Organisational Shape-shifting
Crisis management, firefighting, burn-out, collapse
– these are the exhausting management techniques of a reactive reality...and they're getting more overwhelming and frenetic. The underlying qualities of organisations surviving the hurdles of today's business are those with the capacity to sustain forward motion and stamina, whilst adapting and responding with agility. This is the secret to long life.
Easy to write in a paragraph, but much harder to endure, and even thrive, under continuous challenge. In part, this is because of the lack of innate flexibility in systems, plus processes that insist on dealing with new challenges in old ways.
We create a culture out of the community, and work communities often create cultures resistant to change and unconventional solutions. The Catch-22 is that the power of stable structures, protocols, and ordered processes is exactly that which will prevent an organization from adapting fast in contemporary business.
Marketing, Production, and Accounting stories have shaped the unique identities, practices, and preferences of organisational cultures. However, these stories built cultures that have now become unwieldy and cumbersome. For global adaptive, travel-light scenarios and environments, ‘hand luggage only’ is the emergent code.
It's becoming essential to unlearn cultural practices that limit new growth and flexibility and to facilitate a new paradigm agile enough to side-step the slow extinction of dinosaur ways. Even bright-star trendsetters will need the dynamic responsiveness of continuous creative thinking.
So, how do we create true resilience? We pare down and clarify purpose and practice. We build working communities threaded together by common unlearning and re-dreaming experiences. We uncover authentic connections and branding, taking the essence of the organisation and framing it in new systemic behaviors that are collaborative, meaningful, inspired, and beautiful. In other words, we teach and mentor conscious action based on new cultural philosophies, so that the best solutions have optimal opportunities to emerge.
Each organisation and its people are required to step into the zone of fully-conscious responsiveness without sacrificing their essence of integrity and uniqueness. This is the authentic way of businesses of the future, the torque behind the forward-thrusting power of what you do. It is definitely time to have conversations about shape-shifting your organisation to regenerate and express its true power.