Nurturing conditions for organisations that adapt
At Living Organisations, we believe that engagement and learning at every node of your organisation is a key to the generative nature of adaptation in a world increasingly defined by disruption. Fixed structures of time, place and hierarchy, are of less relevance to the emerging world of work, enabled through socio technology and networks. While these changes present exciting opportunities for new work patterns, they also pose real challenges for how we engage in decision making, communication, collaboration and making sense of complexity. Rising to these challenges require adaptability and coherence in our actions towards shared purpose. It requires a shift in our worldview that closer represents how nature works, less how machines work, but recognises that we participate and shape the unfolding. It requires adaptive structures with the integrity to maintain coherence around purpose, yet flexible to support energy and information flow. In short, it requires engagement processes that vitalise and enable, rather than extract and limit. This generative energy for curiosity, learning and innovation is what enables organisations to learn and adapt.
Our mission is to assist people and organisations to tend to the conditions where ideas, creativity and possibilities can grow within the contexts in which they operate.
The purpose of Living Organisations is to facilitate the cultivation of these qualities. Guided by years of experience, informed by the latest systems thinking, complexity theory and supported by a network of thought leaders across the world, we build processes, tools and techniques that we believe to be the most relevant to our current and emerging contexts.
We currently focus on six areas of focus:
Engagement Strategies - Improving the quality of collaboration, performance and decision making
Project Management - Implementation and adopting new technology that supports collaboration and effectiveness
Thinking Partnerships - Co-creating ideas and perspectives in strategy and process
Career and Life Transitions - Personal career journeys, work and life transition
Epistemological Awareness - Understanding our assumptions that shapes what we think we know
Organisational Design - Moving to towards generative and adaptive organisational patterns in design and adaptation
Contact
➤ LOCATION
Perth | Western Australia | Anywhere
CONTACT
ernst.scholtz@livingorganisations.net
“ Mutual Learning is a form of improvisation that is one of the most crucial skills for the future.”
- Nora Bateson
Areas of Practice
engagement and change strategies
We specialise in the utilisation of innovative whole scale digital, and in person social technologies, structures and processes that adds quality to collective participation, collaboration, engagement and decision making. These strategies are best applied in contexts where both change and decision making is essential in working towards a purpose.
career and life transitions
Different roles, careers and life values emerge in various phases of our lives. What once was important might change. A new role at work might require different competencies and a shift in complexity and perspective. In recognising a constant changing sense of self and identity, requires habits of focus, reflection and relational feedback. We assist with various personal strategies to assist role, career and life transitions.
project MANAGEMENT
Developing an integrated project management framework that supports the objectives of an organisation requires a pragmatic delivery approach that adapts and learns. We consider both the technical and behavioural aspects of key roles within an organisation and develop learning infrastructure and delivery systems to support organisational evolution. We support and project manage system implementations that require a change in the way people work.
organisational design
Organisations that vitalise instead of extract need to find different ways to define work, relationships and context, while adapting to an unfolding mission with decision making at the right level. How we relate, focus, adopt structures, and form habits, looks and feels different. We work with organisations to redefine purpose and develop the practices and processes informed by complex living systems, and shift away from framing organisations primarily as complicated machines, towards adaptive organisms nested in ecology. In established organisations this might mean refactoring and rethinking decision making points and processes to increase learning.
THINKING PARTNERSHIPS
We bring a journey of practical experience in supporting change and organisational thinking. Complexity can feel overwhelming, and many journeys inside organisations can place additional demands on people with less time and space to reflect and find their way unique to their organisations context. We partner in such a journey bringing in adding additional perspectives and search to co-create the new.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AWARENESS
The lens through which we look at the world tends to return and confirm our biases and though processes. In looking at our assumptions we start to question the results and patterns that we bring forth in the way we frame our life and work. Now more than ever, a leader’s capacity to integrate and make sense of complexity requires a fluidity in mind, that includes the observer, increased self-awareness, and the capacity to support the generative conditions for learning, inclusion and care for others. These are necessary conditions for creativity and innovation and extend beyond the boundaries of organisations. We help through reflective processes on patterns informing our assumptions that underlie our actions
“Systems Thinking is ‘contextual’ which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; Systems thinking means putting it into the context of larger wholes”