Chapter 6
The Second Relationship—With Your Community
Ensuring Your Organization’s Relevance through Strategic Planning
A company is not a machine but a living organism. Much like an individual, it can have a collective sense of identity and fundamental purpose. This is the organizational equivalent of self knowledge—a shared understanding of what the company stands for, where it’s going, what kind of world it wants to live in, and most importantly, how it intends to make that world a reality.
—Ikujiro Nonaka, “The Knowledge Creating Company,” Harvard Business Review (November–December 1991)
For a football team to function as an intelligent organism rather than as a group of individuals, the players need to take advantage of not only the fact that they have a stronger potential together than one by one, but also that they have different competencies and skills as individuals. This, in turn, requires that the players create shared mental models about football. To merge the different skills of all the players into an effective whole, they need to have exactly the same overall perception of what the game is all about—the non-negotiable set of rules for football.
—Karl-Henrik Robèrt, The Natural Step: Simplicity without Reductionism (Stockholm: The Natural Step Environmental Institute)
