Steinar Haldorsen has used Org Topologies since the early alpha versions. He met us at Agile Pague 2022, where we presented the idea, and since then, Steinar has been our great champion, providing valuable feedback and reporting from the trenches.
Steinar says:
“Since 2022, I’ve experienced great value from using Org Topologies™ (OT) with clients in different organizational development contexts.
One of the most compelling reasons is that it gave us a way to communicate observations, experiences, ideas, and potential change initiatives that were otherwise hard to explain consistently. In terms of how the different players in the organizations interacted, OT provided a way to map that out. It made otherwise “invisible” patterns, such as inefficient mandates and misaligned incentives, clear and discussable.
It shifted the focus from consultant-led advice to client-owned reasoning. This empowered the organizations to take greater ownership of both problem understanding and experimentation with design improvements -- an essential ingredient for sustainable change.
In general, I’ve seen improved quality in organizational design discussions. It reduced unproductive debates colored by personal feelings about, for example, the names of roles or preferred operating models and frameworks. Instead, both managers and employees developed a shared language to address the pros and cons of different organizational designs and approaches to work.
In one organization, we used OT as a foundation from day one of my involvement. While the whole R&D department was educated in the basics, fifteen members of the organization took the OT video course and engaged in a community for continued learning. Throughout the engagement, OT was used to define an aligning system-optimizing goal, to create widespread awareness of ineffective as-is patterns, to support workshops where people from across the client’s organization discovered inefficiencies and came up with improvement ideas, and to communicate initiatives and progress in monthly town halls.
I highly recommend exploring Org Topologies™. It offers a practical and structured way to reveal what’s really going on beneath the surface and to engage organizations in meaningful, system-aware change.”
