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About the guest
Learn more about Ramona Elena-Chercio and her journey in Org Design on her expert page
Summary
Join us on the Org Design Podcast as we dive into a captivating conversation with Ramona Elena Curciu, Head of Coherence, live from the EODF conference in Milan.
In this episode, we explore the essence of org design, the journey from personal challenges to professional triumphs, and the importance of approaching organizational change with humility and respect. Ramona shares her unique insights on balancing the heart and tools in org design, emphasizing the need to honor the past while fostering growth. As hosts, we delve into the mindset required for effective org design, drawing parallels with design research principles. Tune in to discover how compassion and curiosity can transform organizational landscapes. If you're curious about org design or seeking inspiration, this episode is a must-listen. Connect with Ramona on LinkedIn and share your thoughts with us.
Transcript
[00:00:00] **Tim Brewer:** Welcome the Org Design Podcast. My name is Tim Brewer. I'm of the co-hosts today. I have pleasure of having with me here live from Milan, Italy at eODF conference. Damian Bramanis co-host
[00:00:14] **Damian Bramanis:** And across from us at the table we have Ramona Elena Cherciu, and we actually have a job title here of the Head of Coherence. So Ramona, tell us what does it mean? The Head of coherence.
[00:00:31] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** Oh, Head of Coherence came about, I think EODF, a zoom in the pandemic times where people introduced themselves as Head of this and Head of the other thing and Head of HR.
So I felt like pressured into being the Head of something. So the first thing that came up to my mind was coherence, usually people run into a problem and some other people would say, "oh, I think I have somebody who could help bring clarity to what you're going through", so cohesion, it's something that surfaced for me, so I sometimes use it. I also use a phrase when I have to introduce myself in Romanian very quickly.
It doesn't translate quite as well in English, but I'll try it.
I say that, "_hello, I'm Ramona. I speak, I write and I clean up really well"_. Usually when I come in, people associate me with a communicator or a specialist in communicating or communication. So I have to clarify that just because I have a clear way of thinking and expressing myself, doesn't have to mean that an expert in communication.
[00:01:52] **Tim Brewer:** You seem like you got ton of energy. Do you see yourself as an organization designer or how did that come about? Where you start that journey into helping leaders with the structure their not-for-profits and organizations?
[00:02:07] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** To start very, I don't know how to say it. You will say I'm very humble. So I was five and I decided that I'm going to be. The first lady in Romania who was going to be the Minister of External Relations in R omania.
[00:02:31] **Damian Bramanis:** Okay,
[00:02:32] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** so my dad who is a literature professor, my mom is an accountant, so another introduction of me would be I'm made in my DNA. There is words and numbers. They both tell stories.
So my dad was like how should I break it to her? There has been a woman who was a foreign affairs minister and the first in the world as a woman in the communist regime, that wasn't too well, but so you can no longer be the first, I'm sorry to break it to you, but you could be the second one but better than her. It was still the communist regime though and it was hard to explain to a five years old kid, so I kept at my dream.
So I trained to be a diplomat, and this has been my academic background. In Romania, this was when I was in university, it was post-revolution. So, I went to universities in the 2000 . So I built up my own curriculum, which was going to two separate universities.
I started with philosophy for the first year, and starting the second year, I went to law school.
Because this was like two tracks that would allow me to go into foreign affairs and go for a scholarship, to go study abroad.
Life had other plans, or maybe I had other plans with myself and found a solution. Who knows? I got very sick of a very serious illness at 23. I had to give up, not even give up, choose surviving instead of going abroad to study.
So now I say that I have probably a master's degree and a PhD in Romanian Healthcare System because I spent the better parts of my twenties, three or four years surviving life-threatening disease.
So coming out of that doctors tell you, you should now go back to your life, which I taught them not to say anymore because you can no longer go back because you've just went through something that's life altering.
I found an organization that was an American organization called the American Bar Association, which runs a rule of law program around the world, still to this day. It's called the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative. Which had been in Romania and starting the nineties doing consulting work at a systemic level. I would then understand years later and running projects in what we called in countries like Romania, capacity building type of projects.
Fast forward, I meet with Naomi Stanford. Which is one of the people who wrote books in organization design, speaking in a conference about the future of work. I was dragged there by Roxana Mocanu, who is no longer with us, and who started in Romania to educate people about organization design, and Roxanna invited me to this conference in Bucharest and said, you should come, you should listen to Naomi speak. I was like, yes, but there's a bunch of people in HR. I work like, project management with projects assisting governmental institutions for capacity building and so on. I said no, you should come listen to Naomi and I listened to Naomi speaking about the future of work and org design and every other phrase I would go oh, but I did some of that stuff. Oh. But I've experienced, I've gone through, oh. But I've seen organizations go through that type of thing.
