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About the guest
Stelio Verzera is an accomplished entrepreneur, evolution coach, and organizational innovation practitioner, renowned as the co-founder and managing partner of Cocoon Pro. With extensive experience since the mid-1990s in innovation, strategy, and organizational design, he has developed adaptive frameworks like LiquidO to enhance organizational resilience. His diverse background includes studies in fluid dynamics and a successful career in digital strategy, making him a thought leader in the future of work and human systems evolution. Learn more about him on his expert page.
Summary
In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, Tim Brewer and Damian Bramanis interview Stelio Verzera from Cocoon Pro, a long-term member of the European Organization Design Forum. With nearly 30 years of experience in organizational design, Stelio shares insights on the journey that led him to this field, emphasizing the importance of engaging the whole person in organizational changes. He discusses the use of tools like Lego Serious Play to visualize complex concepts and foster collaboration among team members. The conversation highlights the need for organizations to adapt continuously and the significance of understanding the deeper layers of an organization, including culture and individual competencies. Stelio advocates for a shift from mechanistic to organic organizational structures, urging leaders to embrace their influence and responsibility within a broader ecosystem. This episode offers valuable perspectives for leaders looking to enhance their organizations' performance and culture.
Transcript
Stelio Verzera EODF
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[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: Welcome to the Org Design Podcast.
We are coming to you directly from Milan, Italy. We're having an amazing time here at the EODF conference. I've got myself, Tim Brewer, co-hosting with Damian Bramanis. Thanks Tim. Rory Mustan over in production. Rory, it's so good to have you here live.
[00:00:17] Damian Bramanis: Today we have Stelio Verzera from Cocoon Pro. And Stelio has been a long-term member of EODF, instrumental in the European Organization Design Forum. And coming up next year, will have 30 years experience in org design. So we're talking to someone here who's got a lot of wealth of wisdom to share.
[00:00:38] Stelio Verzera: Thank you so much for having me. Really happy. I love this podcast, by the way. I think I'm gonna listen to all the episodes that I lost.
[00:00:44] Tim Brewer: Why don't we start with, not everyone goes to school thinking, when I grow old, I want to be an org designer. What was your journey leading out of school and how did you end up having such a rich career in org design?
[00:00:57] Stelio Verzera: ask that to my parents. So I'm still having a hard time telling what I do for a living and my parents have no clue. They say like, are you really get paid to, to play with Lego bricks in companies? Yeah. Yeah. So I started consulting in this field without knowing it was this field when internet arrived in Italy, 1995. This is why I say 30 years, I was at university. I was studying advanced fluid dynamics, actually aerospace engineering, but just because of my passion for the wind and the waves, I wanted to learn more and more about that. But I was also one of those guys, like many people probably are listening, that were playing with modems doing that, noisy thing in the night and bulleting system and all these things. BBS. Wow. It was like
[00:01:49] Damian Bramanis: BBS. Yes.
[00:01:50] Stelio Verzera: War games stuff. Yeah. In the nineties, and so I was curious enough to get into business, and I started consulting companies that realized it wasn't something for kids. It was actually a new way of meaning, what you can do, what you can be with a company. And this is where my journey in Sociotechnical Systems started. I didn't know back then that I was helping them reorganize, but this is what I was doing. They were redesigning the way they were working, the processes, what people needed to learn, or what roles they needed in the company because this thing was changing everything and I kept going with that. Then there was the 2.0 revolution that changed how companies show up in the market out there, how people can receive, process and transform information for the first time in human history. Got democratized and so that again was a change. Then I crashed my first company, but that's a story for another question probably. But this is how I started.
[00:02:48] Tim Brewer: coming back to Lego we got a lot of listeners who get letters all the time from our Lego lovers. How do you bring Lego into org design?
[00:02:58] Stelio Verzera: Good point. So back to sociotechnical systems. An organization is a system in which people get together, generate a culture, and use their competencies to do something together in the world. This is inherently sociotechnical. So the moment you want to change, improve the performance of that system in, in any way, you need effective ways to engage the whole person.
