Looking for success in all the wrong places?
When looking for the “best practice,” or the ingredient that create successful longterm projects and/or organisations, stop looking for a single practice or ingredient. Instead, step back and refocus on the whole.
Sustainable success is predicated on a simple understanding: today's dynamic environments require organisations to be dynamic if they are to sustain success; and dynamic organisations require dynamic people, processes and systems to create that success.
Becoming dynamic is not about a single person, process, system or single moment in time. Becoming dynamic is about the intertwining and openness of the flows between the individual, the wider community (internal and external), and the processes and systems that bind them together.
Failure tends to happen when people forget this, committing resource to isolated actions that lack congruence with the dynamic nature of the environment. If you want an example of what happens when organisations become too focused/rigid in their thinking, look no further than Nokia:
In 2013 Nokia was sold to Microsoft for 7.2 billion Dollars, one fifth of the height of its value six years earlier. Nokia lost fitness with its landscape, moving from being the dominant mobile phone provider to having 3% of marketshare in 2013. The reasons for this have been widely debated, but a common view is that Nokia was unable to adapt to disruptive change when Apple and Android smartphones disrupted the market. “In the end, the company profoundly underestimated the importance of software, including the apps that run on smartphones, to the experience of using a phone.”(Surowiecki, 2013).
If you want to find the real "best practice," remember, successful sustainable solutions start with a step back to take in the whole picture.
