Collaborative Organization Design for Happy, Healthy, Humane Places to Work & Live
The Landscape of Greener Grass
Collaborative, adaptive organizations and people are happy, healthy, humane and innovative.
Innovate for Health: iVUCA—interconnected, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—environments are both challenging and promising. The challenge: many of yesterday’s organization design solutions (command and control structures, systems and processes) are not adaptive during times of turbulence and accelerated change. The promise: creativity and innovation are most evident and effective when people work together in redesigning whole systems—business units, organizations and networks.
Innovate for Happiness: When employees are meaningfully engaged in analyzing and transforming their whole work system, they maximize their value and that of the entire organization.
Innovate for Humanity: Maintaining “a higher level of employee engagement not only contributes toward short-term survival during economic volatility but also is a key factor for longer-term business performance and better positioning when market conditions become favourable.”
Further evidence for a whole system approach—optimizing people, purpose, planet and profit—is documented in the European Union’s 2009 report on the economic benefits of environmental management. Various case studies highlight environmental strategies that deliver on strengthening these major economic outcomes—productivity, innovation, employment, balanced trade, public finances, economic cohesion and a resilient sustainable economy. To stimulate purposeful economic and environmental recovery and growth, businesses consider these elements—the source of their problems, the strategies for optimizing their core business and creating innovative products and services, the systems and structures necessary to enhance their overall performance. This holistic reflection on sources, strategies, systems and structures is integral to the design of adaptive solutions.
