Interconnectedness and new forms of organizing

What kinds of organizations am I talking about when I think of wise(r) organizations?

Although it’s still very early in my research, I want to think out loud what kinds of features and design patterns I’m noticing and tracking.

New Forms of organizing

One nut we have to crack is how to more aptly design many-to-many relationships. Nature does this all the time, but we really struggle to mimic it in our organizations. For example, multi-directional information originating from many locations and feeding into many places is still hard, and it’s a barrier for development. Beyond sheer information and knowledge management, decentralized, asynchronous participatory sense-making is still slow and tedious. The same is true for more polycentric and fluid resource allocation.

From a wisdom perspective, multi-perspectival knowing enhances our commitment to reality, and the checks and balances of mutual influence make it easier to grow – and less likely to go off the deep end. 

A few features:

• Many-to-many governance and information (Help Desks, Rendanheyi, networks, platform-based), information management
• More community-based: intermeshing of communities of practice, networks and operations
• Transcending polarities, like labor – capital, internal-external, professional and personal development. 

New relationship to the ecosystem

I imagine seeing organizations be alive like an organism is alive, but not in an insular way. Instead, they needs to be actively involved in their environments, active with its “hands” in the dirt. That requires new forms of organizing.

• I expect they’re well-connected with their ecosystem – almost fusing into the space they’re in. (That’s the collective counterpart of an individual low-ego mindset and “going with the flow” while knowing oneself really well.) 
• They are active in their service. They don’t talk a lot, they do. Their presence in the world is not loud but it’s meaningful. They are humble just like a wise person doesn’t wear a “I’m a wise person” button on their shirt. (In fact, the organization that calls itself wise probably isn’t wise.) Their presence allows others to be who they are and do what they want to do. They foster wisdom in others, they don’t compete. 
• Likely completely new forms of legal “containers” are needed to achieve this – a more commons-based, community organizing kind of way to be in the world.

See more on this in Organizations as agents in an ecosystem.

Literacy and Fluency

The way there is hard. Governance, for example, cannot be a paper manifesto or a propositional agreement as much as it need to live in people’s bodies, in their muscle memory, in their hearts, in their rhythm of breathing. That requires skill to achieve flow state where it all becomes obvious where governance is not a cerebral value set but a lived, full experience. Where governance is what we do and who we are. We cannot unlock new forms of organizing without building the skills and literacy to inhabit that world. 

I have a visceral sense of what organizations for this new state would need to look like. I think the call for more participatory, purpose-driven organizations is an expression of that desire but we need to think in a wider scope and with forms that appropriately follow that function. 

• Wise(r) organizations might have a bigger focus on ongoing, embodied learning and rituals that make process negotiations unnecessary. It’s just what we do.
• Wise(r) organizations don’t only talk about disruption and innovation but actively host collective spaces to create the conditions for it.

Wait, are there already here?

It’s easy to think of future organizations as something abstractly futuristic, but there’s a very good chance that some of the features are already around.

“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“

William Gibson

Who knows what we will find once our perspective shifts and we see what already exists in a new light. Maybe what seems naive now will seem spot-on later. That’s how it went with self-organized organizations. 15 years ago, it was crazy and pollyanna; now it’s what hip organizations expect.

For example, a small-is-beautiful small organization of chosen family might be what it looks like. Or a platform that supports practitioners in finding each other for mutual support at a large scale. A “regular” business that has a strong culture of care. Or a yarn store that offers free knitting clinics for people who are lost in their pattern – without requiring you to buy their yarn. They offer it because it gives them meaning to share their knowledge, not because it serves the organizational purpose of selling yarn (whether it’s for profit or not is secondary).