Change architecture is a combination of strategic insight, innovative organizational design and project management focused on creating new possibilities for organized human endeavor. Designing change for an organiza-tion is complex. The behavioural space of an organization is comprised of a dynamic interplay of many factors. Finding the right leverage points to accomplish any planned change can be difficult. The first step is having the right “road map” or paradigm for an organization that can guide the appropriate analytical inquiry and action steps for any given problem situation.

Aspects of Organized Initiative

The paradigm for understanding organizations used by Equilibria begins with a comprehensive view of the total structure of an organization. This consists of nine aspects expressed at a particular moment in time:

Leadership, from this perspective, is the process of shifting the place from which a system operates; refocusing and reconfiguring the structure of collective attention.** It also will foster the capacities that individuals will need to function in this world of increasing complexity and turbulent change. The individual capacities for Imagination, Courage and Creativity are higher forms of consciousness that give access and shape to the higher aspects of organization: vision and direction, mission and identity.

Management Aspects

The growth of management and its increasingly important role in organizations is a 20th century phenomenon. Distinguished here from leadership, management aspects have to do with creating the appropriate structure within which the work is distributed in a group of people, designing and overseeing the basic

Leadership Aspects

The leadership aspects of the structural framework represent the intangible aspects of an organization. They are combination of the totality of perceptions of what is coming toward the organization from the future.

operational processes where work is distributed in time, and securing and maintaining adequate and appropriate facilities and resources that allow and support the work to be done.

Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin after 10 years of research have reached the conclusion that the basic “enterprise logic” underlying today’s typical corporate organization is no longer suited to provide the goods and services required by the individuals that now are their prime customers.

What is needed, according to Zuboff and Maxmin, is a new kind of “enterprise logic” that can authentically support individuals in their quest for psychological self-determination. Organizations that operate according to the new enterprise logic are structurally and functionally different. The sum total of these new organizations will make up what they call a “new support economy.”***

The scope of the changes envisioned by Zuboff and Maxim point to both a reorientation in the way organizations are structured as well as how individuals relate to each other as mediated by organizational life. We might think of it as a kind of “extreme makeover” which will update and align organizations with current reality.

Individual Aspects

The individual aspects focus on the human beings living and working “in” the organization. Typically organizations use job descriptions, organizational structures, lines of command to organize who does what, when, with whom, how, for what period of time, and why. The work to be accomplished is clearly specified in advance.

We have been fitting people into organizational boxes, rather than building organizations around the talents of the people. Start-up, entrepreneurial companies begin this way, but as soon as they achieve a certain size, ‘roles’ are established along with their associated job descriptions. Once roles are assigned, people find themselves limited to the requirements of the particular role. In turn, individuals trade their mental, emotional and spiritual freedom to fit themselves into the organizational context. As a result, people are left hungry for a sense of connection to their work and to others.****

It is at this juncture where we need to recognize that a strengthening of individual capacities and the individual’s connection to the “design” of the workplace—how work is organized—is one of the tasks of the higher stages of organizational development. We need to learn how everyone can take initiative, become more accountable and learn to collaborate with others toward common purposes. It is only on this basis that the organizational “design” process can be turned inside-out and the work to be done becomes self-organizing.

*Adapted from Tijno Voors and Christopher Schaefer, Vision in Action, 1986.

**From Claus Otto Scharmer, “Presencing—A Social Technology of Freedom,” Trigon Themen, February 2002.

***From Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, The Support Economy, 2002.

****From Germaine Watts, Organizational Principles, 2004.