The word ‘open’ now underpins everything we do at Teal Unicorn. We believe the words ‘agile’ and ‘agility’ are overworked, over-stretched to cover more than the words actually mean. What do we mean by ‘open’?
Open Work, Open Management, open architecture, open systems design, open source, open access, open door, open space, open communication, open discussion, open leadership, open innovation, open for business, open ended, open up, open book, open eyes, open minded, open hearted.
We must be open: open society to higher consciousness; open organisations to greater transparency and inclusion; open teams to collaboration; open individuals to self-examination, honesty, and vulnerability.
To open up to better work, we are opening up the organisation like a flower, letting light and air in, making room to move and grow, exposing the workings, inviting others in, welcoming, creating possibilities, allowing pollination, letting the value out, letting us thrive.
The key to advancing work is the manager. We must open up management to be invitational, inclusive, serving, and transparent. Better ways of managing enable better ways of working.
This is an appeal to our better selves to advance work and society to greater humanity and a better world – better ways of being.
We call Information Technology the “Epicentre” of Open, because IT has emerged as the thought leader in Human Systems Adaptability. It has taken over the baton from manufacturing. In most organisations, IT is leading the way. More and more, the wider organisation is asking IT to lead or at least provide expertise in advancing to new ways. IT has strong allies and sometimes other domains take the lead: corporate change, strategy, or personnel/HR can be sources of Human Systems Adaptability thinking.
Conversely, social change is impacting IT, as organisations embrace the new ways of thinking, which we capture in an organisational governance context as “values over value”.
We mapped this trajectory of the advances in IT thinking just like the technology advances:
When considering IT, these new ways have specific implications locally for IT (blue), and for the organisational functions IT engages with (green):
Here is our first cut of what an Open IT “manifesto” might look like
