By Anton Rossouw.
The philosophies and methods of Agile is fast infiltrating the world of general management. This is due to the many successes due to adopting Agile mindsets to the way that software is delivered. This has stimulated rapid evolution fueled by practical learning causing thinkers, practitioners and authors world wide to project Agile into management teams, boardrooms and workplaces outside of IT and software product development.
And so this gave rise to the Stoos network .
It was incubated on January 2012 at Schwyz in Switzerland by 21 concerned and inspired change agents swarming around the leadership problems we face today. Together they agreed that there must be a better way. A rallying call to action was developed:
“Reflecting on leadership in organizations today, we find ourselves in a bit of a mess. We see reliance on linear, mechanistic thinking, companies focusing more on stock price than delighting customers, and knowledge workers whose voices are ignored by the bosses who direct them. All these factors are reflected in the current economic crisis, increased inequity, bankruptcies and widespread disillusionment.
There has to be a better way”
The Stoos network has rapidly grown exponentially to become an organic self organizing learning community of like minded radical business change agents, that share a passion to learn from each other and find the better ways to change organizations for the better.
We go about this by sharing problems, discussing new ideas, theories, paradigms and practices, and implementing them as safe-to-fail experiments to enact positive change. These abundant ideas bring new ways of thinking about systems, driving sustainability, developing leadership, transforming management practices, fostering high performance teams, embracing complexity, implementing simplicity, unlocking innovation, becoming agile and adaptive, and growing new organic organizational structures.
We participated in the first Stoos Stampede that was held on 6-7 July 2012 in Amsterdam, in a stunningly beautiful conference venue De Roode Hoet in Keizersgragt. It was implemented as a classic “un-conference” by organisers Jurgen Appelo and his team. More than 200 inspired people from all over the world attended the spirited sessions of conversation, each contributing and sharing in their own unique way their own unique perspectives and experiences. I am sure we all went away vowing to put new things into practice to find the better way. There were interesting, interactive and collaborative sessions such as:
Indicators for Companies Culture and How to Change
Facilitating effective interventions from within organizations
Management and corporate culture hacking
Agile transformation - What should be the best approach?
Gamification of the working environment
Guided Self-Organisation: Creating a Learning Network
Sociocracy: new governance structure for organizations
Management is dead! Grasping the new model & methods for change
Using Personal-Professional Growth to Adapt Business Cultures
From Overwhelming Complexity to Effective Simplicity
Organize for Complexity. How to make work work again
Organization Design powered by Evolution
Leading change good practices
Learning for complexity. New approaches for knowledge-building
Stoosian Emergent Organizational Practices from the wild
Dealing with Generation Bottleneck
The 10 Worst Management Practices, And How To Turn Them Around
Using Complexity to Accelerate Higher Consciousness
Being the change you want to see in the world
Extremely simple and practical mgmt theory: is that possible?
Fairytales for organizational change
From this we see that there are very passionate people set on creating better leaders and better organisations. The key is sharing knowledge and learning in practice. It will take not a massive revolution, but a quiet and sustained social revolution leading continuously upwards to better places.
Become committed as we are to contribute actively to the Stoos movement!
Stoos is always seeking passionate people that can become part our learning network. Our individual positive contributions can create valuable change that will transform organisations to become more balanced, humane and sustainable workplaces. Its all about change for the better !