It’s been almost a year, maybe more, that I’ve been circling around this topic, without managing to really give it shape. I’m going to try once more this summer during my vacation, I love to relax, read, and write. This will be the occasion. Living organizations is the idea that like the universe of which 65% of matter eludes us, we call it “dark matter”, a large part of organizations escapes us when we reduce them to our org charts, our process diagrams, our hierarchies and our spreadsheets. Here in broad strokes is what I hope to discuss, and I’m counting on you through this post to give me your feedback before it’s too late.

The objective of living organizations is to give other tools to today’s organizations and to those who govern them or work in them, to make visible and tangible this dark matter that is nevertheless essential to their understanding and their dynamism.

Paths for living organizations

When I’m asked to think about an organization, to support a transformation (agile or not), what do I refer to? Here is the draft, I insist I’m delivering to you somewhat what comes out in bulk right now and that I must organize (!). By clicking on the image you’ll get a large 5MB image to see better.

I’m going to try to approach organizations from three axes: structure, value, change. Structure is composed of two themes: the components, what makes up the organization, and the structure that assembles these components. The value of the organization evokes its wealth: knowledge, culture, products, etc. Finally the management of change, how the dynamics of change unfold within it.

Structure

Structure is based on components. The components of organizations are us. As I was able to mention in the agile horde we suffer from limitations and advantages. Among these for thinking about organizations: the sizes of groups (pleasure of belonging, capacity for constructive communication), distances between people for communication, questions of communitarianism, the importance of socialization, visual management as a counterpoint to the ambiguity of words, memorization through storytelling (mirror neurons?), etc.

The structure itself takes forms: are they subject to catastrophe theory? If yes according to contexts they tear, sew themselves back together, fold, the use of verbs to manage the dynamics of structure seems essential to me. Who uses verbs to indicate their organism in motion? But also the inclusion of ideas from thermodynamics and living things that inherit from the systemic approach (for example De Rosnay’s Macroscope, or certain works by Laborit) in the vision of the modern organization. The sociocratic double link (which today we call holocratic) to manage working groups.

As a counterpoint to this very organic approach, the idea that in nature the crystal has managed to maximize the transmission of information (we therefore use it to transmit electricity in our processors) by replicating the same pattern identically. A repetition, a redundancy that makes the crystal the crystal. Thus finding a middle ground between facilitating the transmission of information, and the adaptive organic capacity of complex systems.

Value

Like termite mounds whose objective is to extend the storage capacity of the termites’ bodies themselves, (see the extended organism by Scott Turner), our organizations store, safeguard, maintain, wealth, value. The most obvious are the products they create, the knowledge they generate, the organization’s culture, etc.

Today any governor will understand the importance of creating and maintaining in good condition the culture of their organization, its knowledge.

The tools of agility are a good example for enabling the creation of this value (particularly product and solution), Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startup, a quick overview will be essential.

But how to store and maintain culture and knowledge in good condition? (the propagation of it belongs to the chapter on change management). There are first probably the traditional tools (ECM, GED, and the like). And then there are non-traditional proposals, here are two:

  • Having storytelling sessions on the history and anecdotes of the organization: like brown bags or other coding dojo sessions except that the subject is not business, nor technological, it must be related to the organization’s history, its culture, its anecdotes, its authenticity.
  • Having a regular reading in groups: I was born in Cuba, not by chance, my parents lived and worked there for two years, they took advantage of it to have me born there. Too young to see it, I nevertheless kept in mind the stories of readers in cigar factories. Everyone works, a reader tells stories: history, politics, great texts. I love this idea of readings, in an environment that suits us (the people I meet generally need calm and a sort of bubble to move forward in the ambient chaos).

And then we must look elsewhere, to improve slums we mention continuing education, the injection of new blood at regular intervals, diversity and collective intelligence, decentralized decision-making, etc.

Change

The improvements to slums provide us with paths for change in our organizations. Change management is key. Good intentions don’t resist a bad approach in this area. The support is thought out step by step, the small makes the large, by maturity level (Path of an agile transformation (June 2015)). Change includes the actors of it, it’s not about being coercive to move toward the organizations we describe, technologies like Open (Agile) Adoption are essential.

The presence and affirmation of emotion over analytics is also key. The transformation of Unilever through emotional artistic events is evocative (To the desert and back, Mirvis).

Change feeds on socialization and storytelling (again), summits: global meetings historically from the open source world have a role to play.

Your feedback

Your feedback on this draft interests me greatly. So during my vacation in Crete (where an important moment in the history of our thought takes place, a true choice of civilization, once again in this cradle of democracy) I would be pleased to read you while trying to finally write this new small document.

Brief history of articles on this theme