Development is not something that is done to an individual or group; it is something they do to themselves. It is an increase in the ability and desire to satisfy one’s needs and legitimate desires and those of others. It is a matter of learning, not earning. No one can learn for another, but one can encourage and facilitate the learning of another. Development is not a matter of how much one has, but how much one can do with whatever one has and what resources can create out of what is available.

Organizational development requires leadership, which is primarily an aesthetic activity. One who leads development must inspire pursuit of a vision in whose production the leader had a hand. A vision is a picture of a state more desirable than the one that the organization currently is in. Leadership must also faciliate development of the strategy, tactics, and operations by whose means the vision can be pursued. Since the vision is often one of an ideal that can never be attained, though it may be approached continuously, leadership must see to it that the pursuit itself is satisfying, that it is fun as well as meaningful and valuable. Effective pursuit of an ideal requires the leader to extract the best possible effort from those who follow. In a corporation, this requires providing nothing less than a very high quality of work life.

Part of leadership is an appropriate ethical-moral judgement process. The ideal process would encourage leaders to make decisions only by consensus of all stakeholders. And the final decision should never deprive another of the ability or opportunity to develop unless the one affected by the decision would otherwise deprive others of this ability or opportunity.

However, the number of stakeholders of some corporate decisions runs into the millions, and there is just no way of involving all of them in every decision that affects them. For that reason, multi-national enterprises have to use representatives of various stakeholder groups. In a perfect world, any organization would designate individuals who will be responsible for identifying and evaluating the effects, if any, of current decisions on future generations’ choices and the ability and desire to make them.

A vision that involves a radical change in the way an organization is conceptualized is a transforming vision. One who leads the pursuit of such a vision is a transformational leader. Transformations are primarily qualitative, rather than quantitative, and are large discontinuities, not merely reform or incremental improvements.

The transformation to systemic thinking has brought with it a growing awareness of the fact that the effectiveness with which any of our daily activities (work, play, learning, inspiration) can be carried out depends on the extent to which they are integrated. Making it very apparent that a transformational leader must be able to integrate the various aspects of life in order to effectively pursue development. The transformational leader is one who can create an organization that reunifies life, who integrates work, play, learning, and inspiration.

The transformation of an enterprise from one conceptualized as an animate system to a social system is only one kind of transformation that is possible. However, in our current environment – one characterized by an increasing rate of change; increasing complexity; and an increasing rate of production of understanding, knowledge, and information – there is no other type of transformation that can bring about the necessary focus on employees, customers, and the other corporate stakeholders. A corporation that continues to focus more on shareholder value and less on stakeholders will ultimately fail.

In our last installment of the “Transform your business” series, we’ll talk about Human Business Design.

Previous installations can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11.

Image: Courtesy of 3.media.tumblr

Most organizations refer to asset planning as resource planning. We don’t like the term, especially when it comes to humans. Human beings are assets, not resources. The essential difference between assets and resources is that resources have no value outside the business process they are used in, whereas assets have an intrinsic and potential value. Managed as resources people do what resources do: they become depleted or absent – they burn out or move to another company. Managed as assets they flourish, growing in value for themselves and from there – engaged in heart and soul – add value to the companies (and all other communities) they are part of.

What companies need more than anything in these challenging times are people who are for and are involved in their work with their hearts and souls. That level of involvement and caring is therefore the core issue and determiner of sustainable corporate success in today’s market environment. People engaged with their heart and soul are the most valuable asset any company can have.

Many companies are aware of this and try integrating “human-oriented thinking” into their corporate strategy; some even realize that appreciating people as the asset they are goes much further than being “nice” to them as a motivational incentive; it adheres to a scientific understanding of businesses as complex adaptive systems.

Types of Assets

In asset planning, these types of assets are usually involved:

1. Money
2. Capital Goods
3. People
4. Consumables
5. Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

It’s clear that the required amount and the available amount of each type of asset will not be equal. Because the requirements and supply of any asset are seldom, if ever, in perfect balance, asset planning usually creates the requirement for continuous planning.

Financial Planning

Making a profit was once thought to be the only legitimate objective of an enterprise. But times have changed. More and more enterprise consider profit now as a basic pillar, not the ultimate goal. For that reason, enterprises need to determine the financial conditions required to survive and implement the new plan. This requires financial modeling, measuring financial performance measures under a variety of assumed conditions and decisions to use assets.

