March 12, 2025 • 32 mins
Kurt B. Nielsen is an engineer, entrepreneur, writer and keynote speaker. He has been the CEO of software and consultancy companies, and has for 20 years, worked internationally with Agile, Lean, Scrum, and other progressive leadership patterns.His views are deeply rooted in the Danish Coop movement with focus on individual liberty combined with responsibility for the community.Kurt is the author of the book Liberating Organizations together with a group of collaborators. They have collected a wealth of experience and documented the findings in this book.
Liberating Organizations is a book for those who want to generate more value for all stakeholders through their work in organizations. We propose that this can be accomplished through a resilient and sustainable workplace based on people’s freedom, engagement and their taking of responsibility.The book is an investigation of the cold case of freedom in organizations, why is there so little of it? The result is a solution, a blueprint for a Liberating Organization – a Constitutional Organization where there is freedom under the rule of law – not the law of the ruler. We show how we got to the state we are in now with leadership in our organizations; why it is not ideal – primarily due to lack of engagement; what a better solution could be; and how to get there.
Read about the book: https://liberatingorg.com/
Read an appetizer: https://liberatingorg.com/_d/liborg1.0_appetizer.pdf
Buy the book here: https://prorex.dk/shop/1806-kurt-b-nielsen/18854-liberating-organizations or contact Kurt at kurt.b.nielsen@gmail.com
Picture of the book: https://photos.app.goo.gl/JfCWb8Le2gL823d37
The e-book: https://liberatingorg.com/liborg1.0.pdf
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Hey, everybody. My name is Kurt Nelson. I'm,
from Denmark
in a small village right outside Billund where
LEGO is. So you you understand probably some
of my background from that.
The most interesting things around me today is
(01:35):
actually some of the things I love. They're
right behind me. There are my speakers that
I'm actually an expert in developing high end
speakers.
Who would have thought that? And I absolutely
love working with that, but I also love
working with people and actually see people grow
and flourish and get to be the best
they possibly could.
That's what I do professionally also,
(01:56):
educate
and teach people.
I just wrote a book. It's called Liberating
Organizations,
the cold case for freedom.
And, you see the little bird of liberation
behind me, which is developed by a Ukrainian
artist.
Credit to her, Sofia. And I could absolutely
talk about that for hours, which, of course,
I do if people are willing to pay
(02:16):
for it. And,
doing that next week again, one of the
training courses for organizations
trying to build places
where people can flourish and create value. There's
a lot of people that I owe,
I I guess, who I am and what
I do to. One of them is has
dead and long gone. I never met him.
His name was w Edwards Deming.
(02:38):
He died in '93.
He was the one who was responsible for
him going from The US to Japan
and getting that country into the League of
Nations and being a very professional
and
high quality nation after the devastating war. He's
a hero of mine. I use a lot
of his stuff also in in the book
I wrote.
Some are cool things. You see the flag
(02:59):
behind me. I do a lot of pro
bono work in Ukraine at the moment. There's
a people who has a certain sense of
urgency, I would say,
but not a terribly laid back attitude as
we probably up here in Scandinavia is used
to because we're actually quite comfortable. So that's
what I do, and that's my mission right
now. It's
interesting to me that from your background,
(03:21):
it seems heavy to tech, and you brought
that out in your introduction that you can
build speakers. So you love fidelity, and you
understand ohms and amps and all that stuff
that creates vibrations that people can hear.
What does that have to do with leadership?
I think the first thing is that there's
a sense of quality.
A sense of also,
(03:42):
yeah, as you say, fidelity, and that really
why I build these things is because
the music that comes out of them are
like being there yourself. There's this connection
to the real world, the truth and reality
and facts and
by extension to truth. Yeah.
Yeah. That's an old term. Right? It it
was pretty popular when I was young and
(04:03):
probably before that.
High fidelity
was like a sales pitch. That was Right.
Right. The thing that people wanted
even if they didn't know what it meant.
So I'm looking up right quick. High fidelity,
often shortened to high five, refers to the
high quality reproduction of sound. It aims to
recreate the audio experience with utmost
(04:24):
accuracy and realism.
Correct.
So if we had to change that over
to
leadership, that sounds like authentic authenticity,
I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah. Oh. Oh. You you have to resonate
at a certain level of authenticity
in order to be
a solid citizen, a solid you know, whatever
(04:45):
that person's role is. Don't you think? Absolutely.
Absolutely. It it and without that, then the
answer will be blowing in the wind because
it it will just go from wherever the
wind goes, and and you have to have
that and be solidly
based in in facts.
I grew up in the countryside and the
and boots in the soil were were the
thing and and not floating in thin air.
(05:07):
Yeah. There's gotta be that and it goes
back into that definition of being based in
reality. Yeah. And that is a good segue,
I think, into
what your book is about. Can we talk
about give me an overview,
kinda left to right. Who's the audience, and
what do they wanna get from this? So
in the audience, is is anyone who, for
some reason or another, want to get more
(05:29):
value created out of their organization
and create a
balanced value for all the stakeholders, which really
starts with the customer, those you serve, and
then there is the employees and those who
work there, and then there is the owners,
and then there is a society at large.
The audience that we so far have found
have been owners,
(05:50):
founders
of small to medium sized businesses.
They are sufficiently
close to the money builder that they care
about it. And and they're not lost in
some huge bureaucracy where
position in the hierarchy is more important. Yeah.
They they these are the people we're looking
for. And and the drive for them is
to say, okay. Here is an analysis
(06:10):
of
why we need to work in a different
way in today's complex world than we did
in the old manufacturing world fifty eight, sixty
years ago. What exactly are some
techniques or addresses that you bring forward for
those people to try or put in their
organization as a behavior? It starts, again, with
(06:30):
fidelity and telling you I could in this
case, I would switch to, transparency.
Things have to be transparent.
And then there's a few other things. You
focus on the value stream. How does value
actually get created? You try to get an
overview of that, and then you focus on
teams.
Because when you have to solve complex problems,
which many of our problems today are, if
(06:52):
not outright chaotic Yeah. I don't have the
full picture and you don't have the full
picture. We only have fragmented knowledge, and therefore,
we have to get together. And if we
sit around the table, a bunch of us,
small group, five, six, seven, eight, or nine
or something, perhaps we can see the picture
and we can come up with a solution.
Value stream and teams, and then we also
(07:12):
sometimes refer to the liberating organization as a
constitutional
organization,
where there's the rule of law and not
the law of the ruler.
