🌿🧭🌳 OD04: Change impact mapping, Culture contract, Tweet for Thought and 8+2 organizational lenses
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1. Change impact mapping
A large number of organizational initiatives have the following symptoms:
they might not be given the share of organizational attention and other resources they need
they might start with good intentions, yet have unintended side effects in the organization that are discovered too late
or they might miss important aspects to include from the start in order to achieve their intended outcomes.
Change impact mapping is a useful tool that we’ve recently adjusted to make it more usable for managers and their teams and that aims to address the symptoms above.
How does it work?
For each organizational initiative that you lead or contribute to, map the impact on the four organizational elements: culture & behaviors, structure & roles, processes & technology and business competencies.
The logic behind the tool is that the greater the impact area, the greater the care and attention you need to allocate in order to complete the initiative successfully.
To support you in mapping the impact of an initiative, the template below has examples that describe each of the 1-4 levels of the four organizational elements of possible impact.
By doing the exercise, there’s a chance that you might uncover impact areas that might be blind spots at the moment (e.g. an organizational initiative to improve cross-functional collaboration might have an impact not only on culture & new collaboration habits, processes & technology to support the collaboration between teams, but also it might have an impact on some of the “connector” roles in the organization and also on developing new common business competencies).
Also, you might discover that you need to involve other functions that could support your initiative (e.g. if the initiative touches business competencies, you might want to involve your colleagues from the learning & development team).
Give it a try and let us know how it goes! Next week we’ll be sharing some examples of initiatives and the map of their possible impact.
Culture contract
Another interesting tool we’ve discovered is created by the NOBL team with the purpose of clarifying the implicit assumptions about what an organization’s culture is all about, in practical terms.
The novelty of the tool is that it invites the contributing members to make clear what happens if somebody in the organization feels that things are going off track and how the early signs of going off track would look like.
This is something that we perceive as an added value compared to similar tools that aim to make an organization’s culture more explicit, like various forms of culture maps, culture design canvases or culture canvases.
Practical ideas
If you’re inspired to create a culture contract with your team, head over to the NOBL newsletter that shares more info about the context of the culture contract and ideas of putting it into practice.
Download the template below and invite your team to start working on it.
Tweet for Thought
8+2 organizational lenses
Naomi Stanford has written an insightful article recently, referencing Gareth Morgan's "Images of Organization" book about using models and metaphors when thinking about an organization, understanding how it works and how its elements are interlinked.
Here are the 8 metaphors/lenses mentioned:
1. The organization as a machine
This lens encompasses such theories as Taylor’s scientific management, Weber’s bureaucracy and views of organizations that emphasize closed systems, efficiency and mechanical features of organizations.
2. The organization as an organism
This lens depicts organizations as open systems that focus on the human relations and contingency theories.
3. The organization as a brain
This lens focuses on the cognitive features of organizations and encompasses learning theories and cybernetics.
4. The organization as a culture
This lens emphasizes symbolic and informal aspects of organizations as well as the creation of shared meanings among actors.
5. The organization as a political system
This lens encompasses stakeholder theories, diversity of interests, and conflict and power in organizations.
6. The organization as a psychic prison
This lens draws from psychoanalytical theories to examine the psyche, the unconscious, and ways that organizations entrap their members.
7. The organization as a flux
This lens emphasizes processes, self-reference and unpredictability through embracing theories of autopoiesis, chaos and complexity in organizations.
8. The organization as an instrument of domination
This lens draws from Marxist and critical theories to highlight exploitation, control and unequal distribution of power performed in and by organizations.
Based on our own experience, sometimes we also use our own metaphors like:
9. The organization as a product
This lens looks at the members of the organization as the users of it, users that engage with multiple services/features inside the organization. Through this lens, stakeholders adopt (or not) a certain new feature of the organization - for example a new organizational capability, a new process, a new cultural value. Also, product dynamics can occur. Some examples: features that aren't valuable anymore might be removed at some point; upsell to a better product aka perform well in this country/region and you'll be promoted to a role at the company headquarter.
and
10. The organization as a community of communities
This lens emphasizes people coming together based on similar interests and common purpose, regardless of the formal org chart. Community dynamics can occur, like each community having a core group that develops it or like interest/attention for a certain topic fades and the community slowly disbands.
Practical ideas
One idea is to try to understand your own underlying metaphor about your organization, as this influences how you interact with it, the decisions you take and how you view others in the organization.
Pick 2-3 metaphors that resonated with you from the list above. Try looking at your team and your organization through these lenses, one lens per one week. You might discover some new perspectives about your context.
If you really enjoyed all of this, you can start researching more based on Naomi Stanford’s article. Do you have a metaphor of your own to share? We'd love to hear from you.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as Organizational Development Advisors, helping organizations develop by learning faster what they need and what works for them.
Do you have ideas or tools that could help leaders develop their organizations?