Times They Are A Changing... #2

How Do We Start Creating An Alternate Organizing Design?

How do we move to a new organizing design? Especially when things are already under way – the organizing design/model is established, and people come to each interaction with long established ways of doing things. Further, there is a built in, mostly implicit, expectation about how “things should be done around here”.

The challenge is even more daunting for many when they are unconsciously at the affect of a myth that includes beliefs like: change can only start at the top; you have to have permission or authority to cause change; change takes a long time and requires resources… all these beliefs have the effect of giving permission to inaction, resignation or a reluctant acceptance of the status quo.

We first need to recognize/acknowledge that our prevailing mindset is biased in favor of a worldview in which predict and control is the operating state.  If we can’t predict outcomes, and if we can’t control things on the way to desired outcomes, then we are, de facto, not ready, we are not prepared. We need more predictive data.

Instead, we need to start practicing operating with an emergent worldview in which the operative mode is sensing what is happening in our immediate environment and responding to what we see, sense and feel – sensing the gap between what is going on now and what could be in the furtherance of our purpose.

This moment-by-moment sensing will inform how to respond, NOW, with appropriate next actions – what to stop, what to start, what to do differently, and what to make sure we continue, all to forward the group’s purpose

Here are the key steps:

Start with Purpose

Why does the group exist? Who or what is it designed to serve? Who would care if the group no longer existed – in what way would they be impacted that would be a detriment to them?

Alignment with, and passion for, the purpose should be a fundamental, must meet condition for including people in the group – both in the initial recruitment stage and in the ongoing continuing to belong phase.

Add Values

Clearly articulated, and shared, core values help shape decisions about mission, strategy, governance, policies, rules, systems and day-to-day operations.

As Thomas Jefferson puts it, “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Principles, or core values are non-negotiable, and are another fundamental must meet condition in decisions about who should be in the group.

Align on The Mission

The mission, or strategic intent, is a time-bound expression of intention for the group. It is aspirational and it is an articulation of things like scale, rate of growth, impact, and reputation, to name a few.

The value of articulating a mission is that it helps to guide conversations about resources, priorities, infrastructure, systems and day-to-day focus, goals and priorities.

Design The Groups Key Organizing Elements

1. The Organizing Structure: Organize the work that needs to be done into roles and functions [groupings of roles] that are needed – do not organize around people, job titles or job descriptions
2. The Governance Process: Governance is a continual/ongoing process to decide how to break down each element of the work into roles, what authorities each role has, what to expect of each role, and what resources and permissions each role has
3. Operations: the focus of operations is on getting things done. In tactical meetings the group reviews metrics, update projects, processes tensions – tensions being the gap between what is present now, and what could be to forward the group’s purpose.

 Some Guiding Perspectives

The more explicit we can be about guiding perspectives the easier it will be to align, collaborate, produce desired outcomes, and resolve tensions and conflicts.

1. The focus of leadership is on organizing work, not people
2. Everyone in the organization is considered to be a leader
3. Every leader’s primary job is to advance the roles they fill
4. Each roles is defined to include:
1. Specific accountabilities
2. The decision-making authority and permissions the role has
3. The responsibilities of the role for things like transparency, communication, surfacing and processing tensions
4. Managing expectations
5. Participating in conversations about operations
6. Contributing to governance conversations.

Some Essential Practices

A practice refers to a designed, regular and intentional set of actions that interrupt old habits [ingrained unconscious “practices”] and create new activities designed to generate the behavior and the results, wanted to forward the group’s purpose.

Practices need to be shared and need to be part of everyone’s day-to-day behavior to yield their value.

After the essentials are in place additional practices will be identified as missing in the day-to-day process of identifying and resolving tensions. In governance meetings proposals will be accepted to add new practices, as they are needed.

