MOC Organizational or Business Design & Operations
Notes
- Diagramming Organizational Maturation
- three-box Solution — Box 1 (manage present), Box 2 (forget past), Box 3 (create future)
References
Decentralized & Network-Based Organization
Brafman, Ori, and Rod A. Beckstrom. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Reprint edition. New York: Portfolio, 2008.
Brafman and Beckstrom contrast centralized "spider" organizations (cut off the head, it dies) with decentralized "starfish" organizations (cut off a leg, it regenerates). The book maps out how leaderless networks like AA, Wikipedia, and Apache gained power through distributed authority. For uW staff, this is the conceptual foundation for why we operate as a network rather than a hierarchy, and why catalysts matter more than commanders.
Ford, Lance, Rob Wegner, Alan Hirsch, and Ori Brafman. The Starfish and the Spirit: Unleashing the Leadership Potential of Churches and Organizations. Zondervan, 2021.
Ford, Wegner, and Hirsch apply the starfish/spider framework to church and mission contexts. They argue that the early church was a decentralized, Spirit-empowered movement and that recovering that posture releases leadership capacity across an organization. Read this if you want the theological case for why our flat, catalytic structure reflects something deeper than management theory.
Robertson, Brian J. Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. 1. ed. New York: Holt, 2015.
Robertson presents a governance system that replaces management hierarchy with self-organizing circles, each with explicit roles and decision-making authority. The integrated decision-making process described here shaped how uW thinks about consent-based authority. Worth reading if you want a concrete operating system for distributed decision-making, though our approach borrows selectively rather than adopting holacracy wholesale.
Pflaeging, Niels. Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back Into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization. 5th revised edition. BetaCodex Publishing, 2014.
Pflaeging distinguishes the three structures present in every organization: formal (reporting lines), informal (influence), and value creation (how useful work gets done). He argues that most organizations over-invest in formal structure while the real work runs through the other two. This book gave uW the language for why we highlight informal and value creation structures over org charts, and it introduces "The Beta Choice," a model for maintaining agility instead of sliding toward bureaucracy as the organization matures.
Hamel, Gary. "First, Let's Fire All the Managers," 2011. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers.
Hamel profiles Morning Star, the tomato processing company that runs with zero managers. Employees negotiate "Colleague Letters of Understanding" with each other, set their own compensation, and handle disputes through peer processes. This article demonstrates that radical self-management works at scale in a real business. uW's emphasis on the advice process and peer-to-peer accountability draws from this same well.
Green, Paul. "The Colleague Letter of Understanding: Replacing Jobs with Commitments | Management Innovation eXchange," April 2010. https://www.managementexchange.com/story/colleague-letter-understanding-replacing-jobs-commitments.
Green describes Morning Star's practice of replacing job descriptions with "Colleague Letters of Understanding," voluntary agreements between coworkers about what each will deliver and how they will interact. This turns employment into a web of negotiated commitments rather than a top-down assignment of tasks. Read this if you want a practical model for how peer agreements can replace traditional role definitions.
"Code of Ethics | Morningstar, Inc." Accessed January 29, 2024. https://shareholders.morningstar.com/investor-relations/governance/code-of-ethics/default.aspx.
This is Morningstar's published code of ethics, a reference point for how a self-managed organization codifies shared values and behavioral expectations. Useful as a benchmark if you are thinking about how to articulate organizational principles that guide behavior without top-down enforcement.
Valve. Valve: Handbook for New Employees. Valve Press, 2012. https://www.goodreads.com/work/best_book/19230985-valve-handbook-for-new-employees.
Valve's employee handbook is famous for its candid description of a company with no bosses, no job assignments, and desks on wheels so people can physically move to join projects. It is both inspiring and sobering: the freedom is real, but so is the expectation that you figure out where you add the most value. A short, entertaining read that shows what a fully self-organized company looks like from the inside.
Complexity & Learning
- Pflaeging's Organize for Complexity highlights — the foundational text for three organizational structures (formal, informal, value creation) and why mastery through disciplined practice matters more than individual performance measurement
- Always Learning core value — the Build-Measure-Learn loop as organizational operating system
- CLOUs and operations (2025) — the current team self-assessment and CLOU structure, which applies these principles in practice
Flow & Constraints
- The Phoenix Project and Goldratt's work on constraints show that bottleneck analysis is the lever for organizational improvement. See Sum The Phoenix Project for how WIP limits, feedback loops, and the Three Ways of DevOps apply in practice.
Strategy & Innovation
Govindarajan, Vijay. The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.
