Bonnitta Roy on an open architecture for self-organization

Bonnitta Roy describes in An Open Architecture for Self-Organization how to “to distribute management responsibilities into self-organizing teams, without losing strategic performance“. She calls this “The Open Participatory Organization“, or OPO for short. The governance of an OPO is CriSP, or “continually regenerating it’s starting position“. This means that the form of the organization “takes on the shape that best fits the current conditions and contexts“.

The OPO is built on “locations“, which are occupied by teams. Locations “co-evolve with the teams and people that occupy them“. The locations are “performance-objective-value” zones, where:

• The performance “is an emergent outcome of the collaborative interaction of its members“.
• The objectives “emerge from the role-identities of its members“.
• The values “are an emergent outcome of the intentional-motivational states of the members“.

Bonnitta Roy distinguishes between two types of “performance-objective-value” zones, core and network.

• All “key operations of the company” take place in the core zones. The core zones are “where the value of the company is generated“.
• All other operations that are “necessary and sufficient for the company to sustain itself, develop, improve, and thrive” take place in the network zones.  The network zones are “responsible for the exchange of resources in the organization“. Network zones are delineated into four major classifications: “Access, Adaptation, Support and Incubation“.

Locations exist at different scales in the organization:

• Organization, e.g., “Vision, Mission and Values“.
• Core & Network Zones, where each zone has a “performance-objective-value” set that is common to all teams in the zone.
• Teams, where each team has its own “performance-objective-value” set.
• Individuals, where each team member specifies their individual “performance-objective-value” set.

The OPO distributes “disciplinary power throught the network through a participatory governance“. Strategic choices are based on “involved participation with what is actually the case, not on conversations limited to official scripts … and irrelevant abstractions“.

Related post:
Bonnitta Roy on how self-organization happens