The third dimension of the system I'd like to help you understand is how your organization is aging. We're going to use an organizational lifecycle model or an organizational development model here. You don't need to draw a picture, I'm going to draw the picture right in front of us. Organizations age in many ways the same way people do very predictable phases. For example, with people it is a newborn, and then a toddler and a teenager and young adult and middle aged and so on. The thing about organizations there's there's no biological reason an organization should die.

Some organizations have been around for several centuries, not many, but certainly some. The vast majority of organizations never live past 10 years. So if your organization is older than 10 years, you've already beat the odds, which is great news. But what I'd like to do is to help you to understand where your organization is, in its aging cycle. So let me give you a The high level overview of organizational life cycles, organizations start with an idea, somebody's got a dream somebody has a passion for doing something that they're going to believe is going to make the world a better place or make them a lot of money or whatever it is. So this dream is a time of endless potential and possibility.

Hugely ambitious plans, but nothing exists. So it's not really an organization yet. It's simply a dream. And it takes a lot of effort to make a dream actually become reality. So most organizations never get past or most ideas never get even remotely close to becoming an organization. They just disappear.

However, my guess is your organization has been around long enough to get past the dream phase, and move over to the next which is launching the venture here. We've got lots of energy and life If commitment, and there are people that are being attracted here, people who want to help you fulfill the dream, or people who want to take advantage of whatever that dream has to offer as a customer, it's a time of significant entrepreneurial hustle, boundless enthusiasm. People are working 60 7080 hours a week, whatever it takes to keep business going. There's a very ad hoc sense to things, whether that's leadership or decision making or policies or procedures that just really isn't much there at all. A very loose and creative chaos is what this is like. Usually, this venture is not capable of sustaining itself beyond external support, can't stand on its own feet yet.

This incredible amount of flexibility and responsiveness really is in pursuit of giving the customer whatever the customer wants. Now you can appreciate that that hustle That chaos gets pretty tiring and some organizations get as far as launching the venture and burn out. If your organization has come through the launching the venture, it may well be over here at getting organized. The complexity and the chaos of the venture cannot be sustained. What's required is some discipline. The focus here goes inward rather than simply pleased the customer.

And the inward focus says we've got to get it together, we need some appropriate guidelines for decision making. Not everybody can make decisions. We need some systems for accounting or systems for human resources, or we need an IP system that everybody can work with. So really, we need to get some skills and some functions or some roles clarified here. We need to get some controls in place, as you might appreciate for people who have started With the dream and launch the venture, this can be a somewhat constraining part of the journey. And some people don't like this, it often ends up with a we versus they mentality of the new people that come in to help get organized, that really are not particularly welcomed by those that have been working 70 8090 hours a week to get this far.

And because of that, and for any other number of reasons, organizations can get this far and still burn out and disappear. If you're fortunate, as an organization to get organized and not lose people to really get over here to the making it phase, you have done a great job. Now the making it phase of an organization is where we have established some controls and processes, but not at the cost of our responsiveness and focus to the customer. And if we can balance that tension Between discipline and responsiveness, the business or the agency, or whatever the organization is, starts to become established, it gains a solid foothold in the marketplace. And that foothold is based on success. And it's not just weekly success or monthly success or quarterly success.

It is success over several years in a row. And the key point here is that success is not taken for granted. There's a vitality and a vibrancy here, that is very exciting. We found a positive tension between stability and innovation. We're very in touch with our customers. And yet we're not doing absolutely everything they want us to do.

We are disciplined. We're clear about what the business is and we will do everything we can to do our utmost to serve the customer within specific parameters. We're not going off on tangents. This making it phase of the journey is a very satisfying and fulfilling place to be as an organization, downside, if there is one to making it is, over time, the continued success starts to breed a little bit of complacency. Your organization starts and this is a slow process to become an institution. This is a subtle shift, we shift from doing to being from an external orientation of responsiveness to the customer and the environment to an inward focus on style.