So there was a common language that I came across without having the words for it. So I would name those things in a different way. So to anybody listening to this who thinks, what the hell is the organization design even? And what can I do with it?
If you could just pick up any reading or listen to this podcast and just connect with people talking about it. They might be using different words to something that you have already experienced or are experiencing in your organization, your project, something that you want to start and your thinking about it and just tune into it, and then the language is like learning to play a new instrument, but you've probably, you've picked up a harmonica and you just learn it and sounds come up. But then somebody teaches you how to actually play it. There are notes, there's a score.
When I went for the EODF masterclass for organization design, I explained at the end of it, I played the violin when I was a kid. It's one thing to play without knowing what you're playing, the notes or you play by the ear, they say as a musician, which you can be very good at, and it's another quality to doing it with knowing the scores, the nuances, or even if you are witnessing a concert, it's one thing to just enjoy the music and it's another thing to know the key they're playing it.
To this day, I cannot call myself an organization designer because people would not hire me. I've been working with organizations like the the Ministry of Justice, the national School for Clerks, the National School for Magistrates.
So very, legacy type of organizations. Highly hierarchical, very big egos in the room. People who know exactly what they're doing, they have their pains and things are not working.
They would love you for you to help them. But they also want to tell you how to help them. Yeah. In a way that something changes, but nothing changes for them, that's a little bit tricky.
So if you start using things like coordination mechanisms, organization designs, span of control and things like that, there's a discrepancy that they don't have the management language because they got there, what you have in a company where you learn the management language, even if you start low, they're there many times for political reasons as well, and with political intricacies that play out.
[00:09:17] **Damian Bramanis:** Ramona, you said you didn't want to call yourself an org designer, how would you explain org design to other people and what would you like to be called?
[00:09:30] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** The way that I still explain it to people is the way that I heard Paul Tolchinsky explain it. I think it's, people are more used to organizational development. So it helps to describe it making the association and the difference between the two.
So if an org development, if you as an organization have to decide what you're all about, why do you exist, Why you are are in this world, to what purpose?
So, if we associate it with a car.
Org design is about deciding what's your purpose? Do you carry wood? What kind of a car do you need to carry wood? What are the elements that should define it? How can you organize a car so that it fits this purpose? Do you want to carry cement? Are you a boss. You want to carry people around? Are you a train, what are you set out to do?
Org development is, how do you care for the people who will be driving or operating that car?
So I found that it helped me a lot and to this day when people are really not at all introduced, to these two things, or they clearly confuse the two things as I did, and also what I've learned, it is not like they're completely separate. There's someone sitting in a room doing org development and somebody else in the other corner of the organization and they never talk to each other, they do org design, so they're intertwined most of the time.
[00:11:09] **Damian Bramanis:** Yeah it's interesting that, the kind of the different ways that people perceive org design even within the field. I'm going to put you in a difficult situation, and in this difficult situation.
It's very similar to one you described to us just a couple of minutes ago where there's a, an established hierarchical organization, with a lot of egos in the room, people who want change, but they don't want anything to change for them and who have brought you on to improve their organization. How would you go about doing that? What would you come in and do to be able to start the journey?
[00:11:45] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** First thing, and I say this now, having gone through some failures, trials and failures, Usually when we, if you are like a, someone who is called upon to, to help with things.
The first quality helper should have is to not presume that you are healthier or better or wiser than the one you are being called upon to help. So sitting with them first is very important. I'm going to quote Paul Tolchinsky. I'm sorry, he's right in the next room. I remember once telling him and I was a little bit frustrated and it was a conversation that I've had with older, wiser people than me a couple of times in my experience. "Oh. They're just so stiff and they're so rigid and they don't, woah. They, it is just so stubborn. I'm so frustrated", and Paul reminded me that I should pay attention when somebody is resisting because it is out of love. It is, they care, and if they care, they'll bring that energy, even if it's an opposing energy. Opposition is also a factoring for creating something.
In the stories we tell our children, they're still posing the good and the bad fighting, and then something gets created, the light and the dark. We need both of them. So first of all, and I try to educate and I've tried to educate myself and to this day, I remember that I first need to sit with that organization to understand their past, what is valuable from their past. Not everything needs to be changed.
Immediately, when you go in and it's we need to do this, and of course the predicament is fast. It needs to happen yesterday. Again, I'm quoting Paul, "you need to go slow to go fast". So first sit, listen. Don't be too judgmental. Understand that they care about what they've been doing. And some of it must have been good because look, they're standing. The building is here, the computers are working.
So something in that organization needs to be preserved, needs to be nurtured, needs to be honored, and if you wanna kill things, kill them with decency, honoring that at some point they were being very innovative in that organization.
