How to Grow a Decisive Organization

From The Simple-Minded Manager, Cutting Through Your Work-Life Chaos

WE LIVE AND WORK IN CHAOTIC TIMES. Strategic decision-making in such times requires seemingly contradictory premises: dogged adherence to continuous management process and openness to complex changes in the environments in which organizations function. Factors inside and outside our organizations produce cross-valent winds that buffet us in many directions every day. Growing more decisive management structures is the most daunting task facing leaders at all levels of governmental, civil and commercial organizations.

I use the word "growing" purposefully. Agrarian metaphors like "nurturing" and "shepherding" more accurately describe the strategic decision-making process to me than "constructing" and "building" architectural images or "manufacturing" and "assembling" industrial icons that are usually used. Based on my own experiences in commercial and not-for-profit corporations, I offer ten thoughts on how you might grow a more decisive organization where you work.

1. Don't bother starting unless you are prepared to commit the entire organization to an all-consuming process. Having an expert in strategic planning sitting somewhere, even in the office next to the President, won't work. Even a strategic planning committee won't work. Every person in the organization will see this for the tokenism that it is. To even have a chance of success everyone, starting with the CEO and actively involving the folks on the production line, must be committed to a long-term process.

2. Take a look backward. You cannot decide where to go in the future without a real understanding of where you have been. Few organizations start this process de novo. Even start-ups have a past in the previous lives of their key stakeholders. Write an organizational history. Carefully examine the accomplishments, failures, traditions and culture of the organization's past.

3. Ask every person in the organization four questions: Who are we? What do we do? How do we do it? What do we believe? The answers to these questions, taken together and projected into the future, form the best Mission Statement that an organization can script.

4. Seed this Mission Statement throughout the organization and use it as everyone's primary decision-making tool. Stress to each person that every decision, no matter how small, should be judged as to whether it serves to advance the mission.

 

"The greatest challenge for the informational age manager is to create an organization that can share knowledge." From Thomas A. Stewart's Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations

5. Explore individual values that, taken in the aggregate, define the corporate culture. I want to emphasize the fourth of the above questions -- What do we believe? I think that it is crucial to invest the time and process to learn what is valuable in the work and work environment to people at all levels. This will make stakeholders of people who otherwise would only be employees. From this process you want to be able to craft the following sentence, "This organization's mission is anchored in the belief that ...", and have most people in the organization feel authorship of the statement. By the way, the vision and values of the CEO, top management, and the Board of Directors are critical focal points of this process.

    

6. Define the principles and practices that guide the organization, based on the values exercises. These constitute your internal environment.

    

7. Take an objective look at your strengths and weaknesses. Don't delude yourself. An organization's weaknesses may well present its greatest opportunities for productive change. Also look outside your organization to the opportunities and challenges that you must confront. This is your external environment.

    

8. Define initiatives that will pursue the mission, growing from strengths, strengthening weaknesses, while remaining true to the values that underpin the organization. Keep the list of initiatives small and focused. Be confident in the your organization's advantages. These initiatives will define the needed institutional capacities, the products and services that are your competitive advantage and will manifest your mission. They also define the changes in structure and management function needed.

    

9. Consider stakeholders outside the organization as potential clients, capable of furthering your mission. Whether they are investors, funders, collaborators or competitors, they are potential customers of your products and services. Other organizations, and key individuals in them, are as important resources as those in your own. Sell them on your mission and understand theirs. Learn their strengths and weakness. Search for common values and goals. Negotiate alliances that support your mission.

 

"Cycles are the heartbeats of understanding. A thing perceived is just an event. Repeated it opens up to the instruments of science, the ruminations of philosophers, the imaginations of shamans." From Tyler Volk's Metapatterns: Across Time, Space and Mind, 1995

10. Collect data on performance, feed it back to all levels, ensure improvement, and start all over again. There are numerous cycles in every organization's life. Annually, goals must be defined and monitored, budgets must be set and met. In my experience, the strategic decision-making process works best on an approximately three-year cycle. Assessing the progress made in accomplishing the initiatives, rethinking the mission, probing values, and articulating new initiatives, capacities, and needed organizational development will produce a continuously a self-informing and constantly decisive organization.

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