Just Announced: Joining the 2024 either/org Guiding Council

Today I'm announcing a new role I’m taking on in 2024: a member of the either/org Guiding Council.?

What is either/org?

either/org is “a collective of more than 400 leaders, designers and researchers, sharing inspiring alternatives for every facet of organizational design. We are committed to challenging the dominance of traditional western business culture in org design norms that go unquestioned in so many business, non-profit, and government structures. We see a future where org design is liberated from the legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy.”

“Every organization makes thousands of choices about the way work gets done. Some of those choices are intentional, some are not.” says either/org’s website. “We believe every aspect of an organization should be an intentional choice. A choice tightly aligned with your purpose, context, and values. Where organizations are fit-for-purpose from structure to incentives to ways of working.”

Our mission is to equip organizational designers with inspiring alternatives for futures of work and support them to be deliberate and brave in designing workplaces that fuel performance, innovation, and liberation.

What is Org Design?

Organizational Design is a compendium of many things, and have written that it is made up of four things:

1. Strategy: The purpose, vision, goals, objectives and overarching strategy of organization.
2. Culture: A system of shared values, practices, and processes that hold the organization together and make us interdependent.
3. Structure: Clear roles, rules, pathways for growth and governance structure.
4. Story: The narrative, brand, tone, look and feel that inspires people to join the organization and take action.

In short, Organizational Design is the an organization’s operating system, says either/org:

• Structure
• People
• Ways of Working
• Performance and Incentives
• Experiential Context

What does this future look like?

either/org dreams of a better future of work:

• Share inspiring alternatives for values-driven organizational design
• Fill a major gap in what it takes to design organizations with integrity
• A generation of diverse founders and leaders are inspired, deliberate, and brave in designing organization that are better than anything we’ve experienced before?
• Organizations (the units of human collaboration and foundation of all societies and economies) evolve to be more effective, humane, and responsible
• We work toward a pluriverse liberated from all forms of supremacy

To learn more about this vision, you can visit this Medium post around “Organizational Innovation Through Design.”?

What does its Guiding Council do?

The Guiding Council holds the vision of either/org and steers it in alignment with shared goals and values. The Guiding Council brings their wisdom from a variety of lived experiences, professional disciplines, and theories of change. In our next chapter, we’ll be using skills of facilitation, community and movement building, fundraising, advocacy/case for change, media/PR, and technology to take our work to the next level.?

Why am I joining this program??

Either/org has been spending the last three years gathering and evolving their mission, values, and goals. They’ve created an organizational pattern library and are working to create guidance on how to sequence the patterns to create new options for organizations. I think of it like creating an organizational genome. This collective is creating the building blocks upon which we can build our own organizations and communities to put empathy and community care into action.?

Every organization has its own DNA, its own organizational genome made up of visible and hidden, talked about or unsaid elements. The things we see are things like the vision/mission, strategy, policies, behaviors, practices, but there is more lurking underneath the surface.?

The Cultural Iceberg was first introduced by Edward T. Hall in his book Beyond Culture and is a way to understand what we’re aware of (behaviors and practices) and what is also unconscious about culture. It uses an iceberg as an analogy because most of what we know and understand about culture is unknown or not stated.

Here are the levels of cultural encounters:

• Above the waterline: Aspects of culture that are explicit, visible, and taught. “The way we do things around here,” it’s about 10 percent of the whole view of culture.
• Below the waterline: Underlying but often hidden beliefs, attitudes, values, and philosophies. These are the reasons why things are the way they are in the culture.

The thing about the iceberg is that it is a simple concept that is immensely complex when presenting in the real world. Each of us have our own personal culture, and every space that we enter has its own culture, including our families. We may be in that culture for a short or long time. We may see the visible elements, but often, we’re not there long enough to witness the hidden rules, values, and beliefs that exist among the people there. In our workplaces, we’ve been in it so long that we may not see the visible and hidden beliefs and experience.?

