The Model Laid Bare: A Digest of Posts 31 Through 40

This is the fourth in a series of digests, each covering ten posts from this blog, in chronological order. The third digest covered posts 21 through 30, ending on 15 January 2011. This batch spans the remainder of January through to late March 2011 – a period in which the Marshall Model stops being a background presence and steps fully into the foreground. For the first time, the blog devotes sustained attention to explaining the model’s origins, its inner mechanics, and the personal conviction behind it. The voice, already assured, becomes something more: it becomes declarative.

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31. Employees’ Self-confidence – A Cinderella of Organisational Effectiveness (19 January 2011)

Spotlighting a 1994 paper that, as I noted, remained alien to most Analytic-minded organisations even at the time of writing, this post made the case for employee self-confidence as a neglected lever of organisational performance. Crucially, the note to self appended to the post – that this principle applies to peers as much as to subordinates – gave it a reach beyond the purely managerial. The Analytic mindset treats confidence as a personal trait, largely irrelevant to the work. The Synergistic mindset understands it as a systemic condition that can be cultivated or destroyed by the environment in which people work.

32. There’s a Lot of it About (Bullshit) (20 January 2011)

Brief in its own commentary but pointed in its selection, this post amplified an argument about the urgent need for institutional bullshit detection. The observation – that the internet is simultaneously the greatest disseminator and the greatest destroyer of nonsense – felt particularly germane to the worlds of IT, software development, and consulting, where grand claims and borrowed frameworks multiply unchecked. For a blog that had already sharpened its critique of Agile orthodoxy and management fashions, this was a small but apt statement of epistemological values.

33. A Great Example of the Synergistic Mindset in Practice (22 January 2011)

One of the recurring challenges of the Rightshifting project has been making the Synergistic mindset tangible – not an abstraction, but a way of running a real organisation that real people have actually chosen and that has actually worked. This post amplified a first-hand account from the Management Innovation Exchange of one such organisation in its early Synergistic years, and the sheer level of disengagement the author had witnessed in hierarchical organisations before making the leap. A valuable data point, even if – as I noted – I would love to know how things had been going since.

34. Contextualising FlowChain (22 January 2011)

Posted the same day as the preceding entry, this short but significant piece gave my colleague and co-conspirator Grant Rule his first real platform on the blog. Rule’s argument – drawn from his work at SMS Exemplar – was that Agile methods, for all their value, remained fundamentally constrained by their inheritance of the project model: creating and disbanding teams, establishing and abandoning value streams, discarding accumulated know-how at every opportunity. FlowChain, by contrast, pointed toward something closer to genuine continuous flow. The piece served as both an endorsement and a contextualisation, embedding FlowChain in the broader Rightshifting narrative for the first time.

35. The Many Roles in Software Projects (25 February 2011)

The sole post of February, and a deliberately practical one. Prompted by Capers Jones’ observation that many software projects involve over fifty distinct roles, I published a comprehensive catalogue of the roles required in any serious software development effort – from Interaction Designer and Chief Engineer through to Concierge and Team Psychotherapist. The list, originally inspired by Kent Beck’s XP Explained, was intended not as a job-description generator but as a corrective to the Analytic habit of underestimating complexity by treating “the developer” as a monolithic resource. Teams are ecosystems, not headcounts.

36. Rightshifting Transitions (Part 1): Ad-hoc to Analytic (2 March 2011)

The first of a three-part series that finally gave the Marshall Model’s transition zones the extended treatment they deserved. Part 1 examined the journey from the Ad-hoc to the Analytic mindset: the point at which a growing business, overwhelmed by its own informal chaos, begins to impose structure, hierarchy, and accountability. The transition is rarely recognised as such, is traumatic for those accustomed to doing things their own way, and leaves in its wake – if successful – an organisation that is marginally more effective but, as I noted, almost always less human. The retrospective lesson of this transition: the value of discipline.

