019. Joan Lurie: Leading Change With A Systems Lens
Aug 13, 2020
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Joan Lurie discusses using a systems thinking lens for organizational change. She emphasizes the importance of leaders seeing themselves as part of the system. Exploring challenges in a software company like internal conflict and lack of innovation. Highlighting the need for innovative ecosystems and effective innovation systems for lasting change.
Systems thinking is vital for organizational change, leaders must see themselves as integral parts of the system.
Understanding organizations as complex adaptive systems leads to more effective solutions and transformative change.
Deep dives
Understanding Systemic Change
Joanne Lurie shares her journey of becoming passionate about systemic change in organizational culture. Growing up in South Africa during apartheid, she witnessed injustices in systems, driving her dedication to changing organizational systems. Lurie emphasizes the importance of using organizations as contexts for change, highlighting the success of a culture change program she was part of. By shifting relational patterns and roles within organizations, transformative change can be achieved across multiple organizations.
Challenging Dominant Assumptions in Organizations
Lurie delves into the dominant paradigms in organizations, emphasizing the technical and mechanistic view versus the interpersonal or psychological view. She advocates for understanding organizations as complex adaptive systems, composed of multiple interconnected parts with shared rules and relational patterns. By adopting a systemic lens, organizations can redefine behavior drivers based on meaning-making systems and relational patterns, leading to more effective solutions and meaningful change.
Reframing Leadership Roles
Lurie discusses reframing the role of senior leaders in organizations by focusing on mental maps and systemic roles. She highlights that behavior in organizations is influenced not only by individual traits but also by the mental maps individuals hold of their roles within the system. By helping individuals shift their roles and understand their systemic impact, organizations can facilitate change more effectively, emphasizing role reframing over changing individual behavior.
Creating an Adaptive Space for Innovation
Through a practical case example, Lurie illustrates the process of creating an adaptive space for innovation within organizations. By conducting diagnostics to uncover hidden role patterns and relational dynamics impacting innovation, organizations can redesign their innovation ecosystem. Lurie emphasizes the importance of observing systemic patterns, reframing individual and subsystem roles, and disrupting existing structures to foster innovation effectively, moving beyond traditional approaches to instill lasting change.
Joan Lurie is a development psychologist and one of Australia’s leaders in systemic change & culture, known from her expert commentary in the media on organizational culture. With over 20 years of experience both as an internal change leader in organizations and as a consultant, she founded Orgonomix in 2008 with the mission to help leaders and organizations be free from the systemic patterns keeping them stuck. Joan has developed ‘Orgonomics’ – a proprietary systemic methodology, designed to help top-tier leaders fundamentally transform their businesses and thrive in the ‘gig economy’. She works with the CEOs of some of the country’s largest businesses.
In this episode of Leading Transformational Change, Joan helps us understand how a systems thinking lens can help us bring about organizational change easier and faster. To make it practical, we use a case study to explore how this would apply to an organization struggling with a lack of innovation and internal conflict. Joan shows that, as leaders, we can never see ourselves as outside the issue with the role of fixing the organization, we instead need to see ourselves as an integral part of the system. For the system to change we need to change our own mental maps and the way we frame our roles.
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