Resonant personal and organizational purposes
Workshop 5: People-centred rather than profit-driven organizations? (Xavier Bianne)
At a time when companies and organizations are increasingly pressured to take into account societal and environmental issues, it seemed important to us to go beyond these injunctions alone. The heart of the problem probably lies in the omnipresence of the profit criterion as the sole axis of performance, well before the human factor. How can we hope to reverse this trend and make profit a secondary variable?
Profitability is the DNA of most organizations, so much so that money has become the oxygen of business. Admittedly, the world won’t change in a heartbeat, but how can we put the human being back at the center of all these projects? The real question is probably that of alternative models. Without a credible and viable model, few changes can be expected.
It is certainly on the governance side that we need to look at in order for things to change. Putting people back at the center also means going beyond purely financial and shareholder interests. New models of self-management and self-organization need to be developed and disseminated. The sociocracy model offers many answers and avenues for transformation, by imagining a more shared governance mode in which each stakeholder in a team or organization would have powers in terms of decision-making.
But there are many others. Let us think for example of the slicing pie theory theorized by the American entrepreneur Mike Moyer, which aims to propose an equitable distribution of capital among the founders of an organization. Without going into detail, the milestones he sets out partly allow us to put people back at the center of the structure: remuneration of participants determined by the relative value of their contribution, taking into account future contributions such as money or time, etc. Of course, the moral contract it proposes in this way may seem subjective, but the essential thing is that it is accepted by all stakeholders. It is then up to each organization to find its own recipe!
The “Fairshare model” is another interesting approach, which proposes to rethink organizations in order to remunerate all stakeholders according to 6 investment criteria: natural, human, social, intellectual, financial and manufactured. A new way of distributing value that allows production to meet human, societal and environmental needs at the same time.
There are of course other examples to explore, the list is not meant to be exhaustive. In any case, whatever formula is chosen to put the human being back at the center of organizations, the method always remains the same: experiment, step by step, learn from your mistakes and experiment again. But will those at the helm accept these transformations? Nothing is less certain. Perhaps governments can play a role here: encourage and give substantial support to these new models.
Workshop 8: How can we handle the tension between total uncertainty and the need for an objective and a purpose to motivate and guide each individual and organization? (Delphine Desgurse)
It must be said that never in recent history has uncertainty been so total for individuals and organizations alike. At first glance, it is not easy to reconcile this thick daily fog with the propensity of organizations to plan and anticipate as much as possible. How, then, can we manage this tension between one side of uncertainty and another side of a compelling need for an objective and a purpose to motivate, or at least guide the actions of individuals and organizations alike?
Budgeting, risk management, marketing or even innovation: the current paradigm of organizations tends to leave as little room as possible for uncertainty. And this trend becomes even more pronounced as organizations grow: the more complex they become, the more the need to plan everything becomes apparent. No less than 9% of the time in a company would be devoted to planning and explaining these plans. But for what relevance? Nothing that really stands the test of reality. You have to constantly adjust, rework the forecasts every month, etc.
The health crisis provoked by Covid-19 and the new ways of organizing companies, such as the massive recourse to remote working, provide a unique opportunity to rethink these organizational modes, often centered on financial issues and which in the end, often clumsily project past data in order to hope to detect a near future.
It is precisely in such contexts of radical uncertainty that a company’s purpose and goal can provide a direction, a horizon. The current paradigm must evolve in the direction of more rationality and pragmatism. From this point of view, the research, notably theorized by the researcher Saras Sarasvathy in the 2000s, seems to offer interesting avenues: using available resources and then imagining possible and attainable effects, rather than the other way around. This work has already influenced the methods of many entrepreneurs. It is the same philosophy that motivates Philippe Silberzahn when he talks about bringing a project to life on a day-to-day basis, that an entrepreneur is capable of “starting from who he is, what he knows, and who he knows, and dealing with it, here and now”.
But this arduous navigation between long-term ambitions and immediate objectives must be accompanied by a clear and assumed raison d’être. Only then can we detach ourselves from risky predictions and better grasp the immediate energy of everyday life. The health crisis is a unique opportunity to deepen and strengthen these purposes, but also to deepen self-organization in teams. It is also an opportunity to put a more practical approach into play.