37. Rightshifting Transitions (Part 3): Synergistic to Chaordic (3 March 2011)

Published a day before Part 2 – an inversion that, in hindsight, rather suits a discussion of Chaordic thinking – this instalment described the rarest and most demanding of the three transitions. The Synergistic organisation that has found its purpose and embedded collaborative self-organisation now faces an even more radical letting-go: the willingness to reconfigure itself almost continuously in pursuit of fleeting commercial opportunities. The Chaordic business treats structural instability not as a crisis but as a natural condition. The retrospective lesson here: the value of positive opportunism. Few businesses ever reach this point; fewer still sustain it.

38. Rightshifting Transitions (Part 2): Analytic to Synergistic (6 March 2011)

The pivot of the series, and the transition most directly relevant to the organisations the blog had been engaging with throughout. The Analytic-to-Synergistic transition requires abandoning not discipline itself, but its traditional manifestations: hierarchy, extrinsic motivation, functional silos, targets, projects, appraisals, coercion. For people who have known only command-driven environments, this can be as disorienting as any earlier transition. But those businesses that make it successfully find a world in which decisions are made collaboratively, value streams replace org charts, and a shared sense of purpose binds everyone. The retrospective lesson: the value of purpose. Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle was cited as a useful companion text.

39. The Rightshifting Ethos (20 March 2011)

The most personal and avowedly values-driven post in this batch. Beginning from a Seth Godin provocation – “say what you believe, and see who follows” – I stated plainly what I believed Rightshifting could mean for individuals and for society: improved health, through reduced job-related stress and greater engagement; improved wealth, through more commercially successful and more equitable organisations; and improved wisdom, through the abandonment of a century of Taylorist management assumptions that had long outlived their usefulness. This was not analysis but declaration. The post closed with an open invitation to join the movement.

40. The Origins of the Marshall Model (25 March 2011)

The most autobiographical post the blog had yet published, and one of the most important in the entire archive. In it, I traced the model’s creation through five “happy accidents”: a late submission to Agile North 2008 that led me to Steve McConnell’s asymmetric bell curve; the audience response that prompted me to categorise the different organisational modes; Dee Hock’s concept of the Chaordic organisation claiming the blank right-hand space on the chart; Carol Dweck’s work on mindset reframing the categories from modes to collective worldviews; and finally the recognition that the overlapping zones between categories were not mere statistical artefacts but the most consequential feature of the whole model – the sites of transition, where the real work of organisational change takes place. The piece concluded with the argument that had been implicit throughout: most organisations remain stuck near the median not because improvement is impossible, but because crossing a transition zone is an order of magnitude harder than incremental improvement, and most organisations never even realise they are standing in one.

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The Model Steps Forward

If the previous batch saw the blog beginning to address different audiences, this one sees it doing something more ambitious: taking the model apart, showing its workings, and reassembling it in public. The transitions series is the most sustained piece of explanatory writing the blog had yet attempted, and the origins post is something rarer still – a moment of genuine intellectual autobiography, in which the author traces not just what the model says but how it came to exist.

Two other notes worth making. First, the Rightshifting Ethos post marks the first time the blog had made an explicitly moral argument for the work – health, wealth, wisdom are not technical claims but human ones. The critique of Agile and the Analytic organisation had always had this moral dimension, but here it was brought fully into the open. Second, the contextualisation of FlowChain alongside the transitions series signals that the blog is no longer just diagnosing the problem; it is beginning, cautiously, to describe what the alternative looks like in practice.

In the next digest, I’ll cover posts 41 through 50, picking up from the Improvement ROI Sawtooth (March 2011) and taking us into the spring and early summer of 2011 – a period of relative quiet in terms of volume, but one in which several of the blog’s most enduring ideas receive their most careful elaboration.

– Bob

From Critique to Framework: A Digest of Posts 21 Through 30

This is the third in a series of digests, each covering ten posts in chronological order. The second digest covered posts 11 through 20, ending in September 2010. This batch spans November 2010 to January 2011 – a period in which the blog’s voice grew more assured, the critique of Agile sharpened into something closer to a full diagnosis, and the Marshall Model’s vocabulary began to crystallise.

