THIRTEEN

Organizational Choices

How Your Organization Can Navigate Office Shock

Imagine a world

where organizations will be what they want to organize, guided by their flexive intent, strategy, and priorities. In a world where anything that can be distributed will be distributed, offices will be fluid and flexible. The now-separate functions called human resources or people, real estate, and information technology will be strategically integrated and report directly to the CEO as they develop an office shock navigation strategy. The traditional “home office” for many organizations will not be a towering edifice but rather a distributed network of offices in homes and regional hubs.

To write your own story for offices and officing, we suggest you follow the four steps of the Quick Start Guide:

Step 1: Find Your Future Self.

Step 2: What Future?

Step 3: What Next?

Step 4: What Now?

With your Future Self as a leader or member of an organization, and a preferred future for that organization, place the mixing board in front of you. Looking at the seven spectrums, consider each spectrum for the organization.

Here in chapter 13, we focus on choices for organizational leaders at all levels of decision-making, for organizations at all levels of maturity (start-up to more mature), and for anyone considering mobilizing others to become more active. This chapter is not only written for corporations but for governments, global agencies, and nonprofits as well. In fact, for governments, there is the potential for a single decision to change offices across an entire county, state, or even a country. Nonprofits vary dramatically, but many of them have offices that are experiencing office shock and can benefit from remaking old choices that are now outdated regarding how work gets done. Futureback thinking will help to guide the flexive intent of an organization toward better futures for working and living.

After each key player in your organization determines their critical success factors, a meeting to synchronize the choices can serve as an excellent way to collaborate in new ways. The result may be a revision of some critical success factors to bring them in line with the partnership, thus strengthening cooperation, synchronizing across your internal organizations, and helping all to navigate office shock in a partnership beyond what each organization could do alone.

For each spectrum, make your organizational choices using the following critical success factors as provocation.

The Spectrum of Purpose for Organizations

To be perceived as a “good company,” our organization will need to provide a healthy working environment for people as well as our customers and the communities of which we are a part. Our office buildings will echo our organizational purpose and our workers. The ways our people work will personify our organization.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Purpose?

   Meet a broader range of your employees’ hierarchy of needs—Our organization intends to help our workers meet their fundamental needs for security while also allowing them the space to explore their purpose in working.

   Improve social injustice—Our organization intends to ensure that we provide a safe workspace for everyone, educate our workers about social justice, and work in our community to further social equity.

   Play the wisdom game—Our organization intends to create a wise understanding of the positive and negative aspects of our work environment, with deep concern for our workforce.

The Spectrum of Outcomes for Organizations

Office shock is a chance to rethink both the shareholder and stakeholder value of our organization. It is a chance to look through a wider lens about profitability over time as well as the effects on our workers, customers, and our local communities. Our organization will play an increasing part in growing and sustaining prosperity for our community and the larger society. Organizing for shared value will be amplified through distributed digital networks that encourage collaborative practices and pursuit of common goals.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Outcomes:

   Organize for shared social value—Our organization intends to move beyond the traditional model of organizing solely for efficiency and control. We will work toward using new models to empower people inside and outside our organization.

   Invest in new models of ownership—As new models of ownership are developed, our organization will explore how these models might be used by our organization. Not every new approach will work for us, but we don’t want to miss one that can deliver better outcomes.

   Become a more equitable enterprise—Regardless of the business model we pursue, our organization intends to be a more equitable enterprise that is not solely profit driven. We will deliver social as well as financial value to our workforce and our communities.

The Spectrum of Climate Impacts for Organizations

Our organization will produce within the circular economy and regenerate the planet. We will employ circularity across the entire product life cycle, including extending the life of our possessions through repair, reuse, donation, and recycling. Our regenerative strategy will promote care rather than carelessness, win/win cooperation rather than win/lose competition and will create abundance rather than depleting resources.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Climate Impacts?

   Become part of the circular economy—Our organization intends to move beyond net-zero by improving our supply chains, our delivery systems, the life cycles of our products, and our commitment to recycle or repurpose our products. Our goal is no longer cradle to grave, but rather birth to rebirth.

   Become regenerative in community—The systemic nature of climate disruption necessitates our action to engage the entire community. Our organization intends to manufacture and sell locally as much as possible. When expanding, we will reuse existing infrastructure to minimize distribution and energize the local communities where we will seek workers.

   Go beyond sustainability—Since no single company or government can achieve the goal of saving the planet, our organization intends to lead or contribute to cooperative efforts within our industry and with governmental agencies to transition toward symbiosis.

