Designing a Robust & Contemporary Organisation Operating System
System and Behavior Symbiosis
Real operating system transformation lies in adopting structures that promote growth and adaptability while disrupting organisational habits that hinder them. Resilience comes from strengthening adaptive muscles and finding ease in modular approaches. Discomfort and tension are forms of energy—they embody what it means to be dynamic. Functionally leveraging, rather than avoiding, them is the essence of responsive organisation designing.
Structural Organisation Interventions
To build robustness, prepare to unlearn resistance to deviation, unpredictability, failure, and collaboration. To free a system from fragility, be ready to loosen the grip on control, hierarchies, fixed plans, and siloed operations. These are structural phenomena of any transformation.
Behavioral Organisation Interventions
These principles are behavioral and focus on the energetics of the system. They encourage the opening and application of untapped intelligences, unlocking the full capacity of people to meet what is needed rather than defaulting to what has always been done. This process may feel disorienting, as engaging the full potential of people can often be daunting.
Anticipate and Navigate Surprise and Uncertainty
Expect the unpredictable rather than be surprised by it.
Become a sensor or detective for patterns of change.
Scan for threats and opportunities, and leverage them.
Pay close attention to the periphery. What are the developments? How do they impact you?
Consider potential consequences.
Imagine plausible outcomes (and test them) without relying on guesswork.
Harness ambiguity as a force for change rather than perceiving it as a threat.
Create Feedback Loops and Adaptive Mechanisms
Build a lean operating rhythm focused on testing and learning.
Iterate and adapt as you go.
Share learnings and feedback across the organization to promote systemic learning, questioning, and reimagining.
Go to the factory floor (Gemba) and get close to the real work.
Translate organisation signals into action— for example, resources, designs, rhythms, rituals, time allotment, roles, priorities, and teams given full permission to explore and innovate with strategic constraints.
Foster Trust and Reciprocity
Act in ways that benefit other participants in the system.
Establish mechanisms to ensure reciprocity.
Demonstrate presence and provide support through contemporary leadership ways.
Contribute value to other stakeholders in the ecosystem rather than extracting it.
Focus on giving rather than taking.
Take responsibility for yourself and own your words, actions, and deeds.
Break the Habit of Leading from Your Conditioned Self
Lastly, here are several confrontations to reflect on for reimagining how to hold context and space meaningfully and purposefully—whether in your role(s), leading teams, or delivering on workflows and prioritised outcomes. The essence is this: become exceptionally skilled at working with the unseen, unexpected, and unsaid to build, guide, and sustain a robustly emerging system.
Be realistic about what you can predict and control.
Be optimistic about what you can shape collaboratively.
Be honest about what factors lie beyond the influence of any single individual e.g., a leader.
Identify, monitor, and address complexity that exists beyond what you own or control—outside your doors.
Contribute positively and create value in the broader system (e.g., stakeholders, customers, partners) to justify participation.
Foster freedom, autonomy, collaboration, and initiative at the local level.
Shape the context of the local level rather than controlling what is happening.
Question top-down control by truly evaluating returns, feedback, and motivation.
Attribution
Adapted originally from an article called The Biology of Corporate Survival, Harvard Business Review (2016)