🧩 No Wise Innovation w/o Wise Organizations

Join me in learning how to work well with others

Last call to join our short virtual Organizational Development journey starting Wednesday 11am PST! Learn from and alongside some of the brightest humans I know cultivating pathways for more beautiful futures.

Fellow travelers,

I want to talk to you today about collaboration.

In my multi-year study of vision, it seems to be the case that:

Nobody can bring vision to life without working well with others.

But the way we learned how to do that is lacking. Neither producing great environments to work in, nor the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

I've heard your venting my whole career:

😭 "we're super dysfunctional"

🐣 "the founders are incompetent"

💩 "things are a shit show again"

😖 “we can’t get on the same page”

😫 “it’s a coordination problem!”

I hear you. I’ve been there too.

It's not possible (and wouldn’t be fair) to reduce any of the orgs I’ve worked with to GOOD or BAD.

Each had its own unique blend of strengths and weaknesses, highs and lows.

While much of the better business/tech/society conversation has to do with the external environmental or social impact, I’ve found myself sensitive to the internal organizational impact of, say, poorly tended cultures that fries nervous systems and exacerbates anxiety and depression. Or poorly navigated conflict that results in setbacks or failure for the whole operation or movement.

Perhaps my expectations are too high. Or I naively bought into the marketing hype of startups and non-profits being bastions of awesome places to work.

But from experience, the data, and anecdotally - there is much room for improvement.

Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn

Especially at the earliest stage. When every choice, structure, and friction has an outsized impact on what unfolds.

Whether a for-profit startup, non-profit initiative, grassroots movement, land project, religious/spiritual community or other; the basics are the same:

We're here. Together. Trying to do something. Amidst great change.

How do we do it? In ways that are actually more awesome for all involved?

No matter what we're doing, we have to be able to create organizations that work.

Unfortunately, this is the part that is all too often an expensive afterthought.

For all the focus on risk management, it strikes me as foolish that more founders and org leaders don’t invest in lowering the risk of burnout, conflict, failure and making shitty ripples in the world.

It’s not because they don’t have the ability to be better org leaders. But because they never learned. The institutions that would train them to meet the dynamic world we find ourselves in today don’t exist.

“The question of ‘How do we be together in groups and share a purpose?’ and ‘How do we organize ourselves?’ is a perennial question that all of humanity has faced for as long as we are aware that there has been a humanity.” — Simon Mont

⭕️ Creating Unshakeable Organizations

That's why we're offering a course on it. In our experimental year-long entrepreneurship curriculum, we’re making a claim that organizational development is one quarter of the piece of the puzzle.

This is the only course I know of helping leaders cultivate the technical skills of building a functional organization that actually enables people to work effectively together.

POWER. GOVERNANCE. POLARITY. SENSEMAKING. COORDINATION. CONFLICT. HARMONY.

To stay strong when external challenges threaten the mission. To navigate conflict without breaking apart.

Sampling of frameworks we'll be working with from our friends at Harmonize

It doesn’t matter how inspiring, transformative, trustworthy, or values-centered you are; if part of your job is creating a functional organization, and you don’t understand the mechanics of how to do that, you aren’t going to get very far.

Your accelerator is likely quiet on this front.

Your business school likely thinks that group projects + one touchy feely class is sufficient.

Your leadership coach likely doesn't have the relevant experience building a healthy organization.

Your ops person likely feels too busy with the day-to-day to slow down and invest in strengthening the foundation.

What’s that old saying - an ounce of pain is worth a pound of cure? We’ll introduce the frameworks and skills necessary to build an organization that works from the get go.

The Summer Cultivator is a small time and $ investment to address arguably the biggest failure mode startups face.

Whether you're starting something new and wanting to set a good foundation, in a position to make change within an existing org, or simply interested in the leveling up your org dev literacy for whatever context you find yourself in moving forward.

The teachers we're bringing in for this one, Simon Mont and Tamila Gresham of Harmonize, have been in deep exploration of these themes for combined decades. They are just beginning to package their body of work, and we want you to be amongst the first to experience it.

Join us in learning a holistic approach to organizational development and leadership. Gain practical tools to align values, vision, and impact. And find community with others showing up for the call of our times.

Fellow travelers across sectors, exploring how to live, work, and create with greater harmony. Many of whom we are working with or exploring working with, and are joning out of excitement to develop shared language, frameworks, and tools for doing what is so often a major stumbling process towards enacting our shared visions.

We start this Wednesday, 11am - 1pm PST. For 7 consecutive weeks. Enrollment also includes access to Winter and Spring Cultivator, and a variety of opportunities to connect with others (including a Bay Area IRL meetup!).

Watch the high level overview of the material we’ll be engaging. First 30 minutes are packed with valuable insights, regardless of if you are able to swing the course.

Reach out if you have any questions. If $ is a barrier, tell us your story :)

This is the organizational development operating system that we are choosing to peg School of Wise Innovation to. Like much of the programming here, we’re just bringing in the support that we need ourselves in order to bring our vision to life in a good way, and want to share that with our extended community.

With gratitude,
Andrew

p.s. When I asked ChatGPT for fun what’s the highest leverage action a human could take today, I was shocked by this affirming answer (Claude gave a somewhat similar one):

When I asked how how much of this response was influenced by the handful of questions I had asked about the course over the last few weeks, it said the answer definitely reflects awareness of what I’ve been working on, but “That said: I didn’t consciously tailor that answer to echo the course content directly. This idea shows up in a lot of systems change discussions outside your project as well. I chose it because it's both general enough to apply across contexts and consistent with priorities you've indicated in past conversations.”

Midjourney art by Andrew Dunn