01. PRACTICE

“A practice is an encounter: an encounter with the world and with people and things in it.”
— Prof. Stephen Kemmis

  • Everybody has a practice, but many struggle to define what their practice is or how it creates value - beyond a job title. When we do try to describe it, the language used is often the jargon of the technical craft or traditions of a particular industry or discipline.

    A practice is made of the interactions we have with the environment around us: social, physical or psychological. We are all a mix of different practices: from our technical training, the various workplace cultures and the environments in which we interact.

    But how do we intentionally structure a unique practice that is able to traverse different domains, and build a meaningful, value-creating body of work over a lifetime? How do we reshape not only our own practice, but the collective practice/s within organisations? Practice transformation operates at a deeper layer than change management.

  • The contemporary practice of leadership navigates a complex array of changing paradigms, patterns and paradoxes across business and social environments. In the latest global leadership study, Harvard Business Publishing synthesised the main challenge for organisations as "the need to advance the practice of leadership to meet the needs of transformation efforts across organizations".

    There are inherent practices that build up within an organisation that shape us and are shaped by us: consciously or by osmosis. Contemporary workplaces need multi-disciplined leaders who can carry different practices across domains to deal with new paradigms and complexity. These leaders build and share stores of seeds, rather than create siloes.

    Siloes hoard while practice connects. We reframe siloes as a place to gather and share seeds, rather than as closed granaries. By operating at a foundational layer of practice, organisations can move beyond scarcity thinking into value amplification.

  • The goal of the work in practices is to translate contemporary research on the structure and nature of practices into actionable steps for leaders and organisations to open up the pent up siloes within their groups.

    Professor Kees Dorst has created the Practice Framework (Dorst, 2016) which outlines how a practice operates across four key layers: values, principles, methods and actions. This new way of looking at practice opens actionable pathways to realise value-laden behaviours, interactions and collaboration.

    By leveraging this framework and learning from other practices, organisations can shift the practices within their organisation. Complementary to this research is the reflection-in-action practice from organisational theory (Schon, 1991).

  • The challenge: In the financial services industry, an enterprise-wide initiative was created to connect siloes across nearly 20 different functions. There was no common terminology, process or ownership of innovation ideation.

    The intervention: Through a series of workshops, the hidden frame was identified and reframed. This established a shared metaphor vision.

    The outcome: This built a new and shared perspective on the goal: an innovation greenhouse that could incubate and store seeds and early-stage plants ‘in the commons’, transparently for everyone to see, contribute and collect. This enabled diverse contributions to be welded together to create the collaboration architecture before a future technical solution.