Canopy Gap works with organizations that embrace the “mess.” We talk about the “mess” as being the unpredictable, uncontrollable nature of work and life. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s complex.

Our client partners understand there are no quick fixes or easy solutions to how we work together effectively. Since people are not machines, it requires creativity, experimentation, and adaptation. Together, we find ways to build and sustain more resilient and vital teams, organizations, and networks.

Since 2009, we have partnered with over 40 organizations within healthcare, technology, retail, public media, higher education, membership organizations, nonprofits, and government.

Our work falls into three categories: organization design, ecosystem design, and coaching.

Within organization design, we are committed to finding ways of working and relating within a specific team or organization. This often involves addressing patterns and processes, such as how you learn, communicate, plan, lead, or collaborate together. It can get as nitty gritty as how and when meetings are convened to as broad as discerning the collective vision.

For ecosystem design, this same approach is extended beyond an organization’s walls–the patterns and processes with partners, vendors, customers, or communities–so that multiple parties can collaborate effectively on something larger than one organization can accomplish. When you count the number of partner organizations we have worked with in ecosystem design, Canopy Gap has interacted with over 200 organizations since 2018.

Our coaching approach is based upon the “dynamics of life.” Rather than just focusing on problems, issues, or goals with individuals or teams, we are seeking paths forward where there is vitality and resonance. Team coaching and individual coaching are often woven into design projects as well.

Across all three categories, the entire Canopy Gap network is committed to tracking and tending the relational dynamics, not just the plans and practices. We are facilitators with a life-positive approach, but that does not mean we ignore problems or barriers. We address what comes up. But we are more oriented towards possibilities than problems.

We believe that the primary challenge of the coming decade may be how we reframe and share power.

This influences everything we do, and why we are rely on the principle of participation, especially from the faces and voices that are overlooked, undervalued, or not in the room. We stand firmly in our commitment to JEDHI (justice, equity, diversity, healing, and inclusion) values.

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In the way that we see the world, everyone is a designer. We “mark,” or “designate” our projects and our days with choices. This is what a designer does. We consciously choose an activity or a process to deepen relationships, or improve our work together.

So, we can all let go of the notion of the designer as something elite.

We are not here to tell you what you must or should do. We illuminate choices in the ways your work is structured–from strategy to collaboration to hybrid work practices. We come alongside, helping you all be better designers of meaningful work.

We are facilitators who help organizations and ecosystems work together and relate more effectively through new practices, approaches, and ways of collaborating.

In organizations, this can mean launching a new initiative, bringing more vitality and creativity to your work culture, or communicating more clearly.

It’s the same concept within ecosystems, though with outside people and organizations included.

How can we work better together?

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It is well known that people are resistant to change. And yet in this messy world, we know that continual change is necessary.

Change is more likely to be effective when people impacted by the changes are invited to participate.

Whether it’s a merger, reorganization, new initiative, or you want to revisit how you work together, change can be energizing rather than draining.

We are dedicated to creating space for participation so that people can work together and relate to one another effectively. For us, “creating space” means doing all the small things to prepare an environment for valuable interactions, and then being responsive within that environment to the needs, voices, and potential that surfaces.

We are facilitators. That doesn’t mean that we just preside over meetings. To facilitate is to “make easy.” And although what truly matters in work or life is rarely easy, great facilitation makes participation easier. It makes working together and relating effectively easier.

We talk about effective facilitation involving five key elements:

