OD53: Interested in Personal Strategy? 🧭💡

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Dear readers,

This edition marks the start of the second year of the OrgDev newsletter.

We’re happy and honored to have close to 3000 global peers subscribed to the weekly updates. Thanks for your continued support! 🙏

Going forward, we invite you to keep sending us your thoughts, Strategy & Organization resources that you find useful, info about learning opportunities that our readers might enjoy, or just say hi by replying to any of the e-mails from us. We read and reply to all the messages from you 🌿

Interested in Personal Strategy?

Bülent has just started an exploration about personal strategy - applying strategy concepts to navigating better the wider personal environment and answering the question of "How can I better figure my way forward?" 🧭💡

His aim is to explore strategy concepts from as many fields as possible: business 📊, military ⚔️, sports ⚽️, biology 🐙, gaming 🎮, geopolitics ♠️, martial arts 🥋, sailing ⛵️, racing 🏎 and others. Then refine the core ideas in simple forms that each of us can use in our individual journeys.

You can read about why Personal Strategy matters (3 min read), about the Personal Strategy model that he uses (6 min read) and also about how he crafted his personal strategy for 2021 (9 min read).

If this resonates with you, you can follow the updates by subscribing here:

Personal Strategy updates

1. Sense & Explore

Curiosity fuels exploration. Curated resources that might come in handy.

#Practice

• Product Coalition: You might enjoy browsing this comprehensive list of prioritization frameworks - we discovered some new ideas after skimming the list.

• OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation: An insightful piece about the different types of innovation networks.

"Whatever their form, the value of networks is that they can connect shared interests, make it easier to learn from others who are doing similar work or who are facing similar challenges, and help explore and map out an emergent field of activity that is not yet ‘mapped’ to official responsibilities, job descriptions and organizational mandates. 

Obviously, they can come in many different shapes and sizes, with very different purposes and operate in different ways, but I think there are some things that they have that are particularly useful or needed for innovation. 

To successfully undertake and introduce innovative projects and processes often requires patience, determination and resilience. So it is an area where it can be especially important to be able to connect with and learn from others. 

Types of innovation networks:

1. Inspiration and sharing ideas

2. Encouragement and validation

3. Advice and support

4. Understanding and shared experiences"

#Reflect

• workfutures: Food for thought titled Some Feedback About Feedback. It’s about questioning the inherent goodness of giving feedback to others, and the unexamined premises that underlie people’s obsession with it.

The only area where we can rely on a person as a source of truth is about their own feelings, not about others’ capabilities.

#Study

• managing people with data: Why is bursty interaction better for performance? Why do teams who unconsciously synchronize their behavior perform better?

This piece explores communication patterns among team members, collective intelligence, the connection between behavior synchronization and team performance.

The research has a number of implications for remote companies and distributed teams. First, an always-on culture does not help with team performance. Neither does it help when teams only discuss at regular intervals, like during scheduled check-ins. Good team communication seems to be random from the outside but actually demonstrates that team members are attuned to each other and the pace of their project.

2. Sense & Connect

The wisdom is in the conversations. Opportunities to connect and learn together.

• EODF: Reminder - the next monthly book club happens next week and it’s about Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World. Kathleen M Eisenhardt, one of the authors, will join the talks.

See you there on Tuesday, 2 FEB 2021 from 18:00 to 19:30 CET (free to attend).

Register here

3. Sense & Change

Understanding new concepts and putting them into practice.

We’re really happy that some of you have already started mapping stakeholders dynamically - for business, but also for societal challenges. Given this momentum, we might organize a pop-up practice session soon, to practice dynamic mapping together.

Here’s the v2 of the Guide to Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping.

Next update comes in a couple of weeks, with the 4 map examples of:

• a strategic initiative
• product development
• B2B business development
• career navigation

Get the guide

Next week we’ll publish the first version of the detailed Guide to the Team Chemistry Framework. The next guide will most likely be about Taming the Information Overload Dragon, as this looks like a need for most of us, as knowledge workers.

Thanks for reading

This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the Sense & Change team.

As Strategy & Organization professionals, we're using systems thinking and behavioral science to advise VPs, Directors and their teams to make their organizations more effective.

Our professional mission and intended legacy is:

Creating and sharing sustainable knowledge that helps people deal with the complex challenges they (will) face.

Let’s get in touch on LinkedIn or Medium.