The Primacy of Human Interactions for Organizational Health
The health of an organization is an emergent property of the interactions of its parts, internally and externally: individual with individual, C-suite with frontline, Sales with Product, CFO with Sales, CIO/CLO with HR, CEO with Investors, Company with Employees’ families, Finance with Vendors, R&D with Clients and so on. All these relationships sit within or connect to other relationships to create a complex system, and “organism” that flourishes if those relationships are healthy, and becomes unproductive and diseased if they are not.
Organizational development, change and training, however, is still largely focused on trying to improve individuals as individual humans. Coaches for senior people, perhaps mentors for those lower down. Every kind of behavioral and technical skill training typically for individuals, even if usually with peers. Psychometric profiles of individuals. There’s nothing inherently invalid with those approaches. They’re necessary, but insufficient because just don’t directly address the most important element of individual and group behavior – interactions with others.
In an era of rapid and unpredictable change, an organization requires a courageous and urgent focus on the quality and health of human interactions to be resilient, sustainable, and thriving.
Why ReStroma?
ReStroma builds on the biological term stroma as metaphor for organizational life. The stroma is the supportive tissue and structure that surrounds and connects the cells within an organ. When that supportive and connective tissue is unhealthy, the organ does not function well, which can cause other organs to malfunction or overcompensate, affecting the whole body. Individual cells may be healthy on their own, for a short time, but if they are not connected to other cells, or they’re connected in distorted ways, the organ and the body doesn’t function as well as it might. An organization may struggle with low employee morale, high turnover rates, communication breakdowns, lack of diverse perspectives, intentional or unintentional exclusion. These are the signs of sickness and an unwell stroma.
The biological metaphor is appropriate also to represent organizations, corporations, as complex adaptive systems, not ordered machines. The web of relationships among and between cells and organs makes it very difficult to predict and control the affect of a particular intervention in one part. Managing a complex human system that is the product of its parts, as though its an ordered system that is merely the sum of its parts, is mismanagement. There are some ordered, predictable, parts, which can be managed as such. But overall its a human organization, full of volitional unique unpredictable and uncontrollable individuals and groups with highly contingent relationships with each other. The organization it is a complex web of relationships adapted to its environment, and continually responding to its environment to the degree it listens to its sensing cells and organs far away from the center.
So the stroma is the underlying structures, processes, and systems that support the overall health and vitality of an organization. These are the teams, the formal and informal connections, the technology and physical space that facilitates or hinders communication and information flows, the processes, rituals and practices that make certain interactions and behaviors more or less likely, and more or less easy. ReStroma exists to build or rebuild organizational health.
Why work with us?
We take you seriously and recognize you are in a unique moment in your organizational life, with a unique history. We come with proven (and some experimental) tools and methods, but our first order of priority is to help you see yourselves as clearly as possible, and identify the degree to which you are disposed for the changes you want to make. Our focus is on the relational and situational context of your area of concern or opportunity. This involves the people who matter, who you think matter, and perhaps those who should matter. Their knowledge, experience, perspectives and relationships are the substance of your current state, and therefore the exact place from which to move towards desired state. We help you move in that direction in a way that honors who you are, provides the scaffolding and support to make that move more likely, with the outcome of a healthy, more vibrant, self-sustianable organization that continues well after we’ve stepped back.
Our preferred approach is one of scaffolding – like tissue engineering that provides strong enough structure, for long enough, to overcome inertia, enable new and better relationships to form, to build sustainable and resilient technologies, rituals, processes and practices into your organization. We have a network of expertise in organizational design, instructional design, technology, community management, facilitation, relational thinking, organizational network analysis and more, as well as a range of industry vertical expertise.
Contact us to discover how we can help you.