21. The State of Agile (1 November 2010)

One of the most substantial posts from this period, and arguably the clearest early articulation of the elephant in the room. I argued that Agile at its most effective had the hallmarks of a social science or organisational psychology phenomenon, and not much at all to do with technical practices. From this perspective, the state of Agile was looking vulnerable – poised less at a tipping point than on a knife-edge. Many adopting organisations reported positive early results, but my work with Rightshifting and the Marshall Model had thrown up a key question: adopting Agile necessitated a new mindset for practitioners, yet most host organisations had a prevailing mindset fundamentally at odds with that requirement.

22. Delivering Software is Easy (13 November 2010)

A post that refused the comfort of ‘I’m all right, Jack’. Yes, there were thousands of folks who could reliably deliver quality software – typically in small shops or cosy enclaves. But there were hundreds of thousands who couldn’t, not because they lacked skill, but because of where they worked, who they worked for, and all the monkey-wrenches and bear traps lurking in their daily routines. And millions more depended on the latter. I introduced the concept of the ‘aspiration gap’ – the gulf between where the majority of software development jobs sit and where developers would actually like to work.

23. Rightshifting and the Senior Management Pitch (21 November 2010)

A practical post responding to folks who said Rightshifting struck a chord with them personally, but that their senior management was the audience that really needed to hear the message. Drawing on Paul DiModica’s ‘Three Box Monty’ presentation technique from Value Forward Selling, I described how to position the presenter as a peer of the decision-makers. I then proposed two variants: a Solutions Focus version (replacing problems with what leading businesses do well) and an Outcomes Focus version (replacing solutions with positive outcomes already seen and desired for the future).

24. Would You Rather Not Know? (5 December 2010)

Some people had been asking me what the point was of knowing about what makes organisations more or less effective, given that many developers and even middle managers felt powerless to change anything. The Marshall Model proposed that an organisation’s collective mindset directly dictated its effectiveness – and that significant improvement required a change in how the organisation looked at the world of work. So was awareness merely a recipe for frustration and learned helplessness? I argued the opposite. Drawing on Carol Dweck’s research into mindset, I suggested that simple awareness of the role mindset plays could help people begin to adjust how they see the world. Ignorance was never the more productive option.

25. #lru2010 Conference Report (18 December 2010)

A report on the first London Rightshifting Unconference, held at London City University on 17 December 2010. Ten attendees – including CTOs, consultants and coaches – spent the afternoon exploring Rightshifting ideas in practice. The sessions included a run-through of core Rightshifting concepts, experience reports from Ant Clay of 21Apps (who had presented the Rightshifting curve to clients that very week, with strikingly positive reception) and Grant Rule of SMS Exemplar, plus a session from Liz Keogh on the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition. The event marked a significant milestone: the Rightshifting ideas were no longer just a blog and a Twitter hashtag – they had become a community gathering in person.

26. Agile/Lean Principles Simply Will Not Scale (29 December 2010)

Amplifying a provocatively titled LinkedIn post, I noted that its argument was broadly congruent with my earlier ‘State of Agile’ piece. The core observation: Agile and Lean development could scale in small, medium and large companies, but they typically wouldn’t. Politics – specifically, the threat that Agile posed to people in unnecessary positions – was the root cause. Agile exposes waste, and if your job is pointless, you’re in trouble. So those whose positions were threatened worked to ensure management didn’t buy in.

27. To Deliver the Project at Hand, or Improved Project-delivering Capability for the Future? (30 December 2010)

Responding to Dadi Ingolfsson’s tweet, I unpacked a tricksy can of worms: should Scrum Masters and Agile coaches be more vested in the success of the current project, or in Agile adoption across the organisation? The core tension was between delivering the project at hand and building improved project-delivering capability for the future. A coach who prioritised the latter over the former risked losing the team’s trust. Yet senior management often expected capability improvement as part of the remit. In practice, a delicate balancing act was the order of the day – and one reason why good coaches could really earn their coin.

