Johnnie Moore

Southwest paradox (2)

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

A couple more thoughts on The Southwest Paradox I blogged yesterday.

When we chatted Michael Herman pointed out that the unsuccessful airlines can’t be separated clinically from Southwest. They’re the context in which Southwest is successful. You could say their failure is a key part of Southwest’s success. And simply replicating Southwest will change the context and make the model invalid. (Does this make sense?)

I suppose it’s like a phenomenon I’ve seen in groups. One person in the group takes the role of, say, troublemaker. And often gets scapegoated for it. But if he stops, or becomes compliant, after a while someone else starts causing trouble… as if there is a systemic need for troublemaking, it’s not down to one person just being difficult.

If everyone in the group pursued some daft “best practice” for group behaviour, the trouble doesn’t get made. But eventually, the system demands some trouble. The model fails.

“How-to” modelling always strips bits of a complex system of some part of their context, rendering the model questionable at best.

This is one reason I dislike all these complicated diagrams that are used to “explain” how to run companies. It seems to me that parts of the puzzle of organisations get modelled in labourious detail and then cut away from all the complex things that feed them. You get clever, complicated, intimidating diagrams that are – quite literally – removed from reality.

Another fragment for my emerging preference for…Simple Ideas, Lightly Held, Joyfully Practised.

Share Post

More Posts

Fluke

There’s more potential in each moment than we realise

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Democracy: this time it’s less personal

Doug Rushkoff kicked off day two of the Personal Democracy Forum with a nice counterblast to excessive individualism. Here’s the video. He fears we pay too much attention to web

Johnnie Moore

Just a tweet

This tweet from Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan caught my eye. With respect I am unsure what the Home Secretary thinks that she told GMP to do different. She listened

Johnnie Moore

Speed of conversation…

David Weinberger writes: There must be a mathematical way to express the Law of Conversational Overclocking: As the acceleration of conversation increases past the maximum speed of thought the quality