1. Context provides significance for why people are coming together. It is key for participants to be reminded of the “why,” and their potential impact. When people have this context, they can clearly see the past, present, and future together, and how the parts and the whole can fit together. An effective facilitator weaves people, perspectives, ideas, and time together into impact.
2. Equity is more than measuring talk time or dampening the loudest voices in the room. This principle means we continually seek diversity in the conversation, believing that diversity is the fuel of creativity. A meeting without diverse participation can be flat. An effective facilitator uplifts needed voices—those in the room and not in the room.
3. Participation is not effective when forced or coerced. It takes skill to create an environment where people feel relaxed, engaged, and eager to contribute. An effective facilitator invites people to participate in ways that work for them, tracking the energy and continually working to help build trust and a sense of safety.
4. Timeless Principles root new and dynamic practices, so adaptation is still grounded in what we know can potentially work well.
5. Connected Actions result in a sense of continuity and value. People need to feel like a convening is “on track” and know that actions will be taken as a result of their contributions. It doesn’t mean rigidly sticking to an agenda or extracting opinions. By allowing divergence, finding convergence, and letting people know where on the map they currently are, people stay engaged.  Effective facilitators organically cultivate accountability, so people feel like their time is worthwhile.

Thriving requires the capacity for ongoing change.

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The “organization as house” metaphor explored in the last post is increasingly insufficient. The open exchange of ideas and resources now blurs the boundaries between organizations. The house has become more of a plaza, with shared spaces overlapping with owned spaces. The value chain has evolved into a value network. For any organization, the network is vast: an ecosystem of networks.

A very helpful metaphor is thinking of organizations as living systems – dynamic networks. The modern, industrial view is that an organization is like a machine, not a living system. With machines, you can repair the system with new parts (people), lubricants (policies), or software (processes), and the machine may work more effectively. With living systems, you need a whole new set of perspectives and skills because every participant in the system is dynamic, impacting every other participant, creating incredible amounts of complexity.

In order to affect change in these systems, strategy must be adaptive and supplemented by tending to the “field,” or environment, in which interactions happen and decisions get made. Successful organizations in the network era have the capacity to shift their attention from nodes to links, from objects to relationships, from spreadsheets to dynamics. The nodes – anything that can be entered into a spreadsheet – are still vitally important. But these relationships, the connections between the nodes, are the primary drivers of value in an ecosystem. As Victor Hwang writes,

“An economy is not just indicated by the existence of things, like assets or wealth. It’s also about how those things flow in the system. And flow is driven by how interconnected people are, and how effectively the system enables connections to become valuable exchanges. Trust among strangers, connections between diverse parties, mutual collaborations, shared visions, new teams being formed—these qualities drive flow, they lower systemic transaction costs. That’s what we mean when we talk about ecosystems.”

One of the key questions for each business executive is, “How do we create the best possible conditions to enable these connections?” Adapting physical spaces, organizational structure, strategy, or leadership can help, but are inadequate in addressing the core dynamics of an organization.

Tending the “field” is an essential responsibility if business is to become a positive force in culture and society. Organizations that embrace the intangible links, along with the tangible nodes, have a distinct advantage. They can shift more quickly, and are more connected with mutual understanding, sparks of energy, and continual flows of quality interactions. This is not just conscious business, it is more effective business that leads to greater profits.

Mutual Understanding

Mutual understanding requires listening and responding, comprehending and sharing. “Listening” with the goal of mining information, probing for opportunity, or scanning for crises may yield data but not deepen relationship. An organization that listens well is able to respond, is response-able.

The cycle of listening/responding/listening is a pathway to mutual understanding. These feedback loops, both inside the company and out in the community, are another way that networks build capacity and trust. When the listening and responding are extended, following the paths of impact, organizations can begin to sense their roles, responsibilities, and opportunities within a larger ecosystem.

Market research, in this regard, is insufficient so as long as the “listening” is periodic and extractive. Controlling an inquiry within a focus group or survey, or scraping and collecting customer data, are not inherently bad practices. But devoid of participation and transparency, these methods become transactional at best. They may lead to insights and short term opportunities, but not to mutual understanding and better connections.

Inside organizations, understanding needs to be expansive, not just limited to boss and team. The cycles of listening and responding need a greater diversity of voices and ears, and more unfinished ideas rather than status reports. Get the engineers out into the field, the accountants talking with customer support, and the executives at corner cafes. Office wandering, tangential discussions, and web browsing should be encouraged.

Team meetings should be reconsidered. As an example, the French manufacturer FAVI does not permit meetings to be scheduled unless there is representation invited from all teams, thus severely limiting the number of meetings while simultaneously insisting they are inclusive.

