STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE

There is this old story of a British couple touring the Wicklow mountains somewhere in the fifties. They have lost their way, they don’t find any road sign and everything is deserted. The sun is already low when they finally meet an old local farmer. They ask him for the road to Dublin.
He screws up his eyes, looks one way, then another, then a third, and finally answers: If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.

The second  systemic disease of organizations we pictured by:
People argue in a jeep on a rock plateau, blaming each other. They are stranded. How to proceed? In which direction to go? Or better wait and see?

Why do organizations lose their way till they are even no longer sure where they are? They even don’t know in which direction to go. The simplest explanation is incompetence. But why is incompetence unnoticed or, worse, accepted?
A situation in which people bicker and there is no way to find out how to proceed can come about by four different circumstances:

• A good map is lacking.
• It is not clear where they are on the map.
• They have ventured from the beaten track and are caught unprepared.
• They have no idea where they are heading.

As the saying goes: they drove off the map. It may look like a bold move, but it is just plain careless or stupid. Or both. Lack of direction means not knowing where you are, or not knowing where you want to go. You may even not know how to turn around. Lack of a map means in an organization not knowing the external situation: who the clients are, how they are doing, what they need and want. Or what the competition is doing. Sometimes the situation is worse: not knowing the internal situation. Why are good workers leaving? Why are people demotivated? Where is the money going? That last question is less likely in a business, but not unlikely in a public institution.

In a company, the usual solution is a forceful outside intervention, changing one or more executives, introducing new discipline, reorganization, etc. In an institution the solution is usually the same, but usually much later and more difficult. When everyone is blaming everyone else and everyone is making different suggestions, the discussion has to be forcefully stopped before it can be resumed more profitably.

But once a situation had degraded so much, the rot may be deeper. After new goals and new direction by a new leadership, after a few months or at most a few years, the old situations may recreate itself.
Real success comes from the soul and the marketplace simultaneously (Tom Peters). The first option is that the ultimate clients have to be brought in immediate, dramatic, shocking contact with the people directing and the people doing the work. Or people have to brought to the coal face, like it or not. If you are responsible for sewers, you have to go to an open sewer and see and hear and smell what is going on there.
The second option that the purpose is found or re-found. What is it all about?
In organizational constellations that get stuck, the solution is often either to introduce and rediscover the ultimate customer, or to introduce and rediscover the lost purpose of the organization. Public institutions easily suffer from mission creep.
The third option is to find the zombies: the sometimes surprisingly small number of people who are so demotivated and so unperceptive, who have so low energy, that they drain everyone around them and lower the awareness, the goodwill and the practical intelligence of the people around them.
Zombie organizations produce zombies and zombies produce zombie organizations. In  the situation we explore here, this is not noticeable. People seem reasonably active and happy, though rather unimaginative, unperceptive and uncreative, till the whole work comes to a halt, rather suddenly. Where is the thunderstorm when you need one? Do zombies turn back into humans when they are struck by lightning?
If you have found a lightning that unzombies people, let me know. We could start a booming business. Unless the zombies run the show.

Systemic diseases of organizations

In what kind of organizational situations the usual approaches remain ineffective? Below, I present eleven pictures of such situations. We could call them systemic diseases. In my next blogs I will consider them one by one from the perspective of system dynamics and of constellations. I start with an artist's impression of each type of situation. That may touch you also at an intuitive level.
Remember, any similarity with your own organizational situation is by accident!

1. A crotchety manager with a square face and heavy jaws sits crouched in a meeting behind his stack of reports and position papers. Everybody sits uncomfortably in their own invisible partitions. (Displeasure, tension, mutual distrust.)
2. People argue in a jeep on a rock plateau, blaming each other. They are stranded. How to proceed? In which direction to go? Or better wait and see? (problem-makers quarrel)
3. In a moonlit night the tomb of the founder. His statue looks with dead eyes conceited into nothingness. But one feels somewhere, somehow a spying, suspicious stare. Next to the tomb is an open grave. It might be yours. (shadows of the past)
4. In a Chinese palace garden a school of fish jumps out of the water in gracious arcs, their scales glistening in the sun. The fountains behind them produce a rainbow. In a gilded boat, rowed by servants, the prince looks about in great satisfaction. Even the fish jump for him. A big carper lies gasping and dying on the bottom of the boat before his feet. He studiously avoids to look at it. (The top sponges on the workers. The next echelon is breaking under the strain. A financial black hole is approaching.)
5. A chess player in a simultaneous display. His real competitor is not among his opponents. His attention drops. What is doing here? (Incessant action without any strategy.)
6. A cylinder is pulled through a half-open gutter, again and again and again and again. To minimize friction, they say. It is never good enough. (useless perfectionism)
7. A lot of buzz in an auction room. Small groups watch each other surreptitiously. Bidding is about to start. Who will go home with what? (everything is politics)
8. Somebody is repairing a complicated machine. Others hand over tools or spare parts. Every time it seems to work, but then it doesn’t - as if the devil has a hand in it. Gremlins have a field day. (solvable problems remain unsolvable)
9. A Japanese house with many complicated paper walls and especially complicated paper ceilings with many layers. It seems designed by a crazy architect. (managing by abstract numbers instead of real facts.)
10. Nails are hammered in a huge wooden plate. Threads are stretched and wound between them. It doesn’t result in a recognizable picture. Grown-ups play children’s games without pleasure. (unthinking application of management techniques)
11. An audience listens enchanted to a wise and brilliant speaker. They leave in a daze, no idea what to do next. (management by fads)