Your organization cannot change in the face of the forces and threats of the business environment? Are you battling overly complex systems that frustrate and undermine your attempts to create positive change? Is your organization focused on activity rather than results? Is vital business information leaked, altered, or stopped as it moves up and down the organizational structure? Do you make key decisions that are not implemented or reversed after the fact? Is there a gap between the formal (written) rules about how things are done and the informal (unwritten) rules about how things are actually done? Is your organization’s culture acting like an Invisible Bureaucracy ™ preventing you from getting the results you want? These are some of the signs that your organization has reached a dead end.

One of the problems with identifying and moving beyond an organizational impasse is that managers and staff members are actively involved in the ways of working and patterns of interaction that create and sustain the impasse, and they don’t recognize it because these days . current operations are on automatic pilot and are organizational blind spots; for example, things that others know about the operation of an organization that managers and staff do not know. Often times, an organization is the last to know what customers, suppliers, and competitors have known all along: An organization says it is customer-centric, but then defends itself against customer feedback; You say you are committed to providing quality services, but then you fail to meet your commitments. It is also difficult to know when it has reached a dead end, because organizations have sophisticated algorithms to manage the information they receive from the business environment when it is not “mapped” into how they “see” themselves and their own corporate image. These algorithms function as organizational defense routines that are designed to select inputs that match an organization’s perception of itself and ignore or discard the rest.

Recognizing that an organization is at a dead end almost always requires a burning platform and there are two types of burning platforms: reactive and proactive. The reactive type is when managers wait until a situation has become critical to seek help or attempt to alter ineffective organizational performance and destructive interaction patterns. Alternatively, managers who embrace the proactive type of recording platform realize that while the situation may not be critical at this point, it likely will be if they allow these performance issues to continue to frustrate and undermine their organization’s capacity. to get the desired results. When faced with the signs of a dead end, managers and their staff often ask the question, “How much does it hurt?” If the answer is, “Not so bad,” then things usually remain as they are, until the next crisis rears its ugly head.

One of the strongest and most robust indicators of whether an organization has come to a standstill is the extent to which it has an intentional rather than an unintended culture. An Intended Culture ™ is consciously configured to achieve the desired results of an organization; for example, your goals and objectives. An Unintended Culture ™ tends to be plagued by ineffective autopilot operations and invisible bureaucracy that derail, frustrate and undermine the achievement of goals and objectives, and is a strong indicator that an organization has reached a standstill. The ability of an organization to change and adapt with conscious intention is the true test of the degree to which its culture is consciously chosen (intended) to achieve specific ends.

Creating a desired culture helps an organization overcome obstacles and transforms its culture into a powerful resource that efficiently conducts day-to-day operations on autopilot; for example, efficiently and smoothly without thinking about them. When done effectively, autopilot operations can be your best ally because they increase your ability to compete and achieve your goals. But in most cases, the autopilot operations that characterize an unintended culture and organizational deadlocks are counterproductive because they perpetuate problems with job performance, communication, interpersonal conflict, and decision-making, and then derail them. attempts to create positive change. Creating a desired culture requires managers to use a four-step process to:

a) take ineffective ways of working and interaction patterns from autopilot and bring them back to personal and organizational awareness,

b) reconfigure ineffective processes and behaviors to obtain different results,

c) migrate new, more effective ways of working and patterns of interaction back to autopilot operations through repetition, and

d) define a way forward to achieve the goals and objectives of an organization that incorporates these changes over time so that they are sustainable.

Bottom line: understanding the invisible forces that bring organizations to a standstill and then realigning them through this four-step process begins to transform “culture” into a trusted resource that can be used intentionally to achieve the goals and objectives of an organization.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *