I mentioned in the last blog that we’ve been scratching our heads harder on being social as opposed to using social media. Similar stuff, changed point of view. Tim Kitchin is a treasure chest of thinking who I first worked with back in his Ogilvy days, knew through his Glasshouse adventures and he’s the reason we’re in Charlotte St. Tim’s a member of our advisory board and director of stakeholder relations at CropLife.
Below is his commentary. Read it all the way through, its valuable. I’ve added Charles Leadbeater’s ANIMATION that resonates with his thinking at the bottom.
“Peter
I agree with your direction.
To build on it, today’s organisations run, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, on institutional cynicism. ‘Everybody’ knows that current structures, processes and management systems don’t work. They don’t prevent bad decisions, and they don’t manage positive outcomes and they don’t make people happy.
Because organisations have no conviction, they have no courage.
Because they have no honesty, they build no trust.
Because they are disjointed, they cannot improve.
Because they are too complex, there can be no accountability
This will only get worse. Markets are not factoring in the gigantic hidden risks of this fundamental loss of control, enabled and accelerated by information technology and management consultancy. Stakeholders cannot engage actively with organisations, because they have no meaningful or viable point of traction or leverage.
I suspect:
That (almost) all organisations underestimate the role of emotion and human inertia in innovation and transformation.
That (almost) all organisations are driven by what they feel compelled to do, rather than what they are inspired to do.
That (almost) all organisations fail to anticipate their own irrelevance/obsolescence.
That (almost) all individuals in any corporation are operating way below their personal potential.
That (almost) all organisations underestimate the importance of delivery to generate customer loyalty.
These frictions in the deep structure of the organisations create a tangible loss of opportunities and profit, through productivity-erosion, customer disloyalty, and regulatory handcuffs. These are the outwardly visible signs of a fundamental internal conflict between extrinsic goals and intrinsic capabilities.
In future, organisations will fail even more often and more profoundly as a result of this cynicism. Just as shareholders are entitled to ask whether free cashflow is better returned to shareholders, so stakeholders are entitled to ask whether free energy could be better employed in a different direction.
Tomorrow, because organisations are now too big to change, they will ultimately learn to live without control and instead function like political leaders. They will need to learn build stable and consensual structures from the bottom up and shore up existing processes through investment in soft skills of sensing and listening. Responsiveness and ‘followership’ will be key.
Instead of spending all their time trying to correct for failure, future organisations will experiment more and learn to build on, and celebrate small successes.
Six sigma and other quality thinking drives a negatively-framed control process – to reduce deviation from the norm.
The challenge of an organisation should be positively-framed, to raise the norm.
The role of consultants in this context is to offer plan B, and a plan C…based on an analysis of genuine competence to and a mapping stakeholder/market demand, rather than to refine and re-refine plan A, which may well be doomed to obsolescence – Microsoft? Nokia?
The scale and style of this intervention will be nano-scale consulting. Teeny nudges with unpredictable consequences.
Faced with this reality, organisations should use consultants to:
1. Pre-empt the business’s own demise, by starting anti-businesses
2. Use consultants’ freedom to move like oil within the structure of organisational culture, to allow them to cajole and inspire learning
3. Spot and address underutilisation of free energy
4. Encourage self-service/buyer-centricity, inside the corporation.
I envision a transition from matrix structures to community and corporo-political systems, with infrastructure, amenities, retail and services. All stakeholders are member of the community. Instead of titles and hierarchies, social credit buys goodwill and participation across the community.
In a world of cynicism, the only reliable weapon is innocence…nurturing the honest corporation.
Free-flow over. ;-)
Tim
Tim Kitchin”
Charles Leadbeater’s site We-think is another mine of information. Take a look at the animation. It reflects the context and challenge to traditional businesses and organisations. Succinctly.
