Growing Adaptive Organizations
Making your organization effective and sustainable
to ride the waves of change.
Welcome to GRADO, the community for the Adaptive Organization.
We co-develop a perspective on sustainable organizations in times of many new opportunities.
Our roots include Lean and Agile large and small, organization design, organization development, management and leadership.
We follow an overall view that supports stability and change, unideological and open, bold and cautious.
Join us.
The adaptive organization is no longer new – but it is still a difficult problem for many companies: The era of rapid change requires new approaches and skills from both organizations and individuals.
Every company is different – and yet there are many experiences to learn from. Patterns of what works and what doesn’t work.
We collect such patterns and prepare them so that practitioners at different levels of experience can benefit from them without creating a rigid, “one size fits all” blueprint.
Stories, Patterns and the Big Picture
We believe that there is no best way to convey information.
- Casual visitors may prefer stories to decide if this is the right place. Here we offer “the map” and real life stories of what went well and what went poorly.
- When things get serious, they may be interested in copying and varying the experiences of others. At this level, we provide patterns and playbooks as resources.
- Advanced practitioners will move more and more to a “pull” mode. For them, we have the Pig Picture and more detail.
A Travel Guide to understand
We use the metaphor of a travel guide, because every change is also a (learning) journey. Full of surprises, unexpected twists, new discoveries, but also great disappointments. Nevertheless: it is always an exciting journey
We want to help managers understand
- The challenge and complexity of such change
the need for their active support, commitment and participation - The need to share control and work together
that there is no blueprint that fits their unique situation and context - You always develop from the point you are at, so you need to know how to properly assess your current situation and goals
- How to iteratively change the organization using appropriate concepts and approaches.
Scope
The ability to learn and adapt in short cycles requires a paradigm shift in many ways.
- Structures which fit for purpose – able to deal with our complex and changing environment
- Corporate culture – a culture of transparency and trust creates motivation and creativity.
- Governance – different types of governance coexist for design, development and other parts of the organization.
- Leadership model – employee development becomes more important than execution.
- Autonomy and delegation – leading knowledge workers rely on their skills and intrinsic motivation.
Resilient, Viable, Adaptive
What exactly do we mean with Adaptive?
The best way we found to describe the meaning of adaptivity is to compare a number of alternative system types.
Basic System types
- Robust – the system remains the same, lives with uncertainty, fends off setbacks and avoids damage. In the worst case, is becomes Fragile – the system suffers damage to the point of complete failure.
- Resilient – the system adapts; the system takes damage but avoids a complete failure and eventually recovers. After that, it is a changed system.
Viability
- Viable is continuously and actively concerned with ensuring the stability and securing the future of the system. It is not passive like resilience. It has a concept of identity and a concept of actively shaping the future.
Adaptive
Adaptive builds on Viable Systems. Adaptive addresses themes like being embedded in an ecosystem, the strategy process, the role of leadership and corporate culture and implementing changes.
Viability
The Viability Canvas
The Viability Canvas has been created for an easier start with the Viable System Model (VSM). It allows a quick start with diagnosing the structures, the decision making and the information systems of an organization.
The Adaptive Organization
The Big Picture
The Big Picture is the reference for the information. It serves as a guide, source of information, glossary.
Growing Adaptive Organizations
Meetup
The GRADO Meetup is the place where practitioners enjoy an exchange of ideas and actively drive Open Innovation for the topics.
The Travel Guide
The Travel Map and the destinations to talk about experiences in transforming enterprises.
Travel Group
The DACH30 Special Interest Group, called “Travel Group”, developed the travel metaphor, to talk about patterns without imposing rules.
Growing Adaptive Organizations