From chaos & confusion to clarity consistency and focus

You are a senior member of staff within an organisation that is losing money, is in deficit, is not delivering quality services to its customers and has lost its sense of direction. People are reacting to the next problem in their inbox with no real sense of priority, focus or purpose. In short, it is a challenging, stressful and unhappy environment with a lack of direction, collaboration and control.

If any of this rings true for you (or all of it for that matter) then don’t be afraid to stop reacting, take stock and consider how the organisation needs to change and how you might go about designing and managing that change. A knee-jerk reaction to just cutting jobs and the marketing budget is not the best way to move forwards.

Consider this…

All businesses in the world are fundamentally the same. It doesn’t matter whether they are private or public sector, healthcare or financial services, based in the UK or in Australia; they have four things in common:

1. They have customers

2. They provide products and services (propositions) to those customers

3. They need capability to deliver those propositions

4. They need finance (investment or revenue) to pay for that capability

The manner in which a business organises itself across these four “business perspectives” varies. In other words, every business is the same but every organisation is different.

If left unchecked organisations will grow in a manner that creates unnecessary complexity, confusion and even chaos. Such unnecessary complexity leads to inefficiency, duplication and waste, as well as creating an environment within which staff are stressed, unhappy and unable to be productive and effective. They have no sense of purpose or priority. It isn’t clear to them what they need to do or how what they do contributes to the overall success (or failure) of the business.

In order to avoid the consequences of this otherwise inevitable journey, organisations must ensure three things:

1. Clarity - they must be clear on why they are doing what they are doing - from the vision of the organisation down to individual activities of each member of staff.

2. Consistency - they must adopt and develop a consistent way of working - so that it is clear to everyone in the organisation how they work together in an efficient and effective way.

3. Focus - they must understand what it is that they need to focus on - from the markets, customers and propositions down to individual, prioritised activity, which is driven by the objectives of the organisation.

The Business Lifesystem shows you how to do just that enabling you to transform your business performance.

So, pause, stop reacting and take the time to design, plan and manage a change programme that will transform your organisation to one where everyone knows why they are doing what they are doing, how to do what they now know they need to do and prioritise what they need to do next. All of this, driven by the planned objectives and value of the whole business, not what pops into your inbox next.