Smart Challenges
When we think about challenges our thoughts tend toward pending adversity. It’s a natural response and turns our thinking inwards. Being Smart about these challenges assists in switching us to an outward, more engaging thought process. This opens up the possibility to actively participate in how we manage our interconnectivity with other complex organisations.
Turning thinking outward switches our default position from protection to opportunity. The enduring opportunities for organisations lie in how well these common challenges are addressed. Five key challenges come to the surface if we distil this commonality: Goals, Returns, Innovation, Sustainability and Talent.
Let’s review Smart Challenges in the Ultimate Organisation. There would be no necessity to set Goals, expectation of a Return, need for Innovation, requirement for Sustainability, or Talent to nurture as there would be only one organisation. We’ve discounted this scenario as improbable and have chosen to focus instead on complex organisations.
So, complex organisations interacting with each other display behaviours promoting interdependency. Applying the Smart Challenges to these behaviours brings us closer to being able to measure and compare. We need to be able to identify and categorise organisational activity on Goals, Returns, Innovation, Sustainability and Talent that gives us a scale to compare against other complex organisations.
Being Smart about challenges introduces mechanisms to measure the interconnected behavioural response. As we measure complex organisations we build a platform for comparison and improvement.
Smart Operating
How we operate defines us. It shapes the external view of our identity, manifesting as perceived resilience and independence. We subconsciously operate in particular ways to protect our independence and identity whilst responding to our environment. Being smart about operating brings our instinct for survival to a more conscious level. It creates an opportunity to leverage and nourish our environment to build a resilient, independent complex organisation.
Independent organisations come to the fore by consciously leveraging and nourishing the environment. Resilience can be measured by how consciously common operating activities are embraced. Five key operating practices present themselves if we distil this commonality: Focus, Momentum, Competency, Relationships and Results.
Let’s now look again at the Ultimate Organisation, this time using the lens of Smart Operating. There would be a singular Focus, constant Momentum, full Competency, perfect Relationships and consistently excellent Results. Based on the earlier discussions we’ll discount this scenario as improbable and focus instead on Smart Operating in complex organisations which are fallible by their very nature.
As in the exploration above, applying Smart Operating to behaviours promoting independent identity brings us closer to being able to measure and compare. We need to be able to identify and categorise organisational activity on Focus, Momentum, Competency, Relationships and Results that gives us a scale to compare against other complex organisations.
In the next blog we’ll explore how Smart Challenges and Smart Operating contribute to a 360 degree framework for comparing complex organisations.