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

Leading in Life — Are You an Agile Leader?

Wherever we turn for learning and development, someone is writing about leadership.  From a cursory “google” of the subject, I found at least three books written in the last three years all titled, “The Leadership Gap” alongside countless others addressing…

Helen Maupin

Organizational Designer or Community Builder?

It is Day One after a long journey back from Canterbury, England.  As always upon my return from the Socio-technical Systems Roundtable’s (STS-RT) annual learning event, I am filled with more questions than answers, which is probably a good measure of…

Helen Maupin

Social Innovation

Over the past decade, social innovation has emerged as a viable means of creating permanent systems change.  Although no singular definition has coalesced from those active in this field, the Centre for Social Innovation settled on “new ideas that resolve…

Helen Maupin

The Complexity of Integration — A Hero’s Journey

Integration is a much sought-after capacity in today’s business world.  Interestingly, it is also highly desirable from both an ecological and human development perspective.  The integration of symbiotic species, organizational systems as well as fractured personalities empowers ecological, economical and…

Helen Maupin

4 Coping Tools for Workplace Restructuring

I recently delivered a seminar to a workplace in the throes of restructuring.  Three months earlier, this same company hosted almost 500 employees, today 100 remain with 50 more scheduled to leave within the next month.  Although the employer offered…

Helen Maupin

4 Tips for Glimpsing the Future

What do you see as the greatest source of uncertainty in today’s world? Certainly, driving forces such as digitization, globalization and individuation top most thought leaders’ lists as contributing to the planet’s increased volatility and complexity.  However, at the root…

Helen Maupin

Design Principles for Relating, Working and Leading

I am freshly home from the Organization Design Forum held in Atlanta, Georgia, where my colleagues and I presented some of our ‘discoveries’ on the changing nature of organizational design in today’s New Normal business environment.  As Socio-technical systems (STS)…

Helen Maupin

Coming Together, Staying Together, Working Together

In today’s rapidly changing iVUCA (interconnected, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, the art of building relationships in order to co-exist in community is fundamental for both surviving and thriving.  Global agreement, in principle, supports “the quantity and quality of…

Helen Maupin

Leading With Love

This is what I know about love.  That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost.  One either chooses to care more or to care less. Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden So what does love have…

Helen Maupin

Coming Together or Coming Apart

Just as our global society appears to be coming together through shifting values and social paradigms so it appears to be coming apart at the seams with crumbling social institutions — government, education, healthcare, etc.  Such duality of experience is…

Helen Maupin

Collaborative Community Design

(Co-authored by:  Doug Austrom, Don de Guerre, Bob Laliberte, Bernard Mohr and Carolyn Ordowich) Last weekend I pondered a question my colleagues (Socio-Technical Systems Roundtable) and I are considering as we document our community’s action research discovery process. How do…

Helen Maupin

When Is Enough, Enough?

The recent media attention garnered by Apple’s lack of social purpose and action has raised three questions for me. •  When is enough money, enough? •  When is the incongruence between our values and our actions enough for us to…

Helen Maupin