Has your organization hit a dead end?

Is your organization unable to change in the face of the forces and threats of the business environment? Are you struggling with overly complex systems that frustrate and undermine your attempts to create positive change? Is your organization focused on activity, rather than results? Is vital business information leaked, modified, or stopped as it moves up and down through the organizational structure? Do you make key decisions that don’t get implemented or are reversed after the fact? Is there a gap between the formal (written) rules for how things are done and the informal (unwritten) rules for how things are actually done? Is your organization’s culture acting like an Invisible Bureaucracy™ preventing you from getting the results you want? These are some of the signs that your organization has reached an impasse.

One of the problems with identifying and breaking out of an organizational impasse is that managers and staff members are actively involved in the ways of working and interaction patterns that create and sustain the impasse, and they don’t recognize it because today: current operations are on autopilot and are organizational blind spots; for example, things that others know about how an organization operates that managers and staff do not. Often, an organization is the last to know what customers, suppliers, and competitors have known all along: An organization says it’s customer-focused, but then defends itself against customer feedback; says it is committed to providing quality services, but then fails to deliver on commitments. It’s also hard to know when you’ve hit a dead end, because organizations have sophisticated algorithms to manage the information they receive from the business environment when it’s not “mapped” on how they “see” themselves and their own corporate image. These algorithms function as organizational defense routines that are designed to select inputs that match an organization’s perception of itself and ignore or discard the rest.

Recognizing that an organization is at a dead end almost always requires a burning platform, and there are two types of burning platforms: reactive and proactive. The reactive type is when managers wait until a situation becomes critical to seek help or try to disrupt ineffective organizational performance and destructive interaction patterns. Alternatively, managers who embrace the proactive type of recording platform realize that while the situation may not be critical right now, it probably is if they allow these performance issues to continue to frustrate and undermine their organization’s capacity. to get the desired results. When faced with the signs of a dead end, managers and their staff often ask the question, “How much does it hurt?” If the answer is, “Not so bad,” then things usually go on as they are, until the next crisis rears its ugly head.

One of the strongest and most robust indicators of whether an organization has hit a deadlock is the extent to which it has an intended culture, rather than an unintended culture. An Intended Culture™ is consciously configured to achieve an organization’s desired results; for example, your goals and objectives. An Unintended Culture™ tends to be plagued by ineffective autopilot operations and invisible bureaucracy that derail, frustrate, and undermine the achievement of goals and objectives, and is a strong indicator that an organization has reached an impasse. An organization’s ability to change and adapt with conscious intent is the true test of the degree to which its culture is consciously chosen (intended) to achieve specific ends.

Creating an intended culture helps an organization overcome dead ends and transforms its culture into a powerful resource that effectively runs daily operations on autopilot; for example, effectively and smoothly without thinking about them. When done effectively, autopilot operations can be your best ally by increasing your ability to compete and achieve your goals. But in most cases, autopilot operations that typify unwanted culture and organizational gridlock are counterproductive because they perpetuate problems with job performance, communication, interpersonal conflict, and decision-making, and then derail efforts. attempts to create positive change. Creating a desired culture requires managers to use a four-step process to:
a) take ineffective ways of working and interaction patterns off autopilot and raise them back into personal and organizational awareness,
b) reconfigure ineffective processes and behaviors to obtain different results,
c) migrate new, more efficient ways of working and interaction patterns back to autopilot operations through iteration, and
d) define a path to follow to achieve the goals and objectives of an organization that incorporates these changes over time so that they are sustainable.

Bottom Line: Understanding the unseen forces that lead organizations to dead ends and then realigning them through this four-step process begins to transform “culture” into a trusted resource that can be used intentionally to achieve an organization’s goals and objectives. organization.