🌿🧭🌳 OD35: Ten principles for high-impact organizational interventions ∙ Using scenario archetypes
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1. OD Goodies
Curated starters for this week’s edition:
The Overlap: Tim Casasola writes about co-designing ways of working.
”Adapting our culture to full remote feels obligatory and non-inspiring. Co-designing our ideal culture feels inspiring and abundant.”
Wharton: Insightful interview with professors Sonny Tambe and Peter Capelli, in which they share their concerns about using AI in human resources.
“(…) fairness and optimization don’t often go together very nicely.”
Xynteo: Wicked problems toolkit - explained in an accessible way. Contains an intro to wicked problems, a guide for systems mapping and for backcasting aka applying Theory of Change.
Medium: A simple framework for making better decisions, shared by Sean Hanrahan. Key ideas:
Good decision-making navigates the simple → complex → simple framework.
Moving from simple to complex requires hard-word and additional information. Moving from complex to simple requires an understanding of critical factors, leverage points.
Communicating complexity requires a narrative that includes a common analogy anyone can understand.
2. Ten principles for high-impact organizational interventions
Are you influencing change in your organization?
Here are ten principles co-developed by practitioners and researchers for designing, implementing and evaluating change interventions. The principles were developed and refined based on transdisciplinary collaboration and grounded in knowledge from multiple disciplines.
Ensure active engagement and participation among key stakeholders
Design: What is the appropriate level of participation for different stakeholders and over different phases?
Implementation: How can commitment, influence and ownership among relevant stakeholders be maximized?
Evaluation: What data and methods will yield results that are acceptable and credible for stakeholders?
Understand the situation (starting points and objectives)
D: Who are the key stakeholders and what are their needs?
I: Have new challenges emerged?
E: How is the situation changing?
Align the intervention with existing organizational objectives
D: How will the intervention influence important organizational outcomes?
I: What unexpected trade-offs and tensions between objectives are emerging?
Explain the program logic
D: How do we expect the intervention activities to influence outcomes?
I: What implementation strategies are needed to bring about the change?
E: What should be measured and when?
Prioritize interventions based on effort-gain balance
D: Which activities have the potential of providing the greatest gain for the least effort?
Work with existing practices, processes, and mindsets
D: How can the intervention be integrated into existing practices, processes, and mindsets?
I: Which existing structures can be used, and which need to be challenged, to facilitate implementation?
Iteratively observe, reflect and adapt
D: How adaptable can the intervention and its processes be to emerging issues?
I: What feedback loops are needed for the intervention to be continuously adapted and improved?
E: What data is needed, and when, for evaluation of iterative improvements?
Develop organizational learning capabilities
D: How can the intervention become a vehicle for learning in the organization?
E: What can the organization learn about how it approaches change?
Evaluate the interaction between intervention, process and context
E: What works, for whom, and why?
Transfer knowledge beyond the specific organization
E: What knowledge can be accumulated and transferred to other situations/organizations?
Read the full discussion paper here:
3. Using scenario archetypes
How often are you doing scenario planning?
The Future Today Institute shares a simple framework to help you consider internal and external forces when you envision different futures for your organization.
When you need to develop specific thinking about issues related to strategy and decision-making in your organization, the Five Scenario Archetypes is a useful way to model different plausible outcomes.
Baseline: A description of how the future represents a continuation of today without significant new disruptive forces.
Reversal: A big bet on the past and a return to the previous era before this current wave of disruption.
Collapse: The worst case scenario outcomes for an organization. New norms are dysfunction, inability to keep pace with competition, inability to mitigate risk.
Transformation: The organization driven to evolve to an optimal future state. New norms are anticipation, agility, ability to see around corners, good decision-making.
Chaos: A chaotic event occurs, which might result in sudden risk or opportunity. New norms are unknown.
Outcome: These scenarios should help you and your team refine and recalibrate your decisions.
Read the full description, including an example with 5 scenarios, as part of the T3 (Tool To Try) section here:
Thanks for reading
We hope you found something useful in this edition!
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This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.
We're using systems thinking, behavioral science and mental models to advise organizations to become more effective.
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