OD45: Sense & Explore ? Sense & Connect ? Sense & Change

Foreword

How might we enable effective learning loops for our readers?

This is the question that we’ve been reflecting on for the past couple of weeks. We managed to articulate a possible answer and today we’re evolving the format of the newsletter to give it a try.

Based on the conversations with many of you, we learned that the resources that we share weekly are useful trails that you sometimes explore, when something sparks your interest and you have the time to invest for reading further. We will continue offering these new trails in the Sense & Explore section.

Also, we’ve heard from you and we also discovered together the power of connecting with peers from all around the globe around organizational challenges, sharing lessons learned or around learning together about a new topic. We invite you to discover opportunities to connect and learn together in the Sense & Connect section.

An important need that we all have is to find relevant concepts that might add value to our work, and be able to easily put them into practice. We’ve heard from many of you that you’re exposed to lots of information, on many channels, and it’s overwhelming.

• What if you could understand a concept that looks promising, get an overview of its practical use cases and be able to decide where to apply it next week?
• What if you could do all of this in maximum 15 minutes?

These are the main questions that we’ll explore in the Sense & Change section.

For this section we’re bringing forward an approach that’s in line with our professional mission and intended legacy of

Creating and sharing sustainable knowledge that helps people deal with the complex challenges they (will) face.

1. Sense & Explore

Curiosity fuels exploration. Curated resources that might come in handy.

• Oxford Review: Are you aiming to make evidence-based decisions in your organization? Here’s a piece about why finding evidence to support an argument does not make it an evidence-based argument.
• Leandro Herrero argues that “leadership is not something that one has or not, is something that one practices in a social context and that translates into patterns of behaviours and relationships.”
• Algorithm Watch: As many organizations are exploring AI adoption, a recent report on automated decision-making (ADM) systems in society might prove informative.

In principle, ADM systems have the potential to benefit people’s lives – by processing huge amounts of data, supporting people in decision-making processes, and providing tailored applications. In practice, however, we found very few cases that convincingly demonstrated such a positive impact.

• Harold Jarche writes about the Zollman effect as one of the dark sides of communities and concludes:

When facing complex challenges it is important that there is trust among people sharing their findings and observations.

• Psyche Magazine: On the same topic of trust, philosopher T Ryan Byerly writes about the 5 virtues of trustworthy advisers:

Intellectual benevolence: they want to help you get to the truth, gain knowledge, deepen your understanding, and develop your skills for enquiry.

Intellectual transparency: they tend to share their perspective with you faithfully, out of a motivation to help you progress.

Communicative clarity: they tend to remove or resolve sources of ambiguity when they’re communicating with you.

Audience sensitivity: They appreciate the distinctive features of their audience. They pay attention to your particular views, experiences, abilities and tendencies.

Intellectual guidance: They display a certain open-ended wisdom in supporting you with your enquiries.

2. Sense & Connect

The wisdom is in the conversations. Opportunities to connect and learn together.

• Pop-up sharing session: Join us tomorrow, on Thu, 26 Nov, 4pm GMT to discuss about designing better enterprises together and Enterprise Design Patterns. Details and registration link here on LinkedIn (free to attend)
• #orgtalks: Even though we’re fully booked for the peer-to-peer gatherings happening next week, you can reserve a seat now for future editions (free to attend)
• Systems at Play meetup: “Applied Systems Thinking for organizations - an exploration”, register on Meetup.com (APAC friendly time, free to attend)
• StoryNova: In a recent talk with Alexis Niki, whom we met through NOBL’s Peer Community, we found out about an interesting new workshop that uses the power of stories to navigate uncertainty. Sounds like an intriguing learning experience (paid)

3. Sense & Change

Understanding new concepts and putting them into practice.

Before starting sharing with you relevant concepts in a format that makes them easy to be put into practice, we want to introduce the idea of Sustainable Knowledge first.

Sustainable Knowledge is an emerging approach to knowledge founded on the principles of sustainability.

The intention is to create and share knowledge that is:

• Durable - doesn’t go to waste easily
• Applicable - it’s usable now and reusable in the future
• Minimizing info pollution - doesn’t put a burden on the path to action & pays attention to the ecological footprint

We’ve created the Sustainable Knowledge Manifesto that articulates the philosophy of this approach to knowledge, by detailing 12 principles that work together to create it.

Does this approach to knowledge make sense to you?

We’d love to hear your perspective on this. Just send me a direct message with your thoughts.

Thanks for reading

We hope you found something useful in this edition!

Please feel free to forward the newsletter to any colleagues who you think might benefit from these resources.

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

We're using systems thinking and behavioral science to advise VPs, Directors and their teams to make their organizations more effective.

Let’s get in touch on LinkedIn, Medium or at the next #orgtalks.