Stay fresh! 5 ways to keep your organisation from going stale
Organisations today need to focus on their ability to continue to efficiently and effectively design, develop, deliver and maintain products and/or services that their current & future customers want. The environment is changing so quickly that if they don't they become stale and fail.
Look back to when you first joined your organisation. You were probably "fresh," full of curiosity and questions. The problem is that the longer people are with organisations the more "stale" they become. The questions stop and the "norm" is accepted as something not to be challenged - you could argue that these people have become too intimate, too close, to the organisation, with the consequence being that they stand idly by as their personal worth diminishes and their career slips away from them.
Too many stale people and the organisation becomes vulnerable to drift and failure. Leaders and managers often talk about anticipation or anticipatory awareness, the need to become more aware of the emerging future and the way in which the organisation can either shape or find a best-fit with it. But how can you begin to do this? How do you keep an organisation fresh?
The answer, inspire curiosity - this should not be seen as the responsibility of one person, this should be a ritual, a social expectation for membership in the community (adapted from Lowenstein, the psychology of curiosity):
Pose an interesting question (I'll talk more on how to do this in my next blog)
Expose a problem (e.g. a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution)
Challenge the norm - pose a position is posed that violates the accepted outcome
Social competition - create the need to know what someone else knows
Maintain a feeling of familiarity - make sure the challenge feels intimate/close to experience
There you have it, 5 ways to help stop your organisation from going stale. All you have to do is freshen your eyes.