Starting essentials:

1.  Sensing and responding NOW, displacing predicting and controlling the future
2. Conversations for action – requesting, promising, making offers
3. Maintaining an existence system – a visible, distributed display of measures and metrics, next actions, and projects
4. Surfacing and dealing with conflict
5. Operational meetings
6. Regular governance conversations
7. Managing meeting to stay on purpose
8. Distributed decision-making

Times They Are A Changing…

The Context for an Alternate Organizational Design

Unless we design something different each person, team or group in an organization will naturally adopt the default organizing design, given it is the one we have all been trained and acculturated in.

The aspiration of (almost) everyone in an organization is that work be productive, that relationships be empowering, and the experience of being at work be one of doing something worthwhile that makes a difference to a very specific set of stakeholders.

None of us goes to work to be unproductive, to be frustrated by colleagues such that we end up with the experience of having wasted one’s time, or worse, having missed out on opportunities to experience really fulfilling work. Yet this is what the prevailing organizational design gives most of us – a lot of frustration, and the experience of a lack of fulfillment and satisfaction.

So we need to rethink our organizing model and our practices, so that being at work is meaningful, enjoyable, productive, and makes a difference. So that being at work provides the maximum opportunity for each of us to fully express our genius and the contribution we have to make – the most sustaining reward of work is the intrinsic reward that comes from knowing ­– I made a difference.

The Prevailing (Default) Organizing Design That Needs To Be Changed

Here are some of the key elements of the default-organizing model:

1. Hierarchical – executives, managers, supervisors, individual contributors, each in their box on the org chart, and most with a relationship of deference that increases the further down the hierarchy one is placed
2. Command and Control – policy, strategy and decision-making cascaded down from the top
3. Power-based – status, tenure, expertise, access to resources and connections decide where power and authority to act on one’s own initiative lies
4. Authorities often unclear, and even when they are clear can easily be trumped by someone further up the hierarchy, or someone with access to more power or resources
5. Goals and objectives mostly “handed down”, and frequently occur as a loaded challenge rather than an opportunity
6. Failure can be career limiting, and is best avoided
7. Risks are to be mitigated, and best avoided
8. Trust is low, so watch your back
9. Value statements are usually more slogans than “the way we do things around here”
10. Why we are doing what we are doing is mostly unclear – beyond making money and staying in business
11. Engagement is low, as is enthusiasm
12. The raison d’être of the organization is, implicitly, to maximize the returns to shareholders and investors.

A Possibility For An Alternate Organizing Design

Creating an alternate organizing design/model requires:

1. An alternate mindset
2. New practices, and 
3. New agreements

To use a computer metaphor, adopting a new organizing model is akin to switching from years of using a PC with a Windows operating system to using a Mac and a Mac operating system.  There is a lot that is familiar and a lot that is radically different, even frustrating and confusing.

Anyone can start the process of creating a new organizing model – the impact and leverage increases as the community of participants grows.

Here are some key building blocks of an alternate organizing design/model:

1. The group [team, function, organization] is purpose-driven – everyone in the group knows why they are together and are aligned with, and enlivened by, the purpose they are pursuing
2. Values – are designed to shape actions, decisions and the groups mood and vitality, and they are lived by everyone
3. Shared language – the group works with a shared language with shared meaning, a lexicon that speeds mutual understanding and aligned actions
4. Rules – providing a context for how to work together, they constrain some actions and behavior
5. Roles – all work is articulated as a role that needs to be filled. Everyone has a clear role(s), which means everyone knows exactly what is expected of them and their colleagues in the day-to-day workings of the group
6. Authority, Accountabilities and Permissions are vested in each role
7. Sensing and expressing tensions helps drive change – sensing tensions between what is and what could be and taking action to resolve a tension is a SOP
8. Make a distinction between Governance – the process by which the group alters roles, adds roles, changes policies, adds policies, alters procedures, and adds procedures in a decision-making model so that executing change can happen safely and swiftly, and Operations the day-to-day interactions in which the work of the group is accomplished.

How do we start creating a new organizing design? That is the topic of my next post.