The current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world has new demands on organisational cultures, relationships, teamwork and long-term organisational capabilities. When we are overly focussed on survival, we tend to perpetuate busyness at the cost of important but less urgent long-term demands.
The unfortunate side effects are that many organisations suffer from several symptoms that negatively impact their sustainable competitiveness. These symptoms are usually systemically interlinked, but this may not be obvious to people that reside within the organisation.
Typical organisational warning signs include:
- Our profits are shrinking, and we are worried about our future.
- Our staff appear lethargic, slow and disinterested. It appears senior management must get too deeply involved to get things moving.
- We appear to be spending huge amounts of time maintaining our current business, but not enough time creating a new future.
- The board seems to be too operational and we are concerned about our relevance in the future.
- Our best people are leaving. We are puzzled why this is, as we believe we have lots to offer.
- We have a culture of finding fault everywhere and hence struggle to innovate and energise people.
- Why are certain departments and divisions not cooperating and appear to be duplicating and competing with each other.
- Have we outgrown our structure? What should it look like?
- We are a younger, medium sized company that has grown rapidly, the style and methods we used to get to where we are, are no longer working.
- We have picked up an inordinate amount of bureaucracy along the way, which is holding progress and good service back.