🌿🧭🌳 OD28: Cultivating long-termism ∙ Intro to Wardley mapping ∙ OD goodies
Join 4,000+ others who get our bi-weekly Strategy & Organization resources on Business Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development and adjacent fields like Change ∙ Foresight ∙ Complexity ∙ Leadership and others.
1. Cultivating long-termism
Have you ever wished that more people would care about the long term?
As we study more about complexity and systems thinking, we get a sense that being interested in more than the here and now (or the next quarter) will become critical for someone that wants to lead effective organizations in the current and future times.
Even if it’s not directly related to organizations, we found an initiative that might be of interest for you, if you want to explore more about the long-term mindset.
The Long Time Project aims to cultivate caring about the long-term future.
There are 3 core ideas:
Our capacity to care about the future is crucial to our ability to preserve it
Developing longer perspectives on our existence will change the way we behave in the short term
Art and culture will be crucial to making the much needed transformative shift in attitudes and behaviors
And 5 long term paths that the project proposes:
Deep time - can foster a profound sense of awe for the richness of life on earth
Multigenerational emotions - connect emotionally across multiple generations
Legacy stance - how we build our desire and agency to leave a positive legacy
Mortality consciousness - denial of our own mortality prevents us from engaging with the long term future
Interconnected worldviews - understanding our place in the wider web of life
Here’s a quote that we resonated with in particular:
Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the past and present but also the coming generations.
Read the project’s founding article on Medium:
Intro to Wardley mapping
The Wardley map is a strategic planning tool that is used for building shared understanding about the business components needed to serve customers.
As it slowly starts being used for OD work (especially for exploring new internal capabilities to build), we thought that a good intro might come in handy for you.
Found one on HiredThought. Here are the key steps + some snapshots.
#1: What is your purpose?
#2: What is the scope?
#3: Who are your users?
#4: What are their needs?
Nothing unusual so far. Here comes the Wardley part:
#5: What is the value chain?
#6: How evolved is each component in the value chain?
#7: Gap analysis based on the map
If you want to practice Wardley mapping, there’s an active community over at learnwardleymapping.com, sharing lots of useful resources.
OD Goodies
If you like this stuff and you’re curious about some extra #orgdev.
Duarte.com: first sighting of the corporate folklorist role - “helps to convey an organization’s purpose and values through stories and artifacts.”
Tim Casasola: a bit of food for thought for you about uncommon metrics that could tell a lot about your organization. “Decision backlog length” is an interesting one, for example.
Gartner Research: 77% of employees regularly face cultural tensions in their day-to-day work.
Ribbonfarm: map-makers v. sense-makers. Do you create and/or use one map and try to craft narratives on that map? Or do you make sense of a context by using direct experience and multiple maps?
Quick updates related to the newsletter:
If you’re using Gmail and you find the newsletter under the Promotions or Updates tabs, you can drag & drop it to your Primary tab to receive there.
You can always get in touch with us by replying to the mail.
If you want to shape the evolution of the OrgDev newsletter, we invite you to take this 4-question survey exploring the usefulness of various types of premium content, preferred formats and organizational topics that are most relevant to you.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We’re OD practitioners, working with teams and organizations that are not running on autopilot and advising them to become more effective.