Effective Agility at Work - Book Now
Join me at the European Organisation Design Forum conference in Bilbao, Spain, 6th to 8th October 2022.
“Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.” — Isaac Asimov 1
I’m looking forward to being one of three “provocateurs” at the 2022 European Organisation Design Forum (EODF) Conference “Designing in Today’s World: Effective Agility at Work” taking place in Bilbao, Spain, from 6-8 October.
Founded in 2011, the EODF is the professional community for organisation design practitioners based in Europe.
EODF provides a community for practitioners, educators, and organisational leaders, challenging participants to advance the practice of organisation design, share and synthesise experience and expertise, and create new knowledge so organisations can create greater value and provide more meaning.
The conference is designed around extensive open space exploration — participants choosing topics and moving between conversations to suit their personal interests.
Here’s how EODF positions the event: 2
Our world appears increasingly fragile because of ongoing wars, a global pandemic and policies leading to inflation and all kinds of shortages.
Many organisations struggle with the tension of short-term pressures and long-term ambitions. At the same time, more traditional companies are under pressure to adapt and deliver new experiences quickly, for customers and employees alike.
Effective Agility is one concept that speaks to the ability to rethink, relearn, and change.
How can we, as organisation designers, support organisations?
How can we design for the future and for the here and now?
Should organisations stay grounded in stability to balance the need for change?
Should we rather focus on resilience than agility? And if not, how might org design help to connect strategic agility with operational ability?
In my keynote on day one, I’ll be exploring how organisations can become fit for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
In practice, this requires an organisational culture where sense making, decision making & action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
Organisational design professionals who aspire to help organisations must strike a balance between on the one hand bringing their expertise, insights, and experience to bear on their clients’ challenges, and on the other hand ensuring that people in the client organisation do the bulk of the heavy lifting.
This is vitally important, as they’re the only people who can develop an organisation’s future-fit muscles.
Outsiders can’t do that for them.
I’ll focus on why, after 30 years of the Organisational Learning movement, so few organisations genuinely enable, embed, and embrace the institutional learning that generates effective agility.
We’ll look at the deeply systemic reasons why organisations have failed to embrace learning — and how to access the real leverage for culture change.
As the legendary Donella Meadows pointed out in her seminal article: “Leverage Points — Places to intervene in a system”, deeply systemic challenges like culture change are most effectively addressed at the mindset level. 3
What is the legacy mindset that stifles effective organisational agility and how might this be changed to create a future-fit culture?
Come along to the EODF Conference in Bilbao — 6th to 8th October — to explore this together with a community of fellow practitioners.
Here’s a two minute intro video:
Details of the two other keynotes are coming soon.
Follow the EODF LinkedIn channel to ensure you don’t miss further announcements.
Alongside the keynotes and open space dialogues, the conference also features a case study on Mondragon, the world-renowned federation of worker cooperatives located close to Bilbao. 4
To participate in the conference, click on the Book Your Seat Here button below:
I hope to see you there.
“Pebble in the Sky” (1982 Fawcett Books) p81