Structural and Social Adaptation
I’m using this space today to develop ideas around Adaptation, in both Structural and Social terms. In this I am considering Structural Adaptation as changes in systems and the formal, tangible dimension of our Organisations, and Social Adaptation as the evolution of our Social Context and systems of belief. If I were to think of an example, I think that moving house would be a reasonable fit: I can pack my junk, rent a van, and relocate the stuff to the new building – which is structural change, but only after I have slept there a few times, found my way around, and made a friend, does it feel like ‘home’.
We could perhaps describe Structural Adaptation as linear, tangible, physical, quantifiable, and directed, with Social Adaptation being multi layered, tribal, held in structures of story and belief, identity and community, only qualifiable, and self directed.
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Change, in a real sense, requires both. When Organisations seek to change – or transform – or adapt – they often rely on primary Structural programmes, and rely on chance or good luck for the Social. Or they view the Social as a secondary feature, but I would probably argue the opposite: that Social Context trumps the formal.
Our Social Context contains both synchronous and highly asynchronous contexts, in that we think, feel, and articulate things right now, but we also build meta-narratives over long periods of time, into which we invest our identity and belief. Organisations do not have a memory, except in this social sense, and in the shadows cast into codified or ossified systems and structures, and as I wrote in the Socially Dynamic Organisation, these are always a reflection of the past, casting shadows into the future.
For me this all mitigates for a model of change that is narrative, negotiated, and woven between formal, Structural change, and a socially divergent and moderated one.
CEO - Director - Agent for beneficial and holistic change in the world. Working at the intersection of education, wellbeing, health, business, living systems understanding and place-based systems change.
4 周Dear Julian Stodd again you are on point and give me permission to explore. Perhaps this adaptiveness, this quality within and between the structual and social you talk of, is a continuos energy-information exchange that resonates at a bandwith that self in our current state of consciousness can only partially see and sense. If we choose to shift to a higher/deeper level of consciousness then perhaps it will reveal the full bandwith that was already there. Perhaps in the end, there is just energy within spaciousness and our awareness reveals whatever it is that we focus our attention towards. Awareness as the observer of our attention, if we opetate with an open mind, and open heart and a free will we can see and sense things that we didn’t see before or perhap no one person has ever seen… Nature in all her blissful joy, a graceful unbounded capability with freedom to and freedom from all conditions. Permission to explore all four states at will - observing the patterning, freeze, flow, free and glow…if we just get out of the way and be nature. Today such freedom is ours, freedom to be nature again. Happy Days! ????????
Talent Management, Leadership Development & Organisational Effectiveness
4 周Reminds of formal and informal (or transactional and transformational) organisational system elements in the Burke Litwin model: org structure, job role/ task definitions, individual skill, policies and procedures as the formal system in constant flow with organisational culture, work unit climates, leadership behaviours, employee motivations and management practices as an informal system.