We have always built our company, our Gaia, on some fundamental beliefs: our trust in the inherent power and ability of people, together with our conviction that successful organisations are created by people who make use of more of their potential. From this, our core has developed and expanded. With the certainty that strong results and sustainable development require an integration of the part and the whole. And that is where both people and business can grow.
When we look around the world today, in an increasingly difficult-to-navigate landscape, with rising complexity, rapid and unpredictable changes, and mutual interdependencies, we see that what we believe in and stand for has never been more important. How do we unleash the power in our organisations? Can we create both development and growth while strengthening the focus on sustainable value? How can we lead and steer today’s and tomorrow’s organisations to meet the ever-accelerating pace of change? How do we build resilient organisations created and developed by thriving people?
In a series of blogs, we have described the part of Gaia Mindset that concerns the thriving individual. We suggest that you start there: Gaia Mindset, Holistic Perspective, Learning, Co-Creation, and A New Approach to Leadership.
In this blog we explore Gaia Mindset Organisation and governance.
A Different Focus
How many people answer yes when asked whether the way we organise and govern is actually helpful in creating the value we want? In unleashing the power in our people and organisations? Among the thousands of leaders and employees we meet every year, far too few do. And we believe this is because we need to completely rethink organisation and governance. We need to focus more on learning and development rather than monitoring and control. Many leaders we meet today express strong frustration over the rigid systems we have created in a world where adaptability and agility are becoming increasingly business-critical.
The resilient organisation is the organisation that creates long-term sustainable value and results and has the resilience to continue doing so, regardless of disruptive events and a high degree of unpredictability. It is also the organisation that enables, allows, and challenges the thriving individual to grow and create value.
Belonging and Connection
We humans are social beings with strong needs to be part of a context and feel belonging. We seek and create patterns, structures, and order to understand reality. We also need to have control and to create predictability. And of course, there is a need for management and monitoring of factors important for our success. We need support systems that help us hold ourselves and each other accountable for moving in the right direction. Everyone needs an organisational home and a smaller context. We want to experience the organisation as comprehensible and helpful without it locking us into silos.</p>
Organisation and governance model are two sides of the same coin, and whe
n we succeed in creating conditions for the resilient organisation, they are fully integrated. We need to increase our understanding that complex systems cannot be controlled, but they can be influenced. It will be decisive to make conscious choices that create ownership, focus on learning and co-creation both within the organisation and with key stakeholders. In today’s organisations, this often means being aware of control mechanisms and structures that are counterproductive.
Governance with a Focus on Sowing
What business-critical parts do we need to keep track of? On the one hand, of a diagnostic nature, on the other hand, for development and progress? From this, we can then challenge ourselves to sort out everything else that creates unnecessary bureaucracy. We truly want to challenge the old idea of following up on the harvest; it is more important to focus on the sowing. What sowing do we believe in to harvest what we want in the future? The entrepreneurial approach is to observe the harvest to understand reality as it is and then shift focus to the new sowing.
We can envision a classic management group meeting where business area A has black figures and business area B has red. It is then very easy to only value the harvest. If instead we had focused on the sowing, perhaps a different picture would have emerged where area B has challenged itself, shown creativity and innovation that in the long run is crucial for the success of the business – while area A may have a simpler budget or the market on its side.
Our culture is the soil. Learning and activities that build our future are the sowing. The harvest is mostly historical data. How we handle these three aspects we call a governance model, and it should help us direct the flashlight towards what we actually believe creates value for us, increases our awareness, and helps us become clearer in our intentions.
We could play with the idea that every organisation that exists today has at some point emerged because two people have met and found something they want to succeed with together. When the third person joins, we do not immediately think that we must create management, clear processes, job descriptions, and interfaces. And we wouldn’t come up with the idea that it is the first two’s task to motivate and engage the third. But as we grow, we often lose track of ourselves. We seem to believe that the structures are the answer. We forget that the core of the organisation is to solve tasks that we individually cannot succeed with. We gather in an organisation because we want to achieve something and because we are ready to co-create, learn, and lead together to get there.
A Resilient Organisation for the Thriving Individual
After working with thousands of organisations and many different types of organisations, we at Gaia have come to the conclusion that it is rarely the organisational structure itself, or the choice of a particular model, that is the answer. Sometimes, in fact, a reorganisation is helpful, for example when an organisational model has been chosen that does not follow the logic of the business and people daily experience how the structure gets in the way of work. However, we are increasingly convinced that in most cases it is rather about the organisational life inside the chosen structure. We believe that it is about challenging against and giving space for everyone to be a leader and that everyone needs to lead themselves in five dimensions, regardless of how the formal organisation looks.
To create resilient solutions, we need to increase our awareness of what is actually helpful. How do we create a sense of having a home, a context, while also having a capacity for constant change? An organisation where we can co-create across organisational boundaries to solve our tasks in the best possible way? Where the individual has an operational domicile but where that place in the organisation in no way limits the responsibility and initiatives the individual then drives in the organisation?
Gaia Mindset Organising and Leading for Resilience
We envision an organisation where it is just as natural to invest time and energy in driving common, overarching, and cross-functional development as development within one’s own organisational home. An organisation permeated by a holistic perspective, continuous learning, co-creation, and a non-hierarchical approach to leadership where every person is a leader.
What we propose can be summarized as follows: An approach where you start from and identify with the whole you are part of. A focus on your own and others’ learning. Co-creation with your surroundings to build sustainable value. Seeing yourself and those around you as leaders.
You can read more about Gaia Mindset here. In a series of blogs, we present different aspects of Gaia Mindset. They address both the perspective of the thriving individual and the resilient organisation.
You can find the earlier blogs by looking here for posts containing the words Gaia Mindset. Follow us on LinkedIn, where we continuously engage in dialogue about Gaia Mindset.