(W) Organization – Tony O'Driscoll

Writing on Organization

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Leadership as a System: Circumventing the VUCA Vortex

As organizations experience the strengthening pull of the VUCA Vortex, they find themselves vacillating violently between complicated and complex operating contexts; many are plunging to their demise in the gaping chasm that lies between

How to Fly the Complexity Chasm

The more connected we become, the less control we have. To successfully navigate back and forth across the complexity chasm, leaders must reach beyond traditional organization boundaries to bring together disparate and diverse sets of people, processes and technologies, and reconfigure them in real time to synchronize with their operating context.

Into the Wirearchy

Today’s organizations are suffering from a severe case of responsiveness lag, where their internal structures, operating procedures and time signatures are increasingly out of sync with the external pace and scale of change.

The Digital Nervous System

The predominant challenge facing business today lies in cultivating the capacity for instancy within their enterprises. Instant enterprises focus on developing a perpetual state of readiness for the unexpected.

From Transformation Insanity to Enterprise Instancy

What began as the pursuit of building capability to capitalize on a new business opportunity culminates in the unconscious adoption of crippling orthodoxies that undermine the organization’s ability to respond to uncertainty.

Enabling Organization “Response-Ability” to Change

Opportunity begets capability. Capability begets rigidity. Rigidity begets Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy begets mortality. This trajectory highlights the huge cultural barrier leaders must overcome to increase their organization’s “response-ability” to change.

Agility Architects

The challenge of architecting the organizational system involves managing two paradoxes. An agile company must simultaneously operate at the core (business of today) and the edge (business of tomorrow). It must also be simultaneously stable and flexible. These two paradoxes operate in an infinite evolutionary loop.

Change or Die

Organizations cannot change unless their people change, and most transformation efforts fail because organizations over-emphasize the tangible side of change and under-emphasize the emotional one.

The Disengagement Epidemic: Can ONA Rescue Us?

Just as Galileo created a new tool to reveal hidden stars in the universe, a tool called Organization Network Analysis (ONA) allows companies to uncover the informal networks that motivate discretionary effort.

In Search of Collective Insight

Organizations are drowning in an ever-increasing deluge of data, seemingly devoid of wisdom on how to take decisive action because, they have not learned how to operate at the Insight level of the Wisdom Hierarchy.