🌿🧭🌳 OD18: 60+ questions to understand org silos ∙ The org chart as political map making ∙ OD Goodies
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1. 60+ questions to help you understand the silos in your organization
Are you a leader that works to improve the collaboration across the organization?
Here’s a guide to help you start conversations about silos in your organization and bring more clarity around the topic.
The org chart as political map making
One of the most thought provoking articles that we’ve read recently is an anthropological perspective on org charts:
"(...) org charts are not simply neutral representations of an organization. They are the inter-subjective rendered objective. Like maps, org charts – and the negotiated, political processes by which they are created – reify the power of certain individuals in an organization. The placement of names on the map is critically important, even if it doesn’t comport to how the business is run."
OD Goodies
Curious about more resources on leading organizations?
Here’s a new section of the newsletter with very short descriptions and links. If it’s useful to dive deeper on any topic, just reply to this mail and we’ll cover it in a future newsletter.
Insight via a new research paper published in the Journal of Change Management: "Sizeable initial leadership efforts to shape employee attitudes that are not sustained may be wasted. However, these results also mean that mistakes in leadership at the start of a change may be correctable over the course of implementation."
Key question that distinguishes product teams from feature teams:
"Are you provided roadmaps with prioritized features and dates, or are you assigned problems to solve with business outcomes?"How do you enable remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely, as part of the same value stream? Explore some useful approaches to clarify and evolve inter-team interactions that are based on Team Topologies ideas.
Strategy fan? Here's a roundup of 20+ strategy frameworks, compiled by Sergio Caredda.
4 free workshops on “New Tools for Coordination and Leadership of Virtual Work”, organized by SocioTechnical Systems Roundtable. Here’s a snapshot from the pre-read for the first workshop.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as OD Advisers to high performing cross-functional teams, guiding strategy execution and increasing team effectiveness in complex and uncertain contexts.