Organisational Design Quotes

Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure

We have to accept that much of reality is ineffable and so to understand it we can't rely on words alone.

Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.

Men (women were not found to exhibit this bias) who believe that they are objective in hiring decisions are more likely to hire a male applicant than an identically described female applicant. And in organisations which are explicitly presented as meritocratic, managers favour male employees over equally qualified female employees.

What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP and HTML. There was no central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even organisation anywhere that "ran" the Web. The Web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place". It was a "space" in which information could exist.

I got some funny reactions, a lot of irate reactions, as if I were somehow taking people's fun away from them. I have nothing against sports. I like to watch a good basketball game and that sort of thing. On the other hand, we have to recognise that the mass hysteria about spectator sports plays a significant role. First of all, spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not doing them; you're watching somebody doing them. Secondly, they engender jingoist and chauvinist attitudes, sometimes to quite an extreme degree. I saw something in the newspapers just a day or two ago about how high-school teams are now so antagonistic and passionately committed to winning at all costs that they had to abandon the standard handshake before or after the game. These kids can't even do civil things like greeting one another because they're ready to kill one another. It's spectator sports that engender those attitudes, particularly when they're designed to organise a community to be hysterically committed to their gladiators. That's very dangerous, and it has lots of deleterious effects.

Vast organisations produce a sense of impotence in the individual, leading to a decay of effort. The danger can be averted if it is realised by administrators, but it is of a kind which most administrators are constitutionally incapable of realising. Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism, enough to prevent immobility leading to decay, but not enough to bring about disruption.

When we say ‘housing for all’ and the government responds with ‘the homeless are being temporarily housed in hotels to avoid the spread of the virus’, they are building a linguistic structure that defines the realm of the possible, that implicitly tells us to want less, to expect that total reconfiguration is out of the question. Like a poorly designed building, linguistic structures affect how we think, breathe, move and act. The mould sticks to our skin. We are familiar with a particular kind of linguistic structure: the preservation of a system of organisation that places capital before all else. This system ties our hands and feet together.

The desires of an individual can be collected into groups, each group constituting what some psychologists call a ‘sentiment’. There will be—to take politically important sentiments—love of home, of family, of country, love of power, love of enjoyment, and so on; there will also be sentiments of aversion, such as fear of pain, laziness, dislike of foreigners, hatred of alien creeds, and so on. A man's sentiments at any given moment are a complicated product of his nature, his past history, and his present circumstances. Each sentiment, in so far as it is one which many men can gratify cooperatively better than singly, will, given opportunity, generate one or more organisations designed for its gratification. Take, for example, family sentiment. This has given rise, or has helped to give rise, to organisations for housing, education, and life insurance, which are matters in which the interests of different families are in harmony.

In the medium term, AI may automate our jobs, to bring both great prosperity and equality. Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved. There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movies. As mathematician Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, in what science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge called a technological singularity. One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders and potentially subduing us with weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

Scientists will discover a weak correlation between A and B, assuming C under D conditions. The university PR office will then post something for immediate release: ‘Scientists Find Potential Link Between A and B (under certain conditions)’. News organisations will pick it up and publish, ‘A causes B, say scientists’, which will then be read by The Internets and turned into ‘A causes B - ALL THE TIME!’ Which will then be picked up by TV shows that run stories like ‘A ... A Killer Among Us??’ All of this eventually leads to your grandma getting all weird about A.

Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b, Itziti 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organised victimisation of children and adults. Dissociation, amnesia and attachment, in particular, have been identified as important factors that compel victims to obey their abusers whilst inhibiting them from disclosing their abuse or seeking help (see Epstein et al. 2011, Sachs and Galton 2008). Therapists and social workers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by perpetrators of organised abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterised either as dissociated automatons mindlessly perpetuating the abuse that they, too, were subjected to as children, or else as cruel and manipulative criminals with expert foreknowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organised abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies of the perpetrators. Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strategies designed to terrorise children into silence and obedience, the emphasis of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organised abuse has overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and violence as social practices.

Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs. In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production. Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal. Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occupation. They provide employment to many people in their factories, newspapers, insurance firms, and supermarket chains, yet their financial success is an empty happiness because it is not motivated by understanding or compassion. Caught up in their small world of profit and loss, they are unaware of the suffering and poverty in the world. When we are not int ouch with this larger reality, we will lack the compassion we need to nourish and guide us to happiness. Once you begin to realise your interconnectedness with others, your interbeing, you begin to see how your actions affect you and all other life. You begin to question your way of living, to look with new eyes at the quality of your relationships and the way you work. You begin to see, 'I have to earn a living, yes, but I want to earn a living mindfully. I want to try to select a vocation not harmful to others and to the natural world, one that does not misuse resources.' Entire companies can also adopt this way of thinking. Companies have the right to pursue economic growth, but not at the expense of other life. They should respect the life and integrity of people, animals, plants and minerals. Do not invest your time or money in companies that deprive others of their lives, that operate in a way that exploits people or animals, and destroys nature. Businesspeople who visit Plum Village often find that getting in touch with the suffering of others and cultivating understanding brings them happiness. They practise like Anathapindika, a successful businessman who lived at the time of the Buddha, who with the practise of mindfulness throughout his life did everything he could to help the poor and sick people in his homeland.

Slow down. The Taliban were religious, in the sense that in their opinion a being called Allah really designed and created the world and everything in it, including them. They were also a cultus in that they believed that you should pray five times a day, study the Koran, fast during Ramadan, give a tenth of your income to the poor and visit Mecca at least once in your lifetime. It is a matter of record that they had the ancient statues at Bamyan destroyed. But Professor, who put up the statues? Buddhist monks, that's who. Possibly the monks were not religious, in the sense that they didn't believe in a designer-God but they were certainly part of a cultus and they had lots and lots of supernatural beliefs which you would think were Bad Things. So what you should have said is "Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues. Imagine no ancient statues for the Taliban to blow up." This is absolutely emblematic of your confused attitude. When a religious organisation does something which annoys you, you take it for granted that it was Caused By Religion. But when a religious organisation does something which you quite like you don't think that "religion" had anything to do with it. You hardly spot that there was any religion involved at all.

When we say ‘housing for all’ and the government responds with ‘the homeless are being temporarily housed in hotels to avoid the spread of the virus’, they are building a linguistic structure that defines the realm of the possible, that implicitly tells us to want less, to expect that total reconfiguration is out of the question. Like a poorly designed building, linguistic structures affect how we think, breathe, move and act. The mould sticks to our skin. We are familiar with a particular kind of linguistic structure: the preservation of a system of organisation that places capital before all else. This system ties our hands and feet together.

The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organisation, and maximise chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organise chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility – but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. Even the elephant cannot violate the law of thermodynamics – although its trunk, surely, must rank as one of the most peculiar means of moving matter using energy.

Once the immediate danger of the reactor fire was over, work began on a gargantuan operation to clean up radioactive dust and debris across the newly established 30km exclusion zone - particularly around Chernobyl itself - and to design and construct a gigantic cover over Unit 4 to isolate it from the surrounding environment. Military and civilian personnel throughout the Soviet Union were drafted in for the operation, where they became known as Liquidators - liquidating the disaster’s effects. According to the World Health Organisation, some 240,000 men and women working within the 30km Exclusion Zone were recognised as Liquidators between 1986 and ‘87. The clean-up operation continued on a relatively large scale until 1990, by which time around 600,000 civilian and military personnel had received special certificates confirming their status as Liquidators.215

We’ve got a model for how to do this – though it comes in a slightly unfortunate guise. Religions have often ensured that their followers would meet with the Sublime on a weekly basis, in a cathedral or church somewhere not very far from where they lived. They constructed buildings specifically designed to awe the congregation. But they didn’t just hope that people would drop by. They put a date in the diary, every week. If you lived in the Vienna suburb of Wieden, for instance, you’d go to the Karlskirche at 11.00am every Sunday and be confronted with the Sublime. This beneficial psychological service is in reality distinct from the specifically religious convictions that orchestrated it. But the decline of organised religious faith in many parts of the world has inadvertently also taken away this collective commitment to regularly reactivating our sense of the Sublime.

