🌿🧭🌳 OD39: The Common Sense Framework ∙ OECD OPSI Toolkit Navigator
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1. OD Goodies
Curated starters for this week’s edition:
Management Today: New intelligence report - Will Hybrid Working Ever Work?. Made us think about all the hybrid working sessions that will need professional facilitation (and the associated headaches).
MIT SMR: Profs. Ancona, Williams & Gerlach share that “managers who focus on developing sensemaking capabilities can make better decisions in a complex and unpredictable world.”
Via Twitter:
2. The Common Sense Framework
The Sociocracy 3.0 (S3) team has recently shared a framework that aims to support building a shared understanding of the bigger picture, identifying and prioritizing areas of need, and understanding what to focus on next - at team level and at organization level.
Through 10 essential principles, this Common Sense Framework (CSF) helps you grow and maintain organizations where BOTH the people and the organization can thrive.
The Framework lays out the big picture of what to consider to achieve this, and suggests specific practices and tools that can help you to get there.
Principle 1 – Clarify Purpose: Ensure that everyone understands whom the organization or team is serving, why and to what end.
Principle 2 – Develop Strategy: Develop a strategy to guide value creation.
Principle 3 – Focus on Value: Focus your daily work on value delivery.
Principle 4 – Sense & Respond: Identify, prioritize and respond to impediments and opportunities.
Principle 5 – Run Experiments: Run experiments to address complex challenges.
Principle 6 – Enable Autonomy: Free individuals and teams up to create value as autonomously as possible.
Principle 7 – Collaborate on Dependencies: Co-create and evolve a coherent system to deal with all dependencies.
Principle 8 – Invest in Learning: Ensure the people grow competence and skill, so that they develop.
Principle 9 – Intentionally Develop Culture: Collaborate on fostering a cooperative culture where people achieve their fuller potential.
Principle 10 – Build Shared Mental Models: Invest in building shared mental models, so that people can engage in meaningful dialogue about what’s happening and what needs to be done
It’s interesting to see how the 10 principles have “essential patterns” to help apply each principle. For example, Principle 10 - Build Shared Mental Models has 3 associated patterns:
Navigate Via Tension – Everyone in the organization paying attention for situations that might benefit from building or refining a shared mental model, gets people on the same page so that they can engage in productive dialogue.
Clarify Domains – Explicitly clarifying and documenting areas of responsibility ensures a shared mental model regarding expectations and responsibilities.
Clarify Intended Outcome – By first agreeing on the intended outcome of a proposed activity, project or agreement, people develop shared understanding of where things should be headed and can then engage in productive dialog about how to get there.
And, if we deep dive into one of these patterns, we find ideas like these:
Navigate Via Tension
Pay attention to tension you experience in relation to the organization, investigate the cause and pass on any organizational drivers you discover to the people accountable for the appropriate domain.
Challenges and opportunities for an organization are revealed by people bringing awareness to the reasons why they experience tension.
Note: In this context, a tension is a personal experience: a symptom of dissonance between an individual’s perception of a situation, and their expectations (or preferences).
To discover drivers, investigate what stimulates tension, and describe what’s happening and what’s needed. Sometimes an inquiry reveals misconceptions and the tension goes away.
This framework inspired us to explore further and we’ve started learning more about S3, especially about their patterns.
Explore all the resources of the framework here:
3. OECD OPSI Toolkit Navigator
A special pick this week is the curated list of toolkits created by OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation and their partners.
You can both explore topics:
Or explore use-cases like:
Toolkits are a great way to share innovative methods and practices. A plethora of free innovation toolkits, playbooks and guides exist to help people identify, develop and practice necessary skills and apply new ways of reaching an outcome. We built this Toolkit Navigator, a sort of “meta-toolkit” to help you find the ones best suited to you and your situation.
Enjoy browsing the “meta-toolkit”!
Thanks for reading
We hope you found something useful in this edition!
Please feel free to forward the newsletter to any colleagues who you think might benefit from these resources.
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.