.15576
Morgan, G. (2011). Reflections on Images of Organization and Its Implications for Organization and Environment. Organization Environment. Vol. 24 no. 4 459-478
Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1999). The organization of the future: Strategic imperatives and core competencies for the 21st century. Organizational Dynamics, 28(1), 45-60.
Nadler, D., & Tushman, M. L. (1977). A congruence model for diagnosing organizational behavior. Columbia University, Graduate School of Business.
Stacey, R. (2012) The Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the challenge of complexity, London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-53118-4 (Extract from the Appendix)

For various reasons I have bought a new computer. The one I settled on is a Microsoft Surface Pro 2. I took ownership of it on December 31. It's only January 5 now, and as I think back over the last five days I feel as if I've been through a rapid fire personal learning mill which must be good practice for me in my role of 'change agent'. Here's the story so far (as I type I am downloading Adobe Acrobat XI which is going very slowly).

For a while I've been intrigued watching people take handwritten notes on tablets and endured some scoffs at my old fashioned pencil and paper approach so I was ready to take the plunge into a different experience. And I didn't want to have two devices – a tablet and a laptop. At a conference I sat next to someone from Microsoft who has a Surface Pro. He gave me what I thought was a realistic lowdown on it, including some of the things he didn't like about it: only one USB port, for example. But he seemed very happy with it and assured me that he would not get commission if I bought one as he is not a sales person according to organizational role definition. I formed a good impression of its capabilities

• Learning point one: listen to an existing user's experience and ask lots of questions.

Not to be taken in by first impressions I did some research on tablets, evaluating the possibilities, there are lots to choose from. I also consulted with various other people including a computer whizz who said:

I reviewed both the ThinkPad tablet 2 and the Surface Pro 2. My vote is for the Surface Pro 2. I prefer the Core i5 processors to the intel atom processor from a performance standpoint and also considering you will need to install additional applications you will require for work such as Microsoft office and adobe reader or acrobat and other office applications that may become necessary for your work. It is more pricy but I'm confident you will get a better user experience with it.

• Learning point two: don't go with first impressions, dig around for more information, challenge one's assumptions.

The reviews were generally in favor and the comments from both the reviewers and the users warned me ahead of time that Windows 8.1 is 'very different': reviewers have hosts of complaints and nitpicks about it which they are hoping Microsoft will listen and respond to. So I was pre-armed with that knowledge – which hasn't made things easier but at least I knew.

• Learning point three: Try and visualize what you might be letting yourself in for, be prepared for things not to go as hoped for. Look at the gains not the losses.

Then the crunch time came. I had handed over the cash, and got the device. I'd got a list of everything I wanted transferred from my Dell Latitude to the Surface. I'm always very anxious at this point of transfer (just as in an organization design project) – it's when things get lost or fall between the cracks – like I didn't realized that the reader that reads pdfs on the Surface doesn't have any editing facility. Adobe wasn't transferred over. (Hence my downloading it now). But it seems that just about everything else was ok and ready to roll. The computer whizz, mentioned above, who did the transfer has supported my migration through several computers and knows my anxieties. He's incredibly calm. He installed team viewer as a crutch and left with the instruction to call him if I needed help. I warned him I probably would!

• Learning point four: Do some preparation, have support at the ready and don't be afraid to ask for help

Transitioning over initially involved my having the Dell Latitude running alongside the Surface. I wanted to be sure I had (another) safety net. Why? Because learning a new system is frustrating – I needed to step aside at points and go back to familiarity. There were a lot of things on the Surface that I couldn't work out – like making the text larger and how to toggle between the desktop and the start screen. I contemplated giving up on the whole machine and found out that I had a grace period in which I could return it without any penalty. That's still a possibility but it's receding.

• Learning point five: Take breaks from learning a new system. It's frustrating, time consuming and tiring but don't give up. Persistence works.

On day two however I decided to go cold turkey and switch off my Dell and put it away. So far I haven't got it out and I've been getting on well. Each time I reach a stumbling block I have googled 'how do I … ' and found an answer in one of the forums, or on YouTube – there hasn't been a question so far that I've put that someone else hadn't wrestled with which made me feel a whole lot less stupid. I'm delighted and surprised by the numbers of people who are willing to put out their queries, answer other people's and generally contribute to the learning process.

• Learning point six: Take the plunge and let go of the safety net(s). There are others out there learning and it's fun to feel part of a group feeling their way through new territory – does this qualify as 'joint sense-making' in OD jargon? (Note: I didn't want to keep pestering the computer whizz).

The Surface has a small 10.6 inch screen and for the first time ever I decided I needed a monitor for home use. I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to read the screen for long periods of time e.g. when traveling. Getting the monitor also involved getting the connector which meant more cash outlay and time to go and buy the items.

• Learning point seven: Be ready to adapt to the new situation and also be aware that it may take an unforeseen investment but ultimately be worth it. (I'm hoping so!)

Now it's the end of the fifth day in and I'm feeling more confident and on the plus side it's certainly going to be easier to carry a 2 pound device than a 7 pound one. Tomorrow I'm going to tackle learning the handwriting input piece.

• Learning point eight: Be willing to carry on learning.

So this week I've experienced what people in change situations experience. OK, it wasn't a colossal change but it had all the hallmarks of what it feels like going through a specific change experience and a good reminder for me. When was your last change experience? What did you learn? Let me know.