The art of simplicity

Today while explaining my son how our heating system works, it brought me back to my earlier post about organization charts. Same as in heating system where you have a heating loop and a control loop, 2 loops exist in every organization. The first is formal and visible—it's drawn out in neat boxes and lines as your organizational chart, showing who reports to whom and where decisions get made. The second is informal and largely invisible—it's the actual pathways through which information, ideas, and real work flow to get things done. The two flows of organizational systems When we apply systems thinking to organizations, we can identify two critical flows that determine how effectively an organization functions: Control flow represents the formal authority structure—who has decision-making power, who approves what, and how accountability flows up and down the hierarchy. This is what your org chart captures beautifully with its clean boxes and reporting lines. Informat...

I don't see criticism and (a certain level of) conflict as unhealthy in an organization. The contrary! It is when people stop raising their voice and sharing their feedback that you need to start worrying. It could be a sign that people no longer care and have decayed from commitment to compliance. Beyond following orders As leaders we are constantly seeking ways to drive results. But there's a fundamental distinction worth understanding on how to achieve this:  If we collaborate, the result is commitment. If we coerce, the result is compliance. Commitment comes from within, whereas compliance is forced by an external source. When people comply, they're simply following orders. They do just enough to get by, meet the bare minimum requirements, or check the box. There's no personal investment in the outcome. Commitment, on the other hand, invites full participation, engagement, and discretionary effort. The language of Commitment L. David Marquet states in his ...

The last weeks I'm thinking a lot about organization design and how to improve/optimize our organization. I see well-intentioned improvement initiatives launched with enthusiasm, only to deliver disappointing results. Despite the energy invested, we're not seeing the transformation we hoped for. Why? A possible answer could be found in this statement from Russel L. Ackoff that he did in the video below: If we have a system of improvement that’s direct at improving the parts taken separately, you can be ABSOLUTELY sure that the performance of the hole will not be improved. The trap of reductionist thinking What’s possibly happening here is that we are falling into a common trap—what systems thinkers call "reductionist thinking." We break down the organization into components and try to optimize each part separately: HR launches a new performance management system IT implements a new collaboration tool Operations streamlines a specific process...