28. The Term ‘Analytic Mindset’ Defined (6 January 2011)

Given my frequent use of terms like ‘Analytic thinking’ and ‘Analytic mindset’ in the context of Rightshifting, I paused to define them properly. This was the first formal articulation on the blog of the Analytic mindset as a specific, coherent worldview – characterised by reductionism, command-and-control, local optimisation, and Theory X beliefs about human nature. It marked the moment the Marshall Model’s vocabulary began to be laid down with some precision, rather than assumed.

29. The Constant Tension Between Rightshift and Left-drift (7 January 2011)

Drawing on a blog post by Jamie Flinchbaugh, I highlighted a frequently overlooked reality: efforts at Rightshifting are always swimming against the tide of entropy. Changes within and without the organisation constantly conspire to erode its effectiveness. Most organisations, even those investing heavily in improvement programmes, rarely managed to do much more than tread water. The pace of improvement had to outrun the pace of entropy – a sobering thought for anyone who assumed that gains, once made, would persist on their own.

30. Traditional vs ‘New’ Management Thinking (15 January 2011)

Referencing a post from the Deming Learning Network, I drew parallels between their comparison of traditional and new management thinking and what I called the Analytic-to-Synergistic transition. The post served as a bridge between Deming’s body of work and the Marshall Model, showing that the shift I was describing wasn’t novel – it had been articulated for decades – but that framing it as a mindset transition rather than a process improvement gave it explanatory power that earlier formulations had lacked.

The Voice Finds Its Register

Across these ten posts, the blog’s voice shifts from diagnosis to something approaching prescription. The critique of Agile, which began in Digest 1 as personal disillusionment, is now grounded in a specific model of how organisations function and why they resist change. The Marshall Model’s vocabulary – Analytic, Synergistic, Chaordic, Rightshifting, mindset transition – is no longer shorthand; it’s being defined, explained and applied with increasing rigour.

Perhaps most tellingly, the posts begin to address different audiences for the first time. ‘Delivering Software is Easy’ speaks to the fortunate few. ‘Rightshifting and the Senior Management Pitch’ speaks to those who need to carry the message upwards. ‘Would You Rather Not Know?’ speaks to those tempted to give up. And the #lru2010 Conference Report marks the moment Rightshifting stopped being a set of ideas and became a community. The blog is no longer just thinking aloud – it’s beginning to consider who it’s talking to, and why that matters.

In the next digest, I’ll cover posts 31 through 40, picking up from mid-January 2011 and taking us further into the emergence of FlowChain, the Rightshifting community, and more concrete explorations of what Synergistic organisations look like in practice.

– Bob

The Foundations Take Shape: A Digest of Posts 11 Through 20

This is the second in a series of digests, each covering ten posts in chronological order. The first digest covered posts 1 through 10, from June 2009 to late July 2010. This batch picks up where it left off and spans late July to September 2010 – a concentrated period in which the blog’s emerging themes began to sharpen. Agile’s shortcomings, the case for Rightshifting, the Familiar story, and the question of what organisations actually need to change all come into much clearer focus.

11. Why Agile Is No More (or Less) Than a Skunkworks (27 July 2010)

This post introduced a metaphor that struck me forcefully: Agile, in most organisations, functions as a skunkworks – a small, semi-autonomous team operating outside the normal rules, tolerated but never truly integrated. The analogy highlighted a painful truth: most organisations adopting Agile were treating it as an exception to their normal way of being rather than as an invitation to transform it. They were happy to let a few teams play at being Agile so long as the broader organisational mindset remained untouched. If skunkworks had been unable to shift the mindsets of their host organisations for fifty years and more, why should we expect Agile to be any different?

12. Transcript of Email to @papachrismatts Explaining #Rightshifting (31 July 2010)

A transcript of an email to Chris Matts explaining the Rightshifting concept. Chris had observed that Rightshifting seemed to be a call to arms but that he hadn’t discovered the means it proposed to achieve its aims. My reply was deliberate: the biggest hurdle to improved organisational effectiveness wasn’t a lack of methods – it was ignorance. Most decision-makers had no idea how ineffective their organisations were, nor how much more effective they could be. Rightshifting was about education first, means second. And beneath the top-line message about organisational effectiveness lay a deeper purpose: creating more humane, fulfilling work and workplaces.

