Tag: Evolutionary Organization
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What If Your Job Could Be Anything You Wanted?
At some point in your working life, you’ve probably heard, or even said yourself, “That’s not my job.” Perhaps you’ve encountered or deployed the more polished and weaponized version: “That’s not really in my job description.” In conventional workplaces, these phrases sound reasonable on the surface. People have responsibilities outlined in their job descriptions, and…
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Self-Management Isn’t the Absence of Structure, Just a Different Kind
When people first hear about self-management as an organizational structure, a pretty reliable reaction comes up. It usually sounds something like: So… it’s just chaos? Nobody’s in charge? Anyone can do whatever they want? It’s an understandable assumption. If you remove the org chart, the titles, the manager who approves your decisions and signs off…
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Building the Bridge to Decentralized Organizations
Last week, a friend sent me a McKinsey Quarterly article titled “A new operating model for a new world.” She leads a very rare and special doctoral program in transpersonal leadership and business at Sofia University, and she has been reading my book, Organizing for Impact. Her message to me, with the article included, contained…
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Why Hierarchies Struggle to Build Adaptive Organizations
Recent research from Gartner reveals a stunning statistic. Seventy-nine percent of employees don’t trust their organization’s ability to change effectively. The majority believe their organization has made poor change decisions in the past and will likely fail in the future. This goes far deeper than poor change management. Organizations have a legitimacy problem. The same…
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Building Infrastructure for Self-Managing Organizations
I’ll be honest, I’m spread thin right now. Building infrastructure for self-managing organizations across multiple channels and services centered around my recent book, Organizing for Impact, is definitely a lot. Some days it feels like too much, like I’m trying to gain visibility and traction with seven different things at once, and doing none of…
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Stop Planning to Avoid Failure. Start Planning to Create Possibility.
Picture a planning meeting where most of the energy goes into identifying what could go wrong. People talk about risks, contingencies, and backup plans. The conversation focuses on how to protect against failure rather than what you’re trying to create. This is fear-based planning, and it’s incredibly common in organizations. While it may feel responsible…
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From Hierarchy to Agreements: What It Really Means to Distribute Power
The shift from hierarchy to agreements is one of the most fundamental transformations an organization can make. Picture this: You’re in a meeting, and your team has spent weeks researching a solution to a persistent problem. The data is clear, the approach is sound, and everyone who will be affected by the decision is aligned.…
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Shaping a New Leadership Playbook for a Complex World
There’s a kind of leadership style that once felt like the gold standard. It was all about decisiveness, structure, and holding the reins firmly. In times of uncertainty, it gave people something to rally around: a confident voice, a clear chain of command, and the promise that someone, somewhere, had things under control. But the…
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When Disengagement Becomes the Norm, It’s Time to Rethink the System
Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report offers a grim but unsurprising headline: employee engagement worldwide has declined for the second time since 2009, settling at just 21%. Less than a quarter of the people around the world are engaged in what they do for a living. For managers, the numbers are worse, especially…
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When Your Colleague Isn’t Human: Rethinking Leadership for the Age of AI Agents
It’s hard to ignore all the talk about AI these days. It’s in the news, in our tech, and, more recently, in our dinner conversations. Just last weekend, a friend—a nurse by profession, deeply rooted in earth-based spirituality and about as non-technical as you can get—told me with total sincerity that she believes AI may…