Govindarajan divides strategic work into three boxes: Box 1 (manage the present), Box 2 (selectively forget the past), and Box 3 (create the future). uW's strategic framework builds directly on this model. We use Box 3 projects as time-boxed experiments to test new ideas before committing resources, and Box 2 as the discipline of letting go of things that no longer serve the mission. Start here if you want to understand how our strategy-ops process is structured and why.
Ismail, Salim, Michael S. Malone, Yuri van Geest, and Peter H. Diamandis. Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper than Yours. Diversion Books, 2014.
Ismail argues that organizations achieving 10x performance share common attributes: a Massive Transformative Purpose, leveraged assets, and community-driven growth. The book catalogs specific mechanisms (staff on demand, algorithms, engagement, interfaces, dashboards) that allow small teams to produce outsized impact. For uW, the "MTP" concept connects to our own purpose-driven identity and our need to produce outsized results with a small team.
Bahcall, Safi. Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. St. Martin's Press, 2019.
Bahcall distinguishes "soldiers" (people who execute on proven strategies) from "artists" (people who nurture fragile, unproven ideas) and shows that organizations fail when they let one group crush the other. He introduces the "Bush-Vail rules": separate the phases, create dynamic equilibrium between them, spread a systems mindset, and reduce internal politics. uW's strategy document names this book as part of our strategic framework. Read it to understand why we protect Box 3 exploration from Box 1 operational pressure, and why loving both soldiers and artists well is a leadership responsibility.
Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. 1. Aufl. USA: Crown Business, 2014.
Ries introduced the build-measure-learn loop as the core engine of innovation. Rather than spending months perfecting a product, you ship a minimum viable version, measure what happens, and adjust. uW's strategic framework incorporates this cycle as the method for testing Box 3 ideas. The book also introduced "innovation accounting," a way to measure progress when traditional metrics do not yet apply.
Maurya, Ash. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. 2nd edition. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2012.
Maurya makes Lean Startup principles actionable with a step-by-step method for testing business assumptions. He walks through building a "Lean Canvas," identifying your riskiest assumptions, and designing experiments to validate them before you invest heavily. Useful if you are leading a Box 3 project and need a practical playbook for iterating from a rough idea to something that works.
Chang, Ann Mei. Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2019.
Chang adapts Lean Startup thinking to the nonprofit and social enterprise world, where the feedback loops are longer and the stakes different. She addresses how to measure impact when you cannot rely on revenue as a signal, and how to run experiments in contexts where failure carries real human cost. For uW staff thinking about how we test and iterate in a mission context, this book bridges the gap between startup methodology and the realities of our work.
Rigby, Darrell, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi. "Embracing Agile." Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile.
Rigby, Sutherland, and Takeuchi explain where agile methods work (complex problems with evolving requirements) and where they do not (routine operations with stable processes). The article offers a grounded introduction to agile principles for non-software contexts. Read this to understand when agile practices should shape how your working group operates and when a different approach fits better.
Butler, David, and Linda Tischler. Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too). First Simon&Schuster hardcover edition. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Butler and Tischler describe how Coca-Cola applied design thinking to balance the competing demands of scale (consistency, reliability) and agility (speed, experimentation). The tension between these two forces is one every growing organization faces. Useful for thinking about how uW maintains its ability to experiment and adapt as the work expands.
Teams, Trust & Culture
McChrystal, Stanley, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. 1st edition. Portfolio, 2015.
McChrystal recounts how he transformed the Joint Special Operations Command from a traditional military hierarchy into a networked "team of teams" by pushing for radical transparency and shared consciousness. The book argues that in complex, fast-moving environments, the old model of command-and-control cannot keep up. uW's strategy document draws heavily on this work, particularly the idea that shared consciousness, giving every level of the organization the same situational awareness once reserved for senior leaders, is what enables decentralized teams to move fast without losing coherence.
Fussell, Chris, C. W. Goodyear, and General Stanley McChrystal. One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Portfolio, 2017.
Fussell extends the Team of Teams concept into practical implementation. Where McChrystal's book tells the story, this one provides the playbook: how to build liaison networks, how to run information-sharing forums, how to create the connective tissue between autonomous teams. Read this if you have absorbed the Team of Teams vision and want concrete steps for making it work in your own context.
Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. New York: Bantam, 2018.
Coyle identifies three foundational skills that high-performing groups share: building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing purpose. Groups that create belonging cues (signals that say "you are safe here, you matter") outperform groups that rely on talent alone. This book gives you the behavioral science behind why relational-first organizations like uW can outperform more conventionally structured ones, and it names the specific practices that make that culture real.
Lencioni, Patrick M. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. 1st edition. Jossey-Bass, 2011.