The nations whose chief support was in the chase, whose chief interest was in the battle, whose chief pleasure was in the banquet, would take small care respecting the shapes of leaves and flowers; and notice little in the forms of the forest trees which sheltered them, except the signs indicative of the wood which would make the toughest lance, the closest roof, or the clearest fire. The affectionate observation of the grace and outward character of vegetation is the sure sign of a more tranquil and gentle existence, sustained by the gifts, and gladdened by the splendour, of the earth. In that careful distinction of species, and richness of delicate and undisturbed organisation, which characterise the Gothic design, there is the history of rural and thoughtful life, influenced by habitual tenderness, and devoted to subtle inquiry; and every discriminating and delicate touch of the chisel, as it rounds the petal or guides the branch, is a prophecy of the development of the entire body of the natural sciences, beginning with that of medicine, of the recovery of literature, and the establishment of the most necessary principles of domestic wisdom and national peace.

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimised by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Daly (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilise 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the catharthic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

Perpetrators were designated vaguely as 'Asians', while claims were made that the abuse was not about ethnicity and religion but about domination of man over woman;and anyway, who are we, with our Church paedophilia and sexual abuse scandals - that of the media personality Jimmy Saville being a case in point - to adopt the moral high ground over a victimised minority?......In both cases , we are dealing with organised - ritualised even - collective activity. In the case of Rotherham, another parallel may be even more pertinent. One of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity of different levels of social life- behaviour that somehow seems out of sync with the age in which we live - is the rise of the violence against women.

I explored the importance of politics and power for the consultant who becomes a temporary participant in the patterning of relations and discussion in any organisation into which they are invited. I also offered a critique of the idea of a consultant or manager as someone who somehow stands outside this patterning and by being objective can offer some kind of ‘diagnosis’ of what is ‘really going on’. In much contemporary management literature managers are also thought to be ‘system designers’, Senge (1990), which implies not only that an organisation can be thought of as a ‘system’ but that a manager has the ability to be part of and separate from the system which is being designed. There is no indication in such theories how it is possible to reconcile the notion of a free individual choosing what kind of intervention to make at the same time as assuming that there is an equally independent, self-regulating ‘whole’ organisation upon which one is acting. As an alternative I started to argue, drawing particularly on the work of Norbert Elias, that both consultants and managers are forming and being formed by the web of relations into which they are acting, and are constrained in what they are able to understand and do.

beware the "slash"—a job listing that advertises for a UX/UI designer betrays a lack of appreciation for the value of UX, and suggests that the organisation is probably actually looking for a UI designer.

By drawing on Taylor and Arendt, I have made alternative claims for the visioning process: that it is a necessary and powerful way for groups of staff to exercise freedom together, of imagining a new future, but that it is a temporary and partial process which cannot map out all aspects of knowing how to take the next steps. As generalisations, such statements only take us so far in knowing how to act. Rather, it is incumbent upon staff in organisations continuously to look for ways to discuss, argue over, rework and functionalise these idealisations. I am arguing that change is not something which can be just designed and prescribed by senior managers in an idealised strategy process, but is happening every day in every department and unit in the organisation. Being open to what the organisation is already becoming allows for the possibility of the practical implications of a visioning process to emerge. The dangers of not being open implies that we already know what’s best for the organisation irrespective of the variety of work environments where staff are already largely doing their best to make things work. It then has the potential for bullying and even violence, where by violence I take Arendt’s definition of the prevention of the necessary daily struggles over power.

It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’,34 used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji.35 This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users:36 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male. The emojis we have on our smartphones are chosen by the rather grand-sounding ‘Unicode Consortium’, a Silicon Valley-based group of organisations that work together to ensure universal, international software standards. If Unicode decides a particular emoji (say ‘spy’) should be added to the current stable, they will decide on the code that should be used. Each phone manufacturer (or platform such as Twitter and Facebook) will then design their own interpretation of what a ‘spy’ looks like. But they will all use the same code, so that when users communicate between different platforms, they are broadly all saying the same thing. An emoji face with heart eyes is an emoji face with heart eyes. Unicode has not historically specified the gender for most emoji characters. The emoji that most platforms originally represented as a man running, was not called ‘man running’. It was just called ‘runner’. Similarly the original emoji for police officer was described by Unicode as ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’. It was the individual platforms that all interpreted these gender-neutral terms as male. In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people.38 So instead of ‘runner’ which had been universally represented as ‘male runner’, Unicode issued code for explicitly male runner and explicitly female runner. Male and female options now exist for all professions and athletes. It’s a small victory, but a significant one.

