Living Organizations in Turbulent Times

By Curtis Ogden

While reading the book The Living Company on the train to Philadelphia, a number of things came up for me as I think about IISC’s (and other nonprofit organizations') internal and external world and work and future . . . . Arie de Geus has long written from the premise that organizations are living beings residing in, interacting with, and being shaped by ecosystems, and not isolated machines that can simply be engineered to do what we want them to do. mIf we share his view, this has implications for the way that organizations might think about themselves and act.

de Geus writes that the most successful/resilient organizations (living systems) are open to and aware of their environments; tolerant of “experimentation, outliers and eccentricity”; and cohesive (there is an awareness that all members are a part of something that is shared and there is a shared commitment to that something). Furthermore, resilience (surviving and thriving - which is the basic imperative of all life) is built upon the commitment and ability of organizations to embody a diversity and spectrum of perspectives and skills that can create more options in terms of potential responses to external circumstance. Think "border habitats" where life is often at its most resilient, as species adapt to function in more than one ecosystem.

de Geus goes on to suggest that “planning” is really not an effective approach for determining future direction for organizations as living systems, because it is overly mechanistic, does not map onto the complex realities in which we live, looks too much to the past with a problem-solving lens, and often puts all eggs in one basket in terms of a strategic course of action. A much better approach is to engage in a “playful” organic creation of different scenarios for the future and a loose plan of action for each so that the organization can be appropriately proactive and responsive.

Innovations (and therefore adaptability) come from living systems that have the space for said innovations to occur (time to think, reflect, restore), communication channels for sharing these innovations , and a tendency to "flock" (breaking out of isolation and using the channels).

As we enter into ever more turbulent times, this raises some questions for me about life at IISC and the organizations we serve:

• Should strategic planning shift to more scenario planning exercises?
• How much cohesion do we and our clients really have internally, and how might this be built through networks?
• To what degree are we all ensuring that we embody adaptive diversity (internally and through our networks) in terms of perspectives and skills?
• How can we make sure that we respond to turbulence with a commitment to continued experimentation as opposed to going back to something known (and potentially stale/irrelevant)?
• Do we have the right structures for “flocking” to ensure that innovations spread and are truly shared?

It strikes me that there has been considerable resonance the past 10 years or so with this notion that organizations are living systems, and that the challenge has been to change our behavior so that it aligns with these beliefs. Collective intelligence, network theory, ecology, complexity theory, and our current experiences with systems running out of control (or perhaps just doing what complex systems are meant to do) are demanding that we ACT differently and not simply rearrange the furniture in our burning house.