The Need for Organization Transformation
May 28, 2025
Author: David Sibbet
Is it possible that we are entering a truly new era of organization change? Many believe that the shadow side of the pervasive mechanistic paradigm that underlies corporate strategies has led to a crumbling of confidence in traditional responses to change.
Our equating success with the ability to extract value from the earth, from less powerful nations and peoples, and from our very children through the attention economy has left us reeling with problems. When objective rationalism is over-valued, relationships and reciprocity are ignored.
Mother nature is now talking back. It is encouraging us to move to a more ecological and living systems paradigm. Finding this bridge is what The Grove’s organizational work is about.
What is the Basis of Organizational Coherence?
The Grove has worked for years to help leaders and consultants lead better meetings, support better teaming, imagine more creative strategies and deal with large system change. But today simply evolving the status quo doesn’t seem like an answer to the scale of issues now facing anyone who wants to lead or consult with organizations.
We all need to understand the true basis of organizational coherence. Organizational coherence refers to the degree to which purpose, values, strategy, structure, culture, and day-to-day operations are aligned and mutually reinforcing. A coherent organization operates with a clear sense of identity and direction, making it easier for people to work together effectively, adapt to change, and make decisions that support the whole.
Capabilities evolve in these periods of coherence. But eventually things change, the coherence is disrupted and people must manage the inevitable liminal, “in-between” periods required to move to new forms. This is what “transformation” entails: learning to evolve what is truly working and also handle the uncertainty of shifts in states and status in new arrangements.
In some ways, the current massive disruption of globalization as an organizing framework is creating room for change. But we have not yet passed through the denial stage. It seems like many are bunkering and simply waiting, cutting losses, trimming off anything that seems like excess. This is not transformation. This is fear.
What are the choices? Is there even a shared language for thinking about systemic change at this level?
A Language for Sustainable Organizations
We believe that it is helpful to understand that organizations emerge less from rational design and more from the field of attention created by driving aspirations seeking expression within a specific context of real-world constraints.
If this intention gathers followers, then it can generate a creative, problem-solving energy that focuses activity. A network of conversations circles around this axis of intention seeking material expression.
This field of attention works as an organizational boundary that can be managed. For instance, Startups focus on getting their first clients. Growth organizations obsess about sustaining revenues from lead products. Specialized organizations cultivate practice leaders.
With a clear focus of intention, capabilities can evolve within that pattern. It is not a rigid structure but a dynamic field of communications and connections within the boundary established by intention seeking concrete expression.
Our growing insight is that the leader’s role is to address two challenges.
- Creating coherence at a given stage by clarifying and strengthening intention and its expression through concrete processes and initiatives, and encouraging internal solutions to this puzzle.
- Knowing how to shift from one pattern of coherence (often called a stage or archetype) to the next.
One is about optimizing the status quo and its stability, and the other is about dealing with the uncertainty and change of being in between phases.
Responses to both of these challenges are not about having all the answers and micromanaging! They involve being able to support visioning as well as uncertainty and sustaining a learning orientation. It means cultivating resilience and regenerativity.
A coherent pattern, which arises successfully and defines an organization in one phase of its life, can be threatened when people lose confidence in an organization’s purpose or when people no longer believe they are secure in their relationships with each other and the larger system.
These are attentional and energetic realities. When intention and relationships decline, the energy, innovation and vitality can drain out of the organization like water in a sink. But organizations can also destabilize when communication systems and bottom-line realities and infrastructures shift dramatically, as they are in many places today.
Change that combines evolution of capability with transformation of underlying patterns of coherence is an integrated spirit, heart, mind, and body problem.
These ideas are expressed in a Sustainable Organizations Model that has been developed over the last several decades of our consulting work. It outlines seven archetypes for achieving organizational coherence.
The framework is based on a shift from objective, structural thinking to one that acknowledges the dynamic inter-relational nature of human systems. It is a framework designed to provide a rich language for internal dialogue about change and transformation.
