How can we optimise the health of our organisations in a post-Covid, distributed and digitised workplace?
As mentioned in the Playbook Summary, leaders of pioneering organisations tend to point to their corporate culture when defining what sets them apart, over more mechanistic factors such as the tools they use or the protocols they set. We have tried here to uncover some of the cultural strategies of the most innovative, productive and healthy organisations. As you might expect from the messy world of human interaction, some of these strategies are relatively abstract and intangible, but many turn out to be surprisingly specific, tactical and deliberate.
At the core of effective operational cultures seems to be a set of interpersonal skills and structures that attempt to find an optimal balance across the main attributes of those cultures, such as the human relationships, pace of work, communications, and documentation. We have bundled these wide-ranging but overlapping topics into the theme of Cooperative Behaviours.
Running across the entire theme is an attitude, carried by forward-thinking leaders and innovators, that embraces the diversity and complexity of social groups. As our industrial communities practise becoming more Agile & Lean, evolving into states of increasing Decentralisation, distribution (e.g. Remote & WFH) and Virtualisation, we must recognise and let go of the biases, norms and traditions that we may previously have taken for granted but are now holding us back. Only then are we likely to be comfortable selecting a suitable mixture of interpersonal strategies, testing them in the workplace, and adapting them in continuous cycles.