13. The Nature of the Rightshifting Challenge (5 August 2010)

Written as a response to a question from Pascal, this post tackled the real challenge of sustainable Agile adoption head-on. Most people saw the challenge as getting development teams working in an Agile way, assuming the benefits would spread organically. I argued this was a fundamental misconception. The real challenge was helping organisations shift their prevailing mindset. The majority had an ‘Analytic’ mindset – command-and-control, Theory X, functional silos – which was inherently hostile soil for Agile. Any sustainable adoption had to address the mindset of the host organisation as a whole.

14. What Next for the Agile Community? (6 August 2010)

Responding to Dave Nicolette’s blog post, I shared his view that the Agile community had lost sight of the three areas that originally drove its creation: process issues, human issues, and craftsmanship. Where I profoundly disagreed with Dave was his assertion that Agile had ‘crossed the Chasm’. It hadn’t – certainly not in any sustainable way, and even less so in Europe and the UK. Worse still, few in the community had yet recognised the root cause of failure to sustain Agile adoptions: a failure to understand the true nature of the challenge.

15. Tom Gilb Laments the ’10 Wasted Years of Agile’ (15 August 2010)

I shared Tom Gilb’s blunt assessment that the Agile Manifesto was never well-formulated from the standpoint of ensuring we did the right things right. The key idea – that stakeholder value should be the guiding light for iterative development, not functions and stories – had been clearly laid out years earlier, yet the community had missed this essential point. Tom’s parting question was poignant: if the IT project failure rate (total plus partial) was around 90%, could we get it below 2%? I very much shared his summary of the state of Agile.

16. The Starting of Familiar (16 August 2010)

This was the origin story of Familiar Ltd, the company I started with a colleague upon leaving Sun Microsystems’ UK Java Center in early 1997 – arguably the first 100% Agile software house in Europe. I laid out the founding principles: running the company for the mutual benefit of all, treating people as competent and trustworthy adults, building community for the long term, and seeking win-win-win-win outcomes. People chose their own terms, conditions, rates and assignments. Narrow specialisms were conspicuous by their absence. The result was a hugely engaged workforce that produced essentially defect-free software products.

17. The Teflon Consultants (17 August 2010)

A short, sharp anecdote from my Familiar days. When recruiting consultants, I naturally mentioned our value-for-money guarantee: ‘Whenever we invoice you, just pay as much as you think our work has been worth to you.’ To a person, every potential recruit looked aghast upon hearing this. Not one could conceive of standing behind their advice in the face of such a brutally effective feedback mechanism. I did not offer any of them a position. The post spoke volumes about the disconnect between what consultants profess to deliver and the confidence they have in their own advice.

18. Bain on Business / IT Alignment (18 August 2010)

Dan Rough asked for my thoughts on a 2007 Bain report about business/IT alignment, and how it related to Rightshifting. I noted that the Bain argument was mainly concerned with pragmatic issues such as business growth and costs, whereas Rightshifting found its root in social justice – with profitability derived from that root through a more engaged workforce. I mapped Bain’s four quadrants onto the Rightshifting chart, observing that even their most effective category only reached about the 2x effectiveness mark. There was a vast expanse of possibility beyond that which the report didn’t even acknowledge.

19. Agile. Necessary but not Sufficient. (8 September 2010)

This post drew together several threads from Twitter and various blogs into what became one of the clearest early articulations of my position on Agile. Was I anti-Agile? That was as maybe. My concern was that many people – developers and non-developers alike – were expecting too much from ‘adopting Agile’. Yes, it could make developers’ experience of work more pleasant. Yes, it could double developer productivity. But simply applying Agile principles within development teams would typically buy organisations no more than single-digit improvements to their overall product development bottom line – improvements often lost in the general noise. Agile adoption was, unwittingly, the vanguard of a shift in mindset within adopting organisations. But it was in no way sufficient for that shift to take root in the rest of the organisation. Necessary, but not sufficient.