What if people lose focus? If there is autonomy and purpose in their work, along with organizational guardrails, the divergences will most often be productive.

Organizations need an enterprise nervous system. Most have been trying to sense the world with a lone ear and a blind eye. The deeper forms of understanding emerge when we follow curiosities, track impact to the edges of a network, and commit to cycles of listening and responding.

Sameness, Diversity, and Energy

There is a spark of energy in the process of understanding between people who are alike, and a different one between people who are different. This is one reason why diversity is so important. Diverse networks are resilient and creative networks. We need difference. We need interactions that don’t fully make sense until we develop empathy. John Hagel calls this “productive friction.” Beth Comstock refers to the importance of “tension.” My colleague, Marti Spiegelman, talks about the constructive “dissonance” that accompanies complementarities.

As leaders, we have the opportunity to hire accordingly. We also have the responsibility to create the conditions where deep diversity in thought, background, perspective, skin color, anatomy, beliefs, and worldviews are not just tolerated but celebrated. This is more than a socially responsible practice. Ecosystems thrive with diversity.

Architectures of Collaboration/Cooperation

With the understanding and the spark of energy, we then need the architectures for collaboration and cooperation. This involves tools and habits, but also setting the tone and scope of interaction. Why are we sharing? The difference between cover-your-ass sharing and a generous exploration of thoughts-in-process is the difference between a static company and a dynamic company. Mandated sharing is just reporting, and may provide information but does not maintain the spark.

Technology platforms, artificial intelligence, and work spaces should promote permeable membranes, resisting the urge to over-design and over-categorize according to team, group, document, folder, or project. Where are the shared spaces? The overlap? The water coolers? Designing for connections and designing for serendipity are the same thing. Zappos built out their downtown Las Vegas headquarters with “intentional inconvenience,” making it possible for unknown co-workers to start conversations with one another.

The tone of the interactions becomes generous when there is trust and shared empathy, along with an openly-evolving purpose. Invitations to risk and experiment raise the level of excitement and engagement in this environment. Creating the conditions for a continual flow of quality interactions means learning to work between form and formlessness, and even letting structures emerge from the flow. Agile informs these practices, as does jazz music, the Golden State Warriors, or watching kids play on the playground.

Working together need not be limited to the organization and its partners. Communities of practice exist for people in a field to share insights with one another. In the past decade, global solutions networks have taken off, creating forums for NGO’s, companies, individuals, and governments to collectively address poverty, human rights, sustainability, financial inclusion and youth unemployment, to name a few. Organizations that embrace these networks embody working within a plaza rather than on a cul-de-sac.

Collaboration and cooperation deliver opportunities to collectively exchange value that can provide benefits to all – better outcomes, happier employees, faster learning, and more thriving organizations.

The Challenge

In his 2016 book, How Will Capitalism End?, economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck predicts that this current cycles of wealth accumulation will continue and capitalism will consume itself. The size of the dust bunnies in the corner will clog all the filters. Social disintegration will accelerate as only the apex predators – the top of the food chain – will wield power.

I take a more positive view, believing that the power of networks, along with business leaders, workers, and citizens working together within our planetary limits, will lead to a new era of qualitative growth for communities everywhere. As economist Kate Raworth says, “new perspectives on what constitutes economic success must emerge.” Take this challenge and responsibility seriously. We can save capitalism from itself and create a future in which everyone thrives.

This article originally was originally posted at LinkedIn Pulse

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If you imagine a company as a house, envision the typical departments occupying various rooms throughout the house. Perhaps human resources is in the foyer, operations in the basement, product development in the kitchen, and so forth. In this analogy, the traditional role of marketing has been to create a winsome awning and a fine porch to attract customers.

As we are now in the age of transparency, the customer is no longer willing to stand on the porch. There are people peeking in windows, walking the perimeter of the property, and resident workers pushing messages through bricks in the wall. There are eggs thrown at the porch via social media. Even for small businesses, there is quite a bit of commotion around our tiny homes.

