We need to improve communication is not the same as, this is what we need to do to improve communication, and not the same as, this is what I am going to do to improve communication. In fact, these things are miles away from each other.
Life in organizations is often lived at the level of diagnosis. Oh God, how good we are at diagnosis. Sometimes people spend the day hopping from one meeting to another and providing an assessment, a view, a piece of diagnosis. Meeting one: we need to fix the supply issue. Meeting two: the product recall is a fiasco. Meeting three: we need to make sure we get the candidate right. With coffee in between. But who is going to at least start addressing the problem? You would have thought that somebody in the room. But what if the rest of the meeting participants are equally good at diagnosing but nobody really jumps in?
It may be that:
a. They don’t have the authority (but somebody has it somewhere)
b. They don’t need the authority but they don’t take accountability
c. They feel they need permission to take the accountability
And another hundred or so reasons.
The diagnosis life, without action, is exhausting.
The organization whose main core competence is admiring problems, is equally wearing.
It’s Ok if you don’t have a solution but you point to them. But if you start with ‘the problem is’, please don’t use a full stop after the description of the problem. The word ‘and’ is required.
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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project, an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral ChangeTM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.
Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project.
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