Creating Leadership Training? Consider Adding An Organizational Design?Module

To survive entrepreneurial start-ups, large enterprises formed in the twentieth century must re-evaluate and pivot organizational structures. Here are OD exercises to spark awareness.?

When creating training material, chances are, you developed several iterations to ensure you address the challenge you’re trying to solve. That’s what happened to me. Our group of Agilists had a particular leadership challenge we wanted to solve, yet new, higher priority issues came to light as time passed, causing the training material to evolve.?

What happens to the amazing experiential content created in the earlier versions? What a dreadful state to let the fine work go to waste! Why not provide the content for you to repurpose — for free!

Objectives of Organizational Design Leadership Training

The following objectives discussed within the leadership training module include:?

• Gain conscious awareness of your organization's current structure.
• Develop personal awareness of how the current organizational design impacts you personally.
• Understand how structures can cause barriers.
• Create shared ownership in pivoting from old structured patterns of behavior and form new methods of engagement representative of the demands of the modern world.?

In the organizational design-centric activities that follow, participants will walk away with a clear picture of their current organizational structure and the system's limitations and opportunities. Knowing the current climate will help determine the future state. Each exercise finds its roots in a unique and integral methodology, be it Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching or ORSC, ICAgile, or Gestalt Psychotherapy.?

Target Audience

The following experiential training material is geared toward mid to senior-level leaders and may include executives, pending the size and appetite of your organization. What works well for one organization may not work for another; feel free to amend where required.?

Ice Breaker

Before jumping into any deep activity, consider warming up participants in an engaging activity related to territory and structures.

Facilitators — ask the audience the following questions:

• Are you a cat or dog person?
• If you’re a dog person, how do dogs mark their territory?
• What are human markers of territory? (Brainstorm ideas on the list and discuss)
• If there is enough psychological safety in the group, ask how people witness human markers of territory within their organization.

The outcome of the exercise is to awaken consciousness to the idea humans mark their territory in various ways, particularly at work in their current structure.

Exercise: Spaciogram

Now that the participants are warmed up, we take a cue from Gestalt Psychotherapy and explore spatial structures in an activity called a “Spaciogram.”?

The exercise is a helpful way to become aware of the polarization or fragmentation in a group dynamic. It is a way of awakening how participants may represent themselves in the system. While the exercise can be performed in a physical room where spatial differences and clusters emerge, the activity adapts for online use.?

Facilitator Instructions:?

• Everyone stand up from your laptop/computer desk and move around your room.
• As you move around your room, notice what part of the room you feel most comfortable in.
• Be aware of how you feel as you move toward and away from your computer.?
• Notice whom do you feel the most comfortable with and whom you prefer distance from.
• Now gradually choose a place in the room that you want to occupy and sit down.
• If you feel the need to change your space, you are welcome to do so.
• After everyone has stopped moving, get in touch with how you feel and what it is like to be where you are.
• Take time to be aware of your immediate surroundings and what makes you feel comfortable there; how can this space be even more comfortable for you?
• Now, look around the room to see where everyone else is. Who is in the middle, who is on the outside of your screen? What positions are people in?
• Stay where you are. Ask each participant to express how they feel in their chosen place and what it is about this space that makes them comfortable.?

Facilitator — take note of everyone’s position and their observations surrounding the environment. Dig deeper and ask questions regarding the individual’s current state and how their feedback relates to the existing organizational structures in their place of work. Are there similarities or differences? What stands out the most?

Case Study: Morning Star Self-Management At?Work

The next step is to dive into a thought-provoking case study focusing on traditional organizational structures and the ability to pivot to a new way of being.?

Facilitators — ask the group to either read (or listen!) to the case study as homework before the session or divide into groups either online or in-person and ask participants to read the body of work together. Once complete, bring everyone back for a thoughtful question period and debrief.?

Case Study: “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers” by Gary Hamel in the Harvard Business Review.

Group Discussion

• What aspects of “Beyond Management as Usual” capture your interest?
• What emotion does “absent directives from others” evoke?
• Facilitators — given the wealth of material found within the case study, I encourage you to read the story and create relevant questions that possess laser focus toward the challenges you want to solve within your organization.?

Exercise: Digital Constellations

In the following exercise, the core objective is to discover the interest level of participants regarding organizational change, such as an agile transformation. The activity can be conducted in person or online.?

For more information on constellations, read the following Medium story:

Facilitator’s Online Set-Up & Instructions

• Draw a large circle on a collaborative application like Mural, Muro, or Microsoft Whiteboard with concentric circular levels
• In the center, place a challenge, theme, situation, question, or structural challenge to explore.
• For example, a facilitator may pose the following question in the middle of the circle “how onboard are you with the agile transformation?” to see what spatially unfolds.
• Each participant orients on the board to the central theme.
• Or, identify objects representing team members and get each person to orient themself on the board spatially.
• Observe spatial orientation, and relationships such as groupings, connections, tensions are identified.
• The team (or system) gets immediate feedback to consider and reflect upon.

Coaching Opportunities

Facilitators— during the debrief, the following questions can be posed to participants for additional feedback regarding their choice on the constellation board.?

• What are the dynamics that you witness within the constellation?
• How does the interaction in the field feel like?
• What will it take for X (whatever it is) to move closer to the center?
• What are the organizational structure relationships?
• What are the leadership team relationships?

To Conclude

Most large enterprises formed in the last century are finding themselves fighting against nimble, hungry, entrepreneurial start-ups with the ability to gobble up market share. The bureaucratic organizational structures built in the twentieth century no longer work in today’s economy. We are all responsible for finding a better way of working. The first step to unravel old behaviors is to create employee awareness, engagement, and a desire to change.?

The organizational design exercises presented in this story each tackle building awareness from a different point of view. The Icebreaker is an exploratory way to look at human markers of territory followed by the Spaciogram, an experiment to awaken participants to how they represent themselves in the system. Next, the Morning Star Case Study demonstrates how a traditional org structure can reinvent itself. And finally, in Digital Constellations, participants discern their level of interest regarding organizational change, such as an agile transformation.

A huge thank you to everyone I consulted with many months ago on building the first iteration of the Leadership Training Modules. Your assistance is greatly appreciated.?

Resources

• The Leaders Dilemma: How to Build an Empowered and Adaptive Organization Without Losing Control. Authors: Franz Roosli, Jeremy Hope, Peter Bunce
• ICAgile Adaptive Org Design Learning Outcomes?
• Awareness, Exploring, Experimenting, Experiencing. Author: John O. Stevens
• Four Keys To A Healthy Workplace Hierarchy?
• Containers, Differences, and Exchanges Model

This story was originally published on?Medium 07-14-2021

Lisa Bradburn is transitioning into an Agile Coach and is a?Gestalt Psychotherapist-In-Training.?She writes about the intersection of technology and the human condition. Follow Lisa on?Medium.