This is stressful for companies that like their pristine porticos. As McChrystal writes,

“Most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”

There are more people now who want to know how a company treats its workers, how they treat the planet, and what they stand for. They expect an available chat window, phone line, or response on Twitter.

With communication networks, this information circulates quickly. A bad retail experience may have previously been shared with a few folks at the bar or salon, or in the church basement with a dozen people. Now, the network effect kicks into gear and a story can reach thousands within minutes.

You can try to maintain the organizational facade, or even install security cameras, but recognize that information wants to be free. Rather than having a surveillance approach, I encourage you to selectively open doors and windows. Invite people in to see the inner workings of your company.

The visitors may applaud, or they may gasp. Each gasp is an opportunity to learn, an invitation to respond with real questions, acknowledge flaws, and offer amends and aspirations. The public wants authenticity, not defensiveness, and tends to reward companies that reveal their own maturation process. This gives you the chance to utilize a positive network effect. As consultant and author Harold Jarche writes,

“Trust emerges through openness and transparency.”

The online retailer Zappos openly publishes an annual culture book of employees’ statements and art about working at the company. It is unedited, and thus includes complaints as well as praise. It is an authentic representation of culture – more of a glass house than a contrived porch.

The technology company Buffer openly publishes how they calculate their pricing model and employee salaries. As a customer or prospect, you can see how the subscription fees you pay are allocated. The consulting firm August posts their strategy documents in a public Google Drive for anyone to review. Billion dollar tire retailer Les Schwab has shared profits with employees since opening their first store opened in 1952. Now they have nearly 500 stores, crediting their growth in part to training each person, who starts by changing tires, on how to read financial statements and ledgers. Everyone in the shop has full access to the books.

Capitalism needs more accountability. We need more open books, open data, and openness to dialogue. This is the path to restoring trust.

Invite the public to meetings. Have open Q&A sessions with workers, prospective employees, customers, and citizen media representatives from the community. Share unfinished ideas and concerns with employees. Facilitate a strategy rather than deliver one. Admit uncertainty, and acknowledge mistakes.

There’s a timeless truth about trust – it is based on experience. When organizations deliver on their promises, and authentically reveal their aspirations and struggles, people begin to empathize and trust, one experience at a time. This applies to CEO’s as much as it applies to cashiers. When customers get invited into the boiler room and the kitchen, they start to invite neighbors too . . . not because it’s perfect or beautiful but because it is common to us all. They’ve been asked to participate. As the trust builds, they likely will.

This article originally was originally posted at LinkedIn Pulse

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Frost Flowers in the Arctic Ocean by Matthias Wietz

Peter Block captured the timeless truth that “people will be accountable and committed to what they have a hand in creating.” This principle applies to both customers and employees. Advocacy increases when people are not just “consuming” or “working” but are directly participating in a worthwhile endeavor. In a connected world, business models that are participatory are more likely to succeed in the long term.

More and more, customers and partners are contributing to design, strategy, and marketing for organizations they care about. When granted ownership for making key decisions, the network becomes more invested. This is much more than just soliciting “buy in.” It requires creating space to be impacted by those you are impacting. We are just starting to understand how these social processes can work. The tools already exist to expand participation at scale rather than just through customer advisory councils, focus groups, and influencer programs.

Employees, too, become more engaged when they are more fully participating in the direction of the company. General Electric is in the midst of a big structural transition to empower its 333,000 employees to take the company into the future. Beth Comstock, the Vice Chair of GE, outlines a vision of distributed management and culture of openness in her article The Rise of Emergent Organizations.

Some companies have succeeded through granting full ownership to its workers. There are now nearly 7,000 organizations with employee stock ownership plans in the United States, with a total of 13.5 million participants and $1.1 trillion in assets. This number does not include the many companies that offer stock options, or companies that offer profit sharing. Within an ESOP workers receive the power of ownership through company stock. Studies demonstrate that ESOP’s have greater worker satisfaction, better performance, higher wages, and more job security than publicly traded companies. Two of the five largest ESOP’s in the US are supermarkets, low margin businesses with historically high turnover rates. A recent study in the UK asked employees, what impact does ownership have on your organization?