Capital Expenditures

Given its planned pursuit of an approximation to its pie in the sky design, what new facilities and equipment will a company need? Usually, the needs are treated individually and justification to deploy assets based on estimated returns on the investment. Enterprises need to consider the fact that some investments might look poorly on a plan when considered individually but contribute to the bottom line when integrated into the overall system.

People as assets

People are e the most valuable asset a company can have. Nevertheless, they are generally used less efficiently than any other type of asset. The waste of employees’ time and competence is huge. The quality and competence of employees had increased significantly during the last decades. However, the way people are being managed and the organization of human capital has not. More often than not, humans are seen as extensions or replacements of machines.

The trend of increasing the number of people as much as possible (no matter the output required) when times are good and downsizing (no matter the output) in bad times shows how unsophisticated our approach to human asset planning is. In later parts we will offer a solution to that problem by implementing a market economy within the enterprise.

Consumables

Each organization consumes assets it uses: material, energy, services – just to name a few. These assets are supplied by either an internal or external source; most enterprises focus on supplying itself with any consumable asset to avoid interdependency. However, in this networked and globalized economy, it has become almost impossible for many companies to obtain and retain the competencies required to provide many of these assets in an economic manner, threatening their ability to compete.

Let’s just look at the media agency world: When enterprises bring advertising in-house, they often have problems attracting superior talent. As a talent, would you want to work for a huge media agency with good opportunities to advance, or would you work for an enterprise with no chances of real advancement since the rest of the enterprise is devoted to anything else but media? Specialized enterprises are able to provide specific assets at a lower cost and higher quality than most in-house divisions.

However, the relationship between suppliers and enterprises are often negotiated so as to guarantee behavior not supporting (or even fighting against) the interest of the enterprise. Let’s continue with the example of the media agency: If the enterprise reimburses the agency based on a percentage of company’s media spend, the agency will do anything to increase the media budget. No matter the effect, no matter the outcome. A whole industry of research institutes and consumer behavior studies survive because agencies need data to convince enterprises to spend more money on media. Has there ever been a real study that shows the effect of advertising on sales? In many cases, agencies are better selling to enterprises than to sell the product of the enterprise to customers. As a result, agencies become lobbyists for media, not for their customers they’re supposed to sell to. To break this vicious cycle, agencies should be compensated for increases in sales without increasing media spend and for decrease in media spend without loss of sales.

This would serve customers much better. Currently, media agencies increase their profit often at a cost to customers. (Time, Annoyance, etc.) Once enterprises preach the gospel of media spend cost reduction by sharing the benefits with all suppliers, a paradigm shift will occur.

Information

There’s a frequent misconception that implementing a KMS (Knowledge Management System) can provide all the support decision makers require. Research has shown that most KMS’ miss; they fail to fulfill the promises that were used to justify their development. For that reason, we need new assumptions about information.

Managers need less irrelevant information

All of us experience it each and every day: Information overload. Email bankruptcy. Social Media fatigue. Once we have to deal with too much information, we tend to use less information to make decisions. And we have a natural drive to know more and more about less and less. This might be the perfect approach for boutique firms but large corporations need less specialists and more generalists – T-Shaped people. For them to be successful, enterprises need KMS’ to help them filter out irrelevant information and condense relevant information appropriately.

Managers shouldn’t be burdened with knowing what information they need

The complexity of systems requires executives to manage effectively without understanding the system well. A system that can be comprehended fully doesn’t need a good manager. In return, a manager that requires each and every detail is scared and will play it safe, not advancing the system appropriately. Executives earn their pay when they possess the skill to make a decision based on enough facts not on all facts.

The information that managers need is whatever information enables them to do better with it than without it.

A Knowledge Management System shouldn’t be static, it needs to be embedded within the organization and management system as an infinite learning loop, capable of constant improvement. This  will enable executives to learn what they need or they will be stuck in the “always-asking-for-more-information-loop”.

Less communication between certain stakeholders is better

The Information Age has one gospel: More information is better. When all stakeholders are aware of what the other stakeholders are doing, this should enable stakeholders to coordinate their activities better and improve performance, correct?

No.