So to have people be able to express, put on the table literally, change and evolve not only what they think, but also what they feel about the work and what they don't know that they know. Our brains are continuously absorbing information. You enter the office in the morning, you don't even notice, but you notice many things that remain with you.
The mood of the morning, the face of a person. So we have a whole lot of stuff in our brains that our hands are able to go and retrieve, even if we don't know it's there. There is a lot of neurobiology on how the hands are connected with all levels of the brain. Not only the cortical rational part, but also the limbic and even the amygdala, the, the part of the reptilian part of the brain. So serious games and specifically Lego serious play, which is a specific methodology, but we use also others, all these things allow people to use their hands with the constructionist and constructivist approach.
I can dive in that if you want, but to express, to represent abstract concepts like performance, like trust, like leadership, put that on the table, change it. And as the people change it with their hands with other people, they change the neural structures in the brain that stays with them for years.
It's incredibly powerful. Now, what Lego did in the nineties, Lego was going through a very big strategic problem because a new breed of games of toys arrived the digital ones, and they didn't want to enter that space. Actually, they ended up doing that afterwards. Lego, the word Lego means Leg got in Danish. It means play well. They strongly believe that children need to use their hands and their creativity in a specific way, not going to the digital space, but they were losing market. They were closing there. There was in a deep crisis. So long story short, they generated a methodology that didn't have the bricks at the beginning, but ended up having the bricks at the end to solve complex issues, to work on complex issues and make strategy out of them. And that ended up in 2010 being released in open source, and it's called Lego Serious Play. So it's a specific way, there's a method to use the bricks in order to tackle complex problems alone and in groups.
[00:05:42] Damian Bramanis: So cool. So that does, when I write notes, if I write them on paper with a pen in my hands, it seems like there's something that connects far deeper to my brain than if I'm just typing it out. Is that related to what you're talking
[00:05:53] Stelio Verzera: it is related
[00:05:54] Damian Bramanis: to the hands?
[00:05:55] Stelio Verzera: about when you are nervous, your hands swell, or you bite your nails or you tap or something. There, there is something neurological.
The hands are the most connected part of the body to the brain, and that's because we evolved changing the environment. Like primates, we are primates. And as we evolved that in that way, using the hands to change our houses, to go hunting all of that, that, that left our hands deeply connected with the whole of brain.
[00:06:24] Damian Bramanis: so tell us how you use your hands in org design. Because when we think about org design facilitation, often people think about talking and sharing stories and sitting around there's much less frequently people talk about doing things with their hands.
[00:06:37] Stelio Verzera: absolutely. So this goes back to how you engage people.
So this also, not the whole of org, you can use it in also in traditional top down org design, but in participatory processes in which people have to describe, co-create the work they want to do together. And especially if we talk about adaptive organizing, which means that the organization doesn't do a every reorganization, any every, I dunno, five years, but it's continuously evolving.
You need people to take ownership of that inside of the organization, so it's even more participatory. If that's the case, you want to have tools, technologies, what processes that allow people to express what they have inside in terms of what it means for him, for them, for example, to have performance in a team.
And that's an amazing question. You go to three different teams. You ask this question, you have three different answers. Performance we take for granted that performance is those three KPIs. Yeah. And what else? And then there is a whole lot of stuff in order to perform or embed what we mean by performance, there is so much.
So whenever there is something that is not complicated, that's from from latin, complicated means unfolded, and then you can unfold it. There is an exact answer to complicatedness. As opposed to complex. When it's complex, there is no exact answer. There is an exploration. The paradigm
[00:08:03] Damian Bramanis: the wind and the waves, like you said.
[00:08:05] Stelio Verzera: Exactly. Non-linear dynamics. Yeah. Emergent systems. This is science. It's not hocus pocus. And when that's the case, you need the wisdom of the people, especially because they are the ones that then will have to operate the system they design. And in that serious games are really powerful. They can use their hands to make sense of what they feel about something that they couldn't verbalize. But then they tell the story about the model that they built. And I've seen more than once, I have to say burst of emotion, like people in board of directors starting to cry because they had something inside they couldn't express about their company and why it matters to them, how they want it to be, and that they see it on the table, that their hands have built it, and suddenly it makes sense. It clicks and all the other people in the group recognize that moment. It becomes a defining moment on which the future is built.
