It is a reality that our behaviors depend on our environment and vice versa.
A simple example could be if we are in a place where a huge bonus is paid only to the person who generates the most sales in a team, it is very likely that no one on that team will share information, or give advice on how to get more sales because everyone will want to win the juicy bonus.
Then, if you ask them to collaborate, they just won’t. Because it’s better if they don’t.
What if we remove that bonus and make it a group bonus? It is very likely that the person who always won the bonus will be upset. But it’s also possible that if the person feels stimulated to fight for a bonus, unlike what they did to achieve it before, now they will have to work as a team to achieve it.
Are we trying to directly change people? No, they are the ones who the power to decide of whether or not they want to adapt to the environment.
Four I’s plus One
One of the great challenges of self-organization, when it is carried out, is that the teams are focused on themselves, and in many cases, they forget the rest, they are only under-optimizing a part of the system, forgetting that they are part of a system where there are many more parts and which has a greater purpose: the organization.
This model was originally conceived by Mark Van Vugt, who originally only had four elements (information, identity, institutions, and incentives), which he called design principles in interventions to protect the environment. Jurgen Appelo extended it by another dimension, infrastructure and it became the Five I’s model.
Definition of the Five I’s: The single I’s explained
So now we will explore each of the elements of this model. After explaining each of them, I will share some questions that can guide you to start implementing them.
Information
As a starting point, we must encourage people to be aware of the consequences of their current behaviors, for this, we are going to implement information radiators.
Information radiators are tools that allow us to transmit relevant information to people in a simple way, visible to the entire organization. It intends to make the information transparent and keep it available to everyone to make decisions. For example Lean Change Management’s change canvases, Dashboards, kanban boards, OKRs, etc.
In addition to generating information radiators, the challenge here is how do we help people communicate better?
For example, a long time ago organizations began to remove walls and replace them with open spaces or glass walls, open-door offices, with COVID all that changed by implementing collaborative tools such as zoom and teams, among others.
It is important that the information on the radiators allows and encourages valuable conversations between all people involved.
Questions to ask to face the change:
- What information do people need to have visible?
- How should our information radiator be?
- What do we need for the information to flow?
Infrastructure
This element was incorporated by Jurgen Appelo in the original model of the Four I’s and refers to the physical or digital, tangible or intangible barriers that we may have in our environment in the face of the changes we want to boost.
For example tools, distance, language, time zones, etc…
It is also important to generate guides that allow people to know that they are going in the right direction.
Questions to ask to face the change:
- What barriers should we remove?
- Should we push a barrier?
- What guides are we needing to point the right way?
Institutions
Although most organizations are likely to be full of rules, sometimes it is necessary to add a few more to help us boost those behaviors necessary for change.
We need to generate guidelines that together with the aforementioned elements allow us to generate changes in the environment that promote changes in people.
Even the same people can generate this governance as communities of practice or informal structures through rules, politics, codes of conduct, processes, etc…
Questions to ask to face the change:
- Do we need any rules?
- Are there rules that we should discard because they no longer favor the behaviors we want to encourage?
- How can we make agreements to continue working together when we disagree?
- How can governance happen between people?
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