OD66: Capabilities x questions x trust x purpose

Interconnections around Organizational Capabilities, Questions as Tools for Thought, 20 Reasons Why I Trust You, Unwritten Expectations, Purpose and Busyness

#practice

Interconnections around Organizational Capabilities

If you’re curious about how organizational capabilities are interlinked with

• Business strategy
• Organizational effectiveness
• Organizational design
• New ways of working
• Organizational identity and culture
• Organizational learning and change
• L&D

… you might want to check the?article ?that Bülent has written for the anniversary edition of?Offbeat , a digital publication focused on L&D.

Happy 1 year anniversary, Lavinia & team! Keep up the great work ??

While the last part of the article is providing some ideas around how L&D professionals can contribute to the development of organizational capabilities, the rest might be relevant to anyone who has an interest in the disciplines mentioned above. Enjoy!

15 min read

Questions as Tools for Thought

We discovered the next resource via Luke Craven’s latest newsletter?edition .

Are you using questions as tools for thought in your practice?

Some ideas from Gordon Brander, who wrote the original piece about?questions :

”Questions as a primitive: What if we collected (…) general-purpose questions? What if we posed them during key moments?

Asking questions of data: Could my whole notebook become a living network of facts over which I can pose questions?

Questions as data: (…) if questions are composable, then perhaps?we might be able to cause them to self-organize, evolving more complex questions from simpler ones.

Questions as creative partners: Questions can act as creative partners. They can cause us to walk back over familiar terrain, and see it from a new angle (…)

Questions as lenses: The question acts as?a lens around which we factor our understandings.

Questions as un-answering: Can a tool offer new ways to uncover the important questions we can’t yet articulate?”

4 min read

20 Reasons Why I Trust You

There’s a lot of talk about trust in business articles, especially with the remote/hybrid dilemma that many organizations face these days.

We found this?inspiring list ?from Leandro Herrero, which is unlike most writings about trust. Could it energize you and the (work) relationships you have?

1* min read

* Okay, it’s just one minute of reading, but hopefully many more minutes of reflecting.

#reflect

What are the?unwritten expectations ?in your work?

#study

Purpose and Busyness

Thanks to the?Path Nine ?newsletter, we discovered the?Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness ?research report published in 2009 by Hsee, Yang and Wang.

It’s an interesting exploration of the interconnections between purpose, idleness and busyness. Abstract (highlights and spacing ours):

There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science.

In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason:?People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy.

Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that?even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that?many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.

Also, authors speculate that:

(…) the concurrent desires for busyness and for justification are rooted in evolution. In their strife for survival, human ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources;?expending energy without purpose could have jeopardized survival.

With modern means of production, however, most people today no longer expend much energy on basic survival needs, so?they have excessive energy, which they like to release through action.

Yet the long-formed tendency to conserve energy lingers,?making people wary of expending effort without purpose.

Our research also complements recent research by Ariely, Kamenica, and Prelec (2008) on humans’ search for meaning. Whereas the work of Ariely and his colleagues suggests that people work in order to search for meaning (i.e., achievement and recognition), our study suggests that?people search for meaning in order to work.

6 page PDF

Thanks for reading

We hope you found something useful in this edition. See you again in two weeks!

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

As?Strategy & Organization?professionals, we're partnering with?visionary Tech companies?to help them address their?most complex strategic & organizational challenges.

Our?professional mission and intended legacy?is:

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