Shearwater TSCM specialises in the design, manufacture and training for integrated counter surveillance solutions. Our clients include government, military organisations, police, larger corporations and professional sweep teams. Shearwater's equipment is deployed around the world. The close relationship the company has with it's clients, through training and feedback from field operations, ensures that ongoing development focuses on leading edge, maintaining a 'Defence in Breadth' philosophy.

If you gather a team of experienced leaders and ask them why past projects failed, the explanations flow readily: The project was bigger than we realised . . . we were too slow . . . our design was flawed . . . we were operating from faulty assumptions . . . the market changed . . . we had the wrong people . . . our technology didn’t work . . . our strategy was unclear . . . our costs were too high . . . our organisation sabotaged us . . . the competition was tougher than we thought . . . we reorganised ourselves to death . . . we fought among ourselves . . . our strategy was flawed . . . our strategy was good but our execution was lousy . . . we ran into unexpected bottlenecks . . . we misunderstood our customers . . . we were short on resources . . . the economics didn’t work . . . we got killed by internal politics . . .

It has become fashionable for modern workplaces to relax what are often seen as outmoded relics of a less egalitarian age: out with stuffy hierarchies, in with flat organisational structures. But the problem with the absence of a formal hierarchy is that it doesn’t actually result in an absence of a hierarchy altogether. It just means that the unspoken, implicit, profoundly non-egalitarian structure reasserts itself, with white men at the top and the rest of us fighting for a piece of the small space left for everyone else. Group-discussion approaches like brainstorming, explains female leadership trainer Gayna Williams, are ‘well known to be loaded with challenges for diverse representation’, because already-dominant voices dominate.

One promising way of redefining the meaning of ‘economist’ is to look to those who have gone beyond new economic thinking to new economic doing: the innovators who are evolving the economy one experiment at a time. Their impact is already reflected in the take-off of new business models, in the proven dynamism of the collaborative commons, in the vast potential of digital currencies and in the inspiring possibilities of regenerative design. As Donella Meadows made clear, the power of self-organisation—the ability of a system to add, change and evolve its own structure—is a high leverage point for whole system change. And that unleashes a revolutionary thought: it makes economists of us all. If economies change by evolving, then every experiment—be it a new enterprise model, complementary currency or open-source collaboration —helps to diversify, select and amplify a new economic future.

Multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational work does not depend on designing the perfect system, but on enabling people to work together with shared intentions and a sense of personal and professional agency

If we wish to embed design approaches more firmly into the fabric of public organisations as an approach to dealing with change, then do we not need to examine our current governance mechanisms as well?

One might say, with Latour, that what comes into play is a continuous discovery of the state; or, with Dewey, that public managers are prompted to continuously inquire into what is ‘exactly’ the public’s problem. This is a question of the degree to which the managers, through the exposure to design work, have been challenged beyond their ‘stable state’ and are compelled to embrace new ways of working empirically, and thereby also strategically, with their organisation. Part

The soul in customer experiences with soul is the essence of a business and we encounter the essence through each and every part, be it product, service, advertisement, interface or personal interaction we have with the organisation. For this reason the term ‘customer experience’ refers not only to the interaction our paying customers have with our products, services and brands, but also to every single interaction inside the business between colleagues, employees, suppliers, shareholders and contractors, and every interaction between those who work for a business and who are representing the business, and every person who comes into contact with the business. Every single one of us has our own personal customer experience which we project and for which we have to take full responsibility.