Author Douglas Rushkoff writes, “A genuinely distributed economy requires those on the ground to develop strategies for economic and social viability from the bottom up.” The cooperative model may be the best within capitalism for developing these strategies. More than 250 million people around the world work in or within the scope of cooperatives, associations of people united voluntarily to jointly own and democratically control their enterprise. Cooperatives have flourished in almost every sector from healthcare, to banking, to manufacturing.

For example, half of Germany’s renewable energy is citizen-owned. In May of 2016, renewables in Germany supplied nearly all of the domestic electricity demand. The flagship example of the cooperative model is the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain, with over $16 Billion in revenue, spanning 257 separate cooperatives that include over 74,000 workers. Over more than sixty years, only a few Mondragon companies have failed and no jobs have been eliminated. If an organization of this size can effectively govern itself democratically, we can’t claim that expanding ownership is too complex.

The core of these practices and models involve creating “structures of belonging,” to borrow Block’s phrase. People deeply desire to be included, listened to, and valued for their contributions. They want to be invited into membership, feeling more useful and connected to each other and the outcomes they generate. Capitalism detached from a universal drive for belonging – severed from human connection – creates schisms and isolation. It doesn’t have to be this way. The option of sharing ownership, whether through company stock or decision-making, leads to stronger networks, more sustainability, and a more balanced economy.

This article originally was originally posted at LinkedIn Pulse

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Scales of a butterfly wing underside

This Q&A with Todd Hoskins originally appeared in the Pomello Blog.

What are the most common reasons that you see companies pursuing a company culture change management strategy?

Many organizations view “culture” as a problem that needs to be solved, typically after an increase in employee turnover, declining performance, or some disruption such as a merger or acquisition. By the time culture is raised as an issue, there is usually already a lack of energy, focus, and dedication.

In many cases, the core issue of trust has been compromised along the way. When trust is broken or not considered essential, the blame is often projected onto leadership, organizational structures, the “market,” or one or more departments. It’s not viewed as a systemic issue which it nearly always is.

A deficiency in trust leads to a culture of fear and self-protection. That’s when we get “office politics,” “power games,” and people “checking out,” or moving in divergent directions, some of them out the door.

At this point, organizations often seek help through consultants, experts, and programs. Often they have already tried to form a committee or “task force,” do some “team building,” or have increased pay or benefits without the desired results. At that point, most don’t know what to do.

We are also seeing more and more organizations starting to be aspirational, recognizing that culture itself is a pathway to exponential value creation. People read about, or have an experience with, Southwest, Zappos, Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, or other great cultures and want to know how they can do it. The numbers are rather consistent – dynamic cultures create dynamic results.

What are the hardest aspects of facilitating these change management initiatives?

It’s not easy! To truly shift a culture, there is no step-by-step solution. You cannot merely approach it strategically through research, analysis, plans, and policies, and this is what organizations are accustomed to. There is no blueprint.  This is really hard because companies in transition or pain want the answer quickly. The possibilities emerge as the relationships strengthen, and that takes time. The solution ends up being many solutions that are unique to the organization and time.

A very helpful metaphor is thinking of organizations as living systems. The prevailing view is that an organization is like a machine, not a living system. With machines, you can repair the system with new parts (people), lubricants (policies), or software (strategy), and the machine may work more effectively. With living systems, you need a whole new set of perspectives and skills because every participant in the system is dynamic, impacting every other participant, creating incredible amounts of complexity.

Energized organizations are full of people who are fully free to be themselves serving something greater than themselves. This requires both solidity and fluidity. When this happens, when individual gifts and talents start to coalesce in the direction of an evolving vision, momentum grows, leading to creativity, courage, and ultimately well-being and profits.