And the constitution
is the set of working agreements. So if
it's a company, it's some of it is
reflected in the bylaws, for example. And some
some of them are just simple working agreements
between two teams and say, whenever we delegate
(07:35):
the job to you, this is how we've
agreed that that exchange occurs. So there's rules
of engagement. There's rule of order, a lot
you know, it's a building a a behavior
model of what's in and what's out for
organizations'
schema, I guess. I'll I'll call it a
schema to operate from. Don't you think that
most organizations get too heavy in the building
(07:57):
all the schema and not really work in
the work? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, building
the scheme is the easy part. Right? Oh,
we'll sit down. We'll crank out all kinds
of Absolutely. Processes and regulations,
and then nobody looks at it or follows
it or
enforces it. And another thing is that most
of the scheme that's being developed
are so elaborate and comprehensive
(08:19):
that you can't find two people within the
organization to have the same understanding of it.
I've I've actually in for the book here,
I did 90 interviews
with people that we found that these were
people I didn't know before,
most of them actually. Yeah. And a very
frequent statement from many of these people that
said, oh, I wish our organization
(08:40):
would be a bit more outward focused
instead of inward. Meaning what? That means that
why don't we look after what after our
customers and what they actually want all the
people we serve Yeah. Instead of being too
preoccupied with our
internal
exercises. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the army is
the army is marching around on the ground.
(09:01):
They actually not out there dealing with the
world. Yeah. That is a great way to
say that. I love that. I hear what
you're saying that it gets
in in an old, organization I used to
work at, it was busy work. Right? We're
we're doing busy work to do work Yeah.
Versus
what's the impact of what we're doing to
whoever we're supposed to be serving.
(09:22):
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we have a term
here that's used in in in in our
language, in Danish, which is pseudo work. Pseudo.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Fake. Yeah. Fake or Pseudo work. Yeah. Oh,
I'm shuffling papers. I'm shuffling papers. I'm putting
stuff over here. Yeah. Got it. And then
tomorrow, I'm putting it back again. Back where
(09:43):
it was. Yeah. Exactly. It looks suspiciously like
work.
Yeah. Alright. So I'm gonna guess that some
of your
current viewpoint
of work organizations,
leadership trust
comes from
this family
farming startup of a coop.
Would you agree with that? Well, that it
(10:05):
certainly was was quite a big influence. I
mean, that was how life was lived. There
were these small family farms, and,
they didn't have much bargaining power or anything.
So it was part of what actually pulled
the Danish countryside out of poverty was that
these poor fellows gang together and they started
creating dairies and
(10:26):
shops and purchasing agreements and
slaughterhouses and so forth. So that takes organization
and it takes leadership,
but by golly, it has to take a
lot of trust. Yes. It does. Of course,
these were independent operators. There was not Right.
A boss that told these to get together.
But initially, of course, out of need, they
(10:47):
got together and they didn't agree, and sometimes
there were heavy discussions,
but they did find ways forward. They operated
with representative decision making, which is another part
of what we really discuss in the book,
is to replace the top down power based
hierarchy with representative
decision making, where people give a certain authority
(11:09):
to delegates that they trust. Right. But but
again, trust has to be there.
Otherwise, it doesn't work. In this world, there
is really only two way of operating, either
you trust or you control. I wanna make
sure the listener hears this because you're talking
about basically
dealing with these independents, which on paper are
competitors. Yeah. They're competing in the business space,
(11:32):
and you have to convert that mindset to
say there's a different way we could do
this if we got together. Well, I looked
up Merriam Webster's definition of cooperative,
an enterprise or organization
owned by and or operated
for the benefit of those using its services.
Yeah. And some of the services that you
just mentioned was being able to bargain better.
(11:54):
It's almost like a union, isn't it? I
mean, you're, like, representing a a bunch more
people instead of just one organization. That that
is one thing, but they also actually did
create,
dairies, for example. My dad was involved in
and foundational in creating actually quite a large
one. They together
were underwriting
alone for building this building and buying this
(12:16):
machinery Yeah. Which none of them could have
had on their own. And, also, it serves
the region. It serves the area
that these people are in. Yeah. You're building
commerce. You're building the tools of commerce
for them. Yeah. And you are raising your
income level because instead of setting the raw
material, raw milk, for example,
(12:37):
you now sell refined cheese and butter and
what have you, which, of course, carries a
higher value and keeps the business in that
local community.
So why can't we get a government using
that model?
I
think there's a lot. I think there's a
lot with human nature that but actually, one
of the things I quote in my book
is the preamble to the Swiss constitution. And
(13:00):
if you look at Switzerland,
they are probably one of the closest to
that in in the way that the government
operate there. And there's also another thing is
that the government in Switzerland, which is approximately
the same size as Denmark,
there's only one third of the members in
the government.
What does that mean? There's not that overhead.
I mean, you don't have that many ministers.
Alright. So it's a little smaller. But the
(13:21):
trust part, it's just so important.
Also in all other aspects. So so that's
part of why we came out with the
book also is to, here are some tools
that you can help develop trust. Some of
it, of course, is very personal, but some
of it is also to have structures that
support it. Right. One of the people I'm
inspired by, Dave Snowden, who talks about complexity,
(13:45):
he says if you want people to change
behavior, sometimes you have to give them the
tools that allow them to change. Mhmm. Yeah.
So trust,
an example is, one of the most effective
markets known to mankind is the diamond market
in New York City.
It happens to be run by Orthodox Jews
mostly,
but they do trust each other. If I
(14:05):
say to Edwin, I'm gonna buy for a
million dollars diamonds from you, then you don't
need a contract because that will happen tomorrow
if I said so. That's a very tight
knit organizational structure with those kind of expectation.
And I can't imagine it's easy to get
into sideways.
An a new No. That's probably correct. But
the thing is just to think about I
(14:25):
mean, if we, in our organizations,
inter country relations, if we can raise the
trust level,
you know what? Then
our
transaction
costs and our monitoring costs, they drop. There's
some transparency
there that wasn't there before. Yes. That has
to be built over time. It doesn't just
happen. No. Trust is a hard thing to
(14:47):
build and easy to lose. Yes. So I'm
looking at the Swiss preamble of the to
the constitution because I wanted to hear it
myself.
In the name of almighty god, the Swiss
people in the cantons
I don't know what cantons are. They they
like small states. Mindful of their responsibility
towards creation,
resolve to renew their alliance so as to
(15:09):
strengthen liberty, democracy, independence, and peace in a
spirit of solidarity and openness towards the world.
Determined to live together with mutual consideration and
respect for their diversity,
conscious of their common achievements and their responsibility
towards future generations,
and in the knowledge that only those who
use their freedom
(15:30):
remain free,
and that the strength of a people is
measured by the well-being of its weakest members.
