informal coalitions

Co-creation – a core dynamic of organizations, not simply jargon for working together!

"I prefer radio to television. The pictures are better."

Anon

Over recent years, it has become increasingly common for the word "co-creation" to be used to describe a deliberate act of collaboration within and/or between organizations. This might involve, for example, collaboration between members of a business and its customers or other stakeholders; between designers and end-users; between multiple web-based contributors to an open-source resource such as Wikipedia; or between managers and staff within an organization.

In this last regard, the term is now firmly established in the language of the "employee engagement" movement. But I believe that using it in this way not only devalues the word but, more importantly, obscures a critical aspect of organizational dynamics that is implicit within it. In particular, using the term to describe structured approaches to participative management, joint decision-making and collaborative working risks missing the point that all meanings and outcomes are necessarily co-created.

And this insight is fundamental to an understanding of how organizations work, how change happens and how leaders need to act as a result.

Shared Values - Hit or myth?

A post in Stephen Billing's blog, entitled Three Reasons Not To Aim For Shared Values, has sparked an interesting discussion on the credibility of establishing "Shared Values" within an organization, and on the worth of striving to do so. 

The need for Shared Values has been one of the taken-for-granted assumptions of management orthodoxy for almost 30 years now. Pursuing it consumes a lot of time, effort and money, as development programmes, HR policies, formal communication initiatives and so on are designed and implemented to bring these about.

But is it right to view the idea of Shared Values as one of the 'hits' of leadership practice?  Or, as Billing argues, is the perceived benefit that these bring to an organization a myth that needs to be challenged?

Leading is a "doing word"

In a recent post, The language of organizational change, I drew an analogy between the central role that verbs play in language learning and the equivalent role played by organizational dynamics in understanding how change happens. As I argued there:

"... once people understand the underlying dynamics of organizations, they understand change. The rest is just content."

To take this a stage further, Informal Coalitions shows how the critical dynamics of change are embodied within (and simultaneously emerge from) people's everyday conversations and interactions. So this places talk and language at the core of change and organizational dynamics. 

Individual, team and organization development – the missing ingredient?

Managers – quite rightly - invest substantial amounts of time, effort and money in individual and team development. Too often, though, they assume that improvements in these dimensions will deliver the desired level of organizational performance – especially if this is accompanied by a programme of organization development.

So why is this not the case? What else is going on? And why doesn’t classical OD fill-in the gap at the organization ‘level’?