Call center solutions for small business What does it mean to develop a call center solutions that is small business friendly? It is unique to each organisation, which necessitates that the design be designed on a case-by-case basis. Do you have a partner who is willing to help you build your solution from the ground up? Scaling is a crucial aspect of developing a call center solution for a small organisation. Tiny businesses aren't always small businesses. By the end of a single year, a company that accepts a few dozen calls per week may be taking several hundred calls per day — Alternatively, they could remain the same size. It depends on a number of things, one of which is whether they are committed to providing the resources their customers and employees require for organic growth. Speak with your technology solutions provider about scalability if you want to provide your company the chance to expand. ChaseData offers a variety of scalability alternatives, including solutions that allow for remote agent flexibility, allowing your team to grow and shrink as needed. That way, you'll always be in control of your labour costs, and you'll have the correct number of employees on hand to handle whatever your customer base throws at you! Small Business Still Be Smart A prevalent assumption is that small business call center solutions must be limited in terms of features and capabilities. This is absolutely not the case. When it comes to the technology employed in today's call centers, small can be mighty. One of the most pressing concerns when it comes to increasing efficiency and productivity in a call center – whether large or small – is reducing time spent on repetitive information. Consumers frequently say that they spend several minutes providing simple information to call center personnel, including repeating it several times for verification or because their call has been moved. This process is not only inconvenient for the caller, but it can also be a waste of time and money for your call center! Using smarter technology to limit the quantity of data that must be transmitted is a wonderful approach to improve productivity, efficiency, and customer happiness. It assists in the reduction Our Topics Tags -: ivr solutions in delhi | voice blaster | voice logger | GSM PRI Gateway | GSM VoIP Gateway | Gsm gateway

Adaptive design is a layered organisation of kluged adaptations acquired sequentially and assembled on the fly: it is heuristic "all the way down".

I listened to the sharp, staccato beat of my shoes. To me they said, quick, precise and well-organised. And just because I wore high, sexy designer shoes (Russell and Bromley thank you; who can afford Jimmy Choos?!) I wasn’t like all the bitch bosses in romcoms. They were high but not super high, and made from supple, polished black leather. As sexy shoes, went they were workmanlike but expensive. I think shoes say a lot about you. I wanted people to know that I, Claire Harrison, had got where I was through hard work and intelligence but I still had class and style. Shoes have nuances and with this pair, I’d nailed it. Just like the meeting I was headed to. I’d worked all weekend to get this presentation to within an inch of perfection.

All the steps of the CODE Method are designed to do one thing: to help you put your digital tools to work for you so that your human, fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best. Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.

Resilience versus Robustness. Typically when we want to improve a system’s ability to avoid outages, handle failures gracefully when they occur and recover quickly when they happen, we often talk about resilience. (…) Robustness is the ability of a system that is able to react to expected variations, Resilience is having an organisation capable of adapting to things that have not been thought of, which could very well include creating a culture of experimentation through things like chaos engineering. For example, we are aware a specific machine could die, so we might bring redundancy into our system by load-balancing an instance, that is an example of addressing Robustness. Resiliency is the process of an organisation preparing itself to the fact that it cannot anticipate all potential problems. An important consideration here is that microservices do not necessarily give you robustness for free, rather they open up opportunities to design a system in such a way that it can better tolerate network partitions, service outages, and the like. Just spreading your functionality over multiple separate processed and separate machines does not guarantee improved robustness, quite the contrary, it may just increase your surface area of failure.

This book is different: it provides all the basic information you need, clear and concise examples, and direct advice on how to think about business models at your organisation.

Do use business model analysis to think about how organisations are designed to create value.

The first is value creation. Business models have something to do with how (and why) organisations create value.

The second concept is design. Business models have something to do with how organisations function, specifically in terms of the structures and relationships that govern behaviours and activities.

business model is the organisational design used to exploit an opportunity and create value.

Every organisation exists for a single purpose: to create more value than an individual could do alone. That value could be profit, education, economic growth, social justice, entertainment or any number of other possible outcomes.

The potency of design is related directly to these structural/organisational matters, after all, particularly in respect of strategic design. The consultancy model simply does not have the necessary freedom to radically change the brief, to work the context, to search for strategic solutions outside of its engagement.

The idea of dividing our work into smaller units isn’t new. You’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: if you’re stuck on a task, break it down into smaller steps. Every profession and creative medium has its own version of “intermediate steps” on the way to full-fledged final works. For example: “Modules” in software development “Betas” tested by start-ups “Sketches” in architecture “Pilots” for television series “Prototypes” made by engineers “Concept cars” in auto design “Demos” in music recording

your Second Brain is a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth, not just a single use case. It is a laboratory where you can develop and refine your thinking in solitude before sharing it with others. A studio where you can experiment with ideas until they are ready to be put to use in the outside world. A whiteboard where you can sketch out your ideas and collaborate on them with others.