[00:08:55] Damian Bramanis: So what might that look like? I'm trying to imagine a boardroom with someone in the boardroom creating a model of what their organization might look like.
What would that physically be?
[00:09:06] Stelio Verzera: Yeah. We, you can do many things with Lego bricks. You can also create a model of departments and, real stuff, but that's not Lego serious play. What we're talking about is expressing complex and normally abstract concept, not creating a mock up of the organization, but still through that, performance, value for the customer, strategy. You can build an entire strategy on the table, including the factors that can affect your future. What is the identity? What are the values of the company? What are the risks? All these things can be on the table. You can play with them. So what you can imagine is that there are different type of bricks or again, this is just Lego series play, but we use another system.
It's called Serious Game System that can in involve cards. Dices, different things, including the bricks, and you have these things on the table, and normally there is an individual construction. So I propose to the team the same or to the people in the room, the same question. And they build different things because they have different things in their mind.
And then you can either create a layout, so put those things in relationship on the table with each other, make sense of the relationship, or you can converge in a common things. You can create a share model out of the individual models. The important thing is that constructive is a sense that when you build something with your hands out of your brain. You can then modify that thing in the real world. And as you do that, that changes the synopsis that the neural connection in your brain. So that stays with people. I've seen people after three years talking about that session and saying, but do you remember the elephant on the boat that made sense for all of them?
And they knew the meaning of the whole thing and it stays with them forever. We are three dimensional beings and we still write strategy one dimensions the text or diagrams in two dimensions, but everything that matters in our lives in 3D.
[00:11:03] Tim Brewer: It's really cool. Something did pique my interest that we ask a lot of our guests, which is, you're at a dinner party, someone says, what do you do for work? And you're like, I'm an org designer, " oh, what's org design?", How do you explain to someone? I know some of the tangibles, "oh, I help people build their organizations with Lego". Would be obviously super interesting, but how do you describe to someone, particularly a leader that is already attempting or doing org design in one form or another, but doesn't call it org design? How, how do you define design?
[00:11:33] Stelio Verzera: don't call it org design either.
[00:11:35] Tim Brewer: What do you call it?
[00:11:35] Stelio Verzera: So first of all, I, again, I don't want to convey the fact that I use Legos all the time. We use 40 different tools. And what I like when, if I am the party, when I say what would you do? I have two answers depending on who asks. One answer is, I do management consulting, which is absolutely false.
I don't consult, meaning, I don't bring the wisdom from outside, inside, and I don't believe in management as a layer, as a solution, but as an activity, and that gets more complicated, complex actually. But still, this is what people understand easily. So if they, if it really doesn't matter what I do and they're asking for being polite, this is an easy answer.
I do management, I run a company that does management consulting. We work in change and performance easy. But the real answer that, that when people really care about what I do, I say that we give superpowers to game changers. So the people that want to change the game of the company. Meaning how the thing feels and how the thing performs. We can give superpowers to them in different ways.
[00:12:38] Damian Bramanis: what do you wish your job title was? What would you call that as a job title?
[00:12:43] Stelio Verzera: I think on LinkedIn at the moment, I have Serenity Gardener.
[00:12:48] Damian Bramanis: Serenity Gardener.
[00:12:49] Stelio Verzera: Yeah. This is what it is all about.
At the end of the day, why do we do what we do? It's not because people can make more money, they perform. Yeah. It's also that. But it is, that work must be more fulfilling. People must go home. It's a huge part of life. This thing about work life balance is bullshit. Now you can bleep this Of course. Thank you.
[00:13:08] Tim Brewer: Beep.
[00:13:09] Stelio Verzera: But it is, it's a huge part of our lives and it's really a shame that people are so disengaged at work, Gallop have the numbers of that and people just go to work because they have to pay the mortgage or whatever at the end of the month. This is nonsense and this is the nonsense of the last century. It wasn't like this before. After mass production the mechanistic metaphor for people who have become cogs and this is a problem in society, it then percolates to the relationship with children, to everything, pretty much. And so that serenity is something that needs to be gardened.
