Agile organizational development
Agile organizational
development
A company’s ability to adapt quickly and regularly to change can be a major competitive advantage. In dynamic environments, this ability is even essential for survival.
But change is also stressful and involves a lot of uncertainty. Change projects are often associated with painful memories. Organizations therefore tend to avoid change. Employees remain in a state of “One would have to…”.
We support you in empowering your company at all levels of agile organizational development: to continuously mirror yourself and your environment and make these observations discussable, to gain hypotheses and deductions from them and thus provoke good ideas, and finally to make resilient and courageous decisions and test them quickly and effectively.
Exactly how this works for you depends on how strong the ability to change already is in your company and at what speed your organization can develop.
Do you have questions?
“Now that we have been on the path to a more agile organization together with the Organeers for more than a year, we are noticing clear changes in our behavior, starting with us in management: we have become much braver, can let go and experiment more.”
Nina Schubert, CEO
mediaman GmbH
When we started working with Organeers, we found ourselves in an error culture dominated by silo thinking and little creativity. In addition, our information and communication structure was very hierarchical; our employees had little knowledge of our economic situation, for example.
Even though it was crystal clear to us that we wanted a different form of company management and cooperation, the path was still difficult.
Letting go was not easy for us, we always tried to protect ourselves by going through all possible edge cases in advance to protect ourselves as much as possible from mistakes.
Now that we have been on the path to a more agile organization together with Organeers for more than a year, we are noticing clear changes in our behavior, starting with us in management: we have become much bolder, can
let go and experiment more.”
Overall, communication and information at mediaman is much more open and clear, which helps us enormously because we can get to the really important things faster and more concretely.
How did we manage that? Through regular joint, accompanied reflections on our structure and cooperation, including the resulting changes. This helps us not to remain rigid in the next structure, but to make adjustments again and again where necessary. It was very tedious and exhausting at first, but with each iteration it becomes easier and more normal for all of us.
We have also established subject areas in which employees can drive forward company-relevant topics and ideas quickly and effectively on their own responsibility with a team they have put together themselves. This builds up speed, leads to really good solutions and creates a new self-confidence at mediaman, because we are creating something tangible.
We experience the cooperation with Organeers as very open, approachable and trusting. They get actively involved, sometimes give us the impetus we still need to get going and support us so that we feel safer. We see more clearly today and have become more courageous.
»Up to now, we had actually worked almost method-free, and with the OD Circle (Coordination Circle for Organizational Development) we have now introduced a very stringent meta-process with which, in principle, every employee can make structural problems visible and also bring ideas for solutions to a decision.«
Claas Voigt, CEO
emetriq GmbH
The starting point was that, since our departure into self-organization, we had found ourselves caught in a certain way between the directive introduction of structures and leaving the teams to their own devices. We oscillated between these two extremes, and in the past we had not found a good way to create the necessary framework centrally so that truly decentralized cooperation could also function well across the board. This more or less led to chaos and we were not in a good position to make really robust organizational development decisions and to develop ourselves consistently.
Up to now, we had actually worked almost method-free, and with the OD Circle (Coordination Circle for Organizational Development) we have now introduced a very stringent meta-process with which, in principle, every employee can make structural problems visible and also bring ideas for solutions to a decision. In this way, we are now methodically managing the necessary balancing act between central decision-making and involving the entire organization. Of course, we are still seeing significant resistance to change in a wide variety of places, but this is no longer directed at the management; it is undirected and therefore much less destructive and no longer at the relationship level.
Of course, the OD circle is also a small formal hurdle for some people at the beginning, but the decisive factor is that the circle of problem providers is constantly growing, as is the circle of solution providers. Cooperation between the company and individual parts with the OD circle is growing slowly but steadily and we are now managing to actively involve more and more colleagues in iterative organizational development.
I have found the collaboration with the Organeers to be very collegial, less distanced in an advisory capacity, which is also very important for us and our culture in order to be able to establish the necessary proximity to get to the root of some problems much more quickly. You are always very focused on solving the problem and yet very well-founded and equipped with a lot of experience as to which interventions work and which are unlikely to work. And yet, of course, the external advisor, who can always take a neutral position if a conflict arises between two parties in order to mediate.
“With Organeers, we have been able to think differently about the development of our organization and, as a result, significantly reduce our growing pains while at the same time visibly leveraging the dormant potential we had suspected.”
Andreas Jonderko, Owner & CEO
gastronovi GmbH
In the beginning, with our 10 – 20 people, everything was no problem, we were small teams. But I wouldn’t have thought that it would develop into divisions and rifts and an elbow mentality, especially because we’re all there for the same cause. Back then, the biggest mistake for me was to look to corporations to take a leaf out of their book.
With Organeers, we were able to think differently about the development of our organization and, as a result, significantly reduce our growing pains and at the same time visibly leverage the dormant potential that we had suspected.
One of the core topics of this process, namely setting up interdisciplinary teams, solves pretty much all the problems we had before: in structure, in responsibility, in coordination, in project management… When I think of our workshops in the past alone, with 12 people from sales and another 6 from the project and and and and… how productive can that be in the end? Now it’s as if you’ve been on a huge diet and suddenly you can move again.
We are very operational and opportunistic by nature and still have to learn to work continuously on our structures, which we have done far too little of so far. We also tackled this topic together and now have really great colleagues who are driving this topic forward, in addition to the newly established workspaces that deal with strategic and structural topics. It is made up of representatives from various roles and responsibilities at gastronovi, who work together to continuously develop our organization. More and more people are learning to take different perspectives and make decisions.
Collaboration with the Organeers is very agile, not so typically structured and has this special feature of a different perspective. You have taught me a lot about running without plans, contrary to my preference for structure. And I particularly like how quickly and clearly you have uncovered the weaknesses in our system.