That's that's a whole lot right there. It
is.
It is. There there is a lot in
there. Yeah. I I didn't know it went
on before I started researching these things about
constitution
as such. Yeah. And and talking about the
(15:52):
constitutional
organization
where you define that and you agree on
it. And when people enter, they commit to
it. Right. Well, it becomes the operating ethos
and Yeah. Values of the organization.
And if you're not on board with that,
that's that's the goodness of having a good
onboarding program Yeah. That you can give them
(16:12):
the sheet music and say, hey. This is
what you're joining here. If it's not what
you're not jiving with that, then door's right
there. In our company, Agilean House, we actually
used that in the sense of we had
a competency matrix and a value matrix describing
the competencies we were looking for with new
hires.
And so we listed all of those and
(16:32):
when we asked them to assess themselves and
say, so what do I bring to the
table? Do I have this, I'm an expert
here, can I do it? Or would I
like to learn it? Or what is it?
Right? We also had a value metric and
said, we have these values here, and we
would like to know if you could subscribe.
And we would also like if you bring
(16:53):
some to the table, and values can be,
I really want this, or I I really
don't want that.
Okay. So we did that before we even
called people to interview. We'd ask them to
to answer those things. Okay. And it actually
we've given it to other people. It's very
effective in screening to get the right people
in that. You know, instead of just having
them check the block on what HR says
(17:15):
your skills need to be,
you're kinda stepping beyond that prescription
to look at something that's not really tangible
and try
to observe
what's congruent with them with the questions you're
asking. Right? Because those are gonna be a
bigger tell
than the CV or the, you know, resume.
(17:35):
But they're both important. But, like Yeah. If
you talk about you need to trust people,
you need to give them more authority because
they need to be more independent operating, not
just do what they're told.
David Marquette, US submarine captain, he he talks
about intent based leadership. And he says whenever
you wanna give people authority,
(17:56):
they need to have competence.
Well, as obvious he says, on a nuclear
submarine, you don't want incompetent people walking around
pushing buttons.
You need to have clarity. That means you
need to know where we're going. So when
you make a decision, you can sort of
vector it in the right direction.
And then the last thing which we have
emphasized a lot is you need to trust
(18:17):
in people's character. If you give people authority,
you need to be able to trust that
they will be able to Right. They've they've
got a good head on their shoulders, and
their heart's in the right place. Yeah. Then
but they need to have the character so
that they can make decisions
for the common good and not just for
their own good. Not yeah. Not for selfish
reasons. A Forbes article from January of twenty
(18:39):
nineteen called eight ways to lead employees with
intent based leadership. Yeah. And what do you
think is number one? Become a better communicator.
Yeah. And I think communications
in and of itself is overlooked
a lot
in organizational
behavior
because they don't seem to spend a whole
lot of resources
in building a knowledge base, if you will,
(19:02):
a common operational
framework that everybody
is aware of. We use this word for
that,
very distinct
and straightforward
communications
styles. Right.
How do you build better communications
that gains more trust? Well, first of all,
as you said, you you've got to define
your vocabulary.
(19:23):
Now it's not enough just to write it
in some sort of personnel handbook.
It needs to be lived and communicated day
by day and reminded because the finer things
you you know how it is with language.
That there are certain things you could say
to me with your American background, and I
say, what was he talking about here? But
it has a meaning to you. And so
we need to communicate. That's the first thing.
(19:45):
Then we need a commitment to radical transparency.
Retired general, Stanley McChrystal, he was sent to
Iraq Twenty Years ago and discovered that he
couldn't cope with the Al Qaeda, with the
hierarchical structure because they were just moving so
much faster.
So so he came up with this other
model. He said, the first thing was we
needed was radical transparency.
And not that stuff that the CIA always
(20:07):
kept hammering. This is on a need to
know basis and you don't need to know.
Mhmm. We needed radical transparency
and then push authority
as far out as you can find someone
who can carry it. Okay. That required him
to to change his behavior from being what
he called the chess master moving the pieces
around to becoming the gardener who prepared the
soil for this to grow. That was pretty
(20:29):
hard on a 50 year old four star
general, he said. Old dogs, new tricks. Yeah.
Exactly. I am trying to get a definition
of radical transparency
because it sounds pretty cool. I like the
idea,
and I'm not aware of that. I I
don't think there is a very precise definition
of it apart from the fact in context.
And I understand that there are situations in
(20:51):
companies
and organizations where you can't have Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Complete transparency. It's not for everybody. Yeah.
That's true. For the main part, you should
probably go a bit farther than than you
normally would be comfortable with and actually let
people who work in the organization
see the transparency,
see where you're going. You're also saying to
give them agency. Yeah. With my background with
(21:12):
the US army,
you get to have battle command, which meant
when the stuff's flying,
you make decisions as best you can where
you're at regardless, and that's the expectation.
But in practice,
hierarchy is the absolute driver of all things
and answers all things and then keeps things
(21:33):
separate by design.
Radical transparency,
I found a definition on Wikipedia.
Radical transparency is a phrase used across fields
of governance,
politics, software design, and business to describe actions
and approaches that radically increase the openness
of an organizational
process and data.
(21:54):
Its usage was originally understood as an approach
or act that uses abundant network information
to access previously confidential
or alright. So, basically, you're opening up the
floodgates
of everything we know so everybody can do
something. You can do something and can intervene
and say, oh, hey. I've got this detail.
That's the name of the game in complex
(22:15):
situation is that I may believe that I
have seen everything.
Daniel Kahneman, now deceased,
says that, he talks a lot about cognitive
biases, how we consequently
think wrong. And he but the mother of
all biases is, quote, what I see is
all there is, end quote. What happens when
you open up and let other people see
(22:36):
combined with psychological
safety,
where they dare speak up, then you will
discover some things. You will discover things you
don't like to hear, but you will also
stay away from some of the larger
disasters that you might step into. Well, I
think it's the only way you're gonna get
to a problem solved in a complex situation
(22:57):
is in order to have that availability
of people to share and listen. So the
other part of that is it's easy to
have access to data, information, knowledge.
But as you said, the psychological safety, an
organization
may not wanna hear or a leader or
somebody somebody that's a stick in the mud
that is like,
(23:18):
oh, and wants to go to fisticuffs every
time a problem happens.
So there's gotta be somebody that's a gatekeeper
or not a gatekeeper, like a policeman
that's gonna be like, hey. Now everybody play
nice.
So who does that in an organization?
And then I'm sure it's in the constitution.
Right? If you're gonna build an organization,
you're gonna have to build that piece of
(23:40):
Mhmm. Curation,
policing.
As an English politician,
recently in an interview, I'm very pleased you
asked that question.