Various stakeholders often have different measures of performance and those are often in conflict with the various divisions. Increased communication between stakeholders might actually hurt the overall performance of the enterprise. Before opening up the flood gates of communication, the enterprise, it structure and performance measures need to be aligned with all stakeholders. Once implemented, each stakeholder communication should be evaluated and communication levels adjusted accordingly.

Managers have to understand their KMS

A Knowledge Management System has one objective: to support the enterprise and improve performance. Executives need to control the system, they need to ensure not to be controlled by the system. This requires a deep understanding of the system, its capabilities and limitations.

In summary, asset planning’s objective is to deliver useful inputs to decision making and the ability to identify and learn from mistakes to ensure improvements of pie in the sky and gap planning. This will help implementing a system that improves decision making and allows for rapid learning and adaption.

Let’s talk about that in the next part.

Previous installments can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

Image: Courtesy of Emil Kozak

Organizational design produces the vision of an organization and a desired behavior. The gaps between what the organization is and now is doing, and where it wants to be and to be doing, expresses the challenge to be tackled by gap analysis and gap planning.

Gap Planning determines how the gaps are to be closed or reduced. It is the preparation of the design’s “initial  drawings” which provide the instructions required to close or reduce the gaps. Gaps can be filled by adding things, eliminating unnecessary things or by changing things.

Assessment

Before any assessment can take place, each stakeholder needs to understand and agree on the new direction of the organization:

• Communicate widely the vision, mission and pie in sky design
• Design the data-gathering process and explain to all stakeholders that an enterprise-wide gap analysis will take place
• Discuss with each stakeholder the benefits and difficulties involved in the transformation process
• Establish the initial design and data-gathering lead teams
• Determine the stakeholder task force
• Establish expectations for ongoing communication, and communicate the philosophy for staffing the organization

Using a combination of survey and group interview techniques, gather information on the effectiveness of the current organization. Data gathered should include: core processes and their effectiveness, additional customer data, critical tasks or key activities, work load, roles and responsibilities, decision-making authority, qualitative data on management practices, and internal issues and suggestions for improvement. Enterprises need to consider the current culture, how change has been implemented in the past, and how is has been received by employees at all levels.

Gap Analysis

In planning the analysis, it is essential to clarify what information is most relevant. This involves specifying intended outcomes and possible unintended outcomes. It also involves plans for assessing how well processes have been implemented and where improvements are needed.

We use the example of a luxury car dealership to illustrate the gaps. In this example, there are several gaps that are important to measure. From a service quality, these include (1) service quality gap; (2) management understanding gap; (3) service design gap; (4) service delivery gap; and (5) communication gap.

Service Quality Gap

Indicates the difference between the service expected by customers and the service they actually receive. For example, customers may expect to wait less than 10 minutes for their loaner car but reality is an average waiting time of 20 minutes. Most cars are being dropped off early am and 10 minutes before work are more valuable to people than after 5pm.

Management Understanding Gap

Represents the difference between the quality level expected by customers and the perception of those expectations by management. For example, in a car dealership customers might expect expediency on their repair but management focuses more on excellence than expediency (for many legal reasons).

Service Design Gap

This is the gap between management’s perception of customer expectations and the development of this perception into delivery standards. For example, management might perceive that customers expect someone to answer their telephone calls timely. Customers might think “timely” is less than twenty seconds and management defines “timely” as less than 40 seconds, thereby creating a service design gap.

Service Delivery Gap

Represents the gap between the established delivery standards and actual service delivered. Now, management might establish a new standard of answering each call in less than 20 seconds but average time of answering is 27 seconds, creating a service delivery gap.

Communication Gap

This is the gap between what is communicated to consumers and what is actually delivered. This happens frequently when dealerships offer low-price oil changes and then charge customer for questionable labor.

Gap Fillers

The most important criteria used in evaluating the gap plan is whether it will the enterprise to push in the right direction, avoiding a chaotic transition and helping the organization to utilize opportunities. It’s extremely important to refer back to the mission statement, and understand if the gap plan will help to fulfill promises made in the statement.

When an individual or a group is confronted with a gap between where they are and where they most want to be, they can respond in four different ways: absolution, resolution, solution, and dissolution. Learning and creativity are enhanced more by design (dissolution) than by research (solution), more by research than trial and error (resolution), and more by trial and error than by doing nothing (absolution). The goal is to design an organization that considers dissolution as their main goal. Dissolution of boxes,  paradigm, linear thinking. Through organizational design, all stakeholders will contribute to the creation of a world they are envisioning to live in.

