Adrian is a founding partner of Partnos, which mission is to cultivate healthy organizations. He was CIO at Voxel Group and Engineering Program Manager at Criteo. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer of the Scrum Alliance, professor of the Master of La Salle and ESADE, whose MBA is among the 30 best in the world. In addition, he founded the largest Meetup in the world related to Sociocracy. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, is a regular speaker at international conferences, and an experienced facilitator at Open Space Technologies.
In this interesting talk at SDSummit, Adrian “does not define health as the absence of disease, but as two things: the ability to survive and face great challenges.”
This is a definition for people as well as for organizations and, therefore, he considers that we must take care of the 4 dimensions of health: physical, emotional, rational and spiritual.
For each of these dimensions, Adrian tells us about diseases or problems that it may experience and cures or treatments to heal them.
Physical Dimension
While in the human being we can quickly imagine the physical dimension as the hands, the heart, the muscles or the skin, for an organization this dimension includes the structures, assets, processes, raw materials, etc.
Common problems for this dimension are: wasting, aging, obesity, hypoxia, aphonia, blindness and deafness.
Some treatments for them are: transparency in costs, having an Obeya Room, investing in marketing and communication and implementing different mechanisms to obtain feedback..
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Emotional Dimension 
In this dimension people relations are considered. So, for an organization we talk about culture, values and beliefs.
Diseases related are: gluttony, laziness, anxiety, depression, vanity and mistrust.
And some treatments: training people in emotional intelligence and non-violent communication, defining values, investing in coaching, mentoring programs and conflict management.
Rational Dimension
This dimension is about getting market information, its subsequent analysis and decision-making that must be justified.
It experiences problems like nearsightedness, farsightedness, cognitive biases, and attention deficit.
Some treatments that can mitigate these problems are: limiting the WIP, making decisions in consensus (Sociocracy), having double bonds (Sociocracy), investing in continuous training.
Spiritual Dimension
This last dimension is related with the higher purpose: what are we here for. It connects us with the outside world (suppliers, clients, organizations) and achieves in people a feeling of unity: as an organization we are something more than the sum of people.
Some common illnesses in this dimension are: nihilism, meaninglessness, and guilt.
Some treatments for the aforementioned problems have to do with: working while parking the ego, practicing mindfulness, exercises such as choice without candidates, awareness without judgment, etc.
Conclusions
What we achieved if we maintain healthy all mentioned dimensions for an organization is:
- physical approach: high performance teams, people who like working hard with minimum wastage
- emocional approach: happier people, who feel honor to be part of the organization
- rational approach: honest and humanist people
- spiritual approach: humble and holistic people
You can see Adrian’s talk clicking on this link:
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