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Dear readers,
If you’re curious to learn with us:
How to apply systems thinking in L&D;
How to shift webs of behaviors;
We invite you to join the free webinars that we’re organizing next:
Foresight & Strategy - May 5, 9am CEST;
Causal Loop Diagrams - May 10, 5pm CEST;
Shifting your Web of Behaviors - May 19, 9am CEST.
Shared knowledge accelerates impact, 🌿
Raluca & Bülent
Strategy & Organization Goodies
1/ Strategy: Kjell Nordström (co-author of Karaoke Capitalism) gave an insightful keynote speech during the webinar on navigating business strategy in a turbulent landscape organized by Nordic Business Forum. Some highlights:
(…) political risk has come back into the picture when thinking about business strategy.
(…) an empire could be thought of as an ideological umbrella under which the empires gather friends that have the same ideological position as themselves. “It’s a loosely defined network of partners.” (…) “We will probably do business under our own umbrella. Of course we will interact with other parts of the world but less intensively.”
However, the most crucial factor that determines how we reorganize our work going forward is climate change. According to Kjell, it took us about 200 years to create most of the wealth and welfare we see today. Now, we need to redo all of it in 20-25 years in order to survive. “This means that whether we like it or not, we probably have the greatest industrial tsunami in human history ahead of us.”
Increase your impact by:
Understanding the (geo)political context in which your organization operates;
Developing your foresight skills.
2/ Org Design: From the recent McKinsey article about Redesigning the Design Department, we want to highlight two key takeaways:
Firstly,
It would be logical to expect matrix or agile organizational structures to perform best. But our findings suggest this is not necessarily sufficient to drive cross-functional integration. Our survey results showed that a high level of integration was not linked to a single organizational archetype, implying that wholesale reorganization is not a prerequisite to unlocking design’s potential.
Secondly,
Another hallmark of design teams that reported a high level of integration with the rest of the business was the work they tackled. Designers were not only limited to designing products and services for customers but also helped tackle internal strategic and business challenges.
Increase your impact by:
Networking with designers inside and outside your organization;
Developing your design skills, so that you can contribute to designing businesses, organizations, processes, services or products.
3/ OD: Discovered a good read for OD practitioners, written by Marie Carasco and shared by Paul Thoresen on LinkedIn - The Challenges That Come When Doing Organization Development Work
A few ideas that resonated:
1. Having "a clear conceptualization of the businesses they support and the challenges they face" in order to practice OD;
2. "(...) maintain integrity through ethical and professional practices. One way of doing so is to be transparent in disclosing the breadth and complexities that might come with a given intervention". How often does this happens in practice, when it comes to various organizational interventions?
3. "The act of taking initiative must be balanced against the abuse of power". Abuse of power is a topic that's not explored/exposed enough when it comes to organizational interventions (internal or external).
Increase your impact by:
Reviewing how you conceptualize the organization and its challenges;
Seeking to understand the complexities that might come with specific organizational interventions.
Interconnections
Picks from disciplines (vaguely?) connected to Strategy, Org Design & OD
1/ Data Visualization: Our World in Data published Data Explorer: IPCC Scenarios
How much greenhouse gas emissions the world emits in the coming decades is unknown. It is up to us. It will depend on what people around the world will do now and in the future.
In this situation, it’s helpful to create scenarios that cover a range of possible futures. This is what the ‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’ (SSPs) are. SSPs are the possible futures that climate researchers in the IPCC consider in their models.
SSPs do not tell us what the world will look like. Instead, they tell us what the world could look like.
In summary, SSP1 provides the most positive scenario for both human development and environmental action. We continue to see improvements in education and health across the world; large reductions in poverty; and a shrinking in global inequalities.
SSP5 is similarly optimistic in terms of human development, but achieves this through a large growth in fossil fuels. This is therefore leading to continued large negative effects on the environment.
SSP3 and SSP4 are pessimistic about development: they envision a divided future with high levels of nationalism and large persistent global inequalities as a result. SSP2 sits in the middle of these scenarios: development is not as slow or divided as in SSP3 and SSP4, but progress is slow and unequal.
2/ Policy Making: Related to the Data Explorer above, our next pick is the En-ROADS simulator that invites you to try to limit global warming through various policies. It’s created by Climate Interactive and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative.
3/ Complexity Science: For those of you who are advanced in exploring the science of complexity, the Community Lecture Archives from the Santa Fe Institute might be quite a treasure trove. Enjoy!
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 you to increase your organization-wide impact.