The efficiency and effectiveness of the gap fillers selected in gap planning are not only matters of selection one of a set of available gap fillers, but are also a matter of creating gap fillers not previously available. Organizational business design unleashes creativity in developing a vision to be pursued by an enterprise. But creativity also has an important role in selecting the gap fillers by which to pursue it. Therefore, the selection of gap fillers can also be more a matter of design than research or common sense.

Last but not least, the gaps treated as challenges in gap planning are almost never independent of each other.  Therefore, their solutions interact systematically. The selection of solutions to close the gaps should take into account these interactions, especially their joint efforts on the enterprises’s overall performance.

Tomorrow we will discuss asset planning.

For your reference, you can find the previous chapters here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Image: Courtesy of Minddesign

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” – Jonathan Swift

Every enterprise needs to set Big Hairy Audacious Goals. These Big Hairy Audacious Goals are your limit. It’s an idealized goal that might never be attained, it’s your Moon Landing. We will talk later how to reduce the gap between enterprise reality and pie in the sky ideal. But, forget about limits for a while. This is about expansive thinking: no borders, no limits, no boxes.

Planning for Pie in the Sky includes:

• A clear vision of your enterprise
• A mission statement, expressing the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals
• Specific features the enterprise needs to have to achieve the goals
• A pie in the sky design of the organization

A clear vision of the enterprise

Corporate visions are usually developed by executives, not involving all stakeholders. While developing the vision by few might be more efficient, the vision needs to be shared by all stakeholders in order to be pursued effectively. Most visions define what executives want the enterprise to be in 10 years or so, often forgetting what these executives want the enterprise to be right now. I would argue, it’s imperative to develop a vision that communicates the ideal design of the organization for the here and now, assuming the organizational design will be able to handle changes (and there will be many) without actually forecasting the future. Instead, organizational designs have to incorporate contingency planning.

I have all the plastic in the world but I still carry a few bills with me all the time. I don’t forecast a cyberattack on the banking system, I don’t forecast a massive quake in LA that won’t allow me to access my account for weeks. But all these things and other scenarios are possible. And I would like to be prepared for it.

A Mission Statement, expressing the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals

Most mission statements are borefests: platitudes of epic proportions. A real mission statement should answer the following questions:

• Why does this enterprise exist?
• What are the aspirations of the enterprise?
• What does the enterprise do to succeed?
• How will the enterprise pursue its Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals?
• How will the enterprise serve each stakeholder?
• What makes the enterprise unique?

While formulating the mission statement, stay away from empty sentences/words, corporate speak and anything your best friend outside of your expertise doesn’t understand.

Specific features the enterprise needs to have to achieve the goals

Whenever we develop a website, the first step is to sit down with all stakeholders to go through their wishlist: What features does each stake holder would like to have? Enterprises have to go through this exercise as well to design their ideal organization.

This can be a laundry list of thousands of items or just a minimal document that describes the structure of the enterprise, corporate culture, management style, employee expectations, high-level ideals of products/services, etc. Each ideal enterprise design is different and the features list will reflect its uniqueness.

A pie in the sky design of the organization

Imagine, your enterprise stopped to exist last night. Nothing else has changed: Technology, laws, regulations, taxes, etc. The environment and systems that surrounded the old enterprise still exist and they haven’t changed. Just your enterprise is extinct. Start designing your new enterprise.

What kind of enterprise would you design if you could start from scratch? How would you design it so the enterprise is capable of being improved continuously from within? We’re not asking you to create Utopia, a perfect enterprise. Instead, your pie in the sky design should incorporate what you want to the organization to be right now. While you discuss these ideas with stakeholders, many new ideas will evolve and creativity will flow freely. This process of collaboration is often the most important product of this step to transform your business. Enterprises need to make sure that during this step self-imposed constraints are kept to a minimum. Stakeholders should not be concerned with feasibility, budgets or implementability. Reminding them that the enterprise was destroyed last night might help limiting those constraints. Keep dreaming.

Next, we will discuss gap analysis and gap planning.

For your reference, the first parts can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.