Operations is an aspect of every functional department and team. It’s a mix of people, processes, dataflows, metrics and apps.

It’s also how all the teams connect to each other. Or don’t. Or do sometimes. Or for some people. (Sound familiar?)

A lot of Operations work is about is about breaking things down into their parts, sorting and organizing them, fitting them together. Which sounds like a mechanic’s job, but it isn’t. It can’t be because an organization is a living thing. Ideally, one that is growing and persisting over time.

Operations is inherently about aliveness. It’s a kind of maintenance art1 for the org.

My working definition for Operations has six parts —

1. how people work together, how we make progress on our goals, and how it feels

2. how we generate stability, vibrancy, and memory

3. our collective relationship to change

4. how we sustain ourselves so that we can persist, learn and evolve

5. the frameworks and systems we use to generate accountability, care, growth, and play

6. the technology we use to express ourselves, collaborate, and perform

I’ve see orgs that operate as if it’s just the last two items that matter.

I think a lot of creativity, job satisfaction and growth gets lost when you narrow the view.

How to work well together (which, I would say, is the core question at the heart of Operations work) is not solvable like a puzzle, where it all clicks into place, or driven by a framework (or by an algorithm). It takes ongoing, intentional adaptation, learning and innovating as you go2. Throughout the org. In a many-to-many formation, a learning culture that is open, collaborative and full of conflicting interests. Ideally. Otherwise, you’re stagnating, repeating yourself, hanging on vs thriving.

Just to clarify, art isn’t about the appearance of things. It’s about experience. The quality of it. Art is purposeful and activating. Or not.

How people work together, how we make progress on our goals, and how it feels among us is what generates our day-to-day experience, codifies our company culture (whether we realize it or not), and sustains, expands or diminishes our capacity for creativity.

So many small moves building up to it.

It’s not about control. It’s about making sense of how it all does, or could, fit together.

And what that could activate.

References

  1. “Mierle Laderman Ukeles Art, Bio, Ideas,” The Art Story, accessed September 8, 2023, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ukeles-mierle-laderman/. ↩︎
  2. Adrienne M Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017) https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4548573. ↩︎