The making of …¶

This section is about building things: the teams, the infrastructure, the environments. It is distinct from the conceptual and operational sections elsewhere in this collection. Those sections describe how a thing works and how to run it once it exists. This section is about the work of creating it in the first place.

The foundations framing applies throughout. Building a SIRT or a SOC is a ChangeShop problem before it is a technical one: the organisation is already in a steady state, and that steady state resists the addition of new structures. The resistance is not obstruction; it is information about what the current state needs and what conditions the new structure requires in order to take root. Building a purple team programme involves the PSL dynamics that appear in every complex group undertaking: the rational layer (what does this team actually need to do), the emotional layer (how do people feel about being on the finding end of testing), and the political layer (who has the authority to act on what the team discovers). Building labs creates prepared environments in the Montessori sense: the environment shapes what can be discovered in it, and the design encodes assumptions about what the learners need to encounter.

None of these things succeed primarily because the technical execution is correct. They succeed when the organisational conditions for them have been created, and fail when those conditions are assumed rather than built.