Clearing the fog: Using outcomes to focus organisations

Kate Tarling and Matti Keltanen – Medium

This post is a deep and thoughtful essay on why large organisations struggle to find a clear direction and to sustain high quality delivery. At one level the solution is disarmingly simple: define what success looks like, work out how well the organisation is configured to deliver that success, and change the configuration if necessary – but in the meantime, since reconfiguration is slow and hard, be systematic and practical at developing and working through change.

If it were that easy, of course, everybody would have done it by now and all large organisations would be operating in a state of near perfection. Simple observation tells us that that is not the case, and simple experience tells us that it is not at all easy to fix. This post avoids the common trap of suggesting a simple – often simplistic – single answer, but instead acknowledges the need to find ways of moving forward despite the aspects of the organisational environment which hold things back. Even more usefully, it sets out an approach for doing that in practice based on real (and no doubt painful) experience.

If there were a weakness in this approach, it would be in appearing to underestimate some of the behavioural challenges, partly because the post notes, but doesn’t really address, the different powers and perspectives which come from different positions. The options – and frustrations – of a chief executive or board member are very different from those elsewhere in the organisation who may feel some of the problems more viscerally but find it harder to identify points of leverage to change things. The argument that in the absence of structures aligned to outcomes and goals we should fall back to alignment around purpose is a strong one, but the challenge of even achieving the fallback shouldn’t be underestimated.

It’s a pretty safe bet though that anybody struggling to find ways of helping large organisations to become fully effective will find ideas and insights here which are well worth reflecting on.

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