A favorite quote of management and organizational consultants is “All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they’re getting.” It’s a good way of saying that the strategy in action is not always the same as the one espoused or intended.
This is a deceptively simple principle with many layers. For one thing, it suggests that any group or company’s performance is no accident. Foundational forces (strategic factors) are always at work. Since 90% of organizations fail to achieve their strategic objectives, it’s clear that some design factors tend to be hidden, confusing, unconscious, or ignored. Parts of the organizational strategy are in the dark.
The Role of Strategy Facilitation
Effective strategy making aims first to shed light on all the forces critical to system-wide performance, especially the ones that impede effectiveness, that is, the ability of an organization to achieve its goals. Our emphasis is on understanding the organization as a human system, not just an economic one, as is the case with traditional strategic management.
This broader perspective is critical because the issues that typically stymie performance are organizational ones that impact how people feel, think, learn, and interact in the workplace. An essential focus is on helping people and groups realize where and how their core values and purposes align with the organization’s core strategy. When they do, amazing energy is freed up and performance surges accordingly. When they don’t . . . The difference is like day and night.
Effective Strategy Stimulates REAL Change
Our most important role as strategy facilitators is to more clearly identify and focus the key organizational performance factors. These might include environmental, behavioral, strategic, structural, process, and technological factors. Our role is not to act like experts, there to fix things. Rather, our true contribution is to better illuminate the whole system so that planning teams can offset the human and strategic factors that are counterproductive, outmoded, or unintentional with better initiatives. The problem in most organizations is that internal planners are too close to the system to see it clearly and realistically. This is just human nature. Getting better reality requires a wider, more impartial perspective, which we can bring to the table.