Intro to CODA™ - How To Harmonize Organizations
Many people have a shared vision of the world we long to see. People describe this vision using many different words, often “liberation” and “freedom.” We call our vision Harmony.
Despite many of us sharing this vision, groups are having trouble actually grounding and operationalizing it.
We get together in groups to work toward aspects of this shared, global vision, but we run into all sorts of everyday puzzles such as:
How to organize leadership?
How to make decisions?
How to delegate labor?
How/whether/when to expand?
and more!
These puzzles are so tricky that there are whole fields of study and practice dedicated to figuring them out, generally called Organizational Development or Capacity Building.
The trouble is that the tools and mindsets these fields provide aren’t designed to achieve Harmony, in part because they don’t understand that process is as important as outcome.
Our vision of Harmony is fundamentally about how humans connect and relate. So, no matter how many programs we run, products we create, or policies we pass, if we are not relating to each other well through it all, then we cannot achieve Harmony. How we create together matters as much as what we create.
We need a more holistic way of working together toward our shared vision that considers how and what we create, empowering us to both discover and embody this holistic way as we go.
Introducing CODA™
CODA™ – Comprehensive Organizational Development and Analysis – is Harmonize’s unique, customizable suite of tools, frameworks, processes, and practices developed to help groups work together better to achieve Harmony across their organization, or what we call, Organizational Alignment.
CODA™ addresses the 3 Pillars of Organizational Alignment:
A Way of Being
A Way of Seeing
A Way of Working Together
A Way of Being - Inner Sovereignty & Embodied Awareness
Why do we need a shared way of being?
Being human is hard. Working together is harder. To work together effectively, we need to be able to meet our own trauma and triggers skillfully, stay present to the complexity and possibility of the moment, and welcome new forms of being for ourselves and others. None of these are easy tasks even on a good day.
To do any of this well, we need to be two fundamental things:
1) Sovereign - able to make choices in service of ourselves and others,
And to make true choices, we must understand our options. So, we must also be
2) Aware - know and understand what is happening in our minds, bodies, and souls.
We call these ways of being Inner Sovereignty and Embodied Awareness.
CODA™ includes tools, frameworks, mindsets, and practices to help groups cultivate the Inner Sovereignty and Embodied Awareness necessary to work together toward Harmony.
A Way of Seeing - Power, Belonging, & Justice
Why do we need a shared way of seeing?
In order for us to have and act on a shared vision, discern where and to what extent that vision is manifesting, and imagine future expressions of the vision across many contexts, we need to see the same things in the same way.
We need a shared analysis or lens.
This lens needs to help us identify and shift the fundamental forces that create the world we live in. That is why our lens looks beyond what we create to see and understand the three fundamental forces that underlie how we create together: Power, Belonging, and Justice.
Power is the ability to make choices and exert influence on the self or others.
Belonging is the state and experience of safety & legitimacy when using power in groups as well as the access to the abundance created by a group’s uses of power.
Justice is the creation of dignity and choicefulness for all people and beings through both, the repair of the historical misuses, and also, the ongoing rearrangement of power & belonging.
CODA™ includes tools, frameworks, mindsets, and practices that help groups develop and apply a Power, Belonging, and Justice lens, sharpen their shared analysis, and uplevel their strategies, interventions, and ultimately their impact.
CODA™ in Action
Developed through years of working with hundreds of groups, we use CODA™ to attune not just to what groups create, but also how we create across the 10 Dimensions of Organizations:
Analysis/Cosmology
People
Purpose
Placement
Culture
Structures
Processes
Practices
Policies
Relationships
This means that when we work with a group to, for example, design a new leadership structure, that’s not all we do. We also pay attention to the state of the individuals that make up the group, their shared analysis, shared purpose, and the rest of the aspects of the organization, and work to align them to provide truly holistic interventions.
Harmonize can equip you and your group with the practical tools, frameworks, and mindsets that groups need to:
Foster Embodied Awareness & Inner Sovereignty
Develop and apply a thorough analysis of Power, Belonging, & Justice, and
Remain functional, powerful, and effective
Contact us to coach, train, and/or steward you or your group.
Enroll in our Courses, to build skill and learn how to apply our approach.
