Tag Archive for: organizational agility

Archetypes: mapping organization, culture and leadership

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The empirical evidence agile42 has gathered from multiple client engagements, supports the theory that ideal characteristics of a leader are based on archetypes, ideal types of what an organization should look like and their underlying culture. This has led us to observe a very strong relationship between leadership attitude, organizational design, and organizational culture. 

The idea behind ORGANIC agility is that there isn’t any right or wrong leadership behavior, but rather there are behaviors that one can master, and can be appropriately called upon in specific situations within a specific culture: if a leadership behavior doesn’t correspond to the cultural expectations of the people involved, it will very likely cause a negative emotional response, and potentially increase motivational debt.

In this webinar I gave an overview of different archetypes that are expressed under specific conditions and bring leadership behavior, organizational design and organizational culture together. We also explored some methods within the ORGANIC agility framework, that allow you to recognize the archetype to which an organization can be mapped at a given moment in time, and provide guidance for transitioning to a different archetype, while increasing coherence between culture, organizational design and leadership behaviors.

If you missed the live webinar, I have great news for you! Here you can find the recording of the session, available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel welcome to share it around with friends and colleagues.

 

 

During the webinar, I mentioned the Archetype Assessment as a part of the ORGANIC agility framework. The archetype assessment is a service we provide either virtually or in-person, and it is an engaging and meaningful activity that reveals what people think about the way leadership achieves results in your organization. It allows groups and leaders to express what combinations (archetypes) they see themselves operating in, what expectations they have of one another, and how they can make changes without alarming and disappointing the people they work with. The aim is to support cohorts going through any sort of change, whether intentional (such as an agile journey) or unintentional (such as a merger). Change creates friction and both leaders, and the people they work with, struggle with knowing in what ways it is useful to change and how they can best reduce resistance and help support growth in themselves and others.

Please have a look at the information, and contact us if you are interested or have questions! 

I mentioned the webinar from our colleague, Lasse Ziegler, in this webinar, about Leadership in complex environments, and I recommend you have a look at that one to get an understanding of the leadership styles mentioned briefly in my webinar. 

You are welcome to  join our ORGANIC agility Foundation valid for Certified Agile Leadership I (CAL1) training to get an introduction to ORGANIC agility and a deep dive into the Leadership framework. The topics touched in the ORGANIC agility webinars are part of this training! 

Here you can also access the slides I used during the webinar. 

 

For more webinars and recordings, please look here!
Hope to see you in the next ones! 

 

Diagnosing and changing organizational culture

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One of the main aspects of any agile transformation program is cultural change. During times of working from home it’s even more important than ever. 

Based on the 1st ORGANIC agility principle, “Increase Cultural Awareness and Coherence”, the main challenge is how to understand your organizational culture and how to create coherence based on shared principles without losing diversity.

In this webinar I shared my experiences of using the Competing Values Framework, developed by Robert Quinn and Kim Cameron at the University of Michigan. This framework gives us a model with the purpose to help change agents identify effective ways of diagnosing and changing culture in order to enhance organizational performance.

I am pleased that the topic of the webinar got so much attention. We had people listening from all over the world, and so many questions that unfortunately we ran out of time. We hope that we can continue some discussions with the participants in the future. It was fun and great that the audience was engaged in the topic with comments throughout the session. 

For those who missed the live session, don't panic! Here you can find the recording, and it is also available on YouTube.  Have a look at it and feel welcome to share it around with friends and colleagues. If there is anything we can help you with regarding this topic, feel free to contact us. 

 

 

If you are interested in the Organizational Scan for your organization, feel free to look into our OrgScan Starter Kit. This is a good starting point to understanding the culture of your organization. More details about the OrgScan can be found here. Don’t hesitate to get in touch! 

To learn more about ORGANIC agility, you can have a look at our webpage. We’re continuing to run the Certified ORGANIC Leadership® Foundations (provides CAL1) sessions remotely, so get in touch if you think this would be something for you and your organization.

If you are interested in reading more about ORGANIC agility, you can buy the ORGANIC agility book from Amazon. 

We have more webinars coming up, and the previous ones listed on our website, so please have a look at them here. More webinars!

 

 

Workers on scaffolding

Building blocks for a resilient organization

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It was great to have so many people attending my webinar “Building blocks for a resilient organization” on April 23rd. The subject seemed to be resonating with a big audience and I want to thank everyone for their engagement and questions and especially to the many who got back to me through Linkedin or email: it looks like the community of people who get passionate about ORGANIC agility is growing day by day.

Here you can find the recording of the session, also available on YouTube: have a look at it and feel welcome to share it around with friends and colleagues.

In an era of global challenges, volatile markets and exponentially faster changes, the slow response of decision making and hierarchies makes organizations more vulnerable. Obsessive focus on processes and structures derives from the common mistake of thinking of organizations as machines rather than thinking of them as organisms, social networks of thinking individuals who care about doing a good job.

A new way of thinking about leadership and decision-making is necessary. Instead of a rigid framework you rather need guiding principles to apply in different contexts: don’t copy what someone else has done before and instead find your own solution.

In this webinar, I gave an overview of the building blocks of ORGANIC agility: the leadership framework, principles, tools and practices that help on your journey. With these, you can create an organization that can organically grow and adapt to challenges of the future.

The ORGANIC agility framework allows different kinds of agility to grow in different environments, instead of imposing a single model on everybody. In this way, it is possible to map existing capabilities to market demands, and evolve following trends, as opposed to implementing a specific organizational blueprint, which might have become irrelevant by the time it is finally implemented.

The first element is the Leadership Framework. It is often the entry point for organizations, both because usually, leaders in organizations have been fighting the uncertainty of the markets for long enough to have an instinctive grasp on complexity and because engagement at the leadership level increases the probability of positive results. There are three key aspects to ORGANIC Leadership: first, it sees leadership as a capability rather than a role. Second, it can be combined with and recognizes multiple leadership models that are out there in the world today and sees their value in context, placing particular emphasis on the complexity-informed models. Finally, this is the only current framework that combines situational awareness, leadership attitude, and organizational culture in order to improve effectiveness with the minimum of resistance, and it is presented alongside an intervention model that can facilitate the transition to a different kind of leadership.

The second element is a set of five principles, which play the role of scaffolding alongside the leadership framework. The principles represent different degrees of complexity and different intervention needs. Scaffolding, in this case, reminds us that the principles are not rules that are meant to be followed forever. There are different kinds of scaffolds: some support the construction of a building whose future shape we already know, some provide nutrients for growth to happen, and some completely disappear once they are no longer needed. The same applies to the five principles: once they have been fully integrated into an organization and become part of its DNA, explicit reference to them is unnecessary.

Principles come associated with tools, the third element of ORGANIC agility. They are meant to help the translation of theory into practice and make complexity manageable. Understanding the present condition, establishing fast and diverse feedback loops, and exploring multiple options are all essential.

OrgScan overview

Remember to sign up to the upcoming webinar, continuing on the same ORGANIC agility pattern. The upcoming webinar takes place on May 22nd. More details and signing up. To learn more about ORGANIC agility, you can have a look at the website.

We created an online SenseMaker pulse that would test the level of resilience of various industries sectors towards COVID-19 and learn how many have been adapting successfully to working remotely. We encourage you to participate in the pulse and share a story by accessing the following link: collector.sensemaker-suite.com/?projectID=BusinessResilience_Master. It will take no more than 10 minutes. You are also welcome to share multiple stories as well as the link with friends and colleagues.

We will prepare a report based on the collected stories, which will help everyone understand more and take inspiration from.