20. The Developer’s Job (23 September 2010)

Prompted by a tweet that struck a chord – ‘there are STILL a whole bunch of software developers who think their job is about building great software’ – I explored what the developer’s job actually entails when viewed from a Synergistic mindset. In most organisations, developers are lucky to consider much beyond code. But in a Synergistic organisation, the developer’s job is to understand the needs of the various stakeholders – end-users, sponsors, project champions, product owners, team members, and the wider business – in terms of what they each value, and to collaborate with other areas of the organisation in meeting those needs. Rare indeed, the stakeholder whose needs are confined simply to a piece of software.

The Ground Shifts

Where Digest 1 planted seeds, this batch of posts shows those seeds beginning to germinate. The critique of Agile moves from personal disillusionment to a systemic argument rooted in Systems Thinking, Deming and Tom Gilb – culminating in the clear-eyed assessment that Agile is necessary but not sufficient. Rightshifting evolves from a vague call to arms into a sharper framework about organisational mindsets. And the Familiar story provides concrete evidence that a different way of working isn’t merely theoretical – it’s been done, and it worked.

The most striking development across these ten posts is the sharpening of the diagnosis: the problem isn’t that organisations lack better methods. The problem is that their collective mindset makes those methods invisible, irrelevant, or threatening. This insight – that effectiveness is a function of collective assumptions and beliefs – would become the foundation stone of everything that followed.

In the next digest, I’ll cover posts 21 through 30, taking us from late 2010 into 2011 and the emergence of more concrete frameworks for understanding and addressing these challenges.

– Bob

Where It All Began: A Digest of My First Ten Posts

Looking back through the archives of this blog – all the way to June 2009 – I’m struck by how much of what I’ve spent the past nearly seventeen years writing about was already present in seed form from the very beginning. The concerns, the frustrations, the questions. They were all there, waiting to unfold.

What follows is a digest of my first ten posts on Think Different. Consider it an origin story of sorts – not for me, but for the ideas that have animated this blog ever since. This is also the first in a planned series of digests, each covering ten posts in chronological order, tracing the evolution of the ideas across the life of this blog.

1. An Agile Koan – If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him (23 June 2009)

The very first post set the tone for everything that followed. Drawing on Zen philosophy, I warned against letting Agile – or any methodology – become an orthodoxy we serve rather than a tool that serves us. The koan reminds us that no meaning coming from outside ourselves is real. We must each give up the master without giving up the search. How often we make circumstances our prison and other people our jailers! This was, in hindsight, the earliest expression of a theme I’d return to again and again: the danger of treating practices as sacred rather than as means to human ends.

2. My Forlorn Love Letter to Agile (30 June 2009)

Just a week later, I wrote what amounted to a breakup letter. Addressed directly to Agile itself, I confessed my early infatuation – the purity of spirit, the inner strength, the humanity – followed by my growing disillusionment with its self-indulgence, its difficulty relating to non-agile folk, and above all, its narcissism. This wasn’t cynicism. It was the disappointment of someone who’d seen something beautiful and watched it become less than it could be. Was I wanting too much? Perhaps. But the yearning for something with more depth, a more rounded view of life, has never gone away.

3. Pitching Agile – Some Lessons Learned (16 July 2009)

Here I recounted a BCS miniSPA role-playing session where teams had to pitch Agile to CXOs of a large financial organisation. The exercise was eye-opening. Our team fell into the trap of assuming we were external consultants – and were ‘summarily and cruelly disabused’ of that assumption during the very first pitch. We learnt the hard way that pitches needed concrete numbers (a 5,000-developer organisation spends roughly £400M annually; doubling effectiveness yields £200M in potential savings). We discovered that describing a desired future state worked far better than trying to map the prospect’s current problems. And we consistently fell short in describing the actual actions needed for transformation – a failure pattern I’ve seen repeated in organisations ever since.

4. A Personal Charter (30 October 2009)

After a gap of several months, I published my personal charter – a statement of values and commitments that would guide my professional life. This post was less about Agile and more about the inner compass that shapes how we show up in the world. It planted the seed for what would later become a much deeper exploration of how personal and collective assumptions shape everything organisations do.

