Shark skin is a sheet of teeth: millimetre-scale placoid denticles, each with an enamel crown, dentine core and pulp cavity, rooted in the dermis and oriented from nose to tail so that one way feels smooth and the other rasps like sandpaper. In fast swimmers such as the shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus and other pelagic […]
Most organizations eventually require radical transformation. They drift into and through forms of neurosis, clinging to outdated responses while the environment around them changes. A gap opens between what was, what is, and what is becoming, and it is within this gap that organizational structures harden into habits that no longer serve their purpose. In […]
Organizations routinely announce their commitment to transformation, innovation, and adaptability. They build glossy strategies, launch “future-focused” initiatives, and proclaim agility as their core value. Yet in practice, the opposite emerges: the institutions most loudly declaring innovation are often the most rigid. What blocks them is not lack of intelligence, talent, or resources—it is the stifling […]
We keep lying to ourselves about stability. The polite story is that systems aim for balance, that institutions exist to keep things steady, that culture and politics and technology are here to make life manageable. But none of that is quite true. Things don’t hold together because they are stable in any simple sense. They […]
Do not bring in celebrity CEOs or tech demigods expecting salvation. Their job is to extract value, convert resilience into quarterly numbers, and then leave before the smoke clears. The cycle is predictable: hype, short-term metrics, collapse. The organization becomes a ladder, not a habitat. Transformation isn’t about flashy interventions or heroic (ie human, organisational) […]
The relationship of new technologies with sustainable organisational learning and growth is not itself new. It’s a journey of adaptive sociotechnical integration that is as beneficial to consider in the strategic whole as it is mandatory to define and refine in the instrumental parts. What is new is that non-linear effects are inevitable at scale. […]
Cybernetics tends to be as diverse as the spectrum of artefacts, entities and systems to which it intelligibly or contextually applies. If applied to cybersecurity, must cybernetics necessarily internally model and assume at least the level of variety (as complexity, combinatorial entropy) that its object of study asserts? In this case, does cybernetics then acquire […]
Organisations are information and energy-processing systems. Information and energy-processing systems are autonomously oriented (via physics, logic, mathematics) towards low energy states. This orientation or endemic systems -bias towards low energy states bridges inanimate and living systems but may be considered to have obtained a special status in living systems. The differentiator of life in this […]
As technologies and hybrid technology-and-human systems continuously insert themselves into our workflows and thought patterns, we become progressively and perhaps irreversibly beholden to them more than they could ever remain subject to us…
Swimming upstream…
Organisational transformation is not so much about working within the existing rules as it may be about reconfiguring and extending the underlying axioms and rules of organisational structure, information and energy flow such as to generate new rules and new possibilities of organisational structure and system.
…our globally interconnected organisational systems are still attempting to hammer the square peg of analog thinking and management style into the round hole of digital transformation…
Daedelus Kite 