Intelligent Organizations

But instead of focusing on all of the shiny gadgets to make us forget that we are actually at work, should a company focus on creating a culture where people feel appreciated, valued, and supported in what they do? One study of leading CEOs found that employees value CEOs who invest in corporate culture. One executive consultant noted, "Employees want to work at places where they can grow their skills and flourish in ways other than picking up a pay check."

The leaders we have studied have done just that: they have focused on helping employees grow their skills and flourish in their careers by participating in the mission of the firm.

Studies reporting the  benefits of mindfulness training keep rolling in—not quite with the regularity of those distracting thoughts that keep popping up in your head, but at a good clip nonetheless.

The latest, from a team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports even a short, two-week course in focusing the mind can lead to immediate, tangible results: higher scores on tests measuring reasoning and comprehension.

Even with the priceless brand-building glow enjoyed by a few celebrity CEOs likeRichard Bransonand Tony Hsieh isn’t it strange that so few CEOs attempt the same success? Odder still, few companies tap the scalable, brand-building power of their employees. In fact, it may be their biggest missed opportunity in our increasingly connected yet complex era.

How do we get beyond e-mail to these new social platforms that include an industrial-strength social network? Not through Facebook, because that’s not the right tool. But there are tools now: wikis, blogs, microblogging, ideation tools, jams, next-generation project management, what I call collaborative decision management. These are social tools for decision making. These are the new operating systems for the 21st-century enterprise in the sense that these are the platforms upon which talent—you can think of talent as the app—works, and performs, and creates capability.

So can children learn to read on their own? In the video below, Breazeal describes "an idea in its formation," and how her team is taking risks to trying to understand it.

When the firm is focused on short-term profits and the stock price, sending engineers and salespeople on expeditions to identify new opportunities in unfamiliar countries is unlikely to have much impact.

Know when you have to accept to adopt your round holes to new and better square pegs... 

In essence, Principle #2 asserts that every purported ‘right’ can and should be reframed in terms of interlocking mutual responsibilities. Shifting the emphasis from ‘rights’ to responsibilities makes the desired-outcome of each ‘right’ much more achievable in real-world practice:

> a focus on the interlocking and interdependence of responsibilities identifies how the desired-outcome can be achieved

> a focus on the mutuality of responsibilities provides active protection against paediarchy and other ‘rights’-based dysfunctions

>any asymmetries in responsibilities can be highlighted, and where necessary can then also be described in defensible yet challengeable form – for example, the lesser ‘response-abilities’ of children relative to adults

Interesting observation and contemplation.

Interesting viewpoint on Gamification!  Must read!

R&D returns causality: Absorptive capacity or Organizational IQ.

Having seen several of these organisations, I can concurr that fear based working environments reduce employees to mere machines.  And machines can't be creative.

In terms of feedback, the vice president of organizational management development said this: "The most noticeable change in the largest group, which included scientists and some of the foundation team, was a shift from cynicism to hope. When people talk about what happened to them or how it's changed them, they talk about how they went from being negative, pessimistic and cynical to being hopeful, being more centered."

There's another quote from a project coordinator. He said, "Mindfulness helps clear all the chatter that goes on constantly in your head, and you begin to find out what's real for you in your life. What makes this program so great is that it can effect long-term evolution in individuals, and therefore, in the organization. It's provided more purpose and meaning to what I'm doing at work."

...

Unfortunately for us, Bob stepped down as CEO, and somebody else came in. The new CEO did away with anything that had to do personally with the former CEO. He got rid of our program. But all these years later, I still see people who say that the program really changed them and that they took those benefits with them wherever they went in the corporate world.

We stand on the frontier of an emerging social environment. We got here because our elders and predecessors established standards for network protocols and services that eventually became the Internet.  It took us almost 30 years to reach this level of ubiquity and universal acceptance, but good lessons were learned along the way including the fact that complex standards rarely get adopted, and simple ones often stand the course of time.

Do you tell your employees what to do?
Do you oversee all aspects of their projects?
Do you direct rather than empower?
Do spend more time on day-to-day tasks vs the growth of your company?

Very few founders, startup CEOs, board members, investors, and others supporting the entrepreneurial community actively pursue and advocate disciplined, professional leadership development. This is an enormous missed opportunity.

