Organizational transformation takes hard work and being willing to confront the mental models that drive and limit sustainable change. Managing continuous change is a property of living systems and produces: resiliency through diversity, collaborative networks, cooperative competition, and community. High-performing organizations create their own metamorphic change, continuously moving to a higher level of performance.
…just when the caterpillar thought that the world was over, it found it had become a butterfly…
THE MECHANISTIC MODEL
The mechanistic model of corporate organization has been in practice for over 300 years. An outgrowth of the industrial revolution and classical physics, this model of human and asset organization focuses on centralized command and control management, financial engineering of capital assets, and the preeminence of profit, monetary wealth, and unlimited use of resources. In this world employees are trained, problems solved, losing propositions turfed (both people and things), and the bottom-line optimized quarterly and at all costs.
LIVING SYSTEMS MODEL
In 1992, Margaret Wheatley described leadership and organizations based on the “new science”, a century of research in quantum physics, chaos and complexity theory.
Into the mechanistic sandbox came systems thinking, self-organization, and emergence. Rather than building a bigger and better machine, this approach focuses on what it means for organizations to be “alive”, bringing the advantages of living systems to the decaying mechanistic model.