We start to stake out territory and occupied we settle in as an organization. There's a far greater concern here for how things are done than what is done. There's a loss of urgency to move forward or to be responsive to the outside world. There's a belief that we're great as an organization we're invincible. Your organization takes itself very seriously. It can develop its own symbolism language, style of dress that binds insiders together and very much confuses, in fact, keeps outsiders away.

Risk is minimized here, new external forces are often seen as distractions, and they're ignored, unexpected technical innovations changes and regulations and new customer demands. All of that's ignored because the institution knows best we've started to build walls around the organization. And if there isn't anything done about that, then ization starts to deepen that journey and starts to close in here. This is an imperceptible shift to the insiders, but the outsiders can see it right away. And what happens is we've started to become more we are already an unresponsive bureaucracy. There's a disconnect between the organization and its external environment, history, rules, everything, people argue about rules and policies and roles, procedures forms regulations multiply.

And they become the reason for being innovation and creativity are nowhere to be seen. And of course, in a highly regulated environment, there can be a long time in this closing in stage. In a open free market economy, however, or a public sector economy where the leadership or the organization is voted every four years or so, there's very little tolerance for a closed in bureaucracy in that organization then dies. Now rarely do organizations actually die. Usually what happens is the irrelevant bits get lost, but the things that were really worth something, whether it's key people or key product, or whatever it is, is bought up by someone else, and the journey continues, but in another organization. So a couple things that I'd like to get with you here.

One is your organization may well have and you may have been around long enough to see your organization moving through some of these phases of its lifecycle. The second thing is, if your organization has been around long enough to move from making it to becoming an institution, it has probably been doing some things to avoid closing in, because it's obviously still here. There are three classic responses to an organization that has become an institution. One would be just to ignore anybody that's bringing up bad news and just deny it. And unfortunately, that's practice the reasonable amount. The second thing that organizations will often do when they're in institution is they will do some kind of a reengineering or rationalization process.

In some cases, these are successful in other cases, they leave your organization worse off than before. This would BIA restructuring process or coming up with some new procedures or simplifying efforts or energy around core business products or selling off non core business or whatever it might be. reorganizing the deck chairs on the Titanic was how one organization describe it in hindsight. And they stopped doing that. And they got much more serious. And it was more of a renewal process, a real rejuvenation.

And this is to go back to the very basics of what are we really about here? Who are our customers? What do we really need to do now in a very different way and not let all of our history get in the way of our what could well be a very glorious future. So that's a long story about organizational life cycles. My question really is this right now, where is your organization on this lifecycle journey and if your organization is over in the becoming an institution face, what route has it been taking denial to re engineer or the renew? So, push pause and have a conversation.

When it comes to the system's view. We've talked about the bird's eye view of the stakeholder map and all of the pressures and all of the responses that have been going on. We've talked about Power Authority. And we've just talked about organization lifecycle and where your organization is in its aging journey. What's your role here now? And what are you responsible for?

We could look at our role and responsibility based on something that we can control. Or maybe it's something that we can influence. Or maybe it's something that we have to accept, and we have no control or influence over. Or perhaps we have certainly no control. We don't have any influence. It's certainly not even something we can accept, because we didn't see it coming.

It's a complete and utter mystery in terms of roles and responsibilities in dealing with systems systems are very complicated when it comes to systems thinking and leading change your role and responsibility is to figure out do you have any control? And if so, what would you do about that? The bottom line is we have very little control. Anybody in an organization has very little control of what's actually going on. When we think about leading change, our real obligation here is to nudge encourage entice, invite, in some way, shape, or form, influence what's going on. So that's our work is how do we influence people in this complex system, to help them to understand what's required and what they need to do?

So here's a question from that systems perspective. What will you do to ensure everyone fully understands and acts upon a shared systems view in your changing organization, I'd like you to find This action plan and make a couple notes to yourself.