However, I would rather answer a different one,
which which he did then. For the benefit
of the show, I will answer the question
because this is actually part of what this
came out of writing the book. I have
now for twenty years been a certified scrum
(24:02):
trainer. And scrum is a way of project
management and and getting typically development work, product
development work done. That's where it started, and
it's really started in software, but it applies
to other domains as well. There is a
role called the scrum master. Yes. And legend
has it that it actually was someone who
said, well, what was he actually doing? He's
helping the boys that survive out in the
(24:23):
wild. And, oh, so it's like the boy
scouts, really. What's what's that called? Well, that's
a scout master. Well, then this must be
a scrum master.
So the scrum master has that role, but
the scrum master is like a coach for
the team, and he's the one Mhmm. Who
will stop you if you get off the
rails and said, no. No. We agreed to
do it this way. And there's an interesting
(24:44):
line of,
I would say, cost effect almost, going back
to what we started talking about with the
coop,
with the assembly of free men deciding something
together.
If we go back,
Nordic area or North Germanic areas, really,
back in the old days, thousand years ago,
there were not a central kingdoms. There were
free men
(25:05):
owning a state. I mean, it wasn't a
perfect democracy
by no means. They were there and they
met, and where they met was called a
thing. In Iceland, the parliament is still called
the Althingi.
Thing was also the place where you met
and made decisions.
Are you saying t h I n g?
Yeah. But it's typically spelled with that funny
Icelandic letter. In Danish, it's just t I
(25:28):
n g.
The point of making the here is there
is a tradition for decision making. Decision making
can happen without
the hierarchy of a monarchy or etcetera,
and people can thrive. But what they did
there was that they had such a person
that you are saying who's looking after this.
In India, he's called the law speaker
(25:48):
or in old Norse, Lagman.
And what he did, what he typically, he
was just an old wise guy, and he
knew the law by heart.
So whenever people got a little bit out
of line, he would raise his voice and
say, hey, boys and girls, we actually decided
so and so and so. So this is
how what it is. But see, and the
only way that works is is the people
(26:10):
respect that position. Of course. Yeah. There has
to be the common constitution
that this is how we do things. This
is how we do it. These are the
rules of the chess game, and we're we're
not playing poker here. We're playing chess now
or something.
So you can't list those two. Let me
just let me I wanna read this. So
Britannica has thing under Scandinavian
(26:30):
political assembly. Yeah. Thing, in medieval Scandinavia, the
local provincial and in Iceland, national assemblies of
free men that form the fundamental unit of
government and law. Yeah. And like you said,
meeting at fixed intervals,
the thing in which democratic practices were influenced
by male heads of households
legislated at all levels,
(26:51):
elected royal nominees, and settled all legal questions.
Yeah. But it's different than the English version
of kings and fiefdoms and all that kind
of stuff.
Well, I don't I don't know, but it
just it's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
I did not know this. There's an interesting
connection that I have found now Okay.
Is the same thing existed in Ukraine,
(27:15):
And it also existed in the Cossack societies
up into 1,500,
16 hundreds. That that is why these guys
are fiercely independent.
Right. Because they've got thousands of years under
their belt of of how we do things
Yes. Versus a young country like The United
States, which is pretty juvenile in that regard
of having a history like that where they
(27:37):
grew up with things. One final thing which
I wanted to add to that discussion about
thing because it has a bearing on also
the organizations.
Up in Norway, between
Bergen and Trondheim
on the West Coast, there is this place
called the Gula Thing, which is a historical
site, and you know it's been there since
August or something. But there are written records
(27:59):
from that. So we actually know something about
the laws that were there at the time.
And those laws
are framed in different language. It is not
like you should not, you must not do,
you cannot do, or you should do. It
is the words are mutual commitments.
We, the people of such and such an
entity, have agreed today that no man shall
(28:20):
appropriate another man's horse.
So they are commitments.
That's what the constitution is. It is a
mutual commitment. Yes. And And that's why in
an organization,
when people join,
we expect them actually to commit to Right.
The the all the concepts and everything, that
is so powerful. Thanks for sharing all of
this. I actually think
(28:40):
it it's amazing to me because you're talking
about language, communication,
trusting a system, building a community
all in one breath,
and organized enough and sophisticated
enough to operate it, I'm assuming efficiently, maybe
not efficiently, but it Yeah. It operated
and worked. Again, in complexity,
(29:02):
we call these enabling constraints.
They should not be so tight and so
rigid and so many that they kill all
the spirit of innovation.
But there are enabling constraints, which are the
outer guardrails of how we do things.
Yeah. Yeah. But but flexible enough that people
can operate and still be individuals
in sight. The word that comes to mind
(29:24):
is organic. Yeah. You know, it it's an
organism.
It has certain barriers and constraints as you
say, but there's still growth potential that's unlimited.
Yeah. And there's,
development potential. Again, Dave Snowden says, in complexity,
we are looking for the evolutionary
potential in the present.
And that takes individual
(29:45):
operators
to discover those
evolutionary potentials. Yes. It cannot be centrally forced.
Or dictated. No. Right. Right. Yeah. Inspiration. If
everybody had inspiration, then everything would be done.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alright, my friend. So where can we find
this book? How do people get your book?
Well, first of all, right now, we have
(30:06):
it available on a web shop, and
you can find it on liberatingorg.com.
Also, offer people an electronic copy in a
very simplistic formal way if they will donate
an amount to Ukraine. Got it. We're using
it in Ukraine to train clusters of business,
not exactly a co op, but it's similar.
(30:27):
And we're also going to teach it under
the a program in the master's program on
Kyiv National Economic University,
next semester for a full class. And it's
using the material
translated to new That's awesome.
Well, congratulations.
Yeah. I hope so. I hope it will
help them. That's the first thing, really. Sure.
Sure. I see authors that generate content in
(30:49):
texts and books, and I don't see them
putting it to use like what you're doing.
You're taking the text and then running with
it to train and educate a whole society
or at least those that wanna learn. Yeah.
When that came out of twenty years of
practice, we said we have to pull this
together so that other people can take it
and run with it and and use it.
Well, I wish you well on that whole
(31:09):
journey. But before we roll out of here,
what's your definition of knowledge management?
I'm not sure I have one that is
is very useful. I think there is a
knowledge that you can write down and document
and you can look up and you can
search and and so on. And then there's
the knowledge that is just inside people and
they know how to do things, but they
(31:30):
might not even be able to express what
they know. But you can watch them. In
the old days, I worked as a software
engineer as as well. And, like, for example,
advertising in big newspapers. We were into Los
Angeles time. We had the Orange County Register
as a client. And so how do you
do your advertising?