5. Commitment to Sprint Delivery vs Time-boxing (1 May 2010)

Returning in 2010, I waded into a Twitter debate about whether teams should commit to delivering all stories within a sprint. My position was that the notion of commitment-to-delivery missed the point. Time-boxing was valuable as a feedback mechanism, not as a contractual obligation. Treating sprint boundaries as delivery promises rather than learning cycles was, I argued, a fundamental misunderstanding – one that pointed to deeper problems with how organisations conceived of work itself.

6. Do Managers Need Deep Technical Skills? (7 May 2010)

Jurgen Appelo asked me to clarify my position that requiring managers to have deep technical skills was counterproductive. My argument wasn’t that technical knowledge was worthless – far from it. Rather, I challenged the assumption that the best technical person automatically makes the best manager. This conflation, I suggested, damages both the quality of management and the career prospects of brilliant technical people who have no interest in or aptitude for management. It was a precursor to much of what I’d later write about the dysfunctions baked into traditional organisational structures.

7. Career Paths for Technical Folks (11 May 2010)

Following directly from the previous post, I explored what alternative career paths might look like for people who wanted to grow and be rewarded without being shunted into management roles. At Familiar, the company I founded in 1997, we’d consciously avoided narrow specialisms. Everyone was encouraged to become a ‘generalising specialist’. This wasn’t just about career paths – it was about challenging the deeply held assumption that advancement means authority over others.

8. ‘Coach as Expert’ vs ‘Coach as Facilitator’ (29 June 2010)

I declared my position firmly in the coach-as-facilitator camp. My experience had shown me that the ‘expert’ coaching model – where the coach dispenses wisdom and solutions – often damages the coaching relationship and hinders the coachee’s progress. Real growth comes when people discover their own answers, not when they’re handed someone else’s. This insight would prove foundational to my later work in Organisational Psychotherapy, where the therapist’s role is not to fix but to help the organisation surface and examine its own collective assumptions.

9. Agile: Doing the Wrong Thing Righter (19 July 2010)

Taking a Systems Thinking perspective, I argued that Agile – for all its merits – was often little more than an optimisation of one small part of a much larger, dysfunctional system. No matter how well-run the software development team, the wider system within which it sits can still perform poorly. Introducing Agile to a development group typically helps only that one relatively small part. Some people noted that Scrum, in particular, surfaced dysfunctional organisational behaviours, but few businesses had the will or insight to act on the messages. The friction that followed often threatened the Agile initiative itself.

10. Just Burning Toast and Scraping It (26 July 2010)

A short post drawing on Deming’s thinking about quality inspection. Referencing a piece by Glyn Lumley, I highlighted Deming’s insistence that quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process. We should seek to build quality in rather than inspect it out. The toast metaphor – burning it and then scraping off the char – captured perfectly what most software organisations were doing: creating defects and then expending vast effort to find and remove them, rather than addressing the conditions that produced them in the first place.

The Thread That Connects

Reading these ten posts together, I see a single thread running through all of them: a growing dissatisfaction with surface-level fixes and an emerging conviction that the real work lies in examining and shifting the collective assumptions and beliefs that shape how organisations function. The love letter to Agile was really a love letter to the human potential that Agile promised but couldn’t deliver on its own. The Systems Thinking critique was really an argument that optimising one part of a broken whole changes nothing. And the coaching post was really about the difference between imposing change and inviting people to discover it for themselves.

These ten posts, written between June 2009 and July 2010, contained the DNA of everything that would follow: Organisational Psychotherapy, the Antimatter Principle, the Marshall Model, Quintessence. The seeds were all there, in the soil of early frustration and tentative hope.

If you’ve been reading this blog recently and wondering where it all came from – now you know.

In the next digest, I’ll cover posts 11 through 20, picking up from late July 2010 – where the Rightshifting concept, the Familiar story, and the deeper critique of Agile all come into sharper focus. With over 1,500 posts in the archive, there’s a long and winding road ahead. I hope you’ll walk it with me.

– Bob