Organization design blog

This past week has been about system conversions. In any design project they are fraught with difficulty. They've been brought to my attention in four different circumstances this week, two business and two personal:

a) The merger of United and Continental airlines
b) The trusted traveler program
c) The collapse of my personal laptop
d) My leaving one job to start another in a different organization.

First the merger of United and Continental: I fly United a lot and was interested to see how they would handle the merger with Continental when it was announced a couple of years ago. The main way I've experienced it is through their frequent flier program. So late last year I got a mailing saying my card that was due to expire in January, would be valid until the end of March. This mailing was sent to a prior address but it finally got to me. I checked to confirm that I had, in fact, changed the address in my passenger profile, which I had, so I don't know how that happened but put it down to merger glitches.

I liked the way that with this announcement came a little gold sticker, saying "valid until the end of March" that came with the instruction to stick it on the frequent flier card. I imagined a bunch of people trying to work out what the best method was of getting to this solution and wondered how much the gold stickers cost. What was the rationale for them? Couldn't they have instructed everyone that all cards expiring January 2012 would be valid till end March and saved on the stickers?

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So this week I sent off to the editor Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book on organizational health and started to plan out Chapter 6 which is on healthy technologies. (The book is coming out in December this year).

People ask me how I write. By this they seem to mean what is the process I go through to get words on a page. Do I plan things out? Do I just begin? How do I know what I want to say? The answer is that I have a rough idea of what I want to say – it feels rather like a lump of clay that I put on a potter's wheel with the idea that I will make a vase. Then as I begin turning the words something completely different emerges. I have the ability to knock it down and start again or shape it differently. And this is how I began Chapter 6. I know I want to write about healthy technologies – but what specifically?

Part of my writing process is that once I have roughed out the book contents I then open a folder for each chapter and put into the folder any articles I come across that I think will be relevant to that chapter. Additionally I boldly open a word document with the chapter number and title and just drop into it anything that could be useful when I come to writing that chapter. Thus in determining to begin actually writing Chapter 6 I looked through the articles I had for it, and at the random stuff in my Chapter 6 word document.

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Every so often I read in Fast Company or TechCrunch or somewhere else, a list of useful websites someone has compiled in relation to some topic that they're interested in. Usually, reading these, I find one or two sites that I take a look at. One week, a few weeks ago, I notice that people were giving me links to websites that they'd come across. So below is a random list of websites that came my way one week in March!

The first came through my own website and is from someone at ExperiencePoint. He says that - "I am with ExperiencePoint, and we have a family of web-based change leadership simulations that I am hoping would be a fit within your work. They are engaging learning tools that can help build the change and innovation competency necessary to transform organisations. Executive education centres at LBS, Ashridge, Manchester Business School, Wharton, Duke CE, and others use them with world leading organisations."

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Yesterday we were celebrating the move to the new office. On Monday the final set of people moved in and so we are now 'moved'. It's all very exciting, and to celebrate we held a 'Town Hall', immediately followed by the 'Holiday Party'.

The 'Town Hall' wasn't strictly a town hall, but more of a 'Staff Meeting', (UK) or 'All Hands' (US). A Town Hall is traditionally an informal democratic forum in which citizens have an opportunity to put their point of view and hear what others have to say on a specific political issue or community topic.

The term has now migrated to organizations to describe a large scale face to face meeting where orchestrated information is presented for information, update, or education. It seems that organizational Town Halls are less about consultation and more about telling staff things, although there's usually some form of Q and A slot. For example,

"Steve Jobs recently held a Town Hall meeting for Apple employees, and according to Wired, he had some very choice words for both Google and Adobe."

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Yesterday was my day for thinking about space andorganizational performance. First, I listened to a webinar hosted by the Real Estate Executive Board. It was called the Headquarter Relocation Strategy Playbook and billed as:

"Another addition to REEB's collection of playbooks; this teleconference lays out a road map on the best way to tackle a headquarter relocation. Filled with case studies, actionable tools, and time-saving templates, this playbook should be your first stop when creating your own internal strategy."

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"Emerging" is a word that's I'm hearing a lot right now (emerging leaders, emerging change, emerging strategy, emerging markets, etc) and one that I'm not sure about - this uncertaining is has been highlighted by having just come from a conversation centered on "emerging technologies". It left me wondering - What is 'emerging'? What are these technologies? What, if any are the connections between the various emergings - for example, do more emerging technologies come from emerging markets than from mature markets?

Going back to basics, 'emerging' means "to come forth into view or notice, as from concealment or obscurity" so when yesterday, I was discussing "emerging markets" I meant markets that were coming into view i.e. people were beginning to take notice of them for various reasons. And like the 'emerging markets' there are 'emerging technologies' i.e. those ones that are beginning to hit the mainstream and become noticed.

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