We don't know. Neli knows. Go and sit
(31:50):
by Neli and watch her.
And Nellie couldn't tell us, but we could
observe what she did. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's
another kind of knowledge, and that's the only
way you can get hold of that kind.
Observation. Tacit knowledge is hard to transfer
for sure.
Well, thank you very much for your time
and your expertise and your willingness to be
involved.
I wish you all the best. Yeah. You
(32:11):
too. Thanks a lot for having me.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and
we hope the experiences gained add value to
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(32:32):
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(00:51):
Forward thinkers, thanks for joining us today. The
conversation you're about to step into talks about
all the foundational things that an organization needs
to consider in order to operate. It will
help. Everything you're about to jump into
is gonna help. It will add value. We'll
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(01:14):
and support.
Hey, everybody. My name is Kurt Nelson. I'm,
from Denmark
in a small village right outside Billund where
LEGO is. So you you understand probably some
of my background from that.
The most interesting things around me today is
(01:35):
actually some of the things I love. They're
right behind me. There are my speakers that
I'm actually an expert in developing high end
speakers.
Who would have thought that? And I absolutely
love working with that, but I also love
working with people and actually see people grow
and flourish and get to be the best
they possibly could.
That's what I do professionally also,
(01:56):
educate
and teach people.
I just wrote a book. It's called Liberating
Organizations,
the cold case for freedom.
And, you see the little bird of liberation
behind me, which is developed by a Ukrainian
artist.
Credit to her, Sofia. And I could absolutely
talk about that for hours, which, of course,
I do if people are willing to pay
(02:16):
for it. And,
doing that next week again, one of the
training courses for organizations
trying to build places
where people can flourish and create value. There's
a lot of people that I owe,
I I guess, who I am and what
I do to. One of them is has
dead and long gone. I never met him.
His name was w Edwards Deming.
(02:38):
He died in '93.
He was the one who was responsible for
him going from The US to Japan
and getting that country into the League of
Nations and being a very professional
and
high quality nation after the devastating war. He's
a hero of mine. I use a lot
of his stuff also in in the book
I wrote.
Some are cool things. You see the flag
(02:59):
behind me. I do a lot of pro
bono work in Ukraine at the moment. There's
a people who has a certain sense of
urgency, I would say,
but not a terribly laid back attitude as
we probably up here in Scandinavia is used
to because we're actually quite comfortable. So that's
what I do, and that's my mission right
now. It's
interesting to me that from your background,
(03:21):
it seems heavy to tech, and you brought
that out in your introduction that you can
build speakers. So you love fidelity, and you
understand ohms and amps and all that stuff
that creates vibrations that people can hear.
What does that have to do with leadership?
I think the first thing is that there's
a sense of quality.
A sense of also,
(03:42):
yeah, as you say, fidelity, and that really
why I build these things is because
the music that comes out of them are
like being there yourself. There's this connection
to the real world, the truth and reality
and facts and
by extension to truth. Yeah.
Yeah. That's an old term. Right? It it
was pretty popular when I was young and
(04:03):
probably before that.
High fidelity
was like a sales pitch. That was Right.
Right. The thing that people wanted
even if they didn't know what it meant.
So I'm looking up right quick. High fidelity,
often shortened to high five, refers to the
high quality reproduction of sound. It aims to
recreate the audio experience with utmost
(04:24):
accuracy and realism.
Correct.
So if we had to change that over
to
leadership, that sounds like authentic authenticity,
I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah. Oh. Oh. You you have to resonate
at a certain level of authenticity
in order to be
a solid citizen, a solid you know, whatever
(04:45):
that person's role is. Don't you think? Absolutely.
Absolutely. It it and without that, then the
answer will be blowing in the wind because
it it will just go from wherever the
wind goes, and and you have to have
that and be solidly
based in in facts.
I grew up in the countryside and the
and boots in the soil were were the
thing and and not floating in thin air.
(05:07):
Yeah. There's gotta be that and it goes
back into that definition of being based in
reality. Yeah. And that is a good segue,
I think, into
what your book is about. Can we talk
about give me an overview,
kinda left to right. Who's the audience, and
what do they wanna get from this? So
in the audience, is is anyone who, for
some reason or another, want to get more
(05:29):
value created out of their organization
and create a
balanced value for all the stakeholders, which really
starts with the customer, those you serve, and
then there is the employees and those who
work there, and then there is the owners,
and then there is a society at large.
The audience that we so far have found
have been owners,
(05:50):
founders
of small to medium sized businesses.
They are sufficiently
close to the money builder that they care
about it. And and they're not lost in
some huge bureaucracy where
position in the hierarchy is more important. Yeah.
They they these are the people we're looking
for. And and the drive for them is
to say, okay. Here is an analysis
(06:10):
of
why we need to work in a different
way in today's complex world than we did
in the old manufacturing world fifty eight, sixty
years ago. What exactly are some
techniques or addresses that you bring forward for
those people to try or put in their
organization as a behavior? It starts, again, with
(06:30):
fidelity and telling you I could in this
case, I would switch to, transparency.
Things have to be transparent.
And then there's a few other things. You
focus on the value stream. How does value
actually get created? You try to get an
overview of that, and then you focus on
teams.
Because when you have to solve complex problems,
which many of our problems today are, if
(06:52):
not outright chaotic Yeah. I don't have the
full picture and you don't have the full
picture. We only have fragmented knowledge, and therefore,
we have to get together. And if we
sit around the table, a bunch of us,
small group, five, six, seven, eight, or nine
or something, perhaps we can see the picture
and we can come up with a solution.
Value stream and teams, and then we also
(07:12):
sometimes refer to the liberating organization as a
constitutional
organization,
where there's the rule of law and not
the law of the ruler.
And the constitution
is the set of working agreements. So if
it's a company, it's some of it is
reflected in the bylaws, for example. And some
some of them are just simple working agreements
between two teams and say, whenever we delegate
(07:35):
the job to you, this is how we've
agreed that that exchange occurs. So there's rules
of engagement. There's rule of order, a lot
you know, it's a building a a behavior
model of what's in and what's out for
organizations'
schema, I guess. I'll I'll call it a
schema to operate from. Don't you think that
most organizations get too heavy in the building
(07:57):
all the schema and not really work in
the work? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, building
the scheme is the easy part. Right? Oh,
we'll sit down. We'll crank out all kinds
of Absolutely. Processes and regulations,
and then nobody looks at it or follows
it or
enforces it. And another thing is that most
of the scheme that's being developed
are so elaborate and comprehensive
(08:19):
that you can't find two people within the
organization to have the same understanding of it.
