Issue 08: building an intuitive organisation
Jul 16th
Applying ‘best practice’ is too often like sticking a bandage on a headache. An organisation needs to understand itself before it can identify what it needs, or how to adapt best practice to make it relevant. Issue 08 includes client stories on Foreign & Commonwealth Office and professional services firms, and chapters on insights from our research, engagement with outcomes and how intuitive is your organisation?
“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
Albert Einstein
The intuitive organisation
Some organisations chase one best practice after another in the pursuit of higher performance. Too often these initiatives generate great cost and little impact. Others seem able to pick out elements from a new idea and put these into practice in a way that creates great value and minimum disruption. The ability to do the latter represents significant competitive advantage.
So we did some research. We found there is little difference in the kinds of solutions that organisations try – performance management, people development, restructuring, branding, customer service initiatives and so on. Such interventions have their merits but they also produce varying results for organisations and rarely deliver exactly ‘what it said on the tin’.
Not that it stops people chasing the rainbow. Some organisations are ‘best practice butterflies’. They seize on the latest HBR idea or fly in the hottest business guru only to be frustrated when the outcomes bear little resemblance to what was promised. Often they react by searching all the more frantically for the next panacea in the guise of ‘best practice’.
This article is filed under: business capability, organisation, organisation design, organisational culture, organisational performance