Things work in context, not in the spotlight.

We do need to accept that the power of persuasion at its worst lies in its design to interrupt. It is supposed to interrupt us, our independent, cogent, thinking selves. And it does.

This kind of wrenching cultural change doesn’t happen by executive fiat. As I found, I couldn’t flip a switch and alter behaviors. It was, by any measure, the hardest part of IBM’s transformation, and at times I thought it couldn’t be done.

In Maturana’s terms, the environment triggered the frog to respond; the response was a manifestation of the frog’s altered structure.

An organisation does things, and it systematically does some things rather than others. But that’s as far as it goes. Systems don’t make mistakes — if they do something, that’s their purpose. But it also works the other way around. Systems don’t have inner desires, so they don’t do things intentionally either. There’s just a network of cause and effect. We might think they’re conspiring, but they’re working within structures that made the outcome inevitable. Or we might see everything as a terrible cock-up, but we don’t understand that the outcome was the inevitable result of the way the system works.