Welcome. If you and your fellow organizational members seek to thrive, are open to new ideas and approaches, are committed to an inclusive, participatory process, and believe that together you can create the future of your organization, then this site is for you. If you recognize that the issues your organization is facing are complex and you seek tools that respect that complexity rather than reduce and oversimplify, this site is for you. If you believe your organization has untapped energy, this site is for you.

Guiding Organizational Evolution is a prompt to think differently about change—not as something conceived and managed from the top by executives and consultants using strategies designed to overcome others’ resistance. Rather think of change as a desirable and inevitable movement that can be intentionally guided by all organizational members working together. Here we introduce one approach to this, an iterative process or tool called CHRIIS, developed within the emerging field of systemic design.

CHRIIS, visually represented below, asks a series of questions drawn from many different forms of inquiry—philosophical dialog, scientific methods, design, and so on. It recognizes that any one type of inquiry alone cannot sufficiently respond to complex real-world situations. It leads groups to rethink their collective identity, get to the core of their values and assumptions, imagine new directions, and take actions to consciously evolve and continue to thrive.

The various steps in CHRIIS are introduced here in quasi-poetic fashion, with concise text that might be considered verses, and accompanying images to be slowly contemplated. The verses, and CHRIIS itself, integrate concepts from a wide range of sources to illustrate how change benefits from whole-self engagement. In particular, the verses draw from dimensions of mind, body, and spirit that are often expressed in the spirit wheels of indigenous cultures. In this sense, CHRIIS is an attempt to combine ways of knowing, ways of doing, and ways of being into a way of becoming.

We also include background information about CHRIIS—how it came to be, what it assumes, and how various dimensions are defined in each step, as well as sample triggering questions, ways in which CHRIIS can be adapted and expanded, how CHRIIS exemplifies systemic design, and how inquiries using CHRIIS can be strengthened.

How you engage and play with (as opposed to work with) these materials is up to you. If gaining a sense of the background and theory is important to you from the start, you might wish to read the About CHRIIS sections first, then return to the Verses. But if you can temporarily set that aside, here is an approach that we recommend:

Stop everything you are doing. Take at least sixty seconds to just breath before reading any further.

Read on when you are ready to proceed:  

Change. Transformation. Organizational evolution. These are far too important to rush. To prompt you to think deeply about change, and to help you begin to consider if and how you might use or adapt CHRIIS, we have expressed seven steps in verses. Each verse combines evocative text and images. Think of them as meditations or visualizations. If you have a contemplative practice, try incorporating the verses into it. Or if some guidance would help, try spending some time with each verse, for example, one per day for 15 minutes. Find a place free of distractions. Sit comfortably. Breath deeply. Open up to possibility and suspend skepticism. Examine each image carefully, asking how it speaks to you. Read the text slowly. Close your eyes and repeat words that are especially meaningful to you. Ask how they relate to your organization and its current situation.