Manager
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Contents
Overview
The role of the manager at Organic Design is tasked with formulating the Organic Design strategy in close collaboration with the Organic Design Director and communicating it to all stakeholders to ensure alignment and encourage feedback and improvement.
System specification
In addition, the manager is required to specify the requirements for the Organic Design system and ensure that improvements in technology are implemented to ensure closer alignment with the Platform specification.
Alignment between goals and activities
In terms of "vertical alignment", the manager ensures a clear flow and sequence between purpose and principles, vision, vision, goals, departments and projects within the organisation. This allows the stakeholders to see and understand which high level goals are being acted upon, as well as how day-to-day tasks are supporting the high level goals.
Internal team communications
The manager is also expected to ensure that the system supports all group activities, such as meetings and work on projects and that feedback is responded to, and that team members are generally on the same page and roles and responsibilities are clear.
External partner communication
Using the agreed-upon Organic Design strategy as a guide, the manager communicates with external groups to build support and gather feedback on the Organic Design strategy. The current aims of this process are to achieve endorsement and validation of the strategy or the improvement of the technical aspects of the strategy, depending on the skill-set of the external party.
Skill-set required
Given that Organic Design is a virtual organisation, the role of the manager requires not only a deep understanding of OD principles as described in vision and manifesto, but requires a skill-set that draws upon project management, business analysis and content management.
All trust groups have the general common trait of having members that are aligned to achieving a vision together. This is done by collaborating on a specification for their system and then agreeing on roles that are responsibilities for various aspects of the system's operations.
In the context of a group working together to achieve a common vision, there is a common process involving the defining of the vision, the assessment of the current state of the group with respect to that vision, and the ongoing reduction of the difference between the current state and the fully realised vision. This process can be thought of as motion and as such it has two general aspects; direction (and distance) and energy.
When defining roles for a trust group, these two common aspects translate into two top level distinct roles; director and manager, the former being responsible for the conceptual state of the group and whether it's heading in the right direction, the later being responsible of the resource allocation and energy/resource aspects of motion toward the goals.