There is no exact solution. And this is the other thing, when you talk with managers that have been trained in MBAs, they look for a mathematical solution to any problem. This is not how life works simply. It's not ideological, it's ontological. And also our schools are a problem there.
We get trained in giving the right answer and in talking when somebody tells you to talk and learning what you have to learn this year, not next year, this is complete nonsense, fortunately is changing. So my work, I like to think, is about bringing back that serenity of being in line with yourself, resonating with what you are, wherever, including at work.
[00:14:19] Damian Bramanis: It's so true. And if you think if you ask people how they are at work, they'll give you answers like, I'm stressed or I'm busy, or I'm flat out, they say in Australia, no one I've ever heard has said serene,
[00:14:32] Tim Brewer: flat out like a lizard drinking
[00:14:33] Damian Bramanis: flat out. Yeah. And so does do those things. If people say, oh, I'm busy, I'm stressed. Does that indicate that there's a problem in the organization?
[00:14:41] Stelio Verzera: If all the people are saying that all the time, there's definitely a problem in the organization. We all get stressed. Sometimes it's normal. But if I hear that answer together with, this is a lovely place to be, the work we do is important and I like it. But this is a difficult phase, is different. The problem is that a lot of people are actively disengaged in these companies. Meaning that at the moment they can, they're talking against the company or against their colleagues and there is a lot of ego playing.
Silos thinking is the least of the problem. The problem is that the silos then start to fight with each other. It's two teams, two divisions. All of that is dysfunctional to the serenity, to the peacefulness, and that also is a healthcare problem at the end of the day. That generates most of today's diseases. That kind of stress we put on ourselves because we're not in line with what life is, and we are created places where people are cogs and it doesn't work. Simply doesn't.
[00:15:34] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. If you think through the organizations that you've seen and where there isn't serenity, but there's a need for Serenity, what do you think is the most important advice you could give to leaders today who are looking at improving their organization?
[00:15:51] Stelio Verzera: I think the advice would be to realign themselves with what really matters to them. It's much more of an advice at a personal level. Because I've seen that when that happens, they start to have ripples. They start to do the same things in completely different ways or doing things differently.
And in hierarchical, top-down companies, which is 90% of the market yet, even though there is this fad, this bossless flat organizations, which we can talk about in some cases that's good. In some cases it's just fashionable stuff. But the reality is that most organizations are hierarchical.
So if the boss, at the end of the day what they want, the boss of the board or the owners or the funders or whatever, who has the formal power at the end of the day, just wants the numbers would add up, and that's the only thing that matters. People know it. Everybody in the company knows in their hearts that the numbers are the only thing that matters and that makes the difference.
And the only way to change that is to change the consciousness about what matters in the heart of people, which is not changing the person, it's just telling the person. You can make another step to becoming yourself, not to becoming another thing. And that's realizing that you are, because there are other people around you, what you are is an ecology.
The moment they understand that, the moment we leave that everything starts to change and then we can talk about different processes, different ways of doing things, different tools. All the rest,
[00:17:24] Damian Bramanis: it's interesting you mentioned the, the ripple effects It takes you right back to fluid dynamics of one thing in the wind and the waves can have an impact right across the whole structure.
[00:17:34] Stelio Verzera: that's a characteristic of complex systems. Any fluctuation on boundary condition, every variable can reconfigure the entire, it's reconfigures actually the entire system. This is why it's unpredictable.
[00:17:46] Tim Brewer: You talked about changing boundary conditions, and I'm sure as you've worked with lots and lots of different leaders, through the various tools and methodologies you've got. Is there something that is, you're having a drink with someone at a bar and they're like, "oh my goodness, I've just become a leader of 600 people".
What would your advice to them be the most important things for them to consider as they're looking at their organization, its performance, their organization structure. Is there something that you see as a very common theme," Hey, if you do nothing else before talking to advisors and experts, just do this one or two things. Is that like common advice that you'd have for everyday leaders?
