The Story of OrgX
Eleccion started in 2017 with simple question: What problem do we want to solve?
Looking back on more than 20 years of work in government, commercial, and non-profit organizations we realized that many of the challenges we experienced – organizations that were too slow, too stovepiped, too rigid – had the same root cause: the hierarchy itself. And we were tired. Tired of experiencing the same organizational challenges and dysfunctions over and over again… something had to change. We didn’t have all the answers, but we knew we had to try something different if we were ever going to make progress. So, we set to work – identifying and implementing new approaches to the fundamental structures of organizational design. Organizational ExperimentationTM (OrgX) was born.
At a high level, OrgX allows us to experiment and continually evolve our organizations, just the way we do with technologies. It gives us a framework to observe trends and be inspired by the environment surrounding us, assess our current organizational opportunities and needs, envision what might be possible, incubate ideas in an organizational greenhouse as they mature, iterate quickly to learn and grow, and ultimately scale robust ideas to the larger enterprise. OrgX is different from traditional strategic initiatives and change management efforts: it is evolutionary and continuous, creating a culture of adaptation, improvement, and innovation.
ELX was built on OrgX. And seven years later, it has come to pervade every facet of our organization. Our monthly meetings are “O/I” meetings where we Observe and Iterate together – taking time to learn together and improve. Our annual operating planning meetings allow us to Assess what we’ve accomplished over the year and Envision where we want to go in the coming year. We continually talk about “where we are in the experiment” as we Incubate new ideas – holding on to what works and letting go of what doesn’t. And – the really cool part! – we’re at the point where we are bringing what we’ve learned to our clients – Scaling our experiments to benefit organizations well beyond our corporate borders.
Looking back, what started with a simple idea has become a deep well of experience and innovation… and instead of feeling tired from fighting the same old battles, we are part of a dynamic, energized team of people who are setting the bar for what organizations can be! It doesn’t get much better than that.
