Culture eats strategy for breakfast – all the time
We all know that the organization is the outcome of the strategy but we also know that culture eats strategy for breakfast – all the time. To develop new and transformational digital capabilities, culture and leadership are two critical elements that need to be mastered in order to succeed.
The overall performance of any business or not-for-profit organization depends as much on external factors as on management talent. Jim Collins and a number of fellow researchers published a seminal study about a number of ‘great companies’ that outperformed their competitors with a strong and sustainable stock value. But just 10 years later, the economist Steven Levit observed that those companies were not so great anymore and one of them actually closed down. Even the most extraordinary well-managed companies cannot resist and defy the law of the survival of the fittest.
What’s the secret?
But there must be a secret for high-performing companies successfully enduring external circumstances. I am talking about relatively old companies that started 10, 20 or more years ago, such as Microsoft, Apple, Google or Vodafone, that are continually reinventing their products and service offers and stay agile as if they were still lean startups. What makes such giants remain kick-ass performers given their sheer size?
Creating a truly digital collaborative culture
The majority of successful enterprises in the world thrive on successful group collaboration and this is extremely dependent on a collaborative culture that empowers ‘facilitative leaders’ and bans the ‘lone wolf’ leader.
Successful startups that have learned to survive in highly unpredictable environments develop a different kind of organizational DNA that makes them more resilient to failure when they become large companies. They tend to rely much more on the delivery of teams rather than the single individuals’ cooperative work.
These ‘always fresh companies’ are continually reinventing themselves. They are the kind of organizations where people huddle in meeting rooms that normally have the supporting technology they need for group creativity and problem-solving.
Visitors of the most fashionable companies today are impressed by the informal nature of such huddle rooms with seamless visual collaboration technology such as video conference and digital interactive surfaces everywhere. These companies have discovered a fundamental difference in their collaborative processes they have learned to differentiate between meetings and workshops.
If you keep using your old paradigm meeting principles you would never be able to convert your communities and to transform your organization. On the other hand, if you open the ‘pandora box’ of open participation without a plan you might end up with a lot of frustration and disenchantment.
Implemented properly, well-planned workshops are led by a neutral figure that designs clever group processes that make everyone engaged in the follow-up actions. You can transform an organization by creating a workshop-driven culture, where employee participation drives engagement. A bit like “Scrum” when used in software development. It spreads and top management notices.
Collaborative web-based tools and technology such as MeetingSphere™ provide a unique opportunity for engaging all your workforce in the participative planning process that is required for successfully managing change.
In groupVision, we help people to harness the power of group collaboration technology to help them solve their problems. Our company has a track record in Group Decision Support Software (GDSS) having worked with a number of different technology platforms since our inception in the 90s. Today, our Principal consultants specialize and train our customers in solving problems using MeetingSphere™ as the key diagnostic and problem-solving tool. Contact us for more information.