Organizations are more comfortable with solidity, and less with fluidity. Fluidity requires a certain amount of uncertainty, risk, and letting be, and most organizations are fundamentally risk-averse and seek control.

Why do companies often need help in managing culture change?

We are just now beginning to understand the importance of complexity in physics, biology, ecology, and economics.  Business, unfortunately, has insisted it can operate in a world that is primarily cause and effect, and we are experiencing the results of this. Complexity requires a different way of thinking, planning, and problem-solving.

If you view an organization’s culture as the energy – the tone – of every interaction internally and with customers and others, how do you possibly shift thousands or millions of interactions?

It is possible, but it requires a shift that leads to a shift that leads to a shift. Eventually this can have an exponential effect. For organizations that want an out-of-the-box solution or quick fix, this is hard to comprehend.

When an organization is ready to shift, they benefit from having consultants come in for a couple reasons. First, it requires a unique skill set.  The best consultants for this work, in our view, are skilled facilitators. They are great listeners who understand how to call forth the wisdom that is already in the organization. They understand awareness, emotional intelligence, group dynamics, facilitation, and dialogue. Part of our work is actually helping develop this skill set with our clients.

Second, there is a great benefit of bringing in a team of accomplished facilitators who know how to keep one foot in the organization and one foot outside the organization. This allows the consultants to see the system from both the inside and the outside. It’s hard to understand the system unless you’re in it. It’s hard to see the system if you’re all the way in.

How do you see the role of new technology in helping drive culture change?

We work with our clients in cycles of awareness, convergence, and action. Technology is increasingly providing more insights into this awareness component, helping answer the very important question, “What is really happening here?”

Think of it this way…the human body is equipped with a nervous system that delivers immediate data on what could be potentially harmful or beneficial to us. Our senses, and even our emotions, provide signals as to what we need to pay attention to. We can “sense” potential danger or pleasure.

Organizations have largely been functioning without a nervous system. They have relied on periodic reports and analyses that pretend the future will mirror the past. Annual surveys, for example, just like market research, provide us with aged data outside of context. It’s useful to a degree, but more valuable within a machine metaphor and less in a living system.

With more continuous feedback and tools like Pomello, we’re just beginning to see the shift from big data to personal data – meaningful data that taps into what people across an organization are sensing and feeling now. This will have a huge business impact as the nervous system starts to form at scale. Then organizations will have a multi-dimensional, real-time view on what is really happening at the sensory level, allowing them to be much more responsive and adaptive.

What are the three best practices you would highlight to manage change successfully?

The Art of Dialogue

Every organization would benefit from a deep understanding of how generative dialogue works. It’s not a debate. It’s not an information exchange. Real dialogue is a pathway to better relationships, engagement, and creativity. It’s a foundation for shifting.

Invitation not Coercion

We hear the stories about the failures of “top-down” change initiatives. What gets lost in that narrative is that people don’t like being told they need to change, period. If more organizations could learn the art of invitation, many more shifts would happen. “Would you be able to . . .” is almost always better than “You must . . .” For this reason, it always works better to start an initiative with the willing and resist the big rollouts and announcements. Each time you’re coercive it’s like poking a pinhole in a rowboat. Eventually you’re going to sink.

Resonance more than Alignment

Alignment usually means, “We all agree to agree.” Alignment is a word about precision – “in a line” or “falling into line.” When the focus is getting people lined up, coercion starts to occur, people become silent, we often fail to hear the important voices of dissent, and the energy diminishes. Seeking resonance is less clear and more messy, but calls forth people’s sensory awareness. It shifts the conversation.

What types of initiatives have you worked on? How did you measure success?

Culture shifts require a starting point. Our practice focuses on leadership, sales & marketing, collaboration, employee engagement, or innovation. We also have a customer success practice that brings customers or partners into the shift.

We recently completed a four-year collaboration shift with a 10,000 employee organization that included technology adoption, org design, and training components. Right now we’re working on a sales & marketing shift, a customer success shift, and another collaboration shift.

