The Organization as a Machine: An Outdated Concept - XPLANE | Organizational Change Management Consulting

We had five factors from purpose to landscape to climate to doctrine to leadership and somehow I had been jumping from purpose to leadership and missing three of them. Despite what I had read, there existed two very different forms of why that mattered — purpose and movement — and we weren’t even considering movement. We had no maps of the environm... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is ... See more

Management systems have been designed to provide reliability and efficiency, not adaptability and agility. Many of the tools and practices of modern management are geared towards solving problems and eliminating deviations in processes, behaviors, and practices. Because of this framework, management training and leadership development is often focu... See more

There are a lot of approaches to organization design, but none are reliable and construct-valid. It ignores how personhood and work are intertwined. In addition, the organization isn't a self-aware social singularity, so employees are differentiated as futuristic cogs who 'energize' themselves autonomously. A strategy that can only focus on one sid... See more

I met up with a few of my peers from other companies and floated this idea of topographical intelligence and the use of mapping in business. How did they learn from one battle to another? To say I was disheartened by the response would be an underestimation. Beyond the blank stares, I was royally lectured on the importance of culture, of purpose, o... See more