What you can learn about creating better organizations from a controversial German philosopher
Plus some updates after running my new biz for two months
Welcome to The Deliberate! This is my old personal newsletter where I explored the intersection of personal and organizational development. It’s now the primary external facing outlet for my new consultancy, Deliberate Works. The nice thing about starting your own business is that it gets to be whatever you want it to be. Which means, this newsletter is still about the intersection of personal and organizational development. Funny how that works, eh?
In this issue we have some reflections on what I’m learning about organizational design from my ongoing battle with Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as some more banal updates about what’s been happening in the biz. Let’s dive in!
Heidegger and Organizational Design
If you follow me on LinkedIn you may have seen my recent musings as I slog my way through Heidgger’s Being and Time. It is going about as well as everyone warned me it would. But I’m stubborn, and if I’m going to wade through that much German philosophy, I intend to squeeze every last drop of usable insight out of it.
So far it has handed me two ideas, from two different corners of the book, that I can’t stop turning over in my head. I’m increasingly convinced they’re the same idea wearing two coats — and that together they describe most of what I actually do for a living.
The first idea centers around a hammer.
When you’re using a hammer well, it disappears. You don’t notice it; you’re absorbed in the building. Heidegger called this “ready-to-hand.” The tool recedes so your attention can land on the work.
The hammer only reappears as an object — something you notice, inspect, turn over in your mind — when it breaks. Now you’re staring at the tool instead of using it. Heidegger calls this “present-at-hand.”
Organizations work the same way. When a team’s structure, its meeting cadence, its way of making decisions are all working, they vanish. Nobody talks about them. Attention flows to the real work: the customer, the product, the problem worth solving.
You know an organization is in trouble when people can’t stop talking about the organization. When every conversation is about process, reporting lines, who owns what, why the meeting ran long again. The machinery has broken into view — and now it’s eating the attention that was supposed to go to the work.
Which leads somewhere slightly uncomfortable for an organizational change professional like myself: the best parts of your organization are the ones nobody is thinking about. It’s uncomfortable for me in particular because my job is often to treat these things as present-at-hand — to pick up the broken hammer and turn it over in the light. In my defense, it’s usually because they are broken, and we’re trying to get them working again as fast as we can. But it’s a good reminder not to go overboard. Not to talk about hammers — or operating rhythms — for the sheer pleasure of talking about them. There’s hammering to do. There’s real work waiting.
The second idea centers around “worlds.”
Heidegger says a world is not a collection of objects. Instead, it’s a web of references: this exists in-order-to enable that, which exists for-the-sake-of something someone cares about. The things matter only because of how they point to each other.
This helped me see why the traditional org chart is such an impoverished way of seeing an organization. The organization is not in the boxes. It’s in the lines — and mostly in the white space the lines can’t capture. The roles and teams and tools are real enough, but they’re not where the organization lives. It lives in the relationships between them: the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of that no chart has ever managed to draw.
I’ve started thinking about good org design as building that world — taking the invisible connective tissue and making it just visible enough to work with. Once it’s visible, we can point at it. Elevate it. Argue about it. Improve it. Get a little more deliberate and coherent about how all those references are actually pointing at each other. (This, incidentally, is what a good team charter is really for. Not a rulebook. A way of making a world legible enough to choose on purpose.)
And here’s where the two coats turn out to fit the same body. The hammer says: when the work is good, the structure is invisible. Let it recede. The world says: the organization is invisible, and the job is to make it visible enough to improve.
For a while those felt like they were pulling in opposite directions. Make things disappear or drag them into the light? But the contradiction dissolves once you notice that present-at-hand is a phase, not a destination.
You bring the invisible web of your organization into view on purpose. You make the broken hammer (or to collapse the metaphor further, the broken decision rights, the bad meetings, the non-sensical workflows etc.) conspicuous, name the references, draw the white space. Not because visibility is the goal but because you can’t improve what you can’t see, and you can’t act deliberately on a system you can’t perceive. Seeing the system you’re inside is the whole precondition for changing it.
And then — this is the part I’m most likely to forget as the complete and non-repentant organizational nerd that I am — you let it go again. You hand the structure back to ready-to-hand, better than it was, so it can disappear into the work. The entire point of making the machinery conspicuous is to get it working well enough that everyone can stop noticing it.
So good org design isn’t a state. It’s a rhythm: into view, and out again. You make the world visible so the people inside it can shape it, then you return it to them quiet enough that they can forget it’s there and get back to the building.
The best organizational design isn’t the kind you can see. It’s the kind you finally get to forget.
Updates from Deliberate Works
This is my first update since the April 8th edition where I explained where the name “Deliberate Works” comes from. As you can imagine, a lot has happened in two months:
I continue spending most of my time with an anchor client where I’m participating on a new team responsible for instilling a new sense of “operational excellence” inside a large bureaucracy. The work has been the usual mix of meta-work all teams need to figure out before they can really sink themselves into the work at hand: figuring out their operating rhythm, getting a basic team charter in place, getting a handle on their existing work in progress, etc. I’m loving being in the mix in a larger organization where things often feel inscrutable and difficult to understand and yet there’s a real sense of building something new.
I completed an 8 week operating system experimentation sprint with another organization. We did a quick deep dive to understand the nuanced factors behind the pervasive “meetings are bad” feelings in the org. We then designed a few experiments (an easy full org one around default meeting length, one aimed at rationalizing a series of recurring meetings that used to be spread out across the week, and a few led individual ones led by leaders of recurring meetings). We ran those experiments for 6 weeks and then did a retrospective at the end. They felt some immediate relief, had more ideas for new experiments, and a renewed desire to keep chipping away at the challenge. I also created a 90 minute “facilitation training” that I teased on LinkedIn (and will probably turn into something more robust soon!)
At Work with The Ready is chugging along with episodes on the chaos tax, office politics, how to make big things happen, and what comes after the failed ‘ways of working’ movement. New episodes every week!
I also appeared on the Leading Together podcast where we talked about team agreements.
Get In Touch
I’m excited by this 8 week OS experimentation sprint approach I’ve now run a couple times with different clients. It feels good (for me and for the client) to make meaningful progress quickly on something that has felt stuck for a long time. I’m definitely looking to start 1 or 2 more of these in the coming weeks.
I also built a minimally viable Speaking page on the website for the first time. I’m looking to do some standalone speaking/facilitation sooner rather than later so if you have any leads on opportunities, I’d be very grateful for the connections.
There’s more to come on the Studio side of the business very soon, but not ready to share quite yet.
Replying to this email or sending a note to sam@deliberateworks.com is the best way to get in touch. Otherwise, please share this newsletter with someone who might enjoy it.
Until next time!
Sam Spurlin