Organisational Elements and Cycles

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Organisational Elements and Cycles
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• One windowinto an
• Organisation

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Linking your thinking
to your doing
working in yourcontext
theory and practice
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How does anorganisation tick?
What are its essential elements?
What kind of rhythms and cyclesdoes it have?
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Starting with Organisational Identity
What does this consist of?
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Principles and leading ideas (head)
Three Parts
Values, culture, relationships (heart)
Organisational will (feet) What the organisation
wants to do.
Organisational Identity is the glue it is what
keeps an organisation together. Many
organisational problems or crises are rooted in
issues at this level. Can you think of any?
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Questions

• Can you think of any problems in your experience
  related to any of these three levels

At the Principles and Leading Ideas (head)
level? Often related to simplistic, inappropriate
or unshared principles and ideas
At the Values, Culture, Relationships (heart)
level? Often related to inappropriate or unshared
values, conflict, lack of trust, lack of respect
for diversity
Organisational Will (feet) Often related to fear,
doubt or resentment
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Next Organisations have CONTEXTS in which
they work
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It is from investigating these that we discover
Civil, economic and political conditions and
relationships at local, national and global
levels.
what needs our attention what wants to be done
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• So, working with both
• Organisational Identity
• and
• B. Understanding the Context
• helps us to discover our
• Purpose

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Knowing who you are and what you want do
(Identity) And knowing what your Context is and
what it wants from you Enables you to marry what
you want to do with what the world wants you to
do
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Discovering your purpose And Clarifying and
revisiting your Purpose Are two of the most
important organisational activities to ensure you
stay relevant to your own will and context.
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The problem is
Some only do what is needed, not what they want
to do, so their work is often uninspired, without
passion
Some organisations only do what they want to do,
not what is needed, so their work is often
irrelevant
It is necessary for both your Identity and
Context to be satisfied!
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Next Strategy and Approaches
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Why How
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Approaches? These are practical theories that
guide your work They come out of your Principles
and Leading ideas This is your deeper work
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e.g. You may use an Action Learning approach of
helping people to continually improve what they
do through more conscious learning Or You may use
a transformative (U-Process approach) helping
people to unlearn practices that are stalling or
undermining their development There are many
different approaches.
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Strategies? This is translating your approaches
into more concrete ideas e.g. Using an Action
Learning approach, you may support farmers to
meet regularly to share their innovations and
through these meetings they may be encouraged to
cooperate more.
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Next What are you actually going to do? What
concrete, planned activities? Who? By when? What
skills do you need? What resources?
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From these plans you move to action
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So far we have described what lies at the heart
of organisation what it does its practice
Who and where you are
Why you do it How you do it What you do
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P L A N N I N G C Y C L E
These are also the key elements of an
organisations
Planning Cycle
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P L A N N I N G C Y C L E
But what about the other organisational processes
that support practice? Ensuring that it is
well-managed Keeping it doing what it
does Continually improving and rethinking what
it does Enabling it to be meaningfully
accountable
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P L A N N I N G C Y C L E
This requires Developing and Managing Practice
Three Cycles
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P L A N N I N G C Y C L E
The Monitoring Cycle Shorter-term learning
improving practice
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P L A N N I N G C Y C L E
The Evaluation Cycle Longer-term learning -
rethinking
The Monitoring Cycle Shorter-term learning
improving practice
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P L A N N I N G C Y C L E
The ReportingCycle Accounting back to the context
The Evaluation Cycle Longer-term learning -
rethinking
The Monitoring Cycle Shorter-term learning
improving practice
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Looking at the Whole

• Organisations are messier than the neat elements
  and cycles presented here. They may work with
  these erratically, unconsciously or without
  attention.
• Each element and cycle is a lens through which to
  inquire into the health of the organisation.

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What elements might be missing?

• Structure - Who reports to whom?
• Leadership and management - How are decisions
  (really) made? Where do people have power?
• And others

However these, and other aspects, apply to all
elements and cycles. E.g. How are decisions made
around planning? Whose opinion matters in
analysing the context? How is communication in
the various cycles?
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Diagnosing Leadership

• See the Leadership Polarities in Chapter Two of
  the Barefoot Guide for a framework for inquiring
  into leadership.
• Be conscious of the different kinds of leadership
  appropriate for different phases of
  organisational development (See Chapter 5 of the
  Barefoot Guide).
• Leaders are only one form of leadership. Some
  processes are leadership processes.

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Diagnostic tips

• Sometimes a problem appears in one element or
  cycle e.g. poor practice in the field, or
  fruitless learning processes but
• the source of the problem may live in another
  element or cycle e.g. a lack of purpose, or low
  motivation/will, or inappropriate approach. Look
  for deeper causes
• Sometimes there are vicious circles or
  loopse.g. low motivation leads to poor
  planning and poor practice which upsets leaders
  who then criticise too harshly this can
  undermine motivation even more further affecting
  practice upsetting leaders more and so on. Look
  for causal loops.