🌿🧭🌳 OD78: Which OD Competencies Will You Focus On? 🎶
OD Competencies, Books of 2021, Designing Organization Design, Scaling Impact, Problematizing Scale, Copying Questions, Coordination Headwinds
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Dear readers,
Wish you all a 2022 with lots of good health, learning and impact!
We're happy to continue sharing Strategy & Organization knowledge and tools with you and thank you for your continued support.
Enjoy,
Raluca & Bülent
Which OD Competencies Will You Focus On?
If you want to continue developing OD competencies, here's a quick refresher of ODNE's Global OD Competency Framework. Which ones resonate with you? Which ones will increase your impact going further?
(competency area & link to details) - (competency 1) | (competency 2) | (competency 3)
Systems Change Expert - Systems Change Leader | Culture Builder | Innovator
Efficient Designer - Efficient Designer | Process Consultant |Data Synthesizer
Business Advisor - Strategic Catalyst | Results-Oriented Leader | Trusted Advisor
Credible Strategist - Credible Influencer | Collaborative Communicator | Cross Cultural Navigator
Informed Consultant - Self-Aware Leader | Equity Advocate | Life-Long Learner and Practitioner
Books of 2021 Map
If you're curious about some new books to read in 2022, here's Bülent's shortlist of the most impactful books of 2021:
1. Patterns of Strategy: Fascinating way of understanding strategy, both conceptually and practically;
2. Kautilya's Arthashastra: Indian philosophy of strategy;
3. Reading Castaneda: Breaking the patterns of ways of understanding something;
4. Infonomics: New ways of looking at the flows of data and information in our lives;
5. Past Mistakes: New ways of looking at history and understanding how we don't actually understand it;
6. Human Ethology: New ways of understanding human behavior and universal patterns of behavior.
You can check the whole map here on LinkedIn.
Designing Organization Design
As a topic, organization design is poorly understood. While it is featured in most management books as a chapter dedicated to organizational structures, it is unclear whether organization design is a one-off event or an ongoing process.
Thus, it has traditionally been understood to be the same as an organizational configuration, with neat lines of communication and distribution of responsibilities following pre-set typologies.
Yet what can be said to constitute organizational structure in this first half of the 21st century? The extraordinary growth of digital communications, the
decreasing relevance of hierarchical bureaucracies, and the general demise of command-and-control have all but decimated the traditional notion of organizational structure.Organization design needs a theoretical revamping. Using a mix of design and social science theories and concepts, Rodrigo Magalhaes outlines a new human-centric interpretation of design, design principles, and design culture.
He puts forward a paradigm where the organization, for purposes of its
design, is considered to be a social actor in a permanent state of transformation, with significant repercussions for social and economic life.He also proposes a model of 'leaderful organization design', distinguished as practice-based, guided by values of democratic participation, and driven by design logics which places meaning-making and meaning-taking at the center of organizational life and can be adopted and adapted to suit different environments.
If you're curious to learn more about Designing Organization Design from Rodrigo Magalhaes, the author of the book, join us as the EODF Book Club on Wednesday, February 3rd at 5pm CET (free to attend).
Strategy & Organization Goodies
1/ Sam Rye on Scaling Impact:
There’s a common theory of change which seems to have swept across the social sector, but the problem is — it rarely works as intended.
The idea is that we try something, often as a Pilot, and then if it works, we scale it up. Yet, all too often the ‘scaled up’ version doesn’t have the same effect as the pilot. Why is this? In a word: complexity.
2/ Gord Tulloch on Problematizing Scale:
The social innovation community is entranced by scale. Foundations, incubators, accelerators, governments, social investors and thought leaders are consistently driving expectations that new solutions should be designed and supported to achieve scale. But, what scale are we talking about?
3/ Jessica Joy Kerr making a good, concise point about Copying Questions, Not Answers.
Instead of “What is the best organizational model?” try asking “How can we work more smoothly?”
4/ Venkatesh Rao writes a good commentary on Alex Komoroske's piece about Coordination Headwinds.
The same sort of phenomenology rears its head in many other broadly important trends. Global climate action is a coordination headwind problem. Supply chain logjams are a coordination headwinds problem. Deploying machine learning in orgs is going to be a massive coordination headwinds problem (think of it as hiring a whole bunch of clueless new people into the org).
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This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi,
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