OD36: Do you want to make an impact with your insights? ? Intentional Organization: Netflix case study

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OD Goodies

Curated starters for this week’s edition:

• Ask Nature: The Biomimicry Institute has created a beautiful collection of ideas from nature that could inspire contemplation, design and development work in organizations. Explore universal themes and present day challenges solved through nature's many elegant solutions. One example:

Species richness helps system respond to disturbance

Ecosystems survive biotic and abiotic disturbances by having multiple species that respond in different ways.

• Behavioral Economics: Elina Halonen writes about why we know so little about how a cultural context influences individual decision making.
• GitLab: An example of applying systems thinking to your company strategy. In this case, making use of positive (reinforcing) feedback loops, presented as flywheels.
• Path Nine: Kevin Kirkpatrick shares 4 styles of boundary management between personal and professional aspects of life: integrators, cyclers, separators and role-firsters.

Do you want to make an impact with your insights?

Developing organizations - similar to developing products and services - is a work that's often times based on insights.

Actionable insights help us understand what is going on with the particular situation or phenomena, why it is happening and take action based on this fresh understanding.

Here are some ideas on how to increase the impact you make based on insights:

The latter example was enhanced by using Uber's insight taxonomy, created by their Insights Platform team. This is how the components of an actionable insight look like, in their view:

In the late 20th century, the dominant technological question was “How do we learn better?” In the early 21st, that question has been followed by “How do we better use the things we’ve learned?”

At your company:

Do you want to make an impact with your insights?

Do you need to find existing information and domain experts?

Do you want to share insights from a specific project more broadly than with your immediate team?

What if you had a library of insights related to beneficiaries of the value created by the organization? Would this inform better strategy, design or development decisions?

We invite you to read the whole article about Uber’s Insights Platform: 10 min read

Intentional Organization: Netflix case study

You've probably heard about the Netflix Culture Deck.

Sergio Caredda has published an insightful Performance Profile for Netflix by reviewing the 8 building blocks of the Organization Evolution Framework.

The table below shows, in the last column, a high-level evaluation of each element, based on the level of Intentionality in its design. A 5 means that the critical factor is entirely intentional in its design, while a one means that is fully emergent.

One key idea to apply in complex organizational work is paying attention to the balance between intentionality and emergence. In gardening speak: what are the seeds that you intentionally plant?

Sergio writes:

When I write of Intentional Design, I’m not imagining a corporate architect sitting in a room and designing all aspects of an organization at once. Instead, I see an organization growing around one or more internal elements that represent the â€œseed” around which intentional decisions are taken than shape the organization.

Read the whole article here: 8 min read

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We hope you found something useful in this edition!

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This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.

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