Organizational Evolution

As we organize human work and learning at fantastic scales, let’s strive for something inspiring. Through our relationship with machines, humans are building a new, synthetic intelligence. Organizations are the home for this part-human, part-machine intelligence. The topic to which we now turn is the role organizations play in coordinating the immense scale of work […]

This article originally appeared in YES! Magazine and was then picked up this morning by AlterNet where it is now featured on the homepage. It’s about addressing the threat of technological unemployment (the large-scale loss of jobs to automation) by expanding who ‘owns the robots’ — i.e. who owns the companies that are doing the automating.

With each passing year, organizations act more and more like living entities thanks to the evolution of technology. The notion that organizations might be a form of life is a radical perspective. It is useful as metaphor, but through this and future articles, I hope to persuade you that an “organization as life” perspective is

You may have never heard of “Deliberately Developmental Organizations.”  I hadn’t, until yesterday, but it’s an idea that’s worth understanding because it appeals to some very basic human desires and because it fits nicely the idea of “regenerative business,” which I occasionally write about on this site. What is a “Deliberately Developmental Organization”? Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey

Many of us who have worked in organizations fool ourselves into believing something that just isn’t really true. We think of organizational boundaries as something real, when in fact, it’s just a concept. Sure, boundaries matter from a legal point of view, but that perspective also creates a distortive field that obscures a more important

“Nemawashi” I took a year off in college to go work and study in Japan and went back again in grad school for an internship with Fuji-Xerox (who had some of the very first graphical user interface workstations … remember it all came out of Xerox PARC). While living and working in Japan, I learned

This summer, my wife and I took our two boys to visit the famous Ford Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan. This Ford Motor Company factory was once the wonder of the industrial world, where Henry Ford pioneered America’s leadership in last-century manufacturing. Hub Controls the Spokes The Rouge Plant was the first large-scale example of “vertical integration”

We can learn a lot about organizations from biology. In my last post, I wrote about how the membrane of the cell provides a new perspective on the way organizations connect with the world around them. I closed that piece by noting that the “intelligence of the [cell’s] membrane is a metaphor for something very specific and very real…something

In this article, you’ll learn about a new way of thinking about organizational boundaries; one that helps connect what’s inside the organization with what’s outside it. You’ll also get a new framework for thinking about the way organizations engage customers, partners, and other organizations. It draws deeply on lessons from biology and the amazing ways