Category: Organization Design — a Collaboration Platform

Purpose & Function Setting out on the journey of organization design means consciously choosing to align all the parts of an enterprise.  The aim with this deliberate business solution is to ensure the organization’s strategic or competitive advantage—PURPOSE (why it exists) & FUNCTION (what tasks it does in service to its purpose—is delivered effectively and efficiently to its customer base.  Excellent customer service is directly correlated to whether or not these parts are aligned. Shared Experience Broadly speaking, all organizations share the same three parts: • a Social system—customer demands, rewards/recognition, people processes, ways of working, culture, strategy, value-creation activities) • a Technical system—structures, technologies, management/ coordination processes and systems • an Environmental system—geographic-social-political-economic trends surrounding and influencing the business Bringing this “whole system” into a design exercise can daunt even the best of multi-taskers, which is why a collaborative approach not only eases the brain strain and workload but also enriches creativity, innovation and engagement. Whole System Collaborative Design By collaboratively co-designing their entire enterprise, employees and managers learn how to best serve all their stakeholders not just for today’s circumstances but for future change as well.  Designing your enterprise’s collaboration platform creates the stable, agile foundation capable of surviving and thriving in the rapidly changing environment of the 21st century. Collaboration Platform

Emerging Organization Designs – Part II: Models of Functioning

Last week in Part I, I briefly specified three organizational forms of Adaptive Enterprises that we are seeing in today’s world of work – 1)  Hierarchically-integrated, Decentralized Organizations 2)  Value Realization Networks 3)  Social Eco-systems The images (transformation process models)…

Helen Maupin

Emerging Organization Designs – Part I: Models of Form

If you have been following previous blogs, you will recall me mentioning an STS-RT (Socio-Technical Systems Roundtable) research and discovery process in which I am involved.  The journey my colleagues and I ventured into was to understand and document changing…

Helen Maupin

Culture Change: Keep your Values, Change your Ideals

Recently, I worked with my local urban transit corporation to transform their command and control culture.  Why?  The internal relationships between management and bus operators brought them to the edge of strike action.  Resentment in the workplace had become so…

Helen Maupin

Organizational Change is Personal Change

In its simplest definition, Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the capacity of being socially and self-aware.   The theory states the more able we are to understand and manage our emotions as well as understand those of others, not only do we…

Helen Maupin

Transformation’s Hurdles: Judgment, Depression and Fear

“I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended.  Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is…

Helen Maupin

Relax – Release – Receive, then Act!

  Life always reveals to me exactly what I need to know. Gratefully the shadow side of Self, which inhibits growth, is constantly forced to die.  In essence, these death cycles mark a necessary ending of beliefs and behaviours that…

Helen Maupin

Truth, Beauty and Goodness: Ingredients of Amazing Organizations

Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical:  Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, declares that adequate products and services are no longer ‘good enough’ in the market place. …

Helen Maupin

Emerging Dualities: Transparency vs Anonymity?

In an earlier blog,  I wrote about the shifting global paradigm reflecting how we think about and deal with information in our daily lives.  With the proliferation of digital technologies, we moved from out-right secrecy in the 70s into greater…

Helen Maupin

Change Programs — Why They Don’t Work

I am always interested in how others view change, particularly other disciplines.  But my research does not necessarily bring clarity.  Take the two change models illustrated below as examples.  In the first, produced by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, their…

Helen Maupin

Building Community—an Outcome of Web 3.0?

Although North American society speaks of human development as passing from survival and safety > belonging and love > esteem > self-actualization, Hindus recognize four quite different transitions of the human evolutionary journey  – the desire for pleasure the desire…

Helen Maupin

The Adaptive Enterprise: An Emerging Model for 21st Century Organizations

Over the past five years, my colleagues and I at Socio-technical Systems Roundtable (STS-RT)  explored, dialogued and prototyped our way towards a new model for designing and developing organizations — the Adaptive Enterprise. This body of international educators, managers, unionists…

Helen Maupin