The Wicked Reality Cycle of Problems
Marcus Kirsch
Helping organisations to de-risk transformation projects, team processes and services on a local or portfolio and C-level. Director, Fractional CxO, Clients: EY, NHS, BT, HSBC, WPP, Nissan, etc.: hello-twc.youcanbook.me
Do organisations communicate good enough or are you hiding your learnings?
In one project, it took two months before I saw the business strategy document of the project I was working on. In another, the information relevant to my job existed in four different places, and no one could tell which version was the latest. The term 'throwing things over the fence', which means pushing documentation project tasks into another silo of an organisation, often with inadequate context has come up at least once in every company I ever worked with or in.
Have you ever been frustrated by the lack of information available at work? Leadership and customer-facing teams cannot easily share or access knowledge due to language and organisational knowledge barriers.
The top doesn't understand the bottom and vice versa. The resulting Chinese-whispers of assumptions and misinterpretation diminishes clarity and effectiveness across organisations and their projects and programmes.
Through personal experience, I have seen that transparency, clarity and constant learning are achieved through a shift in governance and by embracing an accessible language.
Delivery teams don't understand the business case; leadership is not interested in the customer experience built. These are all false assumptions I have come across that one has over the other. What if we would break down those silos and assumption through better knowledge exchange?
I attempted to model what problems, projects and efforts could look like in an organisation. Classic, existing model, then a middle-ground model that shows initial knowledge sharing and insight accumulation. Third, an organic, holistic model, which in larger organisations could contain various Ops systems (design, research, dev, etc.)
I am curious about how possible you feel this could be for your organisation and why.
The existing, advanced and holistic model of knowledge transfer
Modern companies need to learn quicker and distribute faster decision-making to where knowledge and learning are strongest.
Wicked problems, the kind of issues that behave like moving targets need a new tactic for organisations to tackle them with the right level of risk.
If learning about problems is not documented and communicated, then how can an organisation improve and stay competitive?
Digital technology to enable this exists in every company. As usual, this is not a technology problem.
It is a people problem. Language, trust and clarity enable a more effective and enabled organisation. The above models help imagine how an organisation's knowledge and maturity flow could look.
How happy is your leadership level with what it knows about the organisation?
How are your teams?
How close are you to any of the above maturity models?
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Or just say hello for a chat. I help organisations of any type of size.
Product Manager - Data Science
4 年unconsciously, folks are too whatever (busy, scared, etc) to want to think. If you can't get the idea across in 5 minutes then status quo it is. Conversely, if you are a celebrity in your own org - all you have to do is say 5 minutes worth of high-level Vision and Strategy statements and the whole company will have to spend the next year trying to make those statements real. The dynamic between these two positions in business I find fascinating. The common ground for me is measurement. Words are okay but numbers are better. I check out as soon as I see too many words and very little math.