Re-imagining an organisation as a living system

This month we welcome a guest post from our friend and colleague Dayle O’Brien. Dayle is an organisational ecologist whose specific interest is in working with organisations to help create living systems in which both people and the overall business get to thrive. Dayle’s contribution here is timely in B Corp Month 2024 as she has supported two B Corps in truly aligning with ‘profit for purpose’ and using their businesses as a force for good through the focus she has brought.

The twenty-first century has been an enormously exciting time in the world of business. It’s been the era of the start-up, when a budding entrepreneur with a great idea could grow from a garage-based operation to a national or even global enterprise seemingly overnight. We’ve seen this in technology companies, of course, but also in what might be called contemporary craft industries making everything from clothing to beer.

With this shift has come new ways of doing business that look well beyond the profit motive. The contemporary way of doing business is to have wholeness, or what David Cooperrider, pioneer of the Appreciative Inquiry Model, refers to as being ‘net positive’. A net positive business is one that contributes to better outcomes for all its stakeholders, thrives as a whole organisation and provides an atmosphere in which individuals can show up in their entirety and explore their potential. In the language of emotional health, such an organisation is operating above the line with a high level of organisational development.

All of this creates a challenge for the growing business that senses the opportunity to take the next leap, but isn’t quite sure what that is going to look like.

For over 100 years, the predominant way in which organisations have been designed is analogous to a machine. A business is made up of many linked but separate parts on the assumption that when all those parts work together according to a detailed plan, success will follow. If one part – a department or a team or even an individual – fails to operate as expected, it is ‘fixed’ by imposing greater order and control to bring it back into line. As the organisation grows, the separate parts grow larger and more numerous. Often new parts are added with the singular goal of imposing more control over the original parts.  

This traditional organisation is led by a CEO or equivalent, who acts as figurehead and provider of the vision. He (it’s still nearly always ‘he’) is assisted by a team of senior executives and together they maintain overall control of the system so that it works as planned and generates the profitability promised to the company’s owners/shareholders.  

The mechanical model worked well during long periods of relative stability in the second half of the twentieth century. The model assumes that organisations and the environments in which they operate follow logical, linear, predictable and controllable patterns devoid of major external or internal shocks to the system, and for forty or fifty years that was largely the case. 

Unfortunately, regular shocks to the system are another characteristic of the global business environment in the twenty-first century. In the last four years alone there have been economic upheavals due to a pandemic and its continuing impact on global logistics and workforce stability, followed by wars and the ever-growing impacts of climate change. Control is a myth, and to pretend otherwise (as most traditional businesses do despite the evidence) is to be constantly chasing your tail, expending a lot of energy while going nowhere fast. 

So where to for that growing business? If the mechanical model of business is broken, how can a modern business design itself to be net positive?

The answer is to see your organisation in a completely different way. To see it as a complex living system rather than a rigid mechanical one. 

Living systems have much greater ability to adapt to unexpected change. In fact, they thrive on it. When it’s impossible to have complete clarity about the direction your growing business will take – that is, when you operate in the real world – this sort of agility is critical.

More than that, when an organisation is designed as a living system, it is ready-made to be net positive, with benefits at every level from customer to community and from junior staff member to shareholder. 

A living system organisation looks very different from its traditional counterpart. It operates from a belief that its people want to and have the capacity to do well and to do the right thing when they have the freedom to do so and the knowledge they need. Part of that knowledge comes from transparency. In a living system, everyone can see how they fit into the whole and how their contribution matters. Hierarchy takes a back seat to ‘everyone has a role to play’ and ‘we’re all in this together’. Uncertainty is embraced as a generator of opportunity, not a threat to the status quo.

The concept of the living system provides a perfect template for a contemporary organisation that wants to be emotionally healthy and net positive. 

However, a word of caution. Creating a living system from an existing business with a more traditional structure is not a case of tinkering at the edges. It requires reframing and a fresh commitment from the company’s owners, its CEO and other senior management. This in turn requires emotionally healthy leadership, vulnerability and authenticity when it comes to loosening the reins. 

It requires a wholesale redesign, including re-thinking many of the structures and beliefs that have underlined the organisation perhaps since its foundation. 

Importantly, re-design of an organisation as a living system needs to be a co-creation, with the collective wisdom, input and effort of everyone. This takes time and dedication, but it sets the business up for resilience and sustainable success by creating a culture that will support the future, whatever it may hold. 

Dayle O’Brien

Over the month of March, the global B Corp community joins together for B Corp Month 2024, celebrating everything it means to be a B Corp. Getting B Corp certified isn’t the end of the road – it’s just the beginning. Most B Corps keep improving their impact over time. As world issues are ever-changing, it’s up to us to keep moving better business forward. And you’re invited. Learn more about how the B Corp standards are evolving. #bcorpmonth

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash