Navigate the Swirl. Richard Hawkes

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Navigate the Swirl - Richard Hawkes


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the clarity of the conversation, which means getting to alignment.

      That is what the Growth River Operating System allows you to do—create alignment and lead transformation in complex adaptive social systems. “Operating System” may sound like it's straight out of the old machine metaphor I've just advised you to leave behind. But it's not software I'm talking about; it's “social-ware.” social-ware means a system for working together in a social system that enables higher performance. It is an upgrade for the human system in the same way that software can be an upgrade for a computer system. Again, it's not simple, because human systems are not simple. It's not a quick fix, because adaptation and evolution doesn't happen quickly. But it is elegant, creative, uplifting, and powerful, because at their best, human systems are all of those things.

      If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing.

      —W. Edwards Deming

      What is a business? And what does it mean to be in business together?

      That's not really a helpful way to think. Organizations may be social systems, but in a business context, they're more than just communities of people. A business organization exists for a purpose: to create value for customers. That's what connects the people in the organization and the activities they enact. But when I ask people to describe that overall value creation process—the shared work they are in together with their team and their organization—too often, they come up short. If the people working in a business do not have a shared definition and model of what a business is, is it any wonder that they struggle to align as they go about doing their jobs?

      Unless we can visualize our shared work, it is inevitable that we will fall into difficult decision-making, unhelpful politics, unclear roles, redundancies, and inefficiencies. And unless we have a common way to understand the business we're in, we can't work on, improve, optimize, and grow that business together.

      If you work in a manufacturing context—in a production line, for example—it may not be that difficult to visualize the shared work of the team or company. You may be responsible for just one step in the process, but the production line itself is a physical representation of all the stages through which the work flows, and the order in which it must be enacted. You wouldn't try to pick up a widget from one end of the assembly line and move it somewhere else, and you're not worried that someone further down the line is going to start trying to do your job.

      I was working with a small business that day, trying to help them understand their workflow so they could get more clarity about who was doing what and how they needed to work together. After discussing their issues for much of the day, it occurred to me that it might help to give them a visual experience of their workflow. The first image that came to mind was the one right in front of me: the conference table. I went around the table and explained each person's respective place in the workflow, from developing their product to delivering it to the customer. The scientist was critical to developing the product but had little interaction with the customer; the salesperson was down the line a bit, ensuring that relationships with customers were value-based and effective; the operations person was further downstream; and on and on. I showed how their business flowed around the table, from role to role, through these various activities. Each was essential and each played a different part.


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