Hey,

I hope you’re having a wonderful day, wherever in the world you are.

My name is Behzod and you’re receiving this email because you signed up for the Organizations as Ecosystems newsletter (or someone forwarded this to you - in which case, you can click that link to subscribe on your own 😉).

First off, thanks for joining me on this journey. I truly have no idea where it will go, but the past few weeks have already been invigorating thanks to many of you sending me recommendations, responding to tweets, or having conversations in private spaces.

Which brings to me to my second point (which is really two requests). I recognize many of you who have subscribed at this point — either people I know or people I know of — so (request #1) I hope that you’ll be patient with me as I re-tread on some of the ground many of you have already walked. I’d like to think that my journey will look different than yours, and perhaps by me sharing mine, we’ll both see things differently at the end of this.

Request #2 is for you to reply to this email with a recommendation for the journey. It can be something to read (or not to read), something to think about, a person to converse with, a metaphor to engage with, and so on. Since I’m doing this project in public, I’d love to have engagement with that public (which is a nudge to reply to these emails with whatever is alive for you at any point).

With that out of the way, let’s talk about where I’ve been.

I have big dreams for some of the very different things I’ll be reading and exploring as a part of this project, but I wanted to start with what called to me here and now. That was something that is probably familiar to many of you — Stewart Brand’s “Pace Layers” from his book "The Clock of the Long Now".

This is well-worn territory for many reasons, so I had mixed feelings about even starting here. But, because it is so familiar, I felt that it may be an oversight on my end to not engage. An oversight it would have been indeed.

The first real piece I wrote for OAE (excluding the welcome post is a brief reflection on Pace Layers in concert with Donella Meadows’ “Dancing With Systems” (thank you Tom for the recommendation). Perhaps poorly titled “Dancing with Pace Layers,” the post meanders through both Brand’s and Meadows’ work, proposing a V0.1 of “Organizational Pace Layers” (which you can see below next to Brand’s):

As I call out in the piece, I don’t love the layers yet, but they’ve been useful thus far, at least as a straw man.

The second piece I wrote — “Debt and Time” — is a reflection on “organizational debt” as a result of reading Clay Parker Jones’ post “Onward!” He shares an image of how organizations learn, which includes both levels and time periods. As I thought about different forms of debt, I borrowed from Jones to wonder what kinds of debt are only visible after a certain period of time.

The third piece that’s up — “Tools are Divisive” — is about tools and which organizational pace layers are prioritized when people make decisions about tools. Specifically, I call out the different priorities that an end-user and a software decision-maker have when deciding what tools to use/buy.

In each of the pieces, I share questions for you (and me) to think about in terms of you, your experiences, and your organizations. If you happen to answer any of them, I’d love to see!

As I mentioned at the beginning, the recommendations from many of you have been fantastic. I'm grateful for each of them thus far and would love it for you to keep them up!

Have a wonderful week - and don’t forget request #2 above.

Behzod