All too often organizations get stuck in the same way of doing things. Why does this happen? Simply put, because it is “normal” behaviour. When we try something a few times and it works we tend to keep doing things that way. Entire businesses are built on this premise, why fix something that isn’t broken? Quite often it isn’t the “thing” that is broken, it is the environment that is constantly changing, that one thing we did a certain way is becoming less and less effective but we don’t quite notice.
Why don’t we notice the lack of effectiveness right away?
Well, because, it’s just like when you gain weight a little bit at a time it slowly creeps up, until our jeans don’t quite fit, but next pay day we just buy a new pair of jeans and then another new suit or dress a couple sizes bigger, until one day you are in the change room and look at yourself in the mirror and don’t recognize the person staring back at you. At this point it is not too late, it is never too late actually, but the only sure shot way of ensuring you don’t get there is monitoring your weight on a regular basis. Your scale is one of the only objective ways to know whether or not you are truly gaining weight and if you are, you may be able to scan your environment for factors contributing to this and course correct.
Now imagine the above on an organizational scale, the bigger the organization, the more “complex” monitoring for “unwanted added weight” becomes.
I am sure some of you might say wait a minute, this is rather simple for us. We know when we are getting overweight, we know what that measure is for our organization. And yes most organizations do, it doesn’t take a genius to identify your “bottom line”, but does everyone in your organization understand their part in effectively contributing to, improving or even maintaining that bottom line?
There is almost always a direct correlation of daily front line activities to you achieving your biggest organizational objectives; and if everyone at every level knew how to measure their individual contribution to the big picture objectives, keeping the unwanted weight off wouldn’t be so difficult.
Critical 2 Vision is the road map that helps you leverage your organizational strengths and build the discipline of continuous improvement to not only keep your team rowing in the same direction, but also to install the capacity for innovation right into the DNA of your organization.