🌿🧭🌳 OD06: UiPath - from 100 to 3000 people in 3 years ∙ Complicated vs. Complex contexts ∙ Brave New Work podcast ∙ Ideas from the Future of Your Work report
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Next, we'll be exploring some interactive formats, starting today with the crowdsourced interview and the Twitter thread. Let’s go!
From 100 to 3000 people in 3 years
Crowdsourced interview with Marius Istrate
Marius is the former Chief People Officer of UiPath and has contributed with his leadership to the growth of the organization from 100 to 3000 employees and from 4 offices to over 50 in less than 3 years, starting with early 2017.
We invited Marius to create together an experimental format: the crowdsourced interview. If you have questions about how the UiPath organization was developed throughout these years, join the crowdsourced interview via the form below by Monday, Feb 24th morning (European time) and Marius will answer as many of these questions in a following edition of the OrgDev newsletter.
Complicated vs. Complex contexts
Mindmap with key concepts
Out of the 5 domains of the Cynefin framework (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, disorder), we discovered that the most useful clarification for leaders is the difference between complicated and complex contexts.
Let's zoom in for clarity. We’ve created a detailed mindmap, including pitfalls and the leadership approach that helps in each context.
Practical ideas
Review both your projects and your business as usual activities
Which contexts are complicated and which are complex? Why?
Complicated contexts: are you searching too much for the right solution instead of just making a decision? What could you do differently, given the recommendations for complicated contexts?
Complex contexts: are you creating the conditions from which good things can emerge? What could you do differently?
Read the reference HBR article, where David Snowden and Mary Boone introduced the Cynefin framework and the 5 domains: “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”
Try to explain the difference between complicated and complex contexts to your team. If you find it useful as a model for non-business contexts as well, try to explain it to your friends.
Food for thought: if you agree with the underlying premise that business contexts become more and more complex, what do you think needs to change in how we approach work?
Brave New Work
Podcast recommendation
Like many of you, we enjoy listening to a practical, no BS podcast now and then. Lately, we’ve been listening weekly to the Brave New Work podcast, which explores subjects related to discovering a more adaptive and human way of working.
Out of all the episodes published so far, we’re recommending the one titled “I’m going through changes w/ Doug Seacrist”, which is about self-organized teams - How do team members experience the early days of having increased freedom and autonomy?
“We were handed the keys but we’re not sure if it’s safe to drive.”
There is a lot of talk about self-organized teams these days, yet really few examples of what this feels like in practice. The episode comes with insights about all the hard work of defining roles, decision rights, team charters and other way of working aspects ... work that most teams have never had to do before and the ambiguity that surrounds all of this.
Future of Your Work report
Selection of ideas that resonated with us
We’re leaving the most dense resource at the end of the newsletter. Thanks for reading so far!
The new report from Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work presents a synthesis of the most powerful technological, business and societal trends impacting us now and in the immediate future - “a state of the union for the future of work.”
Even though the 42 concepts are organized neatly in the 5 categories shown above (categories that can be used when analyzing work done in a specific organization, as well), we’ve had to work a bit harder than expected to curate relevant ideas for the world of work.
Many concepts (e.g. the transition from the service economy to the experience economy) are just described generically in the report, without many details of how this impacts how we’ll get work done.
The most insightful idea
Everyone’s professional identity will need to evolve.
Part of the tasks are being automated, work contexts are changing, expertise is losing relevance in favor of collaboration when tackling complex challenges, the command-and-control approach to leadership is useful in less and less situations etc.
How do we come to terms with this? How do we support others in these transitions?
Join the conversation in the Twitter thread below,
where we’ve shared all the ideas that we’ve selected from the whole report.
Unlike most of the other resources shared in the newsletter, this is more about reflecting a bit about the bigger shifts that have started happening in organizations rather than practical ideas that you could apply tomorrow with your team.
We hope this type of food for thought helps as well.
For us, it’s always a balance between being pragmatic about the present and keeping an eye on the near future.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as Organizational Development Advisors, offering elegant guidance for implementing strategic initiatives in client organizations.
Have you encountered any useful idea or tool that could help leaders develop their organizations?