Lencioni presents five layered dysfunctions that erode teams: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Each dysfunction feeds the next, so the fix starts at the foundation: vulnerability-based trust. Written as a fable, the book is a fast read and gives you a diagnostic framework for figuring out where your team is stuck.
Patterson, Kerry, ed. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Patterson and colleagues lay out a method for navigating high-stakes conversations without retreating into silence or escalating into aggression. The core moves: watch for signs of broken dialogue, re-establish mutual purpose, and demonstrate mutual respect. In an organization that runs on relational trust and peer-to-peer accountability, the ability to hold difficult conversations well is a survival skill. This book teaches it as a practicable discipline.
Kiland, Taylor Baldwin, and Peter Fretwell. Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton: Six Characteristics of High Performance Teams. Annapolis (Maryland): Naval Institute Press, 2017.
Kiland and Fretwell draw leadership lessons from American POWs in Vietnam who organized themselves into functioning teams under extreme conditions. The six characteristics they identify (trust, loyalty, commitment, communication, resilience, and leaving a legacy) were forged in an environment where failure meant life or death. Read this if you want a stark reminder that the principles behind high-performing teams are not theoretical abstractions, but tested under the hardest conditions humans face.
Warner, Marcus, and Jim Wilder. Rare Leadership: 4 Uncommon Habits For Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2016.
Warner and Wilder integrate neuroscience with Christian formation to argue that the rarest and most effective leaders are those who remain relational under stress. Most people default to fight, flight, or freeze when things get hard. Rare leaders stay themselves. The four habits (remain relational, act like yourself, return to joy, endure hardship well) provide a neurological and theological framework for the kind of leadership uW needs: leaders who stay connected rather than reactive when the pressure rises.
Change Management
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. 1st ed. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.
The Heaths use the metaphor of a rider (rational mind), elephant (emotional drive), and path (environment) to explain why change fails and how to make it stick. You need all three: direct the rider with clear goals, motivate the elephant with emotion, and shape the path by removing obstacles. uW's strategy document calls out this book by name as essential for the change management required when transitioning work from Box 3 exploration into Box 1 operations.
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. 1st edition. Random House, 2007.
The Heaths identify six principles that make ideas memorable: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and story-driven. If you need to communicate a strategic change, a new project vision, or a shift in direction to the broader team, this book gives you the toolkit for crafting a message that people retain and act on. Pair it with Switch for a full communication-to-action pipeline.
Hirsch, Alan, and Rob Kelly. Metanoia: How God Radically Transforms People, Churches, and Organizations From the Inside Out. 100 Movements Publishing, 2023.
Hirsch and Kelly argue that lasting organizational transformation starts with internal change (metanoia, a fundamental shift in mindset) rather than structural rearrangement. They push back on the assumption that you can redesign an org chart and expect different results. For uW staff, this is a theological challenge: are we willing to let the transformation start in us before we try to change our systems?
UNDG. "THEORY OF CHANGE COMPANION GUIDANCE." United Nations Development Group, 2018. https://unsdg.un.org/resources/theory-change-undaf-companion-guidance.
This UN guidance document walks through how to build a Theory of Change: a structured model that maps the causal pathway from your activities to your intended impact. Useful for anyone involved in project design, grant proposals, or strategic planning. It forces you to make your assumptions explicit and testable, which aligns with uW's emphasis on time-boxed experiments and evidence-based strategy development.
Personal Effectiveness & Leadership Foundations
Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press, 2004.
Covey's central argument is that personal maturity progresses from dependence to independence to interdependence. The seven habits map that journey: be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first (personal mastery), then think win-win, seek first to understand, synergize (interdependence), and sharpen the saw (renewal). For uW, the move from independence to interdependence is the critical growth edge. We chose to work interdependently, and this book describes the personal habits that make that choice sustainable.
Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Illustrated edition. New York: Avery, 2018.
Clear argues that lasting change comes from small, compounding habits rather than dramatic overhauls. He organizes habit formation around four laws: make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. The book also makes a strong case that systems matter more than goals and that identity drives behavior. Read this if you want a practical framework for personal change that applies to both individual growth and team culture formation.
Sinek, Simon. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. New York: Portfolio, 2009.
Sinek's thesis is that people follow leaders and organizations that communicate their "why" (their purpose and belief) before their "what" or "how." Organizations that start with why attract both talent and supporters who share their convictions. For uW, where our strategic intent is rooted in deep convictions about Bible translation and the global church, this book reinforces why articulating purpose precedes everything else in our communication, internally and externally.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. 1st edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Kahneman maps the two systems that govern human thought: System 1 (fast, intuitive, error-prone) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, effortful). The book catalogs the cognitive biases that derail decision-making: anchoring, loss aversion, the planning fallacy, and many others. For anyone making strategic decisions, this is essential reading. It will make you more skeptical of your own confidence and more deliberate about how you evaluate options.