[00:18:25] Stelio Verzera: yes, but only not in terms of what needs to be done. That's really contextual, but in terms of how things need to be recognized, so we use a metaphor, we use the metaphor of an organization as a river. It's a fluid dynamic metaphor again. And what it tells you is that the organization is always evolving.
It's not that you run a change program, it's changing continuously like a person. I am not the same person I was before starting this podcast recording with you. And that's true for the organization. When you look at it as a river, there is a surface. The surface is tools and processes, is what you can directly observe. It's the only thing you can directly observe. How work gets done, the actions, but underneath there are the competencies, the capabilities of people that translate into competencies that allow that surface to happen. Even below that, there is culture. This is a property of the system, and below that there is people.
So it's a sociotechnical metaphor. So basically it works the other way around. People get together the moment they do, they generate an emergent property that is culture and they use and and devise competencies to use and devise tools to do what they want to do in the world. Now, since we are in a mechanistic mood, in the Zeitgeist of the world is still, unfortunately it's changing fast, but it's still mechanistic.
All leaders when they want to do anything to change the organization, make it perform or whatever, they drop a stone to tools and processes they reorganizing or changing whatever digital transformation, whatever it is. It's thought as changing tools and processes because that's the only thing you can see directly.
You cannot see my competencies directly. You can see the competencies through how I perform in tools and processes level, and the most important thing I find myself telling all of these people is you need to realize that there are all the layers and it is a one thing. So the moment you touch one layer, you're touching all of them. Either you are aware of that or not, and so each couple layer can seem, can represent a different evolution. And the speed, like the profile of velocity in a river decreases as you go deeper. So it takes weeks to evolve tools and processes. It takes months to evolve, competencies it can take year to evolve significantly in culture and with people, good luck.
So what you need to do is always take care of the things together. This is one operational evolution and this is what you care about. All leaders wanna do that. There is a behavioral evolution and there is a psychological evolution. So the most important thing is that you take care of the three of them with the knowing patience that the deeper you go the more time the evolution needs. Otherwise what you obtain is that the inertia of the river eats what you're trying to do, and you develop change fatigue. Too many initiative people are stressed. That's only because you look at the operational level. You want to change that, and you don't take into account that the other evolutions are structural and need more time.
[00:21:32] Damian Bramanis: look deeper into all of the layers. Cool. I have one final question. In almost 30 years working in this field, you must have seen a lot of change in evolution. And then in 30 years from now, I'm sure organization design is going to be progressed and look in some ways quite different to today. What do you see changing in the field of org design and why?
[00:21:56] Stelio Verzera: Thank you for this question. This is what matters most to me. So when I crashed my first company, I dunno how much time I have this, I will try to make it, to keep it short,
[00:22:03] Damian Bramanis: we want to hear from you. Go for it.
[00:22:06] Stelio Verzera: I'll try to make it short. When I crash my first company, it was in the crisis of 2009, 2010.
And and it was a traditionally organized company. We were, it was small company with less than 20 people, but still we had two divisions with a little hierarchy. We played by the book and we crashed the company because we were too young, because we were not listening enough. That's for sure. That is our side of the guilt, but also because the whole world in that crisis couldn't adapt. All of our customer, we were working with multinational, we were going well actually, they froze the budget. They laid off tens or hundreds of people and the whole world was on their knees because of what is called requisite variety.
The ability to adapt that was required by the environment wasn't matched by how our organization were inside. And this is where we started a new company with a big what if, and we ended up designing a company that doesn't do job interviews, don't have budget to have formal power.
Many things, and it was way before even the Agile fad. It was 2010, but way before all the bossless, flat, Holocratic organization. It was just a need. In that moment, there was a paradigm sheet that started from a mechanistic to an organic understanding of organization that is now after 10 years has exploded and it's becoming the mainstream ethos of org design finally, but it's not enough.
What our society needs is the understanding that as adaptive, you can be inside. Also, Al-Qaeda is adaptive. That will not make it a better word unless you also understand that there is no boundary to your organization. The boundary is just a mental construct. Where do you put it? Your employees, your partners, the families of your partners.
So you can put it whatever you want. Actually talking with Nora Basin, we would, we were talking about this in the frame of ecological view of work. And what I propose is that there are no boundaries, there are horizons. The horizon is needed for the conversation. We need to have an horizon when we say my company, otherwise, it's the whole world.