I believe that either/org is well equipped to be leading the charge on making the invisible visible--for us to notice patterns of behavior that we see--and more importantly--see how we might redesign or re-imagine a better way forward.?

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The following is part of my application for the Council:

What excites you about serving on Either/Org's Guiding Council in 2024?

I yearn for like-minded colleagues who shape a compelling vision for the future and help propel us forward, putting ego aside to focus on the collective good. I believe that either/org has the right people and mindsets that align best with my future mission and vision.?

For the past 15 years I have both studied and built transformative movements steeped in community in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors. My work is open, participatory, and peer-driven, and guided by equity which I find has been too forward thinking for the rooms I’ve been in.?

Lately I have been studying and experimenting with building cooperatives and reimagining our new world. Along the way I was invited to join DazzleCon, a conference of the Zebras Unite Co-op, which is a “movement creating the culture, capital & community for the next economy.” This work has me feeling energized and more aligned with my purpose.?

One thing I know is true: that culture change happens because of a movement, not just a mandate. We can’t do this alone. I want to find fertile ground upon which we can build this work with integrity and put it into action, which is why my tagline is “Empathy in Action.” Either/org is a place where I can thrive and we can explore and build together, and I would be delighted to serve on the Guiding Council.

For which of Either/Org's guiding values do you feel you can offer wisdom and discernment?

I can offer wisdom and discernment through the values of being community-built, liberatory, and emergent. My work sits at the intersection of empathy and innovation/change. These domains involve a transformation and context to give meaning and understand how we may evolve. Both of these things require putting empathy into action for one another.?

Community-Built

The work of Either/Org is directly aligned to the challenges upon which I want to focus on in the next five years. The first challenge is helping people overcome burnout and organizations support healing in the workplace so that we can have more empathy and compassion for each other. And the second is guiding organizations to navigate the realities of today, which is emergent, community-centric, free, open by default, and liberatory.?

A way I do that is through community and movement co-design where we discover and define who we are, dream and design a “Minimum Loveable Community”, and then to launch, scale, and sustain that community. My Empathy in Action Framework (https://www.amyjwilson.com/frameworks) – which I designed in an open way–gives us a pathway towards a whole-body approach (the Heart, the Head, the Hand, the Gut) to reimagining our workplaces.?

To me, being part of a community means you’re being seen, heard, and witnessed as a whole person instead of a network which is large and only sees a part of who you are. A community also takes collective action towards a more compassionate world, similar to mutual aid networks (https://themamdc.com/). In my work I’ve found that people desire to: have a shared vision, language, and pathway for change; discover reliable research, proven practices, and action steps; learn, grow, be seen and supported by a community of peers; collaborate and co-create with other leaders; and find meaning and be recognized for their achievements. I hope to discover which of the above is true for this community and will co-create what that future will be if selected as a member of the Either/Org Guiding Council.

Liberatory

Part of being seen as a whole person is rooting my practice in love and compassion, and using my own power towards modeling the behavior for others. I have worked to intentionally let go of learned patterns of behavior that lessened my capacity to give and receive love, and hope to grow and learn together. I have a quote in my book from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that I carry with me: “power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” I fully recognize that we don’t know what equity and justice really looks like, so we must work towards creating a future that liberates us all, and using the power within each of us to build that future.?

Emergent

When it comes to the emergent value, I lean into my strengths as an empath and Highly Sensitive Person/HSP to help intuit and sense what the community needs, and also actively poll/survey the community to make sure we’re creating a safe space for experimentation. I also love to lead public experiments (similar to a hackathon, minus the tech), where we co-create what that future might be together and multiple voices can be heard. As I work, I set the best intentions given the information we have and build in deliberate moments to notice and reflect on the impact that we are making on the world and within ourselves.

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I’m looking forward to working alongside a multi-disciplinary and enthusiastic fellow Council members: Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon, Melanie Kahl, Mark Raheja, Katie Augsburger, and Hermes Huang. If either/org seems interesting, follow along here, join either/org on LinkedIn and explore Ways to Contribute.