Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Organization
Posted on August 17, 2015 by HYPERLINK
"http://tyndaleblogs.ca/rethinkleadership/author/afrancis/" \o "View all posts by afrancis" afrancis
In the last few blog posts, we have been talking about the nature of organizational
culture. Lately, Ive been thinking about the best possible culture to support
environments where there is a high degree of change or what Courtney (2001)
calls residual uncertainty.
Most organizations dont work like the game of baseball, unfortunately. Navigating
organizational leadership means finding our way in a world where often our best
solutions, perfectly executed, will fail anyway.
Complex environments require a certain kind of culture to thrive. In fact, culture will
make or break the health of an organization. Following are four characteristics of
cultures that best support complex environments.
1. Hierarchy is Secondary
So, how do complex, adaptive systems thrive?
1. When they have the least rules possible to produce the desired patterns of behaviour across the
system
2. When members or agents in the system have freedom for self-organization, which leads to emergent
change
This is the antithesis of a hierarchy culture (one of four cultures that emerge from
Cameron and Quinns competing values framework (2011)). Your organization may
function under a hierarchy culture if it does the following:
http://tyndaleblogs.ca/rethinkleadership/blogs/4-traits-of-an-adaptive-organization/