Jen Kelchner is a thought leader on culture, leadership, and digital transformation. She has been featured in Forbes, CMO.com, Google Cloud, Red Hat, Enterprisers Project and other publications. Jen is a contributor to Opensource.com and is the author of several books Open Organization books and recently published Mesh - an organizational design concept and book. Jen is working on the cutting edge of organizational design, culture and building human-centric systems for a better future. Her company, LDR21, is a transformation agency that helps companies develop a clear digital transformation strategy aligned with their overall business goals and objectives.
Founder @ LDR21 | Founding member of the Forbes Coaches Council, Deloitte alumni, and an Open Organization Ambassador Emeritus | Co-Author of Mesh: a human-centric organisational design for a decentralised world
Authored Comments
I agree with you on the knowledge needed for decision making. I teach my clients about creating decision frameworks to make more intelligent and informed decisions.
While the inputs in the article are a great starting point for governance, I believe the modeling that leadership puts forth in an organizational culture will result in the right conversations for making decisions. What I love about Open models is that we can create the defined structures for an organization and then unleash the diversity of thought and collaborative conversations within that lead to innovation, community and solutions. Your culture becomes a healthy ecosystem with the right flow. Unlike in Closed models where an ecosystem becomes unhealthy and stagnant.
Great question! First, one of the beauties of open is that you can create a sustainable structure of governance that works for your organization. I agree with you regarding Jim's comment on democracy. In the article example, the leader fully believed he leveraged the team to communicate and make decisions. But as we dug into our discovery sessions, we uncovered the model was (severely) closed - in this case democracy would have been an improvement. We found that fear was a motivator to control all decision making and communication funnels. I personally favor more of a meritocracy governance. And, as leaders modeling appropriate self-management for our teams.
No matter the "open __cracy" chosen, making sure it is built on the core principles (transparency, community, collaboration, inclusivity, adaptability) will lead an organization to success. Like anything, or anyone, while a measure of spirit is inherent, walking out our open values is necessary to see it come to fruition in our culture(s). While any new governance structure can be slow...adaptability helps you tweak it to the right ecosystem for you!