Redesigning an organisation — some questions based on living systems ideas
At work (Forum for the Future) we are asking ourselves the question:
I personally, like other colleagues, am interested in how systems are organised, especially living systems (see previous posting on living systems principles)? I and the System Innovation Lab team are also interested in the work of re-inventing organisations, especially as ‘Teal’ organisations are based on living systems principles (see previous post on our experiment).
So what questions might we ask ourselves based on this thinking to help us organise ourselves to better serve our purpose?
1. Nested purposes: What are the current purposes of the different teams? What function to they serve towards the organisation’s purpose? How might this need to change and how might they nest together?
Assumptions: What are the assumptions behind the way we are structured, our practices and purposes? What do they say about the kind of organisation we are; the lived purpose(s) we are actually serving? What new assumptions do we want to make?
2. Relationships: What is the flow and relationships between different teams? What is the value exchange (old and new)? For example skills, information and resources and finance? As well as the softer flows such as trust?
3. Innovation, learning and emergence: How does and or might the organisation innovate its practices? How might it be better at learning and transforming itself to keep achieving its mission and impact?
4. Self-organisation: How might it manage itself? I have been trying to understand the process of self-organisation in living systems. My current understanding is it is about power as it is distributed and flows. Where does the power of decision making lie? Where is there agency, the ability to choose to act, happening in the organisation? How is that agency enabled (for example through processes that support transparency, conflict resolution and social norms for working together)?
Will try out these questions in practice and let you know!