Measuring shifts is difficult because you need to both take the long view and know that you’re heading in a good direction. For the long view, we want to know “What are we ultimately trying to impact?”.  A collaboration shift, for example, is not just about getting more people talking. It is tempting to measure users and conversations, but what if there are actually no fruitful conversations taking place?

For us, the long-term impact measures are often connected to new – revenue, products, services, initiatives — or well-being – happiness, health, etc.

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— David Jonassen

Change, like knowledge, cannot be managed.  If we remember that everything is in motion – markets, organizations, people – trying to manage change is like trying to hold water in your hands.

Organizations that have “change management” or “organizational effectiveness” initiatives typically develop a strategy to implement change across the enterprise. The successes of these efforts are usually limited because the approach is:

• One-dimensional: Directed towards a single goal (e.g. employee retention or technology adoption)
• Coercive: The change is “pushed” out or down throughout the organization
• More strategic than relational: The energy and trust between people and parties must be conducive to shifting

We don’t want to discount the importance of strategy. It’s important to be adept at planning, but it takes more than a plan to cooperate with change and guide it in generative directions. Rather than “change management” we like to think of it as “shift facilitation.”

Canopy Gap helps organizations transition into new ways of working together through experiencing a shift in relationship and perspective. Participation in the shifts leads to more energy, creativity, engagement, and impact. The process of shifting occurs through facilitating conversations between groups – teams, partners, customers, etc, – as well as through working through projects together (prototyping) that are representational or integral to the shift, and finally through one-on-one discovery sessions with individuals.

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“All good methods, explanations, and theories inevitably distance us from our primal sense of participation.”

— David Tracy

How do we get to engagement? Sales? Innovation? How does transformation happen? If anyone gives you a Step A, B, and C, beware.

Methodologies are captivating. We are always trying to make sense of the world, and discover the formula that works.

But too much is changing too fast for certainty–even well-researched certainty–to hold true. The best practice of today may not work tomorrow. What is good for one organization may not work for another.

We have given up on the blueprint model altogether. It does not lead to energetic, responsive, and adaptive organizations. It leads to more of the same–yesterday’s version of the same.

Our approach at Canopy Gap is to work with organizations on significant challenges or aspirations, applying tools and principles from diverse fields in the current context of your organization. Every engagement is different because every client and every moment is different.

The principles and patterns have been tested by time. The context is always changing. How we get to better sales, innovation, or organizational transformation will depend on what is happening now–in the market, in the team, in the organization, and within each person.

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“An organization’s fitness—like that of an organism—cannot be assessed in a vacuum; it is a product of compatibility with the surrounding environment.”

— General Stanley McChrystal

With the present-day cynicism towards large institutions, we have lost our sense of their potential. The complex states of government, academia, corporations, networks, and multinational nonprofits are an evolutionary marvel. Before trying to dismantle them, we could step back and appreciate our abilities to gather, coordinate, and accomplish remarkable feats. How can so many people serve a common interest effectively?

This has been accomplished through human ingenuity, modern technology, and the transactional exchanges of value that are less and less effective at motivating employees, buyers, partners, and citizens. People don’t like being commoditized or coerced, and that’s what has been happening inside and outside of many organizations.

We see different possibilities emerging — organizations, large and small, becoming attractive forces of the best talent, most inspiring innovation, and loyal customers.

What if . . .

• Employees were consistently excited to contribute
• Innovation came naturally with little effort
• Leadership was abundant, clear, and respected
• Customers and partners were flocking to you

This is the potential of a relational business where the energy in the workplace, products, services, and advocates is palpable. Trust, purpose, and high quality interactions create profits and wellbeing.

How do these organizations get created? Transformed? Maintained?

There is no playbook for building these organizations because the secret sauce is in the dynamics within every interaction.

Relational business design is for organizations that want to address these dynamics, creating the most favorable conditions for these interactions to take place — in offices, labs, stores, factories, homes, the Internet, and classrooms. Working better together does not happen overnight. It takes time, awareness, cohesion, and action.

This is why Canopy Gap exists. The plans do not create the change. The interactions do.

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