The First Dimension: Pillars

Organisational design and capability is an overwhelming topic. There are hundreds of ways to deal with the complexity of an organisation made up of hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of moving parts. Many large consultancies would have you believe that all this complexity can be neatly tied-up in a 2x2 matrix. This never resonated with me!

Over the past few years I have been documenting all the moving parts so that I could help people make sense of what they have and what their organisational strengths and weaknesses are. But this led to an almost intractable web of factors, as you can see below!

I needed to distill it down to the key elements. What has developed is a model to facilitate senior leadership conversations around evaluating, improving and prioritising change for organisations. In my experience it was extremely common to have boardroom discussions that carry on for hours because we didn’t have sufficient data at the table or we had the perennial problem of too much to do and too little resources to invest. The model has been designed to give clarity to this puzzle.

The model has had a massive extension at Caution Your Blast Ltd (CYB) and proved itself invaluable as the structure for assessing the international governments participating in our recent work with GDS on the Global Digital Marketplace programme. Although we had used the model in private enterprise from startups to banks, using the model on entire governments posed some unique challenges but I feel it passed with flying colours and it has provided great clarity and insights to those we have used it with.

The model has two key dimensions. I’m going to introduce each over the next couple of weeks and then continue with further articles diving into more detail on specific areas.

The First Dimension: Organisation, Product, or Efficiency?

After going through all of the web of concepts, issues and practices I distilled three key pillars to a great organisation.

An extraordinary business needs to

• Build the right organisation: The right leadership, culture, people, structure, environment and support

• Build the right thing: The right services and products, invested in and prioritised at the right time to meet the user needs

• Build it right: The quality, speed and cost-effectiveness to deliver when it is needed

What do you prioritise as a leader?

With so many things to focus on, what do you prioritise. As a quick exercise, in which order would you prioritise these three important areas:

• Efficiency and productivity of your organisation

• The way you hire and develop staff, or lead and structure the organisation

• Your products and services - features, design, and which to develop

If we give a bit more detail does it help?

Efficiency & Productivity (Build it Right)

How do we measure productivity and efficiency and know if we are improving or getting worse. What are our strategy and tactics for being more efficient and productive. What process and practices do we use to drive quality. What process and practices do we use to drive efficiency. How do we organise ourselves to avoid unnecessary costs and delays. How can we maximise revenue from our services. What technology and tools do we use to be efficient.

Organisation & Culture (Build the Right Organisation)

Building the right organisation involves many elements but some highlights would be: What is our HR model, hiring, training, induction, incentives, values and culture. What is our leadership plan, vision, mission, strategy, management style and communication. What is our structure, location, work environment, departmental structure, innovation plan and strategy for organisational change and learning

Product & Services (Build the Right Thing)

What products and services should we build and offer. What are the next features and improvements we should invest in. How do we design and test our UX for products and services. Who are our users and our market, how does our service meet their needs, how does our service connect to our current and potential customers. How do we measure the success of our initiatives and how do we communicate that

I hope those 3 categories made sense and you were able to pick the order in which you prioritise. We have had a few surprises when looking at leaders answers compared to their reality.

What has borne out in my experience of asking many people “where do you prioritise your time as a leader?” is that the most common instant answer is slightly in favour of Build the right organisation over Build the right product and with Build it right last. Not surprisingly this is generally biased by the role of the person answering. In support of this belief in the importance of the human side of our organisations we are regularly seeing articles in major publications on empowerment, talent shortages and leadership of people. This was not common ten years ago. I think that publicity of failed cultures at big name companies has highlighted the costs of not prioritising like this. In fact, when I ask around there is huge support for statements such as:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” attributed to Peter Drucker

And

“People are our greatest asset”

For myself and The Adjacent we see that firstly to build anything you’ve got to have the right team and they need all the right organisational environment and structure to thrive, then you need the right product to meet a market need then lastly we need to do our best to build it with high quality and as cost efficiently as possible so we can make a profit.

It is clear you could build an amazing perfect product that no-one wants, and fail as a business. It is also clear you could have an amazing idea but dysfunctional teams and incapable leaders can leave you with a big promises and no way to deliver, or timebombs waiting to happen.

So, the model should be to prioritise:

This is the first key dimension to consider when assessing your organisation.

But,

When I do assessments interviewing the staff and looking at calendars of leaders what I find is that for leadership roles there are two realities:

General management / leadership role

• 3% People and Organisation actions

• 10% Product/Service actions

• 87% Efficiency actions

Product management / leadership role

• 3% People and Organisation actions

• 40% Product/Service actions

• 57% Efficiency actions

Why are the actions not following the words? This mismatch is even in business media Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast. So What’s For Lunch? The Adjacent team have been working with organisations to try and answer this question. This mismatch between the conscious messages of the leadership and the unconscious reality of their actions is often one of the key causes of low motivation, low initiative and low productivity in organisations. I will look at this dysfunction in more detail in a later article.

I hope that this first dimension for organisational assessment is clear and you are already wondering where you as a leader are spending your time, no matter how big your team.

Next week: The second organisational dimension: Leadership, Systems and Practices

If you’d like to talk to me and the team at The Adjacent, we work with leaders looking for the parts of organisations that should be prioritised to enable and shift the overall organisational effectiveness. We identify strengths and weaknesses using our model and work with leadership and teams to unpack these and devise changes from small tweaks to large programmes.