Purpose & Strategy

Making strategy about structure and meaning.

• What will happen to job titles and defined job descriptions?

  In C21st Orgs, job titles and fixed role descriptions won't exist in the same way because most people will execute various roles in their own particular combination. Workload and preferences will allo...

• If roles are fluid and individuals choose the work they are drawn to, what happens to the less popular tasks?

  This question assumes the problems related to less popular tasks that exist within the status quo will be present within the new model. However, as C21st organisations are redesigned around trust and ...

• Purpose & Values: what's different going forward?

  The Status Quo 21st Century Orgs Purpose is static and unchanging. Purpose likely to be evolutionary and may change over time. Purpose has probably barely been thought about until recently and, if it ...

• Is the purpose of business to make money?

  Making money is not the primary reason for a business to exist or be sustained. It is a natural part of the landscape for an enterprise, but it should dominate neither its sense of purpose nor its def...

• What is the 'sense-and-respond' model?

  Sense-and-respond is the alternative model to the one that dominates the status quo: predict-and-control (see: What is predict-and-control?). Essentially the idea is that we can absorb a range of data...

• How are self-managing organisations structured?

  A self-managing business model is not structureless; it does still adopt a guiding form. In his landmark study, Reinventing Organisations, Frederick Laloux describes three “Archetypes of Structure” th...

• What key cultural assumptions must we address?

  If our organisations are going to survive and prosper in this new era of exponential change then we need to address the way they’re organised and managed. To do this our primary task, particularly at ...

• Resources - what's different going forward?

  21st Century Orgs take a very different view of resources than the status quo. What they are and how they should be sourced and valued is reconsidered. Here we identify how across key resource areas: ...

• Strategy - what's different going forwards?

  The Status Quo 21st Century Orgs Strategic direction is rigidly planned. Strategic direction is potentially structured but predominantly emergent (i.e. emerges over time and from all over the organisa...

• What is the important difference between creativity and innovation?

  “Creativity” and “Innovation” are frequently used as interchangeable terms. But they are not the same thing. Creativity is about coming up with ideas. Innovation is the process that exists between ide...