As I said then and as I believe more than ever today, the principles aren’t wrong or misdirected. However, in the war of words that is central to the battle for the soul of our organizations, fighting under the banner of social business is a losing proposition – the modern equivalent to knowledge management. It’s just not winning the hearts, minds and slices of the budgetary pie necessary for our shared vision to become reality as quickly as we need the change to be the reality.
Unfortunately I have come to feel the same way about the “Future of Work” discussion and movement, despite the fact that it is the direction where my social business cohorts have headed. It’s hard to talk about the future of something when you haven’t created a shared vision upon the present that is emerging and what distinctions must be embraced and elevated.
So what are the words that will serve as our campfire around which we will gather for camaraderie and warmth? What is the language of the movement that encapsulates the multiple distinctions and insights that collectively are driving us towards a future free of today’s most commonly accepted defects? I don’t think it’s social business, I don’t think its future of work. I’m open to other suggestions, but for now I’d like to start this conversation focused on what I have consistently heard as the most fundamental change we must realize – a change in organizational structure and governance. A re-imagination of what an organization looks like and a rethinking of what we mean by work.
While we may not yet have adequate language for what we envision, I submit for your consideration that we are talking about a widespread #ReOrg. The reorganization of our mindsets, methods and measures about the organization, about our relationships to them as humans and about the fundamental practice of management as the underlying operating system that governs its behaviors. It’s time to create a more holistic view of how we create value, and especially with a focus on how we can optimize our ability to create shared value that benefits society as a whole instead of just those who have won the war for control.
Yes, it’s time for a #ReOrg. Are you ready? Let’s talk about it.
In order to even get started on a journey to a New Way to Work, we need to embrace new mindsets that give up on “doing things the way they have always been done”. As I’ve stated in my post “It’s Time for a Forward Thinking Conversation“, we need to rethink, reimagine, redesign and #ReOrg our entire approach to organizations and their culture. A lot of people have been spreading the meme that “Culture eats strategy for lunch” but too few people really understand what culture is and even fewer understand what must be done to shape it and how leaders are negatively reinforcing it with their own behaviors. The challenge is that there are so many contributing factors that go into culture, getting to the root causes, language and actions that create it and reshape it can be a daunting task. There are no standard best practices for fixing a broken culture, though there are some common insights that may be applied to your unique situation. As I see it, the first thing that must change is a need for REAL Relationships in the workplace as much as we need them for success in the marketplace.
REAL is an acronym as well as an intention – it stands for Reciprocal, Empathetic, Authentic and Long Lasting. We all need to get something out of our time together. Despite your title or position, the employees are not only there to be subservient to your will. For many senior leaders this may in fact be the most difficult insight to accept, but the performance improvements to be gleaned have already rewarded those bold enough to embrace this reality. When leaders embrace the fact that we are all in this together and support a deeper sense of TEAMWORK, costs go down, opportunities increase and employee engagement dramatically improves.
New mindsets are more then the foundation of a team based, collaborative culture. They are also about the shift in what we value, what we are willing to accept and what we are not willing to accept. Do we tolerate assholes simply because they are high performers? Do we only care about profit? or do we care about people and planet too? Increasingly market leaders are the one’s who understand that money is only one measure of success. Yes, it is an important measure of success, but as consumers and even corporations are shifting their mindsets, there is a greater realization of the benefits of serving the whole of the market. This is resulting in more leaders and more organizations discarding institutional thinking focused on capturing maximum value for shareholders and instead optimizing to create maximum shared value for all stakeholders.
Quotes from these two posts by Chris Heuer relate to what I said in my last post about the importance of understanding the bigger picture and narrative of vertical development. It helps you to see how each stage of development and level of consciousness is like its own world(view) and reality, with it’s own vision, mindset, values, and meaningful language.
It also explains why there is so much conflict in articulating a shared vision for The Future of Work because leaders are often operating from different stages of development and thus from different mindsets and values. In fact, this is the same reason why there is so much conflict in the world as a whole today and why so many of our political leaders are unable to deal with the wickedly complex problems that are emerging.