Entrepreneurs, especially founders and startup CEOs, need not wait to be encouraged to do this work. They should not consider their own development as a nice-to-have, an indulgence, or an unnecessary expense. They certainly should not delay until their jobs are threatened by their poor performance. 

Here are seven reasons (among many) that every founder and entrepreneurial CEO should actively develop their leadership, and a question about each.

Most of us know what a culturally intelligent individual looks like. We have more than 15 years of research that answers that question. And we can predict someone's global potential in light of their CQ scores. But what does a culturally intelligent organization look like?

As soon as we have ‘order’, or ‘control’, over the context, the fact of entropy should warn us that we’re already starting to lose it. Once the loss of ‘order’ or ‘control’ moves far enough towards a tipping-point, we’re likely to be pushed over the Inverse-Einstein boundary into uncertainty and ‘unorder’, whether we like it or not. The key here is to realise that that far side of the Inverse-Einstein boundary is the only space where counter-entropy becomes possible –  in other words, a place where we can leverage the uncertainty itself to reframe the structure and capability of the variety in our ‘control’-system, and thence to revitalise our ‘useful-order’ in the context.

In the longer term, what entropy really tells us is that the only way to maintain order is to let go of order - and to know when (and under what conditions, and so on) to hold onto order, and when to let it go. That’s a real skill in itself… for which the key trick is to choose to let go before it’s forced upon us by that decay of entropy.

Some quotes that made me smile and think - and vice versa

...the only real law is Murphy’s: if something can go wrong, it probably will. 

Yet Murphy’s is so much of a law that it also has to apply to itself: hence if Murphy’s Law can go wrong, it probably will.

In other words, most of the time, Murphy’s cancels itself out. Which is why we get the illusion that things are predictable, that they follow rules.Which in reality they don’t:....

The primary purpose of rules in organisations is to speed up decision-making and to clarify roles and responsibilities. Since organisations are also systems in their own right, all of the notes above about the limitations of rules in systems-design also apply here. The natural decay over time of relevance and appropriateness of rules is also a key source of organisationalentropy, which, if not addressed, will eventually cause the decay and death of the organisation itself.

The ISO-9000 quality-system standards provide a useful worked-example of layered structure to manage rules in an organisational context. At the point-of-action, work-instructions provide explicit step-by-step rules, and guidance on how to address expected variance. When the work-instruction becomes insufficient, we turn to procedures that, in effect, describe how to adapt or redefine the work-instruction to fit the context. When procedures prove inadequate to cope with the actual variance, we turn to current policy for that overall scope; and if and when a context occurs where policy will not fit the case, we turn to the vision, as the ultimate anchor for the overall organisational-system.

Enjoy!

Brilliant!  Anyone up for lunch?

In both of these cases, systems thinking forces us to look at the whole, not the individual parts.  It is the job of the modern manager to re-vision their function from one of “controller” to one of “steward”.  The focus is on purpose, values and meaning.  What does this business exist to achieve or create in the world?  What values will guide us in doing this?  How is this meaningful for the people who work here?  It is the role of managers to ensure that the correct conditions exist for these things to be realised, not to tell people what to do.

If we are systems thinkers, we don’t lose the ability (or valuing of) analytical thinking; we are, however, extending ourselves in our abilities to apply both when applicable.  There may be something of a butterfly’s “essential being” that existed when it was a caterpillar, but I think we’d all agree that “caterpillar” and “butterfly” are two entirely different things.  ”Butterfly” is not merely “Caterpillar 2.0″; it is “butterfly”, incorporating some elements of, and transcending “caterpillar”, if you like.

It’s about working with things as integral wholes.  It’s about thinking bigger.  Water is inherently wet.  We cannot understand water’s wetness by breaking it down into its component parts; oxygen and hydrogen.  Neither of those elements has an inherent quality of “wetness”.  Similarly, with businesses, we cannot get a truly comprehensive understanding of them simply by breaking them down into their component parts.  Everything is connected to everything else and we are limited in our abilities to manage them effectively if we isolate “problem parts”.  Making a holistic assessment of the system will give us a bigger picture view that highlights strengths, inter-relationships, tensions, the forces at work (both from within and without the system) and areas of hope (where intervention can be applied).