Tag: tools

[May 2026] I now reach for Schein on culture, Westrum on generative-vs-pathological organisations, Edmondson on psychological safety, Senge on learning-organisation discipline, and Galbraith’s Star Model alongside Org Topologies for structure as the more rigorous current vocabulary for what this post calls “structure and culture.” The doing-vs-being distinction still holds; the toolkit has matured. I’ve also since added a fifth box at the cheap end of the diagram, to the left of tools: “terms,” changing the words you use. It’s the easiest change and the emptiest one, and I can’t claim much originality for it. Craig Larman named this years ago in the second of his Laws of Organisational Behaviour: any change initiative gets reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as the status quo. New words, same operating model.

[August 2026] The NUMMI listening questions I set out here, about what changed in the plant and what GM could not replicate elsewhere, are the ones I work through at length in Chapter 3 of Come Prepared to Die. Same plant, read the other way round: the chapter takes NUMMI as the inverse case, where GM copied the production system and left the structure alone. AI now hands you the tools-and-process win almost for free, which leaves the structure you never touched as where most of the remaining gain sits. I came back to that plant from a different angle in the Team Member Handbook post.