13 reads to save for later: An open organization roundup

Take a moment to dive into one of our community's recent article series.
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The open organization community is spoiling us.

For months, writers have been showering us with multiple, ongoing series of articles, all focused on different dimensions of open organizational theory and practice. That's led to to a real embarrassment of riches—so many great pieces, so little time to catch them all.

So let's take moment to reflect. If you missed one (or several) now's your chance to catch up.

Open organizations and mental health

Open Organization Ambassador Sam Knuth just wrapped a visceral and moving series on working openly with anxiety. "Living with anxiety and other mental health conditions feels personal," Sam writes. "It's not something I've talked about at work. It's not something I generally discuss, and it's something I've always felt I was coping with as a private part of my life." With this series, that changes.

Communities of practice

Returning contributor Tracy Buckner recently capped a three-part series on communities of practice, cross-functional groups of passionate people all committed to sharing and collaborating on a common interest. "In open organizations, fostering passionate communities can increase collaboration, accelerate problem solving, and lead to greater innovation," Tracy writes. By the end of the series, you'll be well on your way to building your own community.

Adopting new technologies

Adopting new communication technologies can help your teams work openly—but technological change is hard, because it always involves people too. Open Organization Ambassador Ron McFarland's recent series aims to ease the work of those changes. Bonus: Ron developed a downloadable worksheet open leaders can use to assess their teams' preparedness for technological change.

A guide to learning agility

Learning agility may be "the game-changing key to acquisition, retention, engagement, innovation, problem-solving, and leadership in this emerging future," writes Jen Kelchner. Jen's series—still ongoing—explains the benefits of hiring for flexibility and adaptability when building open teams and organizations.

An open organization at Greenpeace

If you missed this one, then you've been asleep since last decade. In one of the community's most elaborate storytelling efforts to date, Open Organization Ambassador Laura Hilliger explains her work helping Greenpeace become a more open organization. "'Open' isn't just a way we can build software," Laura writes. " "It's an attitude we can adopt toward anything we do. And when we adopt it, we can move mountains." She combines text, audio, and video to spin this epic yarn about that very power.

Bryan Behrenshausen
Bryan formerly managed the Open Organization section of Opensource.com, which features stories about the ways open values and principles are changing how we think about organizational culture and design. He's worked on Opensource.com since 2011. Find him online as semioticrobotic.

1 Comment

I really think that building open teams is an idea of how the future workforce is going to look like. Nice thoughts.

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