But still knowing that is just an horizon. Not the property of the thing, but the property of the beholder of me that I'm looking at the thing. Now, the moment you start embracing that and you say, okay, there is no boundary to my organization. It also means there is no boundary to my influence as a leader, and there is no boundary to my responsibility as a leader.
And that affect how you design your processes. And so this is where the world is going, and I really believe is needing to go. And this is really new as well. It's just two or three years that is becoming part of the conversation. And that people start to talk about business ecosystems, but then the word gets immediately, forgive me for this McKinsey'd, meaning that it becomes a way to sell something.
But I say this because I read an article by McKinsey so I can stand by my statement that talks about that as another strategy. But this is not a strategy. It is also a strategy because the moment you align your interest with the interest of the ecosystem, you tap into exponential returns. That's interesting, but that's not the point. The point is that your company doesn't have boundaries and the way you design must become ecosystemic. Meaning that you are aware that what you do is transform value that comes out of from outside and then goes out of your company. So this, I think is where the org design approaches are going and then the techniques also will evolve. There is artificial intelligence coming. There is a different relationship between people and technology that is happening. I believe we are in the middle of a revolution, at least as big as the nineties probably bigger for sure, faster.
What consultant consulting means is going to change, in my opinion, to disappear. So we automated mechanical work. Now we're automating knowledge work. Pretty much all of the knowledge work will be doable automatically in a few years. But fortunately, there's not all the work. There is a lot of work about relationships. There's a work, a lot of work about. People, there's a work, a lot of work about reading the context and its complexity that we have in our DNA since 2 million years, and that is also where org design needs to put the attention more and more. It's not about the model from whatever is the fad, the moment.
It's really about how. People can get together in such a messy world and achieve something that is now not only the result of the company, but is the result of the company in alignment with the rest of an ecosystem. And it's a hugely, more difficult challenge to tackle. Yeah.
[00:26:55] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. It's almost like you're saying that it's getting closer to the fundamentals, like really focusing on the fundamental principles again.
[00:27:02] Stelio Verzera: Absolutely. I had a talk and it's been three years of event here. It's been amazing. Beautiful people coming from childcare, public institution, everything. And what I realized, it was actually one of the last slides of my talk, and this technically, not just humanly, the slide was about Ubuntu and from Africa.
The idea that I am because we are, which is not an ideology, it's a reality. My body is 99% bacteria genes, unique genes in my body are 99% bacteria. Where do I end? And then you have a child and your cells become that body. And is it you or another thing? It's both. It's both. So the point is it's not altruistic or egoistic. It has to be both. We call it ecoistic. It means that like when you do something for your child, is it altruistic? I don't think so. Is it ego? It's both. You are your family and you are also an individual. This is true for companies as well.
[00:28:04] Damian Bramanis: Thank you so much, Stelio. That's been a really enjoyable conversation for me. If people are interested in what you've been talking about today and wanted to follow up or, or learn more, what's the best way for them to find out more or to contact you?
[00:28:19] Stelio Verzera: I would say I'm, you can find me on LinkedIn for sure. Then I have an about.me/stelio-verzera. There are all my channels and of course the website of my company, which is Cocoon Pro as well. So it is cocoon-pro.com.
[00:28:34] Tim Brewer: Awesome. thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Damian, thank you for co-hosting, Rory in production, crushing it today. Thank you everyone for joining us. Have a great rest of the day.
[00:28:46] Damian Bramanis: Thank you so much, Tim.
[00:28:47] Stelio Verzera: Thank you all
Functionly empowers organizations to embrace a holistic approach to design by recognizing the interconnectedness of people, processes, and culture.
By leveraging advanced tools, teams can collaboratively explore and visualize complex concepts, ensuring that every stakeholder's voice is heard. This participatory design process fosters ownership, enabling organizations to adapt dynamically to changes and challenges. With Functionly, leaders can cultivate an environment where clarity and engagement flourish, ultimately aligning organizational structures with the evolving needs of their ecosystems.