I've I've actually in for the book here,
I did 90 interviews
with people that we found that these were
people I didn't know before,
most of them actually. Yeah. And a very
frequent statement from many of these people that
said, oh, I wish our organization
(08:40):
would be a bit more outward focused
instead of inward. Meaning what? That means that
why don't we look after what after our
customers and what they actually want all the
people we serve Yeah. Instead of being too
preoccupied with our
internal
exercises. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the army is
the army is marching around on the ground.
(09:01):
They actually not out there dealing with the
world. Yeah. That is a great way to
say that. I love that. I hear what
you're saying that it gets
in in an old, organization I used to
work at, it was busy work. Right? We're
we're doing busy work to do work Yeah.
Versus
what's the impact of what we're doing to
whoever we're supposed to be serving.
(09:22):
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we have a term
here that's used in in in in our
language, in Danish, which is pseudo work. Pseudo.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Fake. Yeah. Fake or Pseudo work. Yeah. Oh,
I'm shuffling papers. I'm shuffling papers. I'm putting
stuff over here. Yeah. Got it. And then
tomorrow, I'm putting it back again. Back where
(09:43):
it was. Yeah. Exactly. It looks suspiciously like
work.
Yeah. Alright. So I'm gonna guess that some
of your
current viewpoint
of work organizations,
leadership trust
comes from
this family
farming startup of a coop.
Would you agree with that? Well, that it
(10:05):
certainly was was quite a big influence. I
mean, that was how life was lived. There
were these small family farms, and,
they didn't have much bargaining power or anything.
So it was part of what actually pulled
the Danish countryside out of poverty was that
these poor fellows gang together and they started
creating dairies and
(10:26):
shops and purchasing agreements and
slaughterhouses and so forth. So that takes organization
and it takes leadership,
but by golly, it has to take a
lot of trust. Yes. It does. Of course,
these were independent operators. There was not Right.
A boss that told these to get together.
But initially, of course, out of need, they
(10:47):
got together and they didn't agree, and sometimes
there were heavy discussions,
but they did find ways forward. They operated
with representative decision making, which is another part
of what we really discuss in the book,
is to replace the top down power based
hierarchy with representative
decision making, where people give a certain authority
(11:09):
to delegates that they trust. Right. But but
again, trust has to be there.
Otherwise, it doesn't work. In this world, there
is really only two way of operating, either
you trust or you control. I wanna make
sure the listener hears this because you're talking
about basically
dealing with these independents, which on paper are
competitors. Yeah. They're competing in the business space,
(11:32):
and you have to convert that mindset to
say there's a different way we could do
this if we got together. Well, I looked
up Merriam Webster's definition of cooperative,
an enterprise or organization
owned by and or operated
for the benefit of those using its services.
Yeah. And some of the services that you
just mentioned was being able to bargain better.
(11:54):
It's almost like a union, isn't it? I
mean, you're, like, representing a a bunch more
people instead of just one organization. That that
is one thing, but they also actually did
create,
dairies, for example. My dad was involved in
and foundational in creating actually quite a large
one. They together
were underwriting
alone for building this building and buying this
(12:16):
machinery Yeah. Which none of them could have
had on their own. And, also, it serves
the region. It serves the area
that these people are in. Yeah. You're building
commerce. You're building the tools of commerce
for them. Yeah. And you are raising your
income level because instead of setting the raw
material, raw milk, for example,
(12:37):
you now sell refined cheese and butter and
what have you, which, of course, carries a
higher value and keeps the business in that
local community.
So why can't we get a government using
that model?
I
think there's a lot. I think there's a
lot with human nature that but actually, one
of the things I quote in my book
is the preamble to the Swiss constitution. And
(13:00):
if you look at Switzerland,
they are probably one of the closest to
that in in the way that the government
operate there. And there's also another thing is
that the government in Switzerland, which is approximately
the same size as Denmark,
there's only one third of the members in
the government.
What does that mean? There's not that overhead.
I mean, you don't have that many ministers.
Alright. So it's a little smaller. But the
(13:21):
trust part, it's just so important.
Also in all other aspects. So so that's
part of why we came out with the
book also is to, here are some tools
that you can help develop trust. Some of
it, of course, is very personal, but some
of it is also to have structures that
support it. Right. One of the people I'm
inspired by, Dave Snowden, who talks about complexity,
(13:45):
he says if you want people to change
behavior, sometimes you have to give them the
tools that allow them to change. Mhmm. Yeah.
So trust,
an example is, one of the most effective
markets known to mankind is the diamond market
in New York City.
It happens to be run by Orthodox Jews
mostly,
but they do trust each other. If I
(14:05):
say to Edwin, I'm gonna buy for a
million dollars diamonds from you, then you don't
need a contract because that will happen tomorrow
if I said so. That's a very tight
knit organizational structure with those kind of expectation.
And I can't imagine it's easy to get
into sideways.
An a new No. That's probably correct. But
the thing is just to think about I
(14:25):
mean, if we, in our organizations,
inter country relations, if we can raise the
trust level,
you know what? Then
our
transaction
costs and our monitoring costs, they drop. There's
some transparency
there that wasn't there before. Yes. That has
to be built over time. It doesn't just
happen. No. Trust is a hard thing to
(14:47):
build and easy to lose. Yes. So I'm
looking at the Swiss preamble of the to
the constitution because I wanted to hear it
myself.
In the name of almighty god, the Swiss
people in the cantons
I don't know what cantons are. They they
like small states. Mindful of their responsibility
towards creation,
resolve to renew their alliance so as to
(15:09):
strengthen liberty, democracy, independence, and peace in a
spirit of solidarity and openness towards the world.
Determined to live together with mutual consideration and
respect for their diversity,
conscious of their common achievements and their responsibility
towards future generations,
and in the knowledge that only those who
use their freedom
(15:30):
remain free,
and that the strength of a people is
measured by the well-being of its weakest members.
That's that's a whole lot right there. It
is.
It is. There there is a lot in
there. Yeah. I I didn't know it went
on before I started researching these things about
constitution
as such. Yeah. And and talking about the
(15:52):
constitutional
organization
where you define that and you agree on
it. And when people enter, they commit to
it. Right. Well, it becomes the operating ethos
and Yeah. Values of the organization.
And if you're not on board with that,
that's that's the goodness of having a good
onboarding program Yeah. That you can give them
(16:12):
the sheet music and say, hey. This is
what you're joining here. If it's not what
you're not jiving with that, then door's right
there. In our company, Agilean House, we actually
used that in the sense of we had
a competency matrix and a value matrix describing
the competencies we were looking for with new
hires.