Marquet, L. David. Turn the Ship around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules, 2013.
Marquet took command of the worst-performing nuclear submarine in the US Navy and transformed it into the best by pushing authority down to the people closest to the information. Instead of a leader-follower model, he built a leader-leader model where crew members stated their intent ("I intend to...") and acted on it. This mirrors uW's "signaling intent and asking advice" process almost exactly. Read this if you want to see what distributed authority looks like in a high-stakes, high-accountability environment.
Thomas, Ted A., and Gregg M. Haley. "Leadership, Leader and Command Philosophies: What's the Difference, Why Does It Matter?" Armor Fall 2018 (2018). https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/2018/Fall/.
Thomas and Haley distinguish between leadership philosophy (personal beliefs about leading), leader philosophy (how you develop other leaders), and command philosophy (how you will run your unit). The distinctions matter because conflating them leads to muddled communication and misaligned expectations. Short and practical, worth reading to sharpen how you articulate your own approach to leadership.
Morse, John J., and Jay W. Lorsch. "Beyond Theory Y." Harvard Business Review, May 1, 1970. https://hbr.org/1970/05/beyond-theory-y.
Morse and Lorsch challenge the assumption that participative management (Theory Y) is always superior to directive management (Theory X). They found that the best fit depends on the nature of the work: routine tasks benefited from more structure, while complex creative work required more autonomy. This adds nuance to uW's decentralized approach. The question is not "hierarchy or no hierarchy" but rather which structure makes us faster and more adaptive for the work at hand.
Time & Constraints
- Parkinson's Law — work expands to fill the time available; artificial constraints force focus and simpler solutions
Goal Setting & Measurement
Doerr, John, and Larry Page. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Portfolio, 2018.
Doerr traces the Objectives and Key Results system from its origins at Intel under Andy Grove through its adoption at Google and the Gates Foundation. The core discipline: set a small number of ambitious objectives, attach measurable key results to each, review quarterly, and grade honestly. uW has used OKRs for years. This book is the source text. Pay attention to the distinction between committed OKRs (must hit 1.0) and aspirational OKRs (expect 0.7), and the warning that roughly half of objectives should be created from the bottom up.
Meehan, William F., Kim Starkey Jonker, and Jim Collins. Engine of Impact: Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector. 1st edition. Stanford Business Books, 2017.
Meehan and Jonker argue that great nonprofits share seven essentials: a compelling mission, a clear strategy, effective programs, an engaged board, strong financial health, compelling fundraising, and a motivated team. The book provides a rigorous framework for assessing and improving nonprofit effectiveness. Read this if you want a diagnostic lens for evaluating how uW measures up on the fundamentals that distinguish high-impact nonprofits from well-meaning ones.
Systems Thinking
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller. Edited by Diana Wright. Illustrated edition. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
Meadows teaches you to see the world as interconnected systems rather than isolated events. She explains feedback loops, leverage points, and why well-intentioned interventions often produce counterintuitive results. This is foundational reading for anyone who wants to understand why organizational change is hard and where the high-leverage intervention points actually are. If you find yourself frustrated that "obvious" fixes do not work, Meadows will explain why.
Scaling & Growth
Collins, James C. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap--and Others Don't. 1st ed. New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2001.
Collins studied companies that made the leap from good performance to sustained greatness and identified common patterns: Level 5 leadership (humble but fiercely determined), getting the right people on the bus before deciding where to drive it, confronting brutal facts while maintaining faith, and the flywheel effect. The "right people on the bus" principle is cited directly in uW's strategy document as the most critical piece of strategy development.
Harnish, Verne. Scaling up: How a Few Companies Make It... and Why the Rest Don't. First edition. Ashburn, Virginia: Gazelles Inc, 2014.
Harnish organizes the challenges of growth around four domains: people, strategy, execution, and cash. He provides checklists, one-page strategic plans, and meeting rhythms for each stage of growth. This is a practitioner's manual. If your working group is growing or you are trying to bring more structure to how a team operates without adding bureaucracy, Harnish offers concrete tools.
Organizational Philosophy & Operating Models
Dignan, Aaron. Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.
Dignan organizes organizational design into twelve domains (purpose, authority, structure, strategy, resources, innovation, workflow, meetings, information, membership, mastery, compensation) and asks provocative questions about each. uW's strategy document cites Dignan's observations about the three organizational structures as a key influence. This book is the closest thing to a full operating manual for how uW thinks about organizational design. Read it if you want to understand the "why" and "how" behind our approach to purpose, authority, meetings, and everything in between.