3 handy canvases to conceptualise organisations
These models from NOBL, The Ready and Maptio help you navigate the complexity of developing purposeful organisations.
1. The NOBL organizational charter
Just released by Bud Caddell, founder of organisation change collective NOBL, this is the simplest of the three models I’m sharing today. Bud describes what the charter is for:
1. It helps us as [organisation development] partners to understand the organization and chart its changes over time
2. It gives employees a single document that describes their organization and its ambitions
In this model, organisations are perceived as four nested layers. They’re beautifully simply articulated so the model can be useful with virtually no further explanation. This makes it a very useful document which can be shared widely with a range of stakeholders in an organisation to create clarity and alignment.
Whilst I love the simplicity and accessibility of this canvas, in my view the nesting of the four layers doesn’t always make sense. For example, structures within an organisation are often much more long-term than its strategies, and strategies can emerge from the ways people are connected and collaborate. So it’s not clear to me that structures should always be nested within strategies.
I wonder if perhaps this would be better visualised with strategies, structures and systems as three interconnected areas within the overall purpose.
And I’ll explain later why I believe it’s more useful and powerful to consider Purpose not as an attribute of ‘the organisation’ but as something else entirely.
All that said, I think this is a great contribution to the commons of models for working with organisations.
[Update: Bud and I have had a useful exchange in the Responses below — check it out.]
2. The OS Canvas from The Ready
This canvas published by Aaron Dignan, founder of org design and transformation consultants The Ready takes a more comprehensive view. This makes it a more powerful tool, with a trade-off that it takes more work to get your head around it. Perhaps this is a canvas more for those closely involved in organisation development, whereas the canvas from NOBL can be easily understood by just about anyone.
The thing I like about The Ready’s canvas is that rather than over-simplifying inherently complex organisations to one simple nesting of layers, there are instead nine areas for consideration, which are all connected and interdependent.
Again, however, I believe there’s a problem in viewing Purpose as a component of ‘the organisation’. This is why I created my own adaptation of The Ready’s canvas, building on their excellent work, and adding to this some seminal thinking from Peter Koenig and Charles Davies which goes further in taking a more comprehensive view of the wider process of realising significant ideas in the world.
3. The Creative OS Canvas from Maptio
The Creative OS Canvas was published by my company, Maptio which is an online tool for organisations prioritising creativity and agility over traditional management hierarchy.
The canvas has a different overall lens to the other two. It’s not simply about organisations, but starts with the bigger picture of the process of realising a creative idea. Then separately to this, the organisational operating system which is built to help realise the idea.
The canvas is split into two layers to make this distinction clear. The creative layer contains an ‘initiative map’ which shows how the overall vision breaks down into the smaller ideas which are being realised in service of it. Then it has an articulation of the overall vision (I use the terms vision and purpose interchangeably) itself. Below this in the organisational operating system layer there are six boxes adapted from The Ready’s canvas which represent the main elements of an organisational operating system.
Making this distinction is extremely powerful. It’s all too easy to get lost in organisational thinking so that we lose sight of the fact that right at the very start, before an organisation even began to take shape, someone, somewhere invested themselves in realising an idea. This is the heart of the matter. That’s why it’s best not to see Purpose as part of ‘the organisation’.
End note
It’s worth acknowledging that all three of these models have been produced by white, western men in their 30’s or 40’s. Whilst people of all genders have been involved in their design, we should stay curious and wary of what implicit biases they contain. I’m curious about what other models, perhaps from more diverse sources I might have missed. Can you help me?
Let me end with a thought from one of the grandmasters of systems thinking and a hero of mine, Donella Meadows. Meadows famously wrote about the spectrum of weak to powerful ways to intervene in a system. Topping the list are: changing our paradigms about how we see ourselves and the world around us; and finally to transcend our paradigms altogether.
What I take from Meadows is that whilst models and canvases are useful, we must also continue to question our most fundamental assumptions. It’s something that can be lost on many fans of new ways of organising.
Tom Nixon is the founder of Maptio, and an independent organisation development and transformation coach and consultant. He works with founders to realise big, meaningful ideas in the world. Get in touch with Tom.