Usually, in my country, in the political context, in the public institutions, this has been a really serious problem in my opinion because people would come let's say in a ministry and there's a new party, there's new people coming in. "Everything is bad. We're going to change everything", and they end up fighting for four years, and things don't progress very much, just because they don't take the time to recognize what needs to be preserved and what needs to be let go with respect and dignity and honoring that at some point, that thing had served a purpose.
[00:14:59] **Damian Bramanis:** It's a real wisdom there in, in the sense of honoring that which you might instinctively feel you want to get rid of or something that, that you are trying to reject. It's important to do it with honour, and that something that you're trying to oppose It's actually something you should be seeking out because that's there's real care there.
[00:15:19] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** And even the most stiff leader, most stubborn leader, if you can establish that rapport of respect for what they've been doing. They'll melt down, they'll start to turn around, gradually.
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[00:16:10] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** so I do a lot of design research, user research, separate to org design just about technology products and building software. One of the things we always talk about when we do design research is what approaching it with the right mindset. And so there's this mindset of, you're not you are a novice you're not coming in as the expert. You are coming in knowing that you know less so that way you are, you keep your eyes open, you feel that others' opinions are highly valid. And then you come in with a second mindset, which is of the scientist and it's not projecting what you is it's reading, the data saying this is what someone did this is what their behavior was, This is, what the actual numbers were. And then the third mindset of the three is that you approach it as a tourist. You want to take photos, you want to look at everything. You want to explore and be curious. And so there's these three mindsets that people go into user research with of. I am a novice, I am scientis t, I am tourist. And it strikes me as that those principles of design match very much the same principles of organization design and a similar mindset with what you've been talking
I have a little bit of a anthropologist way of looking at things. It's an ecosystem that you are entering. Yeah. And you might have some knowledge about it. So you might know something about the these type of trees. But the other type of plants, it's the first time that you are meeting, you've never been in this type of a forest.
And it's interesting, and I'm, I always say in terms of ecosystem, you have to pay attention at what's been growing and thriving. What dies in the forest or is about to die and is a healthy death, necessary death for the ecosystem and what's at the what's emerging? What's starting to grow? Does it need help to, is it a parasite or is it something that is going to nourish the forest?
[00:18:19] **Damian Bramanis:** Yeah, Ramona we've talked about a lot of different things today. we've covered some quite deep topics and interesting that we talked quite a lot about the heart in org design. Rather than just about the tools and techniques and the heart when you talk, your heart really comes across, was there anything which you feel that we, haven't covered or that you'd really like to express before we wrap up for today?
[00:18:43] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** I don't know. I feel I hope I didn't go too philosophical. I tend to do that. I think that as long as we're curious about each other, one of my core beliefs is that none of us, with the exception of pathological cases, wakes up in the morning thinking of, I'm going to screw up today, I'm going to fail big.
All of us wake up with a good intention of helping somebody, helping us ourselves contributing to something. So if we can remember this even when we are in a big conflict, even when something at work really doesn't work.
If we can remember, remind ourselves the person sitting across the table or next to me, my colleague, my boss, up this morning with a thought of having a good day, and clearly it's not working out.
What can I do to not add to that bad day that he or she's having? What can I do myself to alleviate a little bit what's going on inside of that person. So I think that if each of us remind ourselves of that whatever process we're, playing with or at whatever hardship we have at work, I think we, we can at least, work through it without adding to the problem, without pretending that we're trying to find a solution when in fact we're adding to the problem that we're trying to solve.
And another thing is that I always recommend, but this is about taking it slow. Sit with a problem for a while. Don't try to understand it immediately. Don't try to go to find the solution immediately. You might be working on a solution to a problem that was not well defined, you will lose time, you'll lose energy, and you'll probably lose some people on the way.
[00:20:50] **Damian Bramanis:** Message of compassion love, mindset of respect, and humility.
[00:20:57] **Tim Brewer:** Thank you, Ramona. That's been really heartfelt and really great insight into org design and the things the. The way that you approach things
If people want to get in contact with you, how do they best reach out?
[00:21:13] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** Definitely reach out on LinkedIn.
[00:21:15] **Tim Brewer:** Thank you so much for joining us, the podcast, Damian. Rory. Thank you also, amazing co-hosts saying goodbye from Milan, EODF.
It's been a fantastic day of podcasts and wonderful time spent with Ramona.
[00:21:31] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** If these guys ever ask you to sit and talk to them.
Please overcome any fear you might have or second thought and just do it, It is going to be enriching and revealing and a good time.
[00:21:48] **Tim Brewer:** Thank you.
If you know someone that you want to share on our podcast page, on the website, there is a form you can refer someone that you would like to hear from and we'll do our very best to track them down and have them on the podcast.
Or if you're sitting in the audience, you can do the same. And refer yourself to the podcast. We love having people share their story, and we've loved having you on the podcast today.
[00:22:09] **Ramona Elena Cherciu:** Thank you.
[00:22:09] **Damian Bramanis:** Thank you.
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