🌿🧭🌳 OD52: Storyboards ∙ Community Engagement ∙ Intentional Organizations ∙ Complex Systems & Uncertainty
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1. Sense & Explore
Curiosity fuels exploration. Curated resources that might come in handy.
#Practice
UX Collective: Fabricio Teixeira has published an updated list of UX design methods & deliverables. Might serve as an inspiration to org designers, enterprise designers and other people doing design work.
Storyboards
A comic strip that illustrates the series of actions that consumers take while using the product. Translates functionalities into real-life situations, helping designers create empathy with the consumer while having a first look at the product scope.
Would storyboards help you when doing org design?
Tamarack Institute: Most of the organizations that we’re working with are exploring the idea of developing stronger internal communities this year. Here is a neat Community Engagement Planning Canvas that we recently found.
This planning canvas will help you work through the main considerations when planning to engage any segment of your community.
Use this as a space to reflect, generate ideas, and refine your thinking. It can also serve as a holding place or reference file to summarize the key information for each of your engagement initiatives.
What are you currently using to strengthen the communities that you’re part of?
#Reflect
InfoQ: Good food for thought about intentionally designing organizations from this interview with Sergio Caredda.
I think that Organisation Design is a sort of misunderstood practice. In many organizations, everyone does bits and pieces of it. Managers produce and update organization charts, functions design processes, IT creates data flows and enterprise architecture documents, and HR is often called to support in this or that change project. All these actions are seen in isolation, though, and not aligned.
In an ideal world, instead, all functions would cooperate in designing the organization so that its fabric becomes consistent. Organisation Design competencies would be spread around the organization, and every manager would understand the organizational impact of their decisions.
(…) recognizing that each person in the organization continually takes decisions that have organizational impact. Think of the manager who decides to sabotage the performance management process, or who decides to hire more diverse candidates, or who establishes a new bureaucratic rule, or who chooses a new software without changing a process, or who designs office spaces.All these actions have organizational consequences, but too often are taken without this in mind. This produces a number of emerging features that are mostly misaligned. So often leaders who claim to have created flat organizations end up discovering layers of internal bureaucracy and hierarchy which were never intended.
Do you resonate with this idea of shared intentionality when doing org design?
#Study
Aeon: Insightful piece about how complex systems science allows us to see new paths forward. Here are some of our selections:
In complex systems, the last thing that happened is almost never informative about what’s coming next. The world is always changing – partly due to factors outside our control and partly due to our own interventions.
Our world is not so different from the vertiginous fantasies of Márquez – and the linear thinking of simple cause-effect reasoning, to which the human mind can default, is not a good policy tool. Instead, living in a complex system requires us to embrace and even harness uncertainty. Instead of attempting to narrowly forecast and control outcomes, we need to design systems that are robust and adaptable enough to weather a wide range of possible futures.
Not only are such systems nonlinear – the whole is more than the sum of the parts – but the behavior of the parts themselves depends on the behavior of the whole.
Like swarms of fireflies, all human societies are collective and coupled. Collective, meaning it is our combined behavior that gives rise to society-wide effects. Coupled, in that our perceptions and behavior depend on the perceptions and behavior of others, and on the social and economic structures we collectively build.
A recent study in Nature Physics found transitions to orderly states such as schooling in fish (all fish swimming in the same direction) can be caused, paradoxically, by randomness, or ‘noise’ feeding back on itself. That is, a misalignment among the fish causes further misalignment, eventually inducing a transition to schooling. Most of us wouldn’t guess noise can produce predictable behavior.
Another type of nonstationarity relates to a concept we call information flux. The system might not be changing, but the amount of information we have about it is. While learning concerns the way we use the information available, information flux relates to the quality of the data we use to learn.
These forms of nonstationarity mean biological and social systems will be ‘out of equilibrium’, as it’s known in the physics and complex systems literature. One of the biggest hazards of living in an out-of-equilibrium system is that even interventions informed by data and modelling can have unintended consequences.
Enjoy studying the whole article if these quotes made you curious 📚
2. Sense & Connect
The wisdom is in the conversations. Opportunities to connect and learn with peers.
shiftN: If you’re interested in Systems Thinking, the Systems Library series might be a fascinating learning experience for you.
The promise is to get to understand systems approaches through classic works by great thinkers, like R. Buckminster Fuller or Michel Serres.
The program starts in March and is fully online (paid).
We don’t receive any sponsorship for promoting the learning opportunities in this section. We share events that we’re organizing for you, or pick the ones that we’re interested in participating as well 🌿
3. Sense & Change
Understanding new concepts and putting them into practice.
Great news! The v2 of the Guide to Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping is here 💡
We’ve detailed the advanced layers:
Influence between stakeholders
Granularity Level
Energy Level
Alignment Level
And we’ve also added a demo example, showing all the 9 layers (common & advanced) together on a single dynamic stakeholder map.
For the next edition of the guide, we’re working on map examples for a strategic initiative, for product development, for B2B business development and for career navigation. Thanks for your continued support.
As we mentioned before, we’re exploring creating in February a detailed guide for the Team Chemistry Framework, along with tips and team meeting designs for team facilitators. If you want to support this new endeavor, we invite you to join the waiting list (all of you on this list will receive a 100% discount code for the guide when it's ready). Special thanks to the 27 readers that already joined.
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.
As Strategy & Organization professionals, we're using systems thinking and behavioral science to advise VPs, Directors and their teams to make their organizations more effective.
Our professional mission and intended legacy is:
Creating and sharing sustainable knowledge that helps people deal with the complex challenges they (will) face.
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