Think Garden believes the challenge of complexity is the challenge for humanity in the 21st Century; it is therefore the challenge for organisations.
At Think Garden, we help organisations reconfigure their strategy, structure and culture through collections of interconnected and interdependent dynamics, to ensure ongoing survival amidst the complexity of the 21st Century. Yes, those are big words and it takes a while to get to know them well (hovering over them will help you get what we're on about in the meantime). It's just part of the Think Garden journey. Stay with us.
None of the major problems of our time—environmental, social, economic, political and organisational—can be considered as isolated. Our world is interconnected & interdependent, and therefore radically contingent. This means the solving of one problem unintentionally creates many new problems; one changed dynamic creates many new dynamics. It’s called complexity.
And yet modern management and organisational thinking is not prepared for this reality; it originated in a far less connected world—a world of steam trains & steel mills, not serverless cloud and the internet. Many of today’s largest, most contemporary companies, using the latest management thinking, are still born from the old world. They are good at best practice and categorising, but not at sense-making & emergent practice. They speak the language of complexity, but they don’t live its teachings.
Working with complexity—instead of against it—means working with the constantly evolving dynamics that interconnectivity and interdependence continually create (and recreate). Thus, Think Garden seeks not to reconfigure organisations, but rather to reconfigure the dynamics of organising. It’s a subtle, but critical, difference.
So what does all this have to do with you? Well, that's up to you. Are you leading an organisation into the 21st Century or not?
At Think Garden, we work hard to help our clients break the cycle of dependence on external management consultants—our goal is to make ourselves redundant. That’s what genuine, sustainable organisational change looks like. That's what a system that learns is all about.
Too much harm has been done to organisations as a result of management attempting one-size-fits-all solutions based on old-world thinking. This thinking considers change as a process of 'unfreeze-change-refreeze' and it fails to understand the shifts that interconnectivity and interdependence create.
Think Garden helps its clients replace this dependence with an organisational system comprised of people, knowledge and interactions that naturally learns and responds to the constantly evolving dynamics that interconnectivity and interdependence create.
The four modules below describe how we undertake these reconfigurations.
Critical to all of this is that the traditional ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ approach of change management fails to appreciate the constantly evolving dynamics that interconnectivity and interdependence create, at all scales of an organisation. It would therefore be disingenuous for Think Garden to sell you a neatly packaged all-in-one ‘solution’ for your organisation.
What we do instead is use our four modules to help you ascertain where—or in other words, at which scales—in the organisation might be suitable places to begin. It is this initial process of sense-making that serves as a launching point.
It's time to reconfigure anew.