And so we listed all of those and
(16:32):
when we asked them to assess themselves and
say, so what do I bring to the
table? Do I have this, I'm an expert
here, can I do it? Or would I
like to learn it? Or what is it?
Right? We also had a value metric and
said, we have these values here, and we
would like to know if you could subscribe.
And we would also like if you bring
(16:53):
some to the table, and values can be,
I really want this, or I I really
don't want that.
Okay. So we did that before we even
called people to interview. We'd ask them to
to answer those things. Okay. And it actually
we've given it to other people. It's very
effective in screening to get the right people
in that. You know, instead of just having
them check the block on what HR says
(17:15):
your skills need to be,
you're kinda stepping beyond that prescription
to look at something that's not really tangible
and try
to observe
what's congruent with them with the questions you're
asking. Right? Because those are gonna be a
bigger tell
than the CV or the, you know, resume.
(17:35):
But they're both important. But, like Yeah. If
you talk about you need to trust people,
you need to give them more authority because
they need to be more independent operating, not
just do what they're told.
David Marquette, US submarine captain, he he talks
about intent based leadership. And he says whenever
you wanna give people authority,
(17:56):
they need to have competence.
Well, as obvious he says, on a nuclear
submarine, you don't want incompetent people walking around
pushing buttons.
You need to have clarity. That means you
need to know where we're going. So when
you make a decision, you can sort of
vector it in the right direction.
And then the last thing which we have
emphasized a lot is you need to trust
(18:17):
in people's character. If you give people authority,
you need to be able to trust that
they will be able to Right. They've they've
got a good head on their shoulders, and
their heart's in the right place. Yeah. Then
but they need to have the character so
that they can make decisions
for the common good and not just for
their own good. Not yeah. Not for selfish
reasons. A Forbes article from January of twenty
(18:39):
nineteen called eight ways to lead employees with
intent based leadership. Yeah. And what do you
think is number one? Become a better communicator.
Yeah. And I think communications
in and of itself is overlooked
a lot
in organizational
behavior
because they don't seem to spend a whole
lot of resources
in building a knowledge base, if you will,
(19:02):
a common operational
framework that everybody
is aware of. We use this word for
that,
very distinct
and straightforward
communications
styles. Right.
How do you build better communications
that gains more trust? Well, first of all,
as you said, you you've got to define
your vocabulary.
(19:23):
Now it's not enough just to write it
in some sort of personnel handbook.
It needs to be lived and communicated day
by day and reminded because the finer things
you you know how it is with language.
That there are certain things you could say
to me with your American background, and I
say, what was he talking about here? But
it has a meaning to you. And so
we need to communicate. That's the first thing.
(19:45):
Then we need a commitment to radical transparency.
Retired general, Stanley McChrystal, he was sent to
Iraq Twenty Years ago and discovered that he
couldn't cope with the Al Qaeda, with the
hierarchical structure because they were just moving so
much faster.
So so he came up with this other
model. He said, the first thing was we
needed was radical transparency.
And not that stuff that the CIA always
(20:07):
kept hammering. This is on a need to
know basis and you don't need to know.
Mhmm. We needed radical transparency
and then push authority
as far out as you can find someone
who can carry it. Okay. That required him
to to change his behavior from being what
he called the chess master moving the pieces
around to becoming the gardener who prepared the
soil for this to grow. That was pretty
(20:29):
hard on a 50 year old four star
general, he said. Old dogs, new tricks. Yeah.
Exactly. I am trying to get a definition
of radical transparency
because it sounds pretty cool. I like the
idea,
and I'm not aware of that. I I
don't think there is a very precise definition
of it apart from the fact in context.
And I understand that there are situations in
(20:51):
companies
and organizations where you can't have Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Complete transparency. It's not for everybody. Yeah.
That's true. For the main part, you should
probably go a bit farther than than you
normally would be comfortable with and actually let
people who work in the organization
see the transparency,
see where you're going. You're also saying to
give them agency. Yeah. With my background with
(21:12):
the US army,
you get to have battle command, which meant
when the stuff's flying,
you make decisions as best you can where
you're at regardless, and that's the expectation.
But in practice,
hierarchy is the absolute driver of all things
and answers all things and then keeps things
(21:33):
separate by design.
Radical transparency,
I found a definition on Wikipedia.
Radical transparency is a phrase used across fields
of governance,
politics, software design, and business to describe actions
and approaches that radically increase the openness
of an organizational
process and data.
(21:54):
Its usage was originally understood as an approach
or act that uses abundant network information
to access previously confidential
or alright. So, basically, you're opening up the
floodgates
of everything we know so everybody can do
something. You can do something and can intervene
and say, oh, hey. I've got this detail.
That's the name of the game in complex
(22:15):
situation is that I may believe that I
have seen everything.
Daniel Kahneman, now deceased,
says that, he talks a lot about cognitive
biases, how we consequently
think wrong. And he but the mother of
all biases is, quote, what I see is
all there is, end quote. What happens when
you open up and let other people see
(22:36):
combined with psychological
safety,
where they dare speak up, then you will
discover some things. You will discover things you
don't like to hear, but you will also
stay away from some of the larger
disasters that you might step into. Well, I
think it's the only way you're gonna get
to a problem solved in a complex situation
(22:57):
is in order to have that availability
of people to share and listen. So the
other part of that is it's easy to
have access to data, information, knowledge.
But as you said, the psychological safety, an
organization
may not wanna hear or a leader or
somebody somebody that's a stick in the mud
that is like,
(23:18):
oh, and wants to go to fisticuffs every
time a problem happens.
So there's gotta be somebody that's a gatekeeper
or not a gatekeeper, like a policeman
that's gonna be like, hey. Now everybody play
nice.
So who does that in an organization?
And then I'm sure it's in the constitution.
Right? If you're gonna build an organization,
you're gonna have to build that piece of
(23:40):
Mhmm. Curation,
policing.
As an English politician,
recently in an interview, I'm very pleased you
asked that question.
However, I would rather answer a different one,
which which he did then. For the benefit
of the show, I will answer the question
because this is actually part of what this
came out of writing the book. I have
now for twenty years been a certified scrum
(24:02):
trainer. And scrum is a way of project
management and and getting typically development work, product
development work done. That's where it started, and
it's really started in software, but it applies
to other domains as well. There is a
role called the scrum master. Yes. And legend
has it that it actually was someone who
said, well, what was he actually doing? He's
helping the boys that survive out in the
(24:23):
wild. And, oh, so it's like the boy
scouts, really. What's what's that called? Well, that's
a scout master. Well, then this must be
a scrum master.
