Incorporating values into recruitment processes

• When personal values align with organizational values, champions can become a powerful force of effective action.
• Incorporate screening for values in recruitment processes (through, for example, banding applicants into categories based on skill level and then choosing from the top-skilled category for complementary values)

Building teams capable of wise action

• Effective teams
  • Have a clear scope
  • Have clear priorities
  • Have access to the information they need to do their job
  • Are interdependent
  • Have stable membership
  • Have roles for every member
  • Have members chosen for skills and self-awareness.
  • Create norms of openly discussing issues
  • Are shielded from the organization’s political turmoil

Creating an organization capable of tackling the unknown

• Developing the capacity to engage in collective reasoning: Structural elements
  • Create credibility
  • Stimulate diversity of thought
  • Invest in communication
  • Develop extended networks
  • Provide appropriate tools for communication
• Developing the capacity to engage in collective reasoning: Actions & attitudes
  • Understand how you use your power to disempower others
  • Identify the possibilities of teamwork and work to develop your team.
  • Step back from daily pressures to get a broader view of the situation
  • Help the group consider their situation in a new light.
  • Know that you cannot control everything
  • Understand wisdom has a spiritual aspect of meaning and values
  • Become a life-long learner
• Appreciative inquiry
  • Appreciative inquiry is a positive approach; it requires reflection and awareness of the world’s interrelated nature.
  • Partner with people/groups with relevant experience
  • Develop good questions. Big questions. Compelling questions. World-changing questions
  • Engage with the public
  • Build structures supporting change (maintain adaptability and use the power of metaphors)
  • Embrace “wicked problems.”
  • Identify positive deviants
• Deal with uncertainty by proceeding in a spirit of experimentation
  • Develop min specs rather than maximum rules
  • Adopt the action-reflection cycle
  • Use your contextual (cultural) rationality to protect yourself from the risks of failure within your organization.

Creating structures that facilitate organizational wisdom

• Develop goals and plans that focus on multiple stakeholders, including customers, employees, and owners
• Push decision making to sites of expertise in your organization & base rewards on performance
• Create systems that facilitate the free flow of communication
• Maintain stability
• Recognize differences as a source of innovation
• Focus on training that develops general skills rather than firm-specific skills
• Tie compensation to employees’ skills and knowledge

The importance of developing your own bureaucratic, institutional, and contextual (cultural) rationality of your operating environment

• Develop your bureaucratic rationality by improving your institutional rationality
  • Job training
  • Work experience in an industry
• Develop your bureaucratic rationality by improving your contextual (cultural) rationality
  • Work experience with a specific organization