The structures that govern much of our work lives do not readily have categories for emotions, nor for hunches and feelings. Consequently, as new initiatives start out, aspects are categorised in a more prosaic and tangible form, which creates a category mistake right at the outset. Better to consider a new initiative as a fragile emotional creature, where a misleading or over hasty description can give rise to misunderstanding and poor decision making.

So for a more rounded perspective into human ingenuity and invention, we must not look solely toward management knowledge but into realms that lie beyond it. Because as we go to work, and as we set foot over a corporate portal, we take all aspects of ourselves along too. None of us become super sanitised versions of ourselves.

Perspectives and the knowledge from the literature on management has had immense influence. Over many decades, it has successfully shaped understanding, practice, and operations globally and within most industry sectors. But on the aspect of innovation and development, I would question whether the wisdom has been as effective.

Hidden uncertainty tends to resurface later, usually at a more expensive moment.

It is worth being precise about what best practice is actually good at. It is very good at repeating something that already works, reliably, at scale, with the same outcome each time. That is an entirely different task from working out what should exist in the first place. When a new idea is still forming, there is no established process to follow, because the whole point is that nothing like it has been done here before. Applying a steady state system to that kind of uncertainty does not make the uncertainty go away, it simply hides it under a spreadsheet, and hidden uncertainty tends to resurface later, usually at a more expensive moment.

Totemics began here, with the suspicion, followed by research, that the many best practice systems in management excel in managing steady state activity yet are less than a good fit for innovation.

It is imperative to understand that with new initiatives there are inevitable episodes of uncertainty, ambiguity, and acceptance that the timing of these episodes are rarely predictable. Any formal or fixed system must be subservient, able to give way to trust and understanding, to barter and compromise, to friendly fight and disappointment. Plenty of time needs to be available for a group of individuals to get to know enough about one another to work collaboratively.

Equally imperative is to know how to be humble and yet simultaneously curious, to know that promising ideas can turn up sometimes from unexpected sources and places. It is vital to remember how easily we all come too quickly to an assumption, and too, to recognise that the things we know are not always those things that we readily think to say. And that we should give time and space to ourselves and to others for reflection, since that is often where we need to look to find gold.

None of this is an argument against structure altogether. A group without any shape at all rarely gets anywhere either. The point is simply that the shape needs to be loose enough to bend around the work rather than the work being forced to bend around it. That is a subtle distinction, but it is the one that decides whether a genuinely new idea survives its first few meetings or quietly dies in them.

[This piece continues in Learning from Lévi-Strauss, where we look at where the name Totemics comes from, and what it actually looks like in practice.]