The Spectrum of Belonging for Organizations

Most offices today are made up of people who are already familiar with one another. Often in traditional offices, people look alike, dress alike, and behave in similar ways. In the future, organizations will create office environments to attract, accept, and reward full-spectrum diversity beyond simplistic labels, categories, and buckets. Organizations will sustain a culture of inclusion and belonging.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Belonging?

   Know your roots—Just like people, organizations have roots: Who are our founders? What communities—physical and social—did we come from? How have previous leaders’ beliefs and prejudices shaped who we are as an organization? Our organization intends to consciously understand this background and use that knowledge to unearth any prejudices and stereotypes that stem from it.

   Know your routes—In our journey from our founding, our organization has traveled routes that were influenced by people, places, politics, and decisions. Our organization intends to uncover those patterns to move forward with a fresh futureback perspective.

   Learn from the anger of youth—The true digital natives are already in the workforce, and their numbers are growing rapidly. Many of them are angry, particularly about climate and social justice issues. Our organization intends to learn from them and integrate them into our workforce and gain from their ideas and talents. Cross-generational learning will be most important for the future.

The Spectrum of Augmentation for Organizations

Our organization will be made up of superminds, groups of augmented individuals working in harmony with technology. Our organization will compete for superminds and mobilize enchanted objects (ordinary objects that will do extraordinary things with digital support) to support our people, our customers, and our communities.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Augmentation?

   Augment intelligence in your organization—Our organization intends to pursue the promise of partnering humans with computers to grow superminds. We will answer these questions for our organization: What do humans do best and what do we want to do for ourselves? What can machines do best and what do humans want machines to do for us?

   Synchronize with others through stories—Our organization intends to tell better stories about our organization’s purpose and commitment to the future. Understanding how storytelling can engage people and strengthen teams will provide us with a powerful tool for imagining a better office through futureback thinking. Stories will be central to our strategy, not just public relations.

   Reduce the risks of augmented intelligence—Our organization intends to balance the unprecedented value of augmentation with safeguards from the threats of misuse or deliberate threats so that we can reap the rewards of better intelligence. At the same time, our organization intends to ensure the safety of our workforce and always offer partnering of humans and machines as a choice.

The Spectrum of Place and Time for Organizations

Because of office shock, our organization will explore new ways of working that have never been possible before. The officeverse will not be just a more-of-the-same internet. The officeverse will offer a chance for us to innovate regarding where, when, and how we work together. Copying the way things used to work in physical offices will be futile in virtual worlds, but our organization will invent new ways of working that are better than being there in person.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Place and Time?

   Redraw your boundaries—Our organization will offer choices for where and when people work if their intended outcomes are met.

   Explore the officeverse now—The officeverse will present our organization with new ways of using technology, collaborating, and pursuing our purpose. Our organization intends to extend our workforce and learn to lead in a world of work where location and time are fluid concepts.

   Customize your workplaces—Workers have always personalized their workspace to enhance their work experience and boost productivity. Our organization intends to support our workers’ choices and provide the technological support they need equitably across the workforce.

The Spectrum of Agility for Organizations

Flexive intent is a commitment to a clear direction of change combined with adaptivity in how you might achieve that change. While traditional offices were hierarchical and centralized, our organization will embrace the officeverse, with clarity of direction. We will be a shape-shifting organization and operate successfully with increasingly distributed authority.

What might your organization do next on the Spectrum of Agility?

   Organize for agility, not just efficiency—As our organization becomes more shape-shifting, we intend to train our managers to use flexive intent to ensure the right people—the people with the best knowledge—are making the decisions.

   Recruit and retain people who are physically and mentally agile—Our organization intends to train managers to create and sustain positive energy in their leadership.

   Use gaming to improve agility—Our organization intends to bring gaming into our office to improve the agility of our workforce and help workers imagine impossible futures. We will ensure gaming methods are equitably distributed so that the positive impact gaming has on brain neuroplasticity is available to all workers.

At this point your personal story is expanding to include how you can guide, lead, or influence your organization to move toward a better future of working and living:

1. How can the UN Sustainable Development Goals help your organization envision the future?

2. As you create a list of factors for future success for your organization, how can you link them with your personal list?

3. With the image of success in your mind, how can you begin to plan a path toward the future that is clear, but not certain?

Now that you have thought about your organization’s choices across the seven spectrums, you are ready to consider community choices in a similar way. This exercise will reveal the levels of synchronization among you, your organization, and the communities in which you operate.