Characteristics of the Wise Organization
Some thoughts about what makes an organization wise…
Values
- Be clear about your values, purposes, principles, & vision
- Know what’s in your heart
- Know what you do
- Be authentic
- Live in abundance and possibility, not scarcity
- Continually seek new purposes
- Set clear intentions & goals; engage 100% (not 90%, not 110%
- Learn from the past, be aware of the present, create the future
Systems
- Understand open systems; understand systems; understand deep system architecture
- Slow down, create space, slack: be purposefully inefficient
- Deliberately emerge new structures to enact new purposes contingently
- Be responsive, not reactive; better yet, lead from deep systemic analysis
- Understand and enact creative destruction (be willing to let go of what you do well, so you can find the next thing to do better)
Networks
- Be highly networked (internally and externally)
- Focus on network collaboration and enhancement, not on competitiveness
- Increase bandwidth & airtime (increase # and diversity of sources of concurrent idea generation, amount of time for each source to contribute; use few linear & sequential processes; network)
- Transcend boundaries (apparent paradox of strong personal boundaries and weak organizational boundaries; blur the distinction of who is “in” the organization)
- Connect to (interconnect with) community
Community
- Seek to build community; strengthen social networks among organizations and among community members
- Focus on ecological and economic sustainability
- Create social justice and equity
- Be public, transparent
- Be healthy; support healthy staff
Knowledge
- Manage knowledge & meaning making, not information (create space at the center of your work for substantive “meta-logues” (Bateson) & capture the results)
- Build knowledge management system architecture to mirror and then expand the knowledge creation and meaning making of your networks
- Target resources strategically
Infrastructure
- Build simple routine self-monitoring systems for basic functions so most of your organizational energy can be spent on non-routine work