🌿🧭🌳 OD37: The uncertainty mindset ∙ Patterns of Strategy ∙ #orgtalks
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1. OD Goodies
Curated starters for this week’s edition:
Quality & Equality: Chris Worley, research professor of management at Pepperdine University’s business school, shares his perspective about what OD is, what common ground is shared between the different definitions of the field, what the values of OD are, and what the role of OD practitioners is.
Business Agility Institute: The 2020 Business Agility Report concludes that the top 5 challenges in the business agility journey are: leadership style, mindsets, silos, sponsorship and culture.
Responsible Investor: Good read that’s looking at the economy through a Systems Thinking lens. Reductionism, in-betweenness, complete and incomplete markets, "Friedman's reinforcing feedback loop", "Government-is-the-Problem reinforcing feedback loop".
Corporate Rebels: An invitation that we liked to “talk, don’t tool” - apps don’t replace conversations when exchanging feedback. Food for thought: when could apps replace meaningful conversations in the world of work?
2. The uncertainty mindset
(…) to understand uncertainty, you must understand what it’s not. Uncertainty, Tan insists, is different from risk. It’s the difference between known unknowns which you can plan for and unknown unknowns which no amount of planning can help you with.
There is a fundamental difference between the two that must be understood (...) The word risk means that the exact future that will result is unknown, but the different possible futures are knowable in a way that allows you to plan by calculating how likely different possible futures are and taking clearly sensible actions based on those calculations. (...)
True uncertainty is uncertainty that cannot be measured and cannot be eliminated using strategies chosen based on likelihoods of outcomes. (...) The existential threat from true uncertainty can undoubtedly be terrifying, but it also represents opportunity for innovation. Where the future is uncertain, people and organizations have to influence what it becomes.Uncertainty is profoundly uncomfortable. And thriving in an uncertain world comes with a lot of pain, in particular emotional pain. It basically means that you can never be “good” at something because if you’re good at something, it means you’ve been complacent (and not ambitious enough).
In a world of true uncertainty, division of labour and scientific management are useless. You need continually adaptive, flexible teams with the uncertainty mindset, who can tackle new challenges and come up with creative ideas. They must work together like a hive but also improvise together like a jazz band.
If these quotes sparked your curiosity, we invite you to read the whole article on Laetitia Vitaud’s newsletter.
Bonus: it's based on looking at the paradigm shift in high-end cuisine from efficiency to innovation. A shift that may sound familiar to many of you if you look closer.
3. Patterns of Strategy
Here’s a snapshot from the Patterns of Strategy book by Lucy Loh and Patrick Hoverstadt; did the highlights in Annotable.
Patterns of Strategy is a new paradigm for strategy development and it truly brings new lenses for looking at business strategy.
“The more I read about the 80 strategy patterns, the more I'm convinced that this work needs to be discovered by more people who make strategy decisions.” Bülent
Patterns of Strategy is based on systemic principles and thus focuses on the relationships between different actors on your strategic context and the fit between your organization and its strategic environment.
This new paradigm looks at strategy as changing the fit of your organization with the environment to your advantage, by concentrating power in time.
Some linked concepts: Emergent strategies, structural coupling view of strategy, co-evolving to fit, strategic direction set by micro-adaptation, relationship trajectories, inertial momentum.
You can watch this introductory video about Patterns of Strategy here:
#orgtalks
Yesterday we had the first 2 #orgtalks gatherings with participants from India, Romania, Austria, Switzerland, UK, Canada and US.
The topics that we deep dived on were around the transition to distributed work and the impact it has on the organization + enabling better cross-functional collaboration.
We decided to meet monthly, so the next #orgtalks gatherings will be on Wednesday, 28 OCT.
If you’re interested to join this space for sharing knowledge and connecting with peers, sign up 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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