So the scrum master has that role, but
the scrum master is like a coach for
the team, and he's the one Mhmm. Who
will stop you if you get off the
rails and said, no. No. We agreed to
do it this way. And there's an interesting
(24:44):
line of,
I would say, cost effect almost, going back
to what we started talking about with the
coop,
with the assembly of free men deciding something
together.
If we go back,
Nordic area or North Germanic areas, really,
back in the old days, thousand years ago,
there were not a central kingdoms. There were
free men
(25:05):
owning a state. I mean, it wasn't a
perfect democracy
by no means. They were there and they
met, and where they met was called a
thing. In Iceland, the parliament is still called
the Althingi.
Thing was also the place where you met
and made decisions.
Are you saying t h I n g?
Yeah. But it's typically spelled with that funny
Icelandic letter. In Danish, it's just t I
(25:28):
n g.
The point of making the here is there
is a tradition for decision making. Decision making
can happen without
the hierarchy of a monarchy or etcetera,
and people can thrive. But what they did
there was that they had such a person
that you are saying who's looking after this.
In India, he's called the law speaker
(25:48):
or in old Norse, Lagman.
And what he did, what he typically, he
was just an old wise guy, and he
knew the law by heart.
So whenever people got a little bit out
of line, he would raise his voice and
say, hey, boys and girls, we actually decided
so and so and so. So this is
how what it is. But see, and the
only way that works is is the people
(26:10):
respect that position. Of course. Yeah. There has
to be the common constitution
that this is how we do things. This
is how we do it. These are the
rules of the chess game, and we're we're
not playing poker here. We're playing chess now
or something.
So you can't list those two. Let me
just let me I wanna read this. So
Britannica has thing under Scandinavian
(26:30):
political assembly. Yeah. Thing, in medieval Scandinavia, the
local provincial and in Iceland, national assemblies of
free men that form the fundamental unit of
government and law. Yeah. And like you said,
meeting at fixed intervals,
the thing in which democratic practices were influenced
by male heads of households
legislated at all levels,
(26:51):
elected royal nominees, and settled all legal questions.
Yeah. But it's different than the English version
of kings and fiefdoms and all that kind
of stuff.
Well, I don't I don't know, but it
just it's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
I did not know this. There's an interesting
connection that I have found now Okay.
Is the same thing existed in Ukraine,
(27:15):
And it also existed in the Cossack societies
up into 1,500,
16 hundreds. That that is why these guys
are fiercely independent.
Right. Because they've got thousands of years under
their belt of of how we do things
Yes. Versus a young country like The United
States, which is pretty juvenile in that regard
of having a history like that where they
(27:37):
grew up with things. One final thing which
I wanted to add to that discussion about
thing because it has a bearing on also
the organizations.
Up in Norway, between
Bergen and Trondheim
on the West Coast, there is this place
called the Gula Thing, which is a historical
site, and you know it's been there since
August or something. But there are written records
(27:59):
from that. So we actually know something about
the laws that were there at the time.
And those laws
are framed in different language. It is not
like you should not, you must not do,
you cannot do, or you should do. It
is the words are mutual commitments.
We, the people of such and such an
entity, have agreed today that no man shall
(28:20):
appropriate another man's horse.
So they are commitments.
That's what the constitution is. It is a
mutual commitment. Yes. And And that's why in
an organization,
when people join,
we expect them actually to commit to Right.
The the all the concepts and everything, that
is so powerful. Thanks for sharing all of
this. I actually think
(28:40):
it it's amazing to me because you're talking
about language, communication,
trusting a system, building a community
all in one breath,
and organized enough and sophisticated
enough to operate it, I'm assuming efficiently, maybe
not efficiently, but it Yeah. It operated
and worked. Again, in complexity,
(29:02):
we call these enabling constraints.
They should not be so tight and so
rigid and so many that they kill all
the spirit of innovation.
But there are enabling constraints, which are the
outer guardrails of how we do things.
Yeah. Yeah. But but flexible enough that people
can operate and still be individuals
in sight. The word that comes to mind
(29:24):
is organic. Yeah. You know, it it's an
organism.
It has certain barriers and constraints as you
say, but there's still growth potential that's unlimited.
Yeah. And there's,
development potential. Again, Dave Snowden says, in complexity,
we are looking for the evolutionary
potential in the present.
And that takes individual
(29:45):
operators
to discover those
evolutionary potentials. Yes. It cannot be centrally forced.
Or dictated. No. Right. Right. Yeah. Inspiration. If
everybody had inspiration, then everything would be done.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alright, my friend. So where can we find
this book? How do people get your book?
Well, first of all, right now, we have
(30:06):
it available on a web shop, and
you can find it on liberatingorg.com.
Also, offer people an electronic copy in a
very simplistic formal way if they will donate
an amount to Ukraine. Got it. We're using
it in Ukraine to train clusters of business,
not exactly a co op, but it's similar.
(30:27):
And we're also going to teach it under
the a program in the master's program on
Kyiv National Economic University,
next semester for a full class. And it's
using the material
translated to new That's awesome.
Well, congratulations.
Yeah. I hope so. I hope it will
help them. That's the first thing, really. Sure.
Sure. I see authors that generate content in
(30:49):
texts and books, and I don't see them
putting it to use like what you're doing.
You're taking the text and then running with
it to train and educate a whole society
or at least those that wanna learn. Yeah.
When that came out of twenty years of
practice, we said we have to pull this
together so that other people can take it
and run with it and and use it.
Well, I wish you well on that whole
(31:09):
journey. But before we roll out of here,
what's your definition of knowledge management?
I'm not sure I have one that is
is very useful. I think there is a
knowledge that you can write down and document
and you can look up and you can
search and and so on. And then there's
the knowledge that is just inside people and
they know how to do things, but they
(31:30):
might not even be able to express what
they know. But you can watch them. In
the old days, I worked as a software
engineer as as well. And, like, for example,
advertising in big newspapers. We were into Los
Angeles time. We had the Orange County Register
as a client. And so how do you
do your advertising?
We don't know. Neli knows. Go and sit
(31:50):
by Neli and watch her.
And Nellie couldn't tell us, but we could
observe what she did. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's
another kind of knowledge, and that's the only
way you can get hold of that kind.
Observation. Tacit knowledge is hard to transfer
for sure.
Well, thank you very much for your time
and your expertise and your willingness to be
involved.
I wish you all the best. Yeah. You
(32:11):
too. Thanks a lot for having me.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and
we hope the experiences gained add value to
you and yours.
See you next time at Because You Need
to Know. If you'd like to contact us,
please email
byntk@pioneer-ks.org,
(32:32):
or find us on LinkedIn.
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