#responsiveorg

CONTEXT This is a little session I created for HEC Exec MBA Digital Transformation Majors. I now use it to allow groups realise fundamental shifts. Talking about it can feel a little pushy or theoretical, so creating a space for them to discuss themselves makes more sense. I’ve used it quite a bit to get an organisation undergoing ‘digital transformation’ to define the term ‘digital’.

POSSIBLE PURPOSES This workshop can be used to: - Create an ambitious idea of the future - Get people behind this idea by coming up with it together - Figure out what new beliefs might be needed, and old ones could be forgotten

FURTHER READING This tool will make more sense if you check out: - The beautifully pithy ResponsiveOrg manifesto - Hosting tools like World Cafe / Open Space technology - Edgar Schein iceberg model (or anything theory which understands that beliefs shape behaviours)

GUIDE TO RUNNING A RESPONSIVE CAFE

1. Gather 5 different examples of Responsive Organisations - either prescribe these or ask the group to crowdsource them using post-its or a tool like Mentimetre - when I’m prescriptive, I tend to use  stories similar to the 5 right hand spectrums in the ResponsiveOrg Manifesto. Examples I often use are: Anonymous, Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, Linux, Patagonia, Zappos, Buffer, Spotify, Buurtzorg, Holocracy

2. A table per story: - each table has a story has a group (of say 5 people) - each table has a table host whose role is create dialogue and capture

3. Discuss beliefs - groups should discuss the story and be curious about it, focussing on uncovering the beliefs that organisation would have to hold in order to behave that way - each group spends 10 mins at each station (total 50mins) - each time they switch, the table host should run them through a summary of what’s been said on the topic so far (1 or 2mins)

4. Make it real - groups go back to their first table - each group creates a thing (like a flipchart) which includes: >>> a belief statement: We believe that ... does ... for ... e.g. WikiLeaks that openness keeps us Good >>> small behaviours or initiatives to manifest this new belief

Leaders of traditional organisations often look at the discussion of Responsive Organistions with horror. Confronted with transparency, autonomy, less process and experimentation they exclaim ‘where’s the risk management?’ Responsive Organisations can have highly effective risk management but they leverage adaptation not compliance in managing risk. 

Traditional Risk Management. 

Traditional risk management is an elegant science. Determine the risks, their frequency and their consequences. Choose your appetite to take risk informed by this assessment and the cost and outcomes of mitigation. We mitigate or accept risks driven by the risk appetite. This process is straight forward in organisations where the focus is scaling a proven process or business model. Risks and their mitigants are reasonably well understood. 

We often focus on the compliance, policies and processes as risk management. They are simply the mitigation, an outcome of what should be a considered decision of what risks to take and which risks to avoid. Many businesses go wrong when they forget to set a risk appetite and seek to mitigate all risk. We have seen organisations where risk appetite declines and processes are tightened with every bad outcome. 

Responsive Risk Management

Responsive Organisations approach risk with the same fundamentally commercial logic. However they tackle the risk assessment and mitigation in a more adaptive and systemic way. 

If the risks of activity are unclear, hard to assess or changing quickly more dynamic risk management will be required. We step out of the domain of setting a fixed policy or process and move into learning in a distributed way. We apply the same process but we learn and mitigate risk using other methods. 

Better understanding by leveraging the insights of entire network of the organisation and its stakeholders is a risk mitigation strategy. So is a continuous process of experimentation to ensure losses are small until greater confidence is achieved. Autonomy shifts the locus of accountability closer to every day risk decisions and accelerates the responsiveness to bad outcomes. Most importantly of all motivating people through purpose and a focus on outcomes mitigates the incentive mismatches which create many risks for traditional organisations. 

We can go into the weekend fulfilled.

We look back on a week that is a celebration of purpose and meaningful achievement to benefit others.

We know we cannot have done better this week and that our efforts were well directed to effectiveness.

We have enjoyed a week of the freedom to do the best work we can supported by our peers.

We can rest tonight comforted by the fact that all our work is up to date and the open issues are next week’s work.

We aren’t waiting for decisions and we have made all the decisions that we needed to resolve this week. 

We are excited about the opportunities to learn, to experiment, to create and grow next week.

We have the transparency of our performance, our peers’ performance and our organisation’s outcomes to be confident on what is ahead and ready for the new challenges that the next week will bring.

We know that our accountabilities are clear and that the culture of accountability means colleagues won’t send a flurry of last minute emails dumping problems on others.

Our week will finish with the thanks and congratulations of a team and an organisation that understands, respects and values our commitment and efforts.

We like business to be simple. Many of our management practices ignore complexity. Time to re-embrace reality.

At a recent Responsive Org event in Melbourne led by Julian Waters-Lynch we were discussing the Cynefin Model. The Cynefin model is a very useful model for understanding responses to differing levels of complexity of the environment.  However what surfaced in that conversation was how badly most businesses perceive their whole system and environment.

Our businesses are deliberately dumb. They exclude information to make our execution of a sustainable business model simple and efficient.

Let’s take pricing as an example. Traditional business make pricing a simple equation of cost, margin and volume to maximise shareholder return. They ignore loss growth, customer engagement, customer retention, reputation, supply chain impacts, sustainability, purpose or other systemic impacts related to changing prices.

When management began a century ago with high transportation and information costs, excluding information often had limited consequences. The competitor or customer in the next market who used that information had real barriers to overcome to make you pay for a bad decision. Pretending complex or complicated environments were simple had less impact on your business

Moving to today the global connection of customers, competitors and the universe has changed those barriers. Businesses who pretend that a complex or complicated scenario is simple will feel the effects back through their networks. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore complexity and simple strategies in complex and complicated scenarios are increasingly threatened by responses from customers, employees or other stakeholders who see the world as it is.