Category: Organizing
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David Hawkins on Organizing Principles
Attractors are organizing principles, and organizing principles have different levels of power. … Obviously the one attractor pattern that dominates all of us is the attractor pattern of life itself. Just as nothing in our universe can escape the influence of gravity, either the principles upon which we operate coincide with the attractor pattern of…
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Margaret Wheatley’s Eight Principles
I found the following eight principles in Biology Revisioned by Willis Harman and Elisabet Sahtouris. These principles are from A Simpler Way by Margaret Wheatley. Notes:1. Willis Harman & Elisabet Sahtouris, Biology Revisioned, pp. 256–58.
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Iain McGilchrist on control
The following quote is from a conversation between Iain McGilchrist and Ameer Shaheed in May 2023. It is part of a series of conversations exploring McGilchrist’s philosophy as laid out in The Matter with Things. (My emphasis in italics.) I would go so far as to say that control, which is the single value of…
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My view on management dashboards
I have encountered many different kinds of management dashboards over the years. I’ve been there, I’ve done that! Let me share a story of what happened when one of my managers left the company. It turned out that he had protected his people. When my manager had left I learned that his manager wanted to…
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Dee Hock on forming a chaordic organization
Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee Hock is one of my favorite books. The Prologue: On the Nature and Creation of Charodic organizations is particularly interesting. A reprint with permission can be found here. Chaordic organizing is about releasing what people desire in the depth of their being, the passion they have for it,…
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My 10 Year Summary: What I Have Learned
Contents 1. Introduction2. Background3. My Journey 3.1. The initial years (2012–2015) 3.2. The middle years (2016–2018) 3.3. The final years (2019–2022)4. Conclusions5. Afterword6. Acknowledgments7. Recommended Books 1. Introduction I started blogging ten years ago today (Sept 26, 2012). At the same time, I started searching for life-giving ways of working. This is a summary of my journey and…
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Henri Bortoft on wholeness in organizations
Simon Robinson inspired me to read Henri Bortoft’s two books The Wholeness of Nature and Taking Appearance Seriously. While reading these books I was struck by the thought that in order to see life in work we need to a dynamic way of seeing. I am currently re-reading Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson’s book…
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Rúna Bouius on Managing People
Rúna Bouius suggests in a newsletter that we need to replace the term “managing people” with something else. Rúna writes (Sept 3, 2022) that: It started with a young leader…contacting me to ask for advice about a workplace dilemma. He explained how he…likes to reach out to subordinates so he can understand where they are…
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New orders reflect new values
The world crumbles. New orders are emerging. Conditions are getting worse and worse. There is less and less to hold on to. There are fewer givens to assume. How to live? What to do? How to organize? The world is falling apart. Fear deepens as necessary orders are lost. Events force rapid reassessment of everything,…
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How to make living structure?
Christopher Alexander on how to make living structure: …success in making living structure…comes from the ability of the maker, at each step in the unfolding process, to do the thing which is required—at each instant to do the thing which is most consistent with wholeness. …and that, of course, depends on the extent to which…