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

Customer Experience Mapping — Part I

Do you have an intimate understanding of your customers’ experiences when purchasing and then using your services and products? Given that mapping organizational workflows prove to reduce operational errors and increase return on investment, it follows that mapping your customers’…

Helen Maupin

4 Rooms of Change — Where do you most like to live? 

If we wish to find out what works, we must start with our own values and personal situation.     Marvin Weisbord Change is all about learning new ways to feel, think and act. I am always seeking simple analogies that…

Helen Maupin

Cultural Change — Possible In Our Lifetime?

In the words of Malcolm Gladwell, “cultural legacies cast a long historical shadow.” They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished. Outliers:  The Story of Success, 2008 In many…

Helen Maupin

From Manipulation to Adaptation — a Shifting Paradigm

From the macrocosm of our planet through to the microcosm of our physical bodies, we are experiencing a radical paradigm shift.  A paradigm is a thought model or worldview shared by individuals or societies that influences how they think, feel…

Helen Maupin

Organization Design — Say What??? 

For the purposes of improvement and/or innovation, organizations redesign their strategies, structures, systems and processes. Over the past 25 years of collaborating with organizations to accomplish their redesign efforts, I witnessed their significant performance improvements. However, only recently (see timeframe…

Helen Maupin

Adaptive Leadership

I can safely say I spent the past 30 years of my consulting career working to disrupt the traditional leadership practices of command and control. The main reason was not to suit my rebellious nature (which it did) but rather…

Helen Maupin

STS Collaboration Platform — An Emerging Social Ethos

When we picture a collaboration platform, our mind typically moves to such technology software housed on our computers as enterprise and customer/sales resource planning systems — ERPs or CRMs, SharePoint, Google Apps, GoToMeeting, etc.  Many organizations implement these software tools…

Helen Maupin

Collaborative Organization Design — The Anishinaabe Way 

Last week I spent two days designing with a First Nations council that represents 28 communities spread across 55,000 square miles.  These grassroots representatives came together purposefully to agree on the strategies as well as design the structure, systems and processes…

Helen Maupin

Leadership’s Shifting Paradigm

No matter what our occupation or where we reside, how we currently live and work is being redefined by global trends such as: •  information and communication technological advances •  demographic changes in a highly educated workforce •  economic shifts…

Helen Maupin

Self-Mastery — Are You Leading Toward or Leaving Behind?

Leadership’s evolution, within our current experience of the Innovation Age, shifts emphasis from role to responsibility.  Understanding leadership, in today’s complex uncertain world, requires us to dig deeper into our fundamental principles.  What was once the foreground of a leader’s…

Helen Maupin

Feminine Leadership — We’ve Come a Long Way Baby!

If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then, you are an excellent leader.     Dolly Parton Leadership in the Innovation Age espouses that global leadership practices are stuck in…

Helen Maupin

Leadership in the Innovation Age 

Most leadership practices —  whether in business, government, community service, labour unions and the not-for-profit sector —  are still operating as though we live in the dark ages of the Industrial Revolution not the high-tech, high-touch Age of Innovation.  An…

Helen Maupin