What is the meaning of an organisation in the face of 21st century challenges: climate crisis, rising risks of AI, mass extinction of nature, pandemics, war, poverty, fascism? Are we carrying on with the same business methods that got us here?

How do we forge together all the parts we are already working so hard on: organisational agility, diversity, equity and inclusion, starting decolonising, productivity, AI co-worker, customer experience, work/life balance, decarbonising, scaling innovation etc etc?

It’s a lot, huh?! Are we doing this and still all getting along? Are we making that impact or are we just fighting each others’ objectives?

My vision is a multitude of leaders of organisations embracing 21st century challenges and thriving because of that work.

I believe the foundation for thriving in a storm of challenges, are strong, human relationships: across the organisation, with partners, customers/citizens and - the often missing one - an organisational relationship with nature. I respect the hard work you are doing and the often undervalued effort you’ve put into relationships. I see the battering your relationships have taken in the face of those crises which have hit the hardest.

This is the mission of Sandkind: to enable relationships within and across teams to strengthen to full humanity so they may go on to create systems within which their humanity can be encoded.

This is an extension of Conway’s Law from software building, which concerns itself with the communication aspect of relationships:

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Gratitude and Respect for this Vision

I talk about my vision with gratitude and respect to all the pattern finders and practitioners who have created a piece or layer of the vision that I knit here into a new pattern.

I acknowledge the destruction our culture has created on the world, so we have sought out Indigenous thinking, guided by elder / Peer of the House of Lords, Baroness Natalie Bennett.

Indigenous teachers - Tyson Yunkaporta and Doris Shillingworth - have shown me how to flip the paradigm of our broken methods with their Relationally Responsive Standpoint - starting with respect and starting with the land. Second: connect - importance of relationships, listening to each other and to the land. Third: reflect and last: direct.

We practice this, for example, by putting time in to recognise and listen before drawing conclusions and creating goals.

Greensand ridge and Chiltern hills - the land I live on the beauty of nature just a short train ride from London which invites me to engage in the lifecycle of the ladybird, hear the sound of the nightjar and notice the missing biodiversity.

My parents and youth volunteers showed me how to light fires and spend time outdoors, having fun, calming us and creating memories for the year round. Through my work I am trying to find ways to be respectful of nature and the land in a mutually beneficial way - Team with Nature was my starting point.

Thousands of people I have worked with across hundreds of organisations have shown me better and kinder ways of working and relating. Including but not limited to agile, lean and tech revolutionaries: Thoughtworks, Team Topologies/Conflux, IT Revolution, Psychological Safety. Social impact innovators: Relationship Project, Aspire, GrayDotCatalyst, DEC, StartNetwork, UN Disha project, and many more.

Lastly I pay respect to the farmers and outreach workers of the Kigezi region in SW Uganda who taught me the importance of relating: when the rains stopped the power and all there was to do was to listen. It made all the difference.