Principles of a
Our work is grounded in 12 core principles because organizational design is complex and will inevitably pose challenges along the way.
In redesigning our organizations we confront issues of power, attachment, appetite for collaboration (or lack thereof), and more. To do this work without an anchoring set of design principles will lead to undisciplined, one-off design choices: re-title this position, form this task force, etc. We offer these principles as a way to ground an organization in a holistic approach to organizational design and ongoing refinement.
Organizational purpose must be clear and resounding before anything else. Only then can we design organizations that engage everyone in a shared purpose.
Strategy is our shared means for pursuing organizational purpose. Strategy is alive; it belongs to everyone at every level; everyone is accountable to it.
Structure is the purposeful configuration of people to activate strategy.
As justice-committed organizations, equity, inclusion, and leadership development are explicit intentions of our structural choices.
Rigorous conversation and conscious decision-making are how we activate strategy every day across all bodies of work.
Avoidance of difficult conversations and deferred decision-making undermine strategy activation and deplete staff morale.
Strategy activation is inherently cross-functional; it requires coordinated conversation and decision-making across teams and position levels.
Effective leadership teams ensure highly relevant strategies and the organizational structure to fully activate them.
Effective leaders create brave space for–and actively participate in–strategic conversation and debate; they model and coach others to build their strategic-thinking confidence.
Meeting design and facilitation are core organizational competencies; without them, rigorous conversations and transparent decision-making elude us.
Group decision-making becomes an organizational strength when we learn and employ consensus techniques that do not require unanimous agreement.
Collaborative technology is essential for sharpening our strategic habits and reducing our cognitive load. We can no longer rely upon emails and slide decks alone to sustain strategic alignment.
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