Fifty six (iii)

You may well be thinking that you have these aspects licked at your organization so what the hell is this amateur lot up to exactly. But I can retort with almost complete confidence that you’ll find equally glaring if different omissions in your influence flows, and likely a shocking poverty of coordination, and you can’t deny that until you’ve been through this process.

I’ve concluded that Attenzi is simply typical, and that beyond normal operating procedure – ie, playing the same every day tune with today’s structure, culture, policies and processes – the typical organization relies too often on serendipitous influence for breakthrough insight and understanding, and that this can only be a prosperous state of affairs when everyone else relies on serendipity too.

John and I came up with an alternative definition for serendipity. The dictionary says: “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”

We say: “all you have to rely on if you can’t identify and interpret patterns systematically.” I guess you could say we’re attempting to substitute a bit more science for serendipity.

It was all good stuff, and at the end of the day I wanted to remind everyone of the fundamental questions. I grabbed a pen from Georgio and listed them:

• If we are going to transform our view of the business in terms of influence flows, how are we to consider its structure, culture, policies and processes?
• What new demands are placed on the skills and behaviors of our people?
• Where should we invest and how will we know if it’s working?

We hadn’t addressed these questions at all but at least we now had a better understanding of the goals and strategies our structure, culture, policies and processes are meant to serve.