Which organisation are you actually running?

I read an interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review article the other day, which crystallised a serious problem for leaders: the fact that most organisations have two distinct sides.1. The reported organisation.

This is the business leaders see through dashboards, KPIs, board papers, transformation updates and management meetings.  It tends to look ordered, measurable and broadly on track.

2. The lived organisation.

This is the business your people actually experience every day. In most cases it’s a lot messier, with workarounds your teams rely on, blurred and indistinct priorities, decisions that never get implemented and concerns that don’t make their way upwards.

The gap between these two organisations can be significant, and not usually because of deliberate dishonesty.

It’s simply the case that information gets summarised every time it moves up a management layer.

The complexity of the lived organisation needs to be distilled into an update; that update then becomes an executive summary, and the executive summary becomes a green or amber box on a dashboard.

It’s also the case that people also learn what leaders want to hear, and when certainty, confidence and positive reporting are rewarded, it’s not surprising that uncertainty and disagreement naturally start to disappear from view.

How to solve the ‘two organisation’ problem

Spoiler alert: you can’t.  In any organisation of size and scale, it’ll be there.

The answer isn’t to try and eradicate it, but to look deliberately for the gaps, to build up a true picture of where the organisations are at:

What do leaders believe has been communicated, and does it chime in with people have actually understood?

What does the formal plan say should happen, and what is the organisation realistically capable of delivering?

What do the dashboards report, and what are employees, customers and operational problems telling you?

In a nutshell, this problem is why we built CultureNav: to help organisations identify the gap between ‘reported’ and ‘lived’ and spot issues before they slow, stall or eliminate progress.

If you’d like to discuss how you can synthetise the two organisations within your business, and see the true reality of how it’s going and how likely you are to achieve your goals, CultureNav could be for you.

Chris