What is organisational vitality?

In short

Vitality is an established term to convey strength, energy and activity, a sense of aliveness.

Organisational vitality is a term used to describe organisations that behave as if they are alive. They behave like living systems, sensing, deciding, acting and adapting based on the environment in which they operate. Such an approach works well in an increasingly uncertain world.

Why it matters

Many organisations today are instances of the Taylorist factory model, which essentially promotes the idea of the organisation as a machine. Despite the typically high human headcount, the leaders manage to maintain machine-like behaviour. Thus they are failing to tap into the vitality of their workforce because process and efficiency are more important than human flourishing.

Human flourishing manifests itself in greater creativity. Creativity is the seed from which innovation emerges. And innovation is how we respond to new situations. Increasing disruption has resulted in an increasing number of new situations. So organisations that fail to nurture human flourishing will be ill-equipped to navigate what is an increasingly uncertain world.

The common misunderstanding

Traditionally the only reason humans are in the workplace is because the technology has not evolved to an extent where the processes can be fully automated. Thus the role of people was (is) to keep the process running with minimum deviation from the operations manual.

This mindset continues to permeate many HR functions. Consequently, many people do not enjoy their work but of course have bills to pay / lifestyles to maintain. This approach no longer serves anyone.

The Intelligent Organisation perspective

Organisational vitality is not an abstract concept, nor a call to arms to be nicer to employees.

Whilst people are an important element of a vital organisation, organisational vitality is much more.

The Intelligent Organisation perspective is that vitality is a unique characteristic of a living system. To mimic a living system, we need to ask what defines a living system and how can we implement those characteristics into the organisation.

There are eight universally agreed characteristics of a living system:

• Growth

• Metabolism

• Waste management

• Structure

• Reproduction

• Homeostasis

• Responsiveness

• Adaptiveness.

Broadly, seven of these serve to boost the eighth, adaptiveness.

Further reading

• Dead or live?    

• On adaptiveness

• Is your organisation constipated?

• The Intelligent Organisation