Be Happy or Be Normal?
In order to be happy, have you spent your life resisting social pressures to be normal? Has anyone said to you, “Why can’t you be like everyone else?” I can certainly relate having elected not to be a wife or…
Collaborations — Not All Are Equal
Whether your entrepreneurial spirit is showing up as an artist, a yoga teacher, a widget producer or an organization designer, most seemingly solo enterprise owners would agree that we can no longer “go it alone.” The complexity of business and the speed at which change is occurring require us to partner with those who have the information and skills we lack. Collaboration has become, without a doubt, the new normal when it comes to inventing and coordinating work. Of the four major projects I am currently working on, all are collaborations that involve anywhere from two to seven contributors.
Work’s Golden Era — 10 New Norms for Work
Assimilating the interconnected, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—iVUCA—demands of our current socio-economic environment can trigger considerable stress in our work and workplaces. The upside of these potentially more stressful experiences is we are witnessing a significant transformation in how we…
Collaborative Workplace Design — An Evolving Practice
In a recent conference call with employees from the United Food Workers (UFW) Union, I shared two case studies of STS (socio-technical systems) designing in which I was the consultant-member of the organizations’ design teams. Both of the case studies…
5 Tips for Leading Learning in Organizations
In 1990, Peter Senge wrote a seminal article on leadership and what it takes to build an organization capable of continuous learning. Those of us researching for current best practice might bypass this potentially dated information, but have a look…
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…
Business Unusual — Happiness Motivates
Let’s face it, the evidence is in on happiness. Joy is our only job. In his 2010 Youtube video, Daniel Pink disclaimed money as the motivator to improve human performance. In fact, research stipulates that once you surpass basic mechanical…
Happy, Healthy, Humane Places to Work and Live
In celebration of Labour Day, Deri Latimer and I put the finishing touches on our latest creative collaboration — how to design happy, healthy and humane work systems, organizations and ‘communities of organizations’ (next week’s blog post). The image to the…
Discovery & Design: The Personal is the Universal
(Co-authors: Doug Austrom, Don de Guerre, Bob Laliberte, Bernard Mohr and Carolyn Ordowich) STS-RT Discovery Process Action research has been the foundation of Socio-technical Systems theory and practice since the 1950s work of Trist and Emery in the British coal…
Celebration Time – Come On!
It’s time to come together? It’s up to you, what’s your pleasure Everyone around the world? Come on! Celebration by Kool & The Gang Celebration of Life by Deepaz http://bit.ly/rMDr5B Today, I celebrate two special events — 1 year…
Governance Frameworks – 1.0 versus 2.0
Although governance is not a new term when we consider corporate, political, economic and development models, it appears to wear different masks in different arenas. Whatis.com defines corporate governance as the rules, processes or laws by which businesses are operated,…
Emerging Organization Design — Part III: Design Principles of Adaptive Enterprises
In my previous blogs on emerging organization design for the 21st century, Part I and Part II, I shared the output from several years of inquiry and action research conducted by the Socio-Technical Systems Roundtable (STS-RT) Discovery and Integration Teams. …