A Mason's Work

At a systemic level, the compasses after a modest inquiry start to point out a couple of

sort of fundamental truths.

Organizations and even individual organisms in a system have a desire to grow.

It's either a stated desire or it's built into the system itself.

Organizations, all that kind of stuff, it's all designed to grow.

And as it does, the appetites of that system increase, the demands increase, the desires

increase, the scope tends to increase.

And so you can very quickly look at a systemic level and apply the compasses that understand

that those appetites, if they are unsustainable, if they add attacks to the systems from which

they emerge, you run into some very discrete problems pretty quickly.

And that is, is almost always capacity, right?

Without the appropriate amount of capacity to solve those organizational appetites, you're

going to go through these cycles.

And the cycle looks something like an overreach or a demand that's too high, some level

of strain on that system, then either a correction of some sort or a complete collapse and then

a restart.

You'll see this in patterns in across society and across kind of most major organizations.

Look for like Cory Doctoro's, you know, blog entry on insuitification, talking about

how the internet works.

This pattern of overreach withdrawal, collapse, and then restarting is something that kind

of repeats itself over and over and over again.

So when you look at your own sort of situation and ways to apply the systemic understanding

of the compass, it makes sense to start to think about the system.

It's to start to say, okay, well, what are the things that I have direct influence and

control over?

How can I exert that influence in a way that allows us to either build capacity to support

those, the demand that's inevitably coming?

Or what can we do to reshape that demand in a way that's sort of manageable, given the

capacities we have?

The boundaries in this case, just like we talked about boundaries in relationships, the

boundaries between organizations start to become useful for creating that scalability

that you need.

I'll give you a kind of an easy example, right?

This is where you would outsource.

You would outsource certain functionalities of certain capacities at an organizational

level.

You would have somebody else do payroll, for example, or you would have somebody else

do your, you know, dental work or whatever the case may be.

There are a lot of situations at a systemic level where it just doesn't make sense for

you to attempt to solve some of these problems on your own that in order to maintain sort of

scalability and functionality, you will have to outsource and you'll have to understand

those relationships between the organizations and structures and ideas and concepts in your

life such that it doesn't become a place of collapse.

So what do you do?

You look around to those places where you're getting your overtaxed, where you might

be in a situation where it makes sense to move a function to a third party or a capacity

to a third party to again give you the systemic sort of responsiveness to be able to scale

and grow.

It builds that scalability into the conversation in a way that allows the organism, whatever

that might be, yourself personally or the, you know, the organizations you're part of,

your work, your lodge, what have you.

Do the things you're good at, take things out that you're not good at, negotiate the relationships

between those two in a consistently repeatable way and then allow the organization to flourish

as all organizations essentially are designed to do.

This is something that every, every, and every structural organization, every internal

sort of model, you know, they very rarely do they sit in sort of equilibrium for long.

There will always be a desire to grow and change and evolve.