Vmcl

Why we start organizations is intimately tied to why we choose to work together in the first place. If your goal is to create a garden in your back yard, you don't start an organization--because that's something you can do on your own. We start organizations because what we want to get done, requires others. That might seem like a simple concept, but it is where organizational effectiveness is lost or won.

Thanks Mark McGrath for producing this wonderful video with your son! That's why we named our book on adaptive organizations, "Flock, Not Clock"—because contrary to hundreds of years of conventional wisdom that guides us to build a clockwork organization that works like a machine, organizations are organic, adaptive superorganisms by nature...much more like a flock than a clock.

Excerpt from the book, Flock Not Clock. The Power of Sharing Mental Models: Wow Stories "I am empowered to create unique, memorable and personal experiences for our guests." This simple employee statement (number 3 on the Ritz-Carlton’s list of 12 service values)[14] exemplifies a culture in which employees are empowered to learn. Ritz-Carlton, one of the world’s most recognized luxury hotel chains, with 90 hotels and resorts around the world, uses organizational learning to drive its award-winning customer service. They do so by building capacity through institutionalized processes they call Daily Line-Ups and Wow Stories that use the power of storytelling as a way to spread learning across the organization.

This post is an excerpt of Chapter 6 of Flock Not Clock.

Designing an Effective Vision Can Be Challenging. By far, the most challenging aspect of Vision design is that they are ideally binary.  Where VMCL is concerned, there are five "checks" for Vision that help you to determine whether or not you've designed an effective Vision. They are:

Recently, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III ordered a "DOD-wide stand down to discuss the problem of extremism in the ranks (1)."  But what is a stand down order? 

This blog was written by Patrick Kastner as a project for PADM 5449 at Cornell University. 

All this talk of culture is of course useless if it’s not implemented. Noting how difficult culture is to define and pinpoint for executives, Chris Cancialosi, Partner and Founder of gothamCulture, nonetheless argues:

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Flock Not Clock.  By definition, all groups (including organizational members) are characterized by culture(s). 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Flock Not Clock. Members of your organization will share a large number of mental models, all of varying importance and centrality to the organization and its success. So what are the most important mental models—the pillars of your culture? Where do you focus first and foremost? Organizational success depends on sharing the right mental models, ones that are complexity-friendly and promote learning and adaptation.

One of the specific and practical things you can do to build a culture of mental models is to get the entire leadership team to assume another as leaders of learning. The CEO must also serve as a Chief Learning Officer (CLO). This dual role is required not just of CEOs but of any leader across the organization. If managers make learning a priority, others will see it as a priority, too. Effective leaders are skilled “lead learners” adroit at inculcating culture (facilitating shared understanding of key mental models).

This post is adapted from Chapter 5 of Flock Not Clock.

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Flock Not Clock. 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock. 

This post was adapted from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock. What are core values, and why does every company feel compelled to create and publicize them? The growing emphasis on organizational culture has likely fueled this trend: many CEOs equate culture with values.

This post is adapted from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock. 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock. 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock. 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Flock Not Clock. 

This post is adapted from Chapter 3 of Flock Not Clock

This blog is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Flock Not Clock.

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Flock Not Clock. There’s a reason that there are articles in Inc. titled “The 9 Worst Mission Statements of All Time” and “Why Most Mission Statements Suck So Bad.” 

If the right kind of Vision is so important, what explains companies that succeed with no [discernible] Vision? This is an important question we get asked a lot. Vision is a function of all organizations, whether formalized as companies, or informal groups of people such as protesters. Additionally,  "good"  Visions adhere to the vision-litmus-checks such that:

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Flock Not Clock. Many companies do in fact articulate a vision, though it often masquerades under different names like purpose or objective, and most frequently as mission.

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Flock Not Clock.

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Flock Not Clock.

July 20th, 2020 Dr. Laura Cabrera spoke today on the simple rules of systems leadership in partnership with Systemic Excellence Global. 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Flock Not Clock. Given that so many companies lack a vision statement and those that exist exhibit a bizarre range of forms and purposes, you may wonder why you need one. 

This post is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Flock Not Clock. 

"Leapfrog Leaders" written by Drs. Derek Cabrera, Laura Cabrera and Hise Gibson applies existing knowledge about the elements of systems thinking to a widely used decision making framework called SOT. SOT stands for Strategic, Operational, and Tactical - which are are thought to be the three levels of problem solving. More specifically, this paper offers readers insight into the skills needed at each level of decision making; as well as how to develop them through an understanding and application of the basics of systems thinking and leadership.

In our jig series, we have explored many jigs such as a Barbell Jig, which combines the patterns R, D and S to create new molecular structures. In this post, we explore the "System of Relationships" jig or "S-of-R". A system of relationships is a part-whole system where the parts are relationships. Usually, (although not always) the relationships act together in some way to make up a meaningful system (as opposed to just being parts of a system of relationships without any dynamical properties or similarities). In other words, it is a jig where a set of relationships work together to form a system. 

This post is an excerpt from Flock Not Clock: Chapter 1.  Flawed Mental Model 4: Utilize Fourth (in the traditional model), flow charts, org charts, and plans only work when we have enough human power, so we’re going to need some human resources. 

This post is an excerpt from Flock Not Clock: Chapter 1.   Flawed Mental Model 3: Control Next (in the traditional model), we need a control structure. We need processes because we need to make sure that we understand every single step of a process that has not happened yet and that will constantly be changing.

This post is an excerpt from Flock Not Clock: Chapter 1.  Flawed Mental Model 2: Command Second, we need a command structure. 

This post is an excerpt from Flock Not Clock: Chapter 1.     Our more complex problems come about when how we think our organization works is out of alignment with how it actually works.

You don’t get to choose whether your organization is a complex adaptive system. All organizations are complex adaptive systems because they are made up of individuals (agents) adapting to their environment. The behavior of an organization—an emergent property of the many agents and their interactions with one another and their environment—is not easily predicted by the behavior of the organizational members alone. As a leader, your challenge is to embrace this reality and leverage it to your advantage.

#SystemsThinking in turn causes us to think differently about #systemsleadership or how to apply a systems approach to a complex adaptive organization (CAO). This short video and demo from Dr.Cabrera's