🌿🧭🌳 OD80: How do you equip yourself for building better organizations?
Hybrid Work Masterclass ∙ Simpler Strategy Documents ∙ Challenges of OD Practitioners ∙ Landscape of Trust ∙ Conversational Life of Organizations∙ Interconnections
Join 4,000+ others who get our bi-weekly Strategy & Organization resources on Business Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development and adjacent fields like Change ∙ Foresight ∙ Complexity ∙ Leadership and others.
Dear readers,
Given the encouraging messages we've received from you, we're dedicating a new business for inspiring and equipping people like you, who want to build better organizations better.
We aim to create and offer premium learning products for this purpose, like masterclasses, bootcamps, long form essays, self-paced courses and avant-garde formats like mega maps, interactive guides, annotated reports, dynamic books, reflection apps and visual museums.
With this international business we aim to serve people like you, from everywhere around the world, across the boundaries of specific disciplines like Strategy, Org Design, Org Development, Complexity, Systems Thinking, Public Policy, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Design, Consulting, Facilitation, (Team) Coaching, Agile Coaching, Mentoring, L&D, HR, Change Management, Start-ups, Product Management & UX Design, Service Design, Innovation, Digital Transformation, Community Building and countless others that might contribute to building better organizations, communities and societies.
ForBetterOrgs.com is the place where you'll find this ever-expanding mix of learning products, starting with the Hybrid Work Masterclass and the maps & guides about Behavior Change, Trends, Information Flows, Team Chemistry, Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping and Negotiation.
Inspired by beautiful offerings like Humble Bundle and Apple Arcade, we're also working hard to design a premium subscription that will offer you easy access to all the For Better Orgs learning products (subscription to be launched in 1-2 weeks).
Thank you for your continued support and hope you'll resonate with this new endeavor aligned with our sustainable knowledge mission. 🌿
Looking forward,
Raluca & Bülent
Strategy & Organization Goodies
1/ Strategy: Adam Bryant writes a short & fresh take (4 min read) on strategy documents. Some snippets:
Strategy documents have become the pack mules of the business world.
It’s time to declutter strategy documents. And my suggestion for doing that is to create two lists: what is going to change and what’s not going to change.
Let’s start with what won’t change. Those items shouldn’t be in the strategy document.
2/ Org Design & Development: Sonja Blignaut inspired the most insightful LinkedIn thread we’ve read in a while, exploring current & future challenges of OD practitioners and key capabilities to develop. Our take:
Biggest challenge now: having clarity on their (moral & heuristic) compass that helps them orient based on the richness of things they observe and be effective in helping a wide variety of interconnections shape and evolve;
Biggest challenge in the next few years: unlearning and relearning what an organization is;
Key capabilities to stay relevant: designing & adapting information flows, learning to read & understand philosophical foundations of things observed, learning to learn, unlearn, relearn (meta learning), dancing with ecosystems, connecting better with linguistics, semantics and sustainability.
3/ OD: Sue Borchardt has shared a beautiful exploration of the conceptual landscape around trust.
It is generally assumed that we all know what trust is, but abstract words like love, beauty, and trust demand continued inquiry & exploration to be useful.
4/ OD: Patricia Shaw offers a fascinating 6 min speech about Leaders and the Conversational Life of Organizations. It’s one of the few short Youtube videos we’ve frequently paused to take notes and reflect - hope you’ll resonate with Patricia’s messages too.
The work of leadership is about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise, (…) of opening spaces for reflective inquiry in the midst of our institutional lives.
Hybrid Work Masterclass
Join us for a 3h Executive Masterclass about Hybrid Work, dedicated to all professionals and managers who are actively seeking to prepare their organizations to perform in hybrid work setups.
See more details about:
What will you get by attending this Masterclass?
What makes this Masterclass special?
Date: Thursday, March 3rd, 4-7pm CET Paris.
Technologies used: Zoom & Miro
Interconnections
Picks from disciplines (vaguely?) connected to Strategy, Org Design & OD
1/ Foresight: The Futures School is offering the Natural Foresight Framework in an open source format.
Bülent was nominated by one of our clients (thank you, Andreea!) to participate at the next TFS program in March (a great opportunity to learn and connect with the Futures & Foresight community).
2/ Survival: We were impressed by the information design of this prepping matrix (randomly discovered via Pinterest). So many insights and connections on a single page 💡
3/ Football: How the world's best team imploded - 18 min video analysis done by DW about FC Barcelona’s evolution in recent years. You may notice lots of interconnected business, strategic, organizational & cultural elements. Wonder if these football clubs are working with Strategy & Organization professionals niched on sports.
4/ Sustainability: Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) and Aalto University are jointly organizing the Sustainability Science Days Conference in May 2022.
A few picks from the sessions list:
Investigating sustainability transformations with social-ecological models: This session explores the challenges of modelling sustainability transformations from the perspective of social-ecological systems.
The Role of Law in Systemic Sustainability Transformation: The session focuses on what kind of roles law and legal governance perform in sustainable transitions in the climate, energy and environmental systems.
Systems methodologies: Sustainability research mostly concerns systems. Yet, the field rarely reflects on the multitude of ways that systems can be understood and studied. In this session we take stock of the variety of systems theories and methods, as well as their implications for sustainability research.
Sustainability Agency: We need systemic change towards sustainable ways of living, working and doing business. In this session, we focus on the role of active agents to promote that change.
All sessions will be open and free of charge for registered participants.
Thanks for reading the OrgDev Newsletter!
See you again next week. ✌️
This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi,
creators of ForBetterOrgs.com, with the aim to inspire and equip people all around the world to build better organizations better.
For this purpose, we’re creating and offering premium learning products like masterclasses, bootcamps, long form essays, self-paced courses and avant-garde formats like mega maps, interactive guides, annotated reports, dynamic books, reflection apps and visual museums.
Sense & Change is our local advisory business, partnering with visionary Tech companies in Romania to help them address their most complex strategic & organizational challenges.