Beta Tests Conducted to Evaluate Openness Across Teams & Organizations
%
of Teams Discovered New Perspectives on Their Strengths & Areas for Growth
The Power of Openness
Openness is more than a buzzword—it’s the foundation of trust, collaboration, and innovation in modern organizations. Rooted in the principles of open-source software, openness has expanded into a cultural framework that enables rapid development, alignment, and growth. Today, where every organization is a tech organization, openness has become a cornerstone for navigating the complexities of digital transformation and decentralized systems.
But how do we measure openness? How do we ensure it is more than an aspirational ideal? Open behaviors emerged to address this challenge, offering a framework for understanding and operationalizing openness at every level of an organization. By connecting human behaviors to organizational principles, open behaviors illuminate the pathways to creating sustainable, human-centered systems.
The Birth of Open Behaviors: Defining Openness in Action
The journey to open behaviors began with a question: What does openness look like in action? This wasn’t just an exercise in theory—it was about giving organizations a way to bring the principles of openness to life in measurable, practical ways.
Working with The Open Organization project, I helped define and operationalize five principles of openness: Adaptability, Transparency, Collaboration, Community, and Inclusivity. These principles formed the foundation for the open behaviors framework, which broke each principle into actionable expressions to reveal how openness manifests in individuals, teams, and organizations.
View the Open Organization Maturity Model for operationalized characteristics.
The Behaviors Behind Openness
Building on the Open Org Definition and Maturity Model, I developed the Open Behaviors framework to operationalize openness through actionable, measurable expressions. These behaviors contextualize the principles of adaptability, transparency, collaboration, community, and inclusivity into real-world practices, offering a lens to assess and cultivate openness across individuals, teams, and organizations.
Adaptability
Adaptable behaviors empower individuals and organizations to navigate uncertainty with resilience, turning potential disruptions into opportunities for growth.
These behaviors look like ones that embrace reframing identity, reprioritizing goals, and shifting focus foster a team’s capacity to pivot seamlessly in the face of challenges.
An example behavior may look like:
Reframing skills to meet emerging
priorities and challenges.
Transparency
Transparent behaviors create a culture of honesty and accountability, strengthening alignment across teams and leadership.
These behaviors may look like sharing knowledge freely, pursuing difficult conversations, or candidly addressing mistakes.
An example behavior may look like:
Proactively sharing context to
provide clarity in complex situations.
Collaboration
Collaborative behaviors align collective efforts, ensuring team members work toward shared goals with synergy and purpose.
These behaviors may look like inviting diverse perspectives, honoring individual flow states, or catalyzing creative connections.
An example behavior may look like:
Catalyzing connections that
will further the collective work.
Community
Community-focused behaviors foster cohesion and loyalty, creating a sense of belonging that motivates meaningful contributions to the group’s mission.
These behaviors may look like reinforcing shared values, maintaining synchrony between team members, or defending collective norms.
An example behavior may look like:
Actively reinforcing shared values
and commitments to maintain alignment.
Inclusivity
Inclusive behaviors cultivate belonging, engagement, and mutual accountability within the group.
These behaviors may look like recognizing equal value across roles, creating personal stakes in decisions, or aligning members with collective objectives.
An example behavior may look like:
Encouraging every voice to
contribute meaningfully in key decisions.
Measuring Openness: The Open Index™
With the support of a Ph.D.-level collaborator, the framework was refined into a psychometric assessment that offered multi-level insights, including:
The Open Index™ assessment was designed to bring the open behaviors framework to life, offering a way to measure and enhance openness. By evaluating behaviors across the five principles, the assessment provided granular insights into strengths and opportunities for growth.
Key elements included:
Individual Scores: Highlighted personal contributions and opportunities for development.
Team Dynamics: Revealed collective strengths and areas for alignment.
Organizational Insights: Provided a macro view of openness across systems and structures.
The tool also raised critical questions about the role of trust in openness. Was trust an input, facilitating the principles of openness? Or was it an output, a result of practicing them? These discussions underscored the interconnectedness of openness and trust, shaping how organizations approach high-functioning, open systems.
Real-World Impact: Transformational Insights
The Open Index™ did more than provide data—it uncovered the hidden dynamics and opportunities that shape how individuals and teams function. By revealing both strengths and areas for growth, it served as a mirror for organizations to better understand their culture and align their efforts with openness.
These examples illustrate how open behaviors not only provide clarity but also spark conversations that lead to meaningful change. They show that openness is not a destination but a process—one that evolves as individuals, teams, and organizations grow together.
Team Adaptability
One team’s adaptability scores showed individual strengths but a challenge in shifting focus collectively. The manager used this insight to refine communication and goal-setting, fostering greater cohesion and alignment.
Collaboration & Psychological Safety
A participant upset by their low collaboration score (60%) realized the issue wasn’t personal—it stemmed from a lack of psychological safety in their team. This reframing shifted the narrative from blame to opportunity, empowering the participant and their team to build trust and openness.
The Role of Community
In a deep dive into the Community Index, a team member with relatively high scores across other indexes showed a surprisingly low score in the attribute of “a shared sense of identity and mission.” By contrast, the team as a whole scored above 85% on this attribute.
Upon discussion, the issue was traced back to a lack of clear communication and a documented vision/mission that all members could align with. Additionally, previous situations had weakened bonds among members, leading to this disconnect.
This scenario demonstrates how behavior scores are not markers of success or failure but indicators of gaps in information, communication, or shared experiences. By addressing these gaps, teams can strengthen their alignment and rebuild bonds, creating a more cohesive and collaborative environment.
The Evolution of Open Behaviors into MESH
While open behaviors were initially designed to measure and foster openness, they became an integral component for MESH, a framework addressing the needs of decentralized systems. In MESH, open behaviors were reorganized into mindsets tailored for:
People-Leaders: Aligning leadership with regenerative practices.
Operational Structures: Enhancing adaptability and alignment in workflows.
Organizational Ecosystems: Supporting cohesion and collaboration across systems.
The framework also informed two new MESH mindsets—Enlightenment and Contribution—and became a core part of MESH’s tenets of Connection, Visibility, and Trust.
Together, these elements support the evolution of openness as one of eight critical conditions for modern organizational design.
“
I’ve met few people who understand open as thoroughly and as intuitively as Jen does. I’ve met even fewer who can write about it as effectively or argue for it as passionately and convincingly.
Bryan Behrenshausen, The Open Organization
Building Better Systems for Humans
Open behaviors represent more than a framework—they’re a catalyst for building systems that foster trust, collaboration, and innovation. By translating abstract principles into actionable expressions, they empower organizations to navigate complexity, drive sustainable growth, and create systems that serve people.
This work continues to evolve through frameworks like MESH and Quantum Capital Dynamics™, proving that openness is not just an aspiration but a measurable, transformational force.
For leaders ready to embrace this potential, the journey begins here.