What Works? [2008]
As the originator of a new strategic approach to organisational development, I’m rather alarmed by the statistic I keep coming across in business books: that 70-90% of companies fail to execute new strategies effectively.
And I find myself thinking: if so many strategies are NOT working effectively, were they actually almost DESIGNED to fail? In reality, did 70-90% of organisations and companies successfully resist the impetus to change course?
It’s quite feasible. I’ve always thought that organisations are best at doing the same thing over and over rather than changing course. Maybe their ultimate output is business as usual [BAU].
And perhaps all those middle managers who claim they’re too busy with BAU to implement new strategic initiatives are really the unsung heroes of the organisation. T
he protectors and redeemers. The besieged survivors who never give in.
If this is true, then the only perverse incentive in this scenario is the expectation placed on CEOs that they should innovate and reinvent. Maybe organisations should live while they can, make the best of what they have and then just slowly fade away, to be replaced by other fitter entities. Like baby boomers before botox.
But of course, there is another way to look at this: if 90% of people failed to respond effectively to a surgical procedure, would we blame the person or the procedure?
Do we really think it’s the organisation’s failure that a new strategy wasn’t implemented effectively. Or was the strategy perhaps ill-conceived and un-implementable?
Align journal identifies five key reasons corporate strategies fail:-
1. Poor definition of the objective
2. Lack of ownership
3. Management misalignment
4. Unfocused or uncoordinated activity
5. Lack of visibility to progress.
Pretty damning, but I think it’s even more than that. I think there’s a basic misalignment in our understanding of how organisations work.
For the past 20 or so years, it’s been fashionable to think of organisations as process-driven machines. It’s a conceptual framework that leads to strategies like “re-engineering” – which apparently almost never works, despite being so popular.
I see value in a more organic approach – based on the assumption that when you collect a few humans together, you create a complex biological entity, not a mechanical or electronic system. Over time, an organisation develops its own way of doing things and of seeing the world.
Usually that’s called culture and it’s considered difficult to change. I would argue that’s because it’s a manifestation of the “life force” of the organisation. It both enables business as usual and is embedded in it.
If you want to see biological factors in operation, look at why people come to work. For every person who works strictly for the economic transaction – the pay cheque – there’s another who comes to work for the relationships they have there or the meaningfulness of the work.
People tend to judge their best and worst jobs on the basis of the autonomy they had, or the respect, or the variety – not the salary. They assess managers by how well they communicate AND listen. . how trusting they are. . how supportive. . how controlling. Software doesn’t do that.
When you set out to change an organisation or set it on a new course, it’s almost like you’re trying to change its DNA. As in nature, such mutations have to be strong and beneficial before they’ll take hold across a group.
There’s enormous inertia and redundancy in any biological system. Changes take time and emerge slowly, often imperceptibly until some situation emerges in which they have demonstrable value.
Imagine how the first long-necked giraffe felt, towering over its mates. Until it discovered it had lots of nice leaves all to itself in times of famine, it probably just felt like a real geek.
So imagine how a set of people who have habituated to business as usual feel, when someone tells them they have to change. Who goes first?
I don’t think you change an organisation’s course through THOUGHT LEADERSHIP or GETTING BUY-IN to your ACTION PLANS or developing BUSINESS CASES and a PROJECT PORTFOLIO. That sounds very impressive and it only really fails in the execution.
Instead I think the best approach is to help an organisation to become more ADAPTIVE and RESILIENT, from top to bottom. Help it to see things through its customers’ eyes, to understand how it fits into its environment, to choose the opportunities that suit it best and to execute strategies that will continue to adapt to that environment as it evolves.
Because it will evolve. Fluidity, rising expectations, and the complexity of everyday life will see to that. Strategies need to be dynamic, not static and so do organisations.
Organisations that are dynamic and effective generate strong interactions, they make waves and they make a difference. They almost never initiate a change process, but they adapt constantly as the need arises.
They have sufficient resource and sufficient diversity to mould to the best opportunities. It’s not one size fits all. They approach different markets or challenges with different variants of the organisation, so that they too are fit for purpose. Over time, the shape changes.
I’d intuitively grasped the need to catalyse and energise, rather than engineer and process. But till I started encountering this statistic that so clearly spells out the failure of the mechanical model, I didn’t have a well-developed argument as to why I thought it was better. Now I do. My way actually works.
Cheers
Jill
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers and legitimate Windshift contacts only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006]
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"Imagine how the first long-necked giraffe felt, towering over its mates. Until it discovered it had lots of nice leaves all to itself in times of famine, it probably just felt like a real geek."
