We are obsessed with being like the best. We want to innovate like Apple, tell stories like Pixar, and stay focused like Southwest. And our organizations spend millions of dollars attempting to emulate these best-in-class companies and capabilities. But what if someone else’s best-in-class isn’t always right for you?
Benchmarking used to be the noble practice of deriving lessons from exemplars. Now it’s being used as a fast and cheap attempt to clone what often isn’t ours to replicate. The failed attempts to bolt on the success of others fragments us from the best toward which we aspire. We can never become whole organizations, rich in our own unique identities, when we are infatuated with copying the identities of others.
Many organizations ask “what can we do?” to improve. Can we manage our business through independent business units? Can we allow our top talent to work remotely? Can we centralize purchasing to reduce cost? There are efficient, proven ways to execute these things, excellently. Yet we believe that much of organizational pain is not a lack of excellence, but an absence of “fit” – the congruence of the choices we make. For us, it’s not about forcing things to work together, but identifying the things that fit together.
Asking “what can we do?” is an excellent exercise to explore possibilities. But most of the companies we work with are already quite formed and spending too much time asking what can we do leads them further away from their identity. So, rather than asking “what can we do?” we need to begin asking, “what ought we do?”
Asking what can we do risks directing us away from being a whole organization. Asking what ought we do forces self-reflection (on our values, current state, etc.) and leads us to choices and tradeoffs that guide us toward wholeness.
WHOLE infers integrity not just of distinct organizational components, but between them.
We work with organizations that have chronic misalignment between various parts of their organizations. We see excellent strategies but not the leaders to execute it. We note well-articulated values, but not the compensation methods to support it. We see excellent marketing plans, but not product to back it up. We see excellent leaders who do not have the character to survive their position of power. And these fragmentations often exist because leaders have avoided self-reflection and the difficult tradeoff decisions required to create a whole organization whose parts all fit.
But rather than focus on the disintegration and inconsistencies, we are going to spend three months working to discover and describe organizational WHOLENESS – how it is made, its counterfeits, its enablers, and its enemies. So as you follow along with this blog, we hope that you are asking with us, “What ought we do to pursue whole organizations with whole people in them?”