Organizations should be viewed as complex and adaptive organisms rather than mechanistic and linear systems. —Naomi Stanford, Guide to Organisation Design

There is a parallel between PARA and how kitchens are organized. Everything in a kitchen is designed and organized to support an outcome—preparing a meal as efficiently as possible. The archives are like the freezer—items are in cold storage until they are needed, which could be far into the future. Resources are like the pantry—available for use in any meal you make, but neatly tucked away out of sight in the meantime. Areas are like the fridge—items that you plan on using relatively soon, and that you want to check on more frequently. Projects are like the pots and pans cooking on the stove—the items you are actively preparing right now. Each kind of food is organized according to how accessible it needs to be for you to make the meals you want to eat.

Yeah. We even organised a group discount on gorilla suits. They’re cheaper to buy than to rent. The costume-rental business is an absolute capitalist clusterfuck, designed to deny the proletariat ownership of—” “OK, OK,” interrupted Brigit. “Keep it in your pants, Comrade King Kong.

When I used to work for the local government organisation we HAD TO change our Passwords every three months. To ensure I could remember it, I used to write it on a Post-It note and stick it above my desk.

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of ’organised paedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts in which such groups emerge. The underlying assumption of literature on ‘organised paedophilia’ is that members of sexually abusive groups are motivated by a pathological sexual interest in children but this does not accord with evidence that suggests that abusive groups can simultaneously abuse children and women. It is increasingly recognised that sexual offenders may not specialise in one particular victim category, and a significant proportion of child sexual abusers have also offended against adults (Cann et al. 2007, Heil et al. 2003). Furthermore, many of the behaviours of abusive groups appear to be designed to elicit fear and pain from the victim rather than to generate sexual pleasure for the perpetrator per se., are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sadistic dimension to organised abuse that is not explicable as ‘paedophilic’. A survivor of organised abuse from Belgium, Regina Louf, made this point clearly when she said: I find the expression ‘paedophile network’ misleading. For me paedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests…I certainly don't want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten, or fifteen didn’t matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some real sadists. (Louf quoted in Bulte and de Conick 1998) A credible theoretical account of organised abuse must necessarily (a) account for the available empirical evidence of organised abuse, (b) address the complex patterns of abuse and violence evident in sexually abusive groups, and (c) explain the ways in which sexually abusive groups form in a range of contexts, including families and institutions.

design is the process of choosing and organising words, images and messages into a form that communicates and influences its audience.” UK Design Council

In an attempt to head off such stinging and potentially damaging criticism both Rockefeller and Carnegie poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public works. In Rockefeller’s case the money went to Chicago University, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today Rockefeller University), and the General Education Board that announced it would teach children ‘to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way’. In 1913 he and his son established the Rockefeller Foundation that remains one of the richest charitable organisations in the world. Carnegie too used his money to encourage education. His grand scheme was to fund the opening of libraries, and between 1883 and 1929 more than 2,000 were founded all over the world. In many small towns in America and in Britain, the Carnegie Library is still one of their most imposing buildings, always specially designed and built in a wide variety of architectural styles. In 1889, Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth first published in America and then, at the suggestion of Gladstone, in Britain. He said that it was the duty of a man of wealth to set an example of ‘modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance’, and, once he had provided ‘moderately’ for his dependents, to set up trusts through which his money could be distributed to achieve in his judgement, ‘the most beneficial result for the community’. Carnegie believed that the huge differences between rich and poor could be alleviated if the administration of wealth was judiciously and philanthropi-cally managed by those who possessed it. Rich men should start giving away money while they lived, he said. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.

The IOSH Managing Safely course is a training programme designed for managers and supervisors in any sector and organisation. It aims to provide them with the knowledge and skills required to manage health and safety responsibilities in the workplace effectively. The course covers a range of topics, including hazard identification, risk assessment, accident investigation, and measuring performance. It is focused on practical actions and real-world guidance.

The way architects focus not only on the structure. They design interiors as well. Similarly organizations also need interior designing.

The interior designing of organizations is called organization design.