Category: Organization
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What is organization?
I don’t think we are working differently enough. The prevailing assumption is that organization is something we design, create and control. I think the world is fundamentally self-organizing. We don’t create it, and we certainly don’t control it, but we can live in it with greater joy and less effort. We can learn to enhance…
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Five key conditions for collective impact
The following key conditions for collective impact and shared success are from an article, which is based on a blog series from 2002 in the Stanford Social Innovative Review: Common Agenda: There is a shared vision for change including a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach through agreed upon actions. Shared Measurement:…
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The upside of self-management
Gary Hamel provides suggestions on how unpack self-management in his new book What Matters Now. Why bother? Well, here is the upside of self-management from What Matters Now, pages 223-225: More initiative – people do help each other if given the opportunity, initiative flourishes More expertise – people do take responsibility for the quality of…
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Unpacking self-management
In a previous post I asked (in Swedish) whether management is needed? My answer is yes, self-management, or as I would rather put it, self-organizing. The follow-up question then is how do you enable self-management? Gary Hamel has a number of suggestions in his book What Matters Now, pp. 212—217: Make the mission boss Let…
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Creative forces of self-organization
After reading We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy by John Buck and Sharon Villines, I have become very interested in sociocracy, a.k.a. dynamic governance. Gerard Endenburg, who started pioneering and applying dynamic governance, has recently written an interesting article about the Creative Forces of Self-Organization together with John Buck. In this article, they…
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Crucial ingredients for collective action
Petra Kuenkel writes on her blog that: “Innovative approaches and new solutions often derive from people’s ability to dialogue and partner for the future. The quality of how we do this matters. People implement what they have helped to create.” She lists the following ingredients for successful collective action: Understand the system Create resonance Prepare…
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Self-organization is not anarchy or dictatorship
Self-organization is not social chaos (as under anarchy) or social order (as under dictatorship). Put in another way, dictatorship or anarchy makes self-organization difficult.
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The living organization
I have raised the view in a previous blog post that an organization is more like an organism than a machine. Now, I’m reading The Living Company: Growth Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie de Geus. The question at the heart of the book is: What if we think about a company as a…
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The grand will
Martin Buber gives in his book I and Thou an account of the movement that is involved in accessing one’s grand will: “The free man is he who wills without arbitrary self will. He believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of him. It does not keep him in leading strings,…
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Lasse Ramquist & Mats Eriksson
Lasse Ramquist & Mats Eriksson har skrivit böckerna Manöverbarhet och Integral Management (på engelska), som båda handlar om hur man i en verksamhet skapar strategisk fokusering och engagemang på livets villkor. Detta är viktigt eftersom produktivt kunskapsarbete kräver att vi organiserar arbetet på ett människovänligt sätt.