🌿🧭🌳 OD65: Different ways of seeing 👓
The Circular Design Guide, When Policies Turn Into Parenting, The Energised Workplace book club, Natural Next Steps of Evolution, Holoptic Foresight Dynamics
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#practice
The Circular Design Guide
Interested to explore a variety of activities and methods around circular design and innovation?
We found this collection created as a collaboration between the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO:
Our take:
What we liked in particular about this collection is that it offers both practical exercises and clues for further exploration when it comes to circularity
Going through some of the activities gave us fresh insights of how to evolve our Strategy & Organization practice towards sustainability and circularity and we hope that you will be inspired as well
When Policies Turn Into Parenting
In this article about stewardship, there is a simple causal loop diagram that aims to explain why management-imposed policies often turn into ”parenting”.
Note that in the diagram:
B loops stand for balancing or negative feedback loops
R loops stand for reinforcing or positive feedback loops
s stands for ”supports” or a positive causal link (both variables move in the same direction)
o stands for ”opposes” or a negative causal link (the two variables move in opposite directions)
From a systemic viewpoint, the new [stewardship] covenant has the potential to reverse an entrenched “Shifting the Burden” structure. In most companies, management-imposed systems and policies have been the predominant way of dealing with organizational crises (B1 in “When Policies Turn into Parenting”). This has led to the continual underdevelopment of individual initiative and responsibility (B2), which, over time, leads to more organizational crises and further justifies the need to develop more systems and policies to help “tend the flock.”
Through this process, the belief among employees that “the system takes care of me” increases (R3), which further undermines individual development. The burden of responsibility is “shifted” to those in higher positions through well-intentioned, seemingly progressive human resources policies. It is a simple extension of the familiar parenting model.
#event
The next edition of the EODF Book Club hosts author Perry Timms to discuss the ”Energised Workplace: Designing Organisations where People Flourish” book.
Details: July 6 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm CEST, free to attend
#reflect
What is the next natural step of evolution that my organization can make?
#study
Holoptic Foresight Dynamics
This week’s most advanced resource comes from the world of foresight. It’s the first time we discovered the idea of holoptic vision and we thought it might help you as well:
The term holoptic refers to the compound eye of certain insects such as the dragonfly or some beetles. This holoptic eye covers the entire head of the insect, and allows them to have a “whole-eyed” perspective of their environment — front, back, and side-to-side, all at the same time and within the same field of view. In contrast, large mammals such as humans have “simple eyes” that severely limit our field of view.
Key ideas (highlights ours):
Holoptic describes a “whole-eyed” vision that sees the surrounding environment as one unique “whole” entity instead of separate parts.
This whole-eyed vision creates a simultaneous, constant feedback loop that allows for individual and collective actions to communicate and emerge in a decentralized fashion as resilient, adaptive and transformative needs arise.
Due to the fact that holoptic vision sees the environment as a unique, autonomous whole entity, it is better suited to perceive and anticipate what is desiring to emerge through the simultaneous actions of the parts and the whole.
Organizations and entities within holoptic systems are best suited to anticipate and co-create the future in tandem with the complex web of players and organisms that make up the larger biocentric, ecocentric and cosmocentric landscape.
We’re still reflecting and connecting the dots around how this new perspective impacts our ways of seeing, in the different contexts we’re immersed in. It’s something unexpected and fascinating as it unravels.
You can also check part 2 here (10 min read).
Thanks for reading
We hope you found something useful in this edition. See you again in two weeks!
This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.
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