🌿🧭🌳 OD84: Strategy, Design & Development at multiple levels 🪢
Explainer: L&D Strategy ∙Business Ecosystem Strategy and Failures ∙ Leadership Layers ∙ Effective Interventions ∙ Wolves Balancing Yellowstone ∙ Sustainable Design ∙ Masterclass Review: Hybrid Work
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Dear readers,
Through ForBetterOrgs.com we’re focusing on inspiring and equipping leaders like you to build better organizations better.
This is the essence of what we mean by this:
Strategy - Finding and adjusting viable ways forward;
Design - Exploring and deciding on designs that are fit for purpose;
Development - Intentionally evolving in a desired direction;
At three levels: individual, team and organization;
Leaderships - Leading together what’s needed, towards better outcomes.
Everything that we’re creating and sharing with you is a mix of 2+ of these elements, because we believe that building better organizations better requires attention and activation of all these 7 essential elements. 🪢
For example, the OrgDev newsletter focuses on: Strategy, Design, Development, Organization and Leaderships.
Team Chemistry focuses on the mix of: Development & Your Team, along with Strategy, Design and Leaderships.
Personal Strategy focuses on the mix of: Strategy & You, along with Leaderships, Design and Development.
We’ll soon launch Linked Learning, aiming to bring fresh perspectives and links to learners and L&D professionals. Focus: Development & You, Your Team, Your Organization.
We envision that these creations, when used together, will form a network of learning companions that will inspire and equip you for impactful collective endeavors, better results and better organizations.
Wish you all a beautiful week,
Raluca & Bülent
Strategy & Organization Goodies
1/ Strategy: If you’re interested in creating an L&D Strategy for your organization, for your team or for yourself, here’s a 15 minutes explainer in the latest Offbeat edition.
Any strategic exploration can be summarized through a series of questions to be answered together, questions that help you find your way forward in a specific context with limited resources and many options.
In the case of creating your L&D Strategy, L&D Plan and L&D Budget, here are 6 guiding questions that might be helpful:
What’s happening outside the organization, generally and also close to our L&D radar?
What’s happening inside the organization, business-wise and learning-wise?
What capabilities and constraints do we have?
What could be some viable ways forward?
How would we put these strategic directions into a concrete plan?
How would we allocate the budget to the various L&D initiatives & processes, so that we have confidence we’ll reach the desired business & learning results?
2/ Strategy: Excellent food for thought from BCG’s analysis of 110 failed business ecosystems. Key lesson: given the increased level of complexity (no. of interconnections and interactions between ecosystem players), designing continuously is key, building on what emerges in practice.
Just look at how a stunning 85% of the primary failure modes that were identified are actually design failures:
BCG has also published an insightful article about Business Ecosystem Strategy, out of which we’ve picked for you their 8 vectors of Ecosystem Evolution:
3/ Org Design: During our latest EODF Book Club session, Amy Kates (co-author) and Leah Waterhouse from Accenture shared their insights about Leadership Layers, one of the key concepts from the Networked, Scaled, and Agile: A Design Strategy for Complex Organizations book:
The integrative leadership layer has piqued our interest in particular. It’s described in the book through its typical core work:
Make recommendations on company direction choices
Define enterprise initiatives and operating priorities within the context of the growth plan
Sponsor innovation activities and new capability development
Monitor cross-boundary performance and make cross-unit trade-off decisions
Define organizational arrangements for execution of the strategy
Align resource levels for key growth and client priorities
Manage operating-level talent for growth
Amy & Leah also shared how the Integrative Layer serves both the Strategic Layer and the Operating Layer:
How does this integrative leadership layer work in your organization?
Interconnections
Picks from disciplines (vaguely?) connected to Strategy, Org Design & OD
1/ Systems Thinking: Gene Bellinger shares a short & insightful piece about effective interventions.
develop visual representations of multiple relationships so I can contemplate the collection of relationships simultaneously. One might consider this as integrating multiple thoughts into a hopefully coherent thought.
(…) The intent is to enable individuals, teams, and organizations to develop a deeper understanding of the relationships and implications associated with situations they are dealing with to enable more effective intervention.
2/ Conservation Biology: How wolves keep Yellowstone in balance.
3/ Sustainability: The Sustainable Design Handbook for physical products groups sustainable design strategies in 3 categories:
Product optimisation is a top-level approach. These changes can often be made after the design has been completed, or even when the product is already in production. Strategies: sourcing locally, lightweighting and alternative material selection.
Design development - Prioritising sustainability as early as possible in the design process will result in the greatest reduction in impact of the end product. Strategies: design for disassembly, for dematerialization, for appropriate lifespan, for reuse, for efficient use, for sustainable behavior, for emotional attachment and for correct disposal.
System change - These strategies require us to think beyond the typical systems, to redesign products and services from the ground up, creating opportunities for truly circular design methods. Strategies: creating a sharing economy, closing the loop, going carbon neutral, re-thinking ownership.
ForBetterOrgs Events
March 15: Creating your L&D Strategy webinar, in partnership with Offbeat
March 24: Executive Summary: Hybrid Work webinar
March 31: ‘Return to Office’ plans webinar
If you’re curious, we invite you to explore all our next events.
Reviews: Hybrid Work Masterclass
The premiere of the Masterclass welcomed 25 participants in various functions (like PMO, Employee Experience, HR, Marketing, Customer Experience, OD, Engineering Management, Internal Communications, Business Performance), from various industries (like Pharma, IT, Banking, Telecom, Consulting and FMCG).
1/ We’ve identified 34 specific challenges related to hybrid work and 2/ explored insights from the executive summaries about hybrid work data, models & tools. 3/ Then we used the Hybrid Work Readiness Index to understand which parts of the organization need attention for enabling hybrid work performance and finally 4/ designed hybrid work setups using the Design Criteria Canvas.
Thank you all for the positive and encouraging feedback 🙏
We are organizing a new edition on April 15. Stay tuned!
Stats from the follow-up feedback:
Net Promoter Score: 62.5%
Usefulness feedback**: overall 3.56/4
Most useful parts of the Masterclass: Executive Summaries with 3.75/4, followed by Hybrid Work Readiness Index with 3.63/4.
Live feedback in chat, when closing with the question: “What was the value that you’ve got from the Masterclass?”
“I appreciated the tools and focus on the outcomes when designing solutions.”
”Really good overview of research/insights and etc”
“Meeting & sharing with representatives of other organizations.”
”Guidance on how to move forward the ways of working we have now ongoing: different models.”
”Interesting method/tools - dynamic practical exercises between people.”
”The Hybrid Readiness Index and the curated documentation.”
”The rich executive summary on Data, Models & Tools.”
”A very comprising framework, the resources and research data and methods that we can actually begin to apply/use in our organizations. I haven't realized before the many levels and dimensions that are involved on such a topic.”
”Lots of data to process (tremendous work - great work). The tools presented seem to be ready to use, in a step by step process.”
”The multitude of tools put in one place. Practical exercises.”
”The Hybrid Readiness Index and all the data & tools.”
** Question: “How useful were for you the following parts of the Masterclass?”
Scale: 1 (Not useful) - 4 (Very useful)
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 leaders like you to build better organizations better.