+
+ It is why his programmes tend to survive contact with the organisations they are meant + to change, when so many do not. What he brings is a disposition, formed over years + inside the work rather than applied to it from outside, and it resolves into three + habits of thought. Aristotle had a word for the faculty they draw on. He called it + phronesis: the practical wisdom that formal knowledge cannot supply, the capacity to + reason well about situations that refuse to hold still. Simon has spent a career + learning to exercise it at scale. +
+The Socratic practice
Hand Simon a problem and he begins where almost no one begins, by doubting its @@ -141,9 +144,12 @@
The Socratic practice
solve a problem no one actually had.The stated problem is a claim, never granted the status of fact until it has earned it.
- -+
The utilitarian practice
The second habit is a moral one, though Simon would not use the word about himself. @@ -156,10 +162,18 @@
The utilitarian practice
holds the systems he is responsible for to the good they return, and counts their friction as a cost, because someone always pays it. - -+
The polyrhythm of transformation
+The third habit took the longest to see, and it is the hardest to see from outside, and it is the most distinctive thing about the way Simon works. Enterprise change, @@ -176,18 +190,46 @@
The polyrhythm of transformation
decision answers to. It is a musician's discipline carried into an industrial one, and almost no one else in the field thinks this way. - -- None of this was arrived at in the abstract. Each habit was formed under load, on real - programmes at real scale, and the record of that is the rest of this site. What the - record shows, read closely, is a single mind refusing the easy version of a hard - problem, again and again, across a career. -
-