When, in attempting to address a question or solve a problem, rather than solutions you find yourself surfacing additional questions and problems, you are probably on the right track. More than that, you are probably asking the right questions. After all, if the answers come too easily, you likely do not really have a problem at all – or you have the wrong one.
Worse, as noted yesterday, we are often sorely tempted to brush aside what we see as distracting side issues and plunge on ahead to resolve the initially presenting problem. It is surprising how often this happens among management professionals at all levels, and in all sorts of matters – including organizational design. This tendency to ignore questions that pop up while we are in pursuit of immediate solutions is one reason we find the many parts and processes of our organizations straying from each other, and from the strategy that they nominally serve.
As we have seen, Peter Drucker stressed that “structure follows strategy.” He also offered the organizational designer three core questions to address before even getting to the specifics of structure. It is these questions – the sort that force you first to generate and answer others – that help you ensure that you are establishing and preserving that essential link. Here they are:
In what area is excellence required to obtain the company’s objectives?”
How many of you – whether you are a one-person operation or manager of a multinational enterprise – seriously explore this question? Having done so, how many of you actually organize – or reorganize – your processes and operations to facilitate, promote, and advance the quality of that excellence?
In what areas would lack of performance endanger the results, if not the survival, of the enterprise?”
In my experience, this is possibly the least effectively addressed problem in organizational design and operations. We’re not talking here, by the way, about anticipating and mitigating the effects of specific events, such as severe weather or labor disputes. We’re talking about inherent or latent weaknesses (or even the flip sides of strengths) that threaten, through inattention, to widen into organizationally devastating ruptures. You need to do this, and you need to factor what you learn into your organizational design.
What are the values that are truly important to us in this company”?
The fact that this question comes last indicates its importance, rather than its precedence. Mindful that you will be coming to it, your exploration of the previous two will help you better confront it in its turn. Moreover, we’re not talking here about the sort of universal values that belong in your personal character; photos mounted in the lobby of senior managers gazing wistfully heavenward won’t instill them in your organization or in you.
What Drucker is referring to here are values that relate to the work you do and/or the products and services you offer. It could be related to safety, quality, reliability, and the like. The two key elements are that they are something that: 1) you – collectively as an organization – feel strongly about, and 2) can be “organizationally anchored.” That is, they aren’t merely words, but are given force and expression through the very shape and operation of the organization.
In order to answer these questions, you are going to have to ask and answer a great deal more. In the course of doing this, you will be revisiting – or perhaps redesigning – your corporate identity and strategy before returning to your final task – organizational design.
Sounds almost Socratic, doesn’t it?
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Today’s tip: Speaking of processes that stray from purpose, please see this excellent discussion by Eric Brown of how to ask the right questions in order to arrive at the right conclusions.
And speaking of managers who may be responsible for all that disjunction, please see yet another troubling survey uncovered by Nic Paton at Management-Issues with a title that has disturbing organizational design implications: “Get rid of all the managers . . .”
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Well said! Good leadership isn’t always about having the answers, rather it’s more often about asking the tough questions.
you’re on a great point. research that a colleague and i have done for a book on the lessons to be learned from corporate failures found that a great many stemmed from glossing over the tough questions, rather than raising as many as possible and confronting them brutally. how else could one of the world’s largest cement companies convince itself that it ought to make lawnmowers, reasoning that its cement was used in homes and, well, homes have lawns. (the company, blue circle, went into bankruptcy proceedings and was later sold.)
Totally Consumed – I agree completely that the crucial issue isn’t the answer, but the question, because if we get the latter wrong, the former will be wrong, also – probably damagingly so.
Thanks for your visit and your writing at your own site!
Hello Paul,
The winning line in your comment: “. . . raising as many [questions] as possible and confronting them brutally . . .”
Both sides of that phrase are essential: both working hard to imagine and generate the questions – I like the emphasis on “as many as possible” – and the frank and “brutal” consideration of them from all perspectives.
I hope viewers will link through from your comment to your site so they can learn about you and your colleague’s new book – best of luck with it, and thanks so much for your visit and your observations!