🌿🧭🌳 OD54: WFH work practices ∙ Natural variation of work ∙ Meta-organizations ∙ Guide to Team Chemistry
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1. Sense & Explore
Curiosity fuels exploration. Curated resources that might come in handy.
#Practice
Learn Geek: For those of you that are curious about work design, we found this nice collection of 35 WFH work practices. Some examples:
Schedule Team Focus Periods. Your individual work team is often a primary source for meetings. Work as a group to identify meeting free periods in the week. Designate these periods as time for focused work within your team.
Use Video Instead. Remote work allows you to use video in new ways – beyond just live-streaming your presence during structured meetings. It can be hard to put all of your thoughts into an email as a way to avoid holding a meeting. Instead, record a video of your presentation. Make sure you are on-screen alongside your presentation, just as you would during an in-person meeting. Make this video available to your intended audience so they can engage on their own time.
Zen Organizations: Excellent article and video by Adam Thompson that argues against using performance targets and advocates for using upper and lower limits that reflect actual system performance.
As for individual performance…this is more determined by the system overall than the individual, assuming competence. Imagine we tracked your own arrival time at work, assuming you left the house at the same time every day.
The biggest determinant of when you arrive is not your skill as a driver…it’s how the traffic system functions. Route options, weather, annual events, daily things like traffic light sequences…all make the biggest difference. Individual skill definitely plays a part…but not as much as we think.A graph like this then allows us to put in a connecting line, which helps our minds to remember that all work can be viewed as a system that naturally varies.
#Reflect
LinkedIn: This piece written by Heidi Beets invites readers to reflect about overcoming discipline bigotry.
It is our responsibility as expert practitioners in our chosen fields to remain curious about other disciplines and find a way that you can compromise in order to work together.
Our perspective is that when complex challenges arise, they don’t come to life wanting to be solved by discipline X, Y or Z. They just happen. Disciplines are human inventions.
#Study
Strategic Management Journal: What do you think about the idea of platform ecosystems as meta-organizations?
This open access paper discovered via the Platform Design newsletter explores ideas like:Platforms as meta‐organizations, or “organizations of organizations” that are less formal and less hierarchical structures than firms, and yet more closely coupled than traditional markets.
To function successfully, however, platforms require coordination among multiple participants not all of whose interests are aligned. These organizational features of platforms raise many interesting and complex strategic challenges and hold implications for how platforms compete.
In this paper, we discuss some of the most salient features of platform ecosystems as meta‐organizations, specifically in terms of the sources of authority or power in the ecosystem, the motivation and incentives a platform creates to attract participants, and its governance and coordination structures.
2. Sense & Connect
The wisdom is in the conversations. Opportunities to connect and learn together.
Personal Strategy: Curious to talk with others about navigating better through uncertainties and how each of us decides on our way forward?
Join the first pop-up sharing session around Personal Strategy (free to attend) on Thursday, 11 FEB 2021, 5pm CET - see details here and register below. Hope to see you there!
Care4: Interested in digital organization design? A new series of paid workshops starts on Tuesday, 9 MAR 2021, covering topics like:
socio-technical systems design; joint optimization; general systems theory; open systems theory; whole systems, unit of analysis, design criteria; adaptive work systems; agile work systems; ambidextrous organization; complex adaptive systems; variance analysis; teams of teams; design thinking; digital socio-technical systems; platforms, digital platform design; ecosystem; customer journey/customer touch points; augmentation; minimal critical specifications; deliberations; operating model; ecosystem mapping; journey maps; value proposition; action learning/action research; stakeholder mapping; bottom up and top down strategy; networks analysis; ideation & imagination; touchpoint mapping; value chain, customer journey and open space.
3. Sense & Change
Understanding new concepts and putting them into practice.
For those of you who liked the idea of being able to have better conversations with your team about your team, we’ve just created the detailed guide to the Team Chemistry framework.
Our hope is that the 30 pages guide will help you understand better what Team Chemistry as a team effectiveness framework is all about and, more importantly, that it will help you facilitate team conversations that will help your team evolve and progress.
We’ve included:
Intro
What is Team Chemistry and why use it?
The story of creating the Team Chemistry framework
Overview
Overview of the 6 enablers x 6 elements and the Periodic Table of Team Chemistry
What might happen if you don’t pay attention to certain elements
In practice
How you can use the Team Chemistry framework
4 different team meeting designs that you can adapt to your team’s context, for your next team meeting
Conversation starters about each element: prompts and questions
Tips & tricks from practice
We’ve decided to put a minimal price (10€+vat) on the guide with the hopes of increasing its chances to not go to waste easily — e.g. saved in the “Read later” folder and forgotten, like it happens with many useful knowledge products that we download ourselves.
If you want to first read the initial guide to the Team Chemistry framework, it is available for free here on LinkedIn. Enjoy!
Other Sense & Change guides that might be useful:
Guide to Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping (paid)
Guide to Personal Strategy Sprint (free)
Guide to Taming the Information Overload Dragon (coming soon)
Thanks for reading
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.