In the Organization Transformation Lab I will start in September, we will look at how this process-oriented language works by exploring how it plays out across seven types of archetypal organizational coherence.
Each session will explore the core question around which each archetype revolves.
- How can we start up and begin hiring?
- How can we grow with enough income to expand staff?
- How can we specialize across several offerings?
- How can we institutionalize and outgrow founders?
- How will we regenerate growth and overcome bureaucracy?
- How can we be co-creative and innovate with partners?
- How can we have a transformational impact?
The Startup Archetype
The first question, for instance, is “how to start up and begin hiring?” The coherence emerges around the “Startup” pattern. Although startups can happen in almost an unlimited variety of contexts and take on many specific appearances, they all need a strong original intention, often it's a bright idea about how something can be addressed with a new service or product. They all must find at least one tangible opportunity to try it out with a client, foundation or agency that will pay.
You can call yourself an organization with just this and not a lot else. Entrepreneurs who love this simplicity might generate any number of arrangements if they can keep finding enough clients to keep resources flowing. This archetype often produces an “anything goes” culture in which trying many different things is celebrated.
The Growth Archetype
But a new aspiration often emerges, which is to focus on strong lead products and services that generate a consistent cash flow that allows for more constituents or staff hires. “Let’s stop hopping around,” people might say.
This is the “Growth” archetype. It searches for and focuses on deep waves of interest. If it catches them, like a good surfer, it can grow rapidly. This growth leads to a culture of “being on the bus or not,” a very different culture from a startup.
Many entrepreneurs cannot shift to this more focused pattern. The ones that do need to understand how to go through the uncertainty of creating a new coherence around new conversations.
This pattern of evolving capability within one pattern of coherence and then experiencing an uncertain, even turbulent transition to a new pattern of coherence continues across all seven key patterns.
The Specialization Archetype
As organizations grow, specializations emerge, and organizations need to shift from “catch a wave” orientation to recruiting and/or developing divisional leaders who can be independently competent at leading different kinds of operations within a larger strategy allowing diversity of effort. Professional services firms and associations often reflect this pattern.
Eventually organizations can become institutions, when systems of reinvestment and reliable returns provide resources beyond founders.
In the large evolutionary process of organizations, the more complex regenerative, co-creative and transformational archetypes all rely on a foundation of the other forms. Thus when fundamental institutional infrastructures destabilize, as they are now under the influence of AI, tariff uncertainty, climate change, and social instability, leaders and organizations are being thrown into uncertainty.
Do they go backwards into earlier forms? Is there a way to regenerate growth? Can we partner up and learn to co-create? What does transformation look like?
These are the questions we will address directly in our new lab, a series of short session explorations. I will also explore how The Grove’s work with Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process has led us to understand that addressing the more evolved questions of regeneration, co-creation and transformation require a real “turn” in mindset and direction. This “turn” is the move away from over-concentration on materialism and mechanization to a more ecological, reciprocal orientation to people and contexts.
I’ve spent 45 years visualizing people’s symbolic understandings of the world in planning visioning sessions, and the art of change. This has led me to understand that most people’s mental models and ways of thinking are severely constrained and dominated by patterns derived from hundreds of years of engineering thinking. Problems can be fixed. People can be managed like gears in a machine. Health can be achieved with the proper chemicals.
Slowly, ecological, whole-systems thinking and approaches are emerging. This way of thinking doesn’t exclude engineering thinking but includes elements that are fundamentally different. Living systems are interconnected, uncertain, relationship-oriented phenomena, sensitive to energetic fields. They need material structures to express themselves, but the structures don’t provide the driving forces—purpose and meaning do—and the conversations within the boundary created by intention and context produce organizational coherence.
Our organizational narratives need updating! If you want to learn how regeneration, co-creation and transformation can manifest in your organization, then come to our new lab series. We are especially interested in leaders with the courage to step up to real transformation.
Learn more in our workshop series Organization Transformation: Seven Archetypes of Sustainability.
Download a free booklet on Arthur M. Young's Theory of Process.