The Coordination System – the unfashionable necessity that will make your organisation work

Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here – 5 mins, with captions.

Unhappy people, putting out fires and feeling like we’re not getting anywhere.  We often look for so-called ‘bigger’ solutions – to talk about purpose, strategy, systems.  And sometimes that’s spot on.

But more often than not, there’s a more powerful, yet very unfashionable component of every organisation at every level that needs to be working for anything to…well…work!

And that’s Coordination.  I’ll explain…

Genuine Buy-In – the power of CAPI

Prefer to watch on video rather than read?  Click here, it’s 4 mins, with captions.

My work with organisations often involves getting groups together so they can see their work situation, make decisions on what needs to change and put these into action.    Which means at some point in the preparation, we are going to be asking “right, so who do we need to have in the room”?

That’s where I lean one of the brilliant concepts of Dr. Ichak Adizes, called CAPI.

The Resource Bargain – The Root Cause of Organisational Pain

Prefer to watch on video rather than read?  Click here – video is 6 mins, with captions.

The world of work is chaotic and filled with anxiety.  We can track most of that back to one source – to the one thing that is rarely done well in most organisations – the Resource Bargain.

The term the ‘Resource Bargain’ comes from Stafford Beer (1926-2002), legend in systems thinking and the creator of the Viable System Model (VSM), one of the best ways to diagnose and change organisations (or any system) so they work better.

What We Really Need – It’s Not Leadership

Prefer to watch rather than read?  Click here to watch me go through this on video – 5 mins, and with captions if you need no sound.

The stupid ‘manager and leader’ thing came up again on LinkedIn this week.  This time it was in the form of this:

…as always – leaders are cool, managers are the worst.

Stepping Up to Senior Management – Your New Kettle Of Fish

If you’d like to watch me go through this on video, just click here.  6 mins with captions.

Senior Management is not just more management.  It’s a new kettle of fish.  I’ll go through:

• The change in the nature of the work
• What the job actually is
• Action To Take

Senior Management

First – what are we talking about here?  The key thing is manager of managers.  Or, managers of multiple teams, who each have their own leadership.  These roles can be called various things, some of the ones from my clients are:

Overload – It’s Time To Save Your Sanity

You can also watch this article as a video – click here.  5 mins, with captions.

There’s a disease afflicting everyone in organisational life and it’s hurting people.  It’s overload.  It needs to be stopped.  Unfortunately…that’s now up to you!

The Fundamental Change

Where did this come from?  My hypothesis is…the mid-90s (note: ‘hypothesis’, which means a proposition to be investigated.  I’m sure there’s research).  It was about then that email got going, and from that moment on, assigning work got extremely easy.  Just email!

Here’s what I’d suggest the graph would look like if we could do stress and number of emails together:

The Middle System – Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Doesn’t Happen And What To Do

This article also exists as a 5-minute video.  Click here to watch if you’d prefer that to reading.

We all want more cross-functional collaboration, whether you’re an executive wanting the areas to sort it amongst themselves, in the middle yourself trying to get work done with other areas, or on the frontline just wanting some consistent messages.

There’s a reason this is often so hard, and one I can give you right upfront – it’s because we can’t see it!  Let me explain….

The social system relationships in most workplaces

As I did in my article and video on the Disgruntled Masses, this piece relies on the Organic Systems Framework of Barry Oshry.  It’s simply great stuff…look into it.  You can watch him talk on YouTube too.

The Disgruntled Masses – How to Change the Unchangeable

Prefer to watch than read?  You can click here to watch me go through this on video. 

The disgruntled masses – the groups in your organisation that are locked into staying the same, staying disappointed, and no lever is long enough to jemmy them free.  This article is about what’s going on and the strategy to get things moving.

Barry Oshry’s Organic Systems Framework

The Organic Systems Framework of Barry Oshry helps us see what’s going on.  He shows how we can see organisations as social systems, and through running week-long live-in simulations with groups for over 40 years, has seen the same consistent patterns emerge again and again. 

Parent or Partner? The deep reason behind getting KPIs to work

Prefer to watch on video?  Click here – 5 minutes, with captions.

‘We need to get KPIs sorted’ is a common refrain, which carries with it the assumption that it is the lack of these things that is constraining performance.

Unfortunately or fortunately…there’s deeper stuff going on that we need to be aware of if we want this sort of thing to work.  And if we’re not aware of it, sorting the KPIs will actually make things worse!

You’d know from your own experience that when the next initiative is introduced, including KPIs, the sensible response is to smile politely until it blows over, then get back to work.  This is a deep issue of ownership, and to understand it, we need to go deeper into working relationships.  And for this, we’ll use the work of Peter Block.

Compression! Fix a major source of pain in your organisation

Want to watch this on video rather than read?  Just click here.  5 mins, with captions.

Today’s article goes through one of the most common causes of organisational pain.  A sore back is guaranteed to make people grumpy, and compression is a great way to give your organisation some proper spinal issues.

Now, a big proviso.  Organisational hierarchies are very out of fashion right now.  Here’s three things though:

1. You’re in one, changing them is hard, and you might as well make the obvious changes to make the thing work properly
2. There are many, many situations where a well-run managerial hierarchy is very much the most appropriate organisational design
3. Hierarchies get a bad rap because of the exact sort of issue I am going to go through in this article.  Fix these, and….hierarchies might just work fine!

OK, let’s get on with it.