Why it matters

Fast change needs fast-changing organizations. It’s time to move away from slow archaic organizational models and to start adopting one built around principles and insights from nowadays. Allowing to evolve continuously, leaping into an improved organization every step of the way. Harnessing the intelligence of the many instead of the few.

To upgrade continuously, you need an organizational model that supports this. That’s why Bloom exists.

To make change easy, a common language and a good understanding of ‘what is our organization’ are necessary.

Let’s dive into these aspects.

Without words, exchanging a sock comes down to pointing and grabbing. To effectively talk about your organization, the language matters.

It’s a recipe for trouble when people are empowered to change their organization while there is no common understanding what there is to organize. Lack of words and common ground leads to confusion and worse. To make organizational change happen by the many, not the few, the group needs a language.

With Bloom you create and adapt a language. Your organization’s ability to talk about the organization moves from toddler to adult.

You’re autonomous to move around. But what is the best route from A to B? In this intersection some take a bus, others go by foot, and some by car. And where to? Some go left, others right, straight ahead and even an occasional U-turn.

But there’s another element at play. The intersection itself. It is the structure that makes all this traffic possible.

These underlying structures are rarely improved, let alone openly discussed. Why? Because it’s easy to see the pedestrians, the cars and the buses. The intersection however is taken for granted and often not considered.

Similar to improving cars, you can improve the intersection itself. But what does that look like?

One way of improving an intersection is to change it into a roundabout. It increases traffic flow. By bus, by foot, by car: there are major wins for all.

Comparing it to an organization, to be able to change intersections to roundabouts, you need to see it for what it is: a building block of your organization. It is a structure that determines how individuals and groups are able to move from A to B.

What are the underlying structures in your organization? Are they visible? Do you have a language to talk about it? Do they change or have they remained the same over the past decades?

The first thing Bloom will do is make it visible. The next step is to improve and to be able to do so continuously.

These stuctures of an organization have an effect, but are quite abstract. They need to move from the abstract to something that relates to day-to-day work.

Compare it with a fresh cup of tea. You can’t really see the heat. What you actually see is the effect of heat: vaporized water. In organizations lots of things that make up the organization are like heat. You can’t see it, hold it, touch it. But it has quite the impact.

In an organization, what is ‘budgeting’ or a ‘management team’? The effect of bad budgeting or a great management team can be felt throughout the company, but the underlying structure is often difficult to see. Let alone change it.

To effectively self-organize, you need clarity on what’s there to organize.

To become an evolutionary organization there is no silver bullet and certainly no one-size-fits-all approach. The way to do it right is to make it your own. As we learned in so many topics in Agile: there are many pathways. Bad ones and good, better and best ones.

To get to the ‘best’ ones for your organization, you need to carve out your own path. You know what makes your organization tick. It’s about experimenting in a disciplined way, learning from others, copying what works for your organization and adapting it to make it fit.

Bloom embeds these abilities in your organization. To evolve. Not once, but continuously. What starts out with just a few seeds, ends up becoming a lively and resiliant forest.

Bloom exists because of the opportunity to experiment and the ability to build upon great ideas.

It is crafted thanks to the availability of a wide range of studies, experts who have shared their knowledge with us, insights that were gained through literature, quality blog posts, meetups, conferences and our experiences. The secret to it all is putting it in practice. That’s when Bloom takes on its form that fits your organization.

Bloom is influenced by the fields of business, anthropology, agile, sociology and pyschology. It puts lots of puzzle pieces together.

For others to do with Bloom as we have done with other concepts, we have made Bloom available as an open source framework.