I’m working on a new project that I call Wiser Organization as a working title. It might become a book.
It answers questions like these:
- What are the practices and patterns that nourish and foster wisdom in organizations?
- How can organizations be more attuned to their ecosystems?
- What is the movement of movements that we need right now?
Individual Wisdom
Wisdom is not just about knowing information or being a good person. Being wise(r) means having information, experience, a deeper understanding, and clarity on what is relevant in a given context.
Yet, much too often, our conditioning and unhelpful frames get in the way. We run on our habitual thinking, the mental limits of our experience and mindsets.
To be “less foolish,” we need to make use of all the different ways of knowing. Our mind gives us one set of experiences, and so do our body, environment, instincts, and other people’s experiences.
One way to intentionally grow and evolve is to catch our cognitive blind spots to evolve and grow. Many psycho-technologies help us with that, for example, therapeutic modalities, coaching, mindfulness, and somatic practices. They provide insight, understanding, internalization, and other ways of building bigger and wider ways of perceiving and holding the complexity around us.
Organizational wisdom
Just as individuals benefit from embracing a wider spectrum of knowledge, organizations too thrive on a multidimensional understanding. The intention of this project is to shape that organizational learning more intentionally.
The capacity of an organization to integrate diverse ways of knowing significantly influences its overall working and the well-being its people.
Organizational wisdom plays a role in different ways:
- How organizations are organized.
Organizational structure, processes, and culture can be limited to getting in touch with reality and its environment. - Organizational frameworks can be a hindrance — with rigidity, silos or absurd products and services. But they can also be an opportunity — connecting the inner workings of an organization in a meaningful way that is mutually beneficial and enlivening for individuals and the whole.
- How to include other forms of knowing.
Meaningfulness includes purpose, but it includes much more. Imagine you had a friend who has a clear sense of their personal purpose. That’s great — but does it automatically make that person more wise? Without checks and balances, it might even be that this person becomes narrow-focused and foolish.
The goal for organizations is not merely to accumulate knowledge narrowly but to broaden the spectrum of understanding and include different ways of knowing. Social technologies listed below support that.
- How an organization is fitted into its environment.
Wisdom is not only about knowing oneself, it’s also about knowing what the world needs. A wise(r) organization seeks a multi-faceted interconnectedness with the world around it. Meaning stems from being in a fitted relationship with the ecosystem, interpenetrating and molding within it. Social frameworks can help facilitate that fit.
A short explanation of what wiser organizations might look like
There are three slogans that I’m playing with in my head. Of course, they are a wildly reductionist version — but they, at the same time, pointing to what’s relevant in the paradigm shift I’m looking at:
From alignment to attunement
From purpose to meaning.
From belonging to interconnectedness.
Let’s look at all three of them!
From alignment to attunement
Alignment is important for ensuring that all actions and decisions in an organization are consistent with each other and with the organization’s aim. It is crucial for efficiency, coherence and effectiveness.
Alignment can be reached in a top-down manner, but it can also happen in a more decentralized manner by aligning strategies like mutual consent on aims or domains of decision-making, a strategy like linking, or processes like the advice process.
Attunement includes alignment but it’s so much more. It’s about how we are with each other in all the different ways. The short version is that a leader might hold a strategic alignment well — but might be incapable of reading the room. And yet, attunement is crucial for sharing a sense of what’s relevant.
Going beyond alignment, attunement includes a focus on the dynamic, immediate, relational, and contextual ways of being and staying together.
- Dynamic in that it is responsive to smaller increments of the system. For example, if everyone on the team reports feeling worn out and overworked today, attunement takes that into consideration (and might decide to shorten the meeting), while alignment holds on to the strategic goals set for this month. Our relevance landscape might change, as should our actions. Attunement is the process by which we can do that together.
- Immediacy. A wisdom-bound organization doesn’t just go with propositional clues but strives for a more holistic approach, with all ways of knowing. By paying attention to the non-propositional, individuals see if there’s a need to shift or pay more attention.
- Relational: Strategic alignment can lose track of the people. Attunement doesn’t see the strategy, aim or alignment as detached from the people but it intentionally tunes into the spaces in-between — the relationships whose interplay creates the whole. This can also mean paying more attention to
- Contextual: Alignment is focused on the organization or project itself. But an organization or project is not an island. And the world is more than a “market” or audience. For example, we don’t want organizations that have alignment in effectively polluting the world (while fulfilling our purpose). That’s why attunement doesn’t only relate to the internal team but also the context or ecosystem it is in.
From purpose to meaning
Purpose — wanting to have a positive impact in the world — is not wrong. And yet, I think it’s incomplete. Too much focus on purpose is like talking more than we’re listening.
It’s important to acknowledge that everything has a shadow side, even the best of purposes. There is no statement or aspiration that encompasses everything. And even if our purpose said “make everything better for everyone”, it would lack focus and an aspiration that gives us a sense of relevance to inform what to do.
In addition, aspiration (purpose) is only one of several dimensions that give us meaning. To explain what I mean, let’s look at a very common example: a purpose-driven organization that treats its staff like crap. Let’s say I deeply care about the purpose — let’s say supporting children with developmental delays — and that’s why I drag myself to work every day. Would you say my (work) life is purposeful? I guess so. Would you say it’s meaningful?
Too many people sacrifice their dignity for a far-away purpose of saving the world. But meaning is created day by day, not in a distant goal.
People know this. If we ask “do you like your work?”, people typically lead with whether they enjoy the relationships and the culture, and then they might refer to the organization’s mission or purpose.
Note that I don’t intend on playing the organizational purpose and the meaningfulness of the work against each other. People are inherently aspiration-driven. But purpose isn’t everything.
Besides aspiration, meaning is also in relationships, in satisfaction or joyful and flowful work, it’s in integrity, mastering skills, in learning. I think it’s time to bring meaning back into workplaces.
Meaning is created by and among people, and that means paying attention to what people — not only the organization — find meaningful. We don’t live on this planet to produce the best products but to live. And life is a day-to-day kind of thing.
From belonging to interconnectedness
It’s not only about us; belonging can lead to in-group behavior. It can also keep a tight membrane between the org and its ecosystem. For example, “America first” is a policy that seeks to satisfy a sense of belonging, and it’s deeply problematic in its context of the world.
Interconnectedness is a term that avoids the binary “to belong or not to belong” and adds a nested view of belonging. We are all connected — and that doesn’t gloss over the fact that some are more connected than others.
On an organizational level, this principle means that to be realistic models of our interconnectedness, organizations cannot be designed to only include internal belonging and connectedness. We need to organize in a way that nests and interconnects “the organization” into the ecosystem where it belongs, including the non-human world and place and even time (in the sense of kairos).
Interconnectedness is about the big We, not just the organizational Us.
This project
This project aims to lay out the practices and principles that make it possible to make this shift. For more information, sign up and read the white paper or have a look around here.
