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Chronic Corporate Indecisiveness? Here is How You might Overcome It
Koen Smets, New Organizational Insights
Two behavioural economics insights can oil the wheels of the organizational decision-making machine
Making decisions is not always easy. Often each option ahead offers us a complex cocktail of good things and bad things, and these can be hard to weigh up against each other. Small wonder that many of us sometimes feel a bit indecisive.
Within organizations, decision-making is typically a collective affair. Different team members put forward their diverse viewpoints, and that facilitates constructive debate. The discussion can help with the effective evaluation of the options, and so lead to well-founded, robust decisions.
But teams are also much better at procrastinating than each of us as an individual.
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How to Catalyze Innovation in Your Organization
Michael Arena, Rob Cross, Jonathan Sims, and Mary Uhl-Bien, MIT Sloan Management Review
Executives can fuel the emergence of new ideas by understanding and tapping the power of employee networks.
Economists have estimated that approximately 50% of U.S. annual GDP growth can be attributed to product and service innovation, and more than 90% of executives claim that long-term organizational success depends on developing and implementing new ideas. Research shows that growth fueled through organic innovation is more profitable than growth driven by acquisition, in part because the organizational capability required is vastly different. Yet organic, or emergent, innovation typically does not occur without heroic effort in many large organizations. While technology giants such as Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook are lionized for their innovative cultures, other industries struggle with hierarchal organizations that make consistent organic innovation very difficult.
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Company Culture Comes From Good Leadership
Doug and Polly White, Entrepreneur
We often define organizational culture as “The way we get things done.” However, Edgar Schein, one of the leading experts in organizational culture and an MIT professor, warns not to look at culture superficially. He says that “Culture operates at many levels and certainly how we do things around here is the surface level.” Shine explains that he thinks of culture like a lily pond where one can easily see surface items like flowers and leaves. However, he says that it is the root system that is nurturing the pond. The pond is really dependent on what is feeding it, its history and who planted it.
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Agile Organizational Change: Leveraging Learnings from Software Development
Jane Martin, OD Network Member, OD Practitioner
The motivation for this paper comes from my experiences with the evolution of software development and my interest regarding ways in which agile development principles could be applied to the practice of organizational change. Over four decades ago, Frederick P. Brooks (1995) published the first edition of a book of essays in which the primary metaphor is a comparison of large system software programming projects to the epic struggles of prehistoric beasts thrashing in, and ultimately succumbing to, the tar pit. As a manager at IBM in the mid-1960s, he experienced the problematic stickiness of delivering complex systems that met project goals on-time and in-budget. Like others of his day, he was working in a context that assumed goals could be known, defined, planned against, and delivered in a structured and orderly way. However, his writing remains relevant because his experience indicated that things did not always go as planned and that scaling projects is inherently complex. The complexity he discusses is not complexity fundamentally related to the technology, but complexity related to people and the human system.
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Stop Using the Excuse “Organizational Change Is Hard”
Nick Tasler, Harvard Business Review
During nearly every discussion about organizational change, someone makes the obvious assertion that “change is hard.” On the surface, this is true: change requires effort. But the problem with this attitude, which permeates all levels of our organizations, is that it equates “hard” with “failure,” and, by doing so, it hobbles our change initiatives, which have higher success rates than we lead ourselves to believe. Our biases toward failure is wired into our brains. In a recently published series of studies, University of Chicago researchers Ed O’Brien and Nadav Klein found that we assume that failure is a more likely outcome than success, and, as a result, we wrongly treat successful outcomes as flukes and bad results as irrefutable proof that change is difficult.
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Using Scenario Planning to Reshape Strategy
Rafael Ramírez, Steve Churchhouse, Alejandra Palermo, and Jonas Hoffmann, MIT Sloan Management Review
Rather than trying to predict the future, organizations need to strengthen their abilities to cope with uncertainty. A new approach to scenario planning can help companies reframe their long-term strategies by developing several plausible scenarios.
In recent years, organizations have been caught off guard by economic volatility, unexpected political events, natural disasters, and disruptive innovations. In response, we are seeing increased interest in scenario planning. Rather than tying their company’s future to a strategy geared to a single set of events, many senior executives are coming to the view that smart management benefits from a richer understanding of the present possibilities afforded from multiple views about possible futures.
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To Understand Whether Your Company Is Inclusive, Map How Your Employees Interact
Bogdan Yamkovenko and Stephen Tavares, Harvard Business Review
To gauge the impact of diversity and inclusion efforts, companies typically track metrics on the hiring, attrition, promotion, and composition of the current workforce. While such statistics are useful, they don’t provide a fully accurate picture. In reality, diversity and inclusion are not merely the number of nonwhite male employees you have. Rather, a truly inclusive organization contains a diverse cross-section of employees who actually interact with one another. So how do you measure this? A venerable management tool — organizational network analysis (ONA) — can result in powerful visual representations of the way inclusion actually plays out in your organization.
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The Silent Killer of Diverse Trainers: Microaggressions and Inequality
Christian Ohonba, ATD Human Capital Blog
As a trainer of color, the obstacle of inequality is a day-to-day experience. In 2017, the workforce is the most diverse it has ever been. From age to race to gender to religion to disability, there are a plethora of signifiers that can make an employee the only “different” person in their space. As the workforce has changed, the trainer has changed as well. In the past, the role of trainer was given to a certain demographic. Now, if a company isn’t careful, archaic ideologies can push out invaluable human capital.
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What is Silicon Valley's Problem with Women?
Alexandra Simon-Lewis, CFO Innovation
Recent reports of harassment and prejudicial behaviour within Silicon Valley have raised questions around the ethics of the tech industry
Despite the tech industry having a strongly male reputation, the world's first programmer was a woman.
In 1843, Ada Lovelace developed the first theoretical software algorithm, a century before the development of the modern computer. Her vision of an "analytical engine" that could "[weave] algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves", imagined a device that could create more than mathematical calculations; one that could give life to art and music. Lovelace's vision should embody the lifeblood of Silicon Valley; that of invention, and pushing the boundaries of possibility. But her legacy jars with the image of the modern programmer – one that is distinctly and, arguably, dangerously gendered.
There's a concerning rise in the number of women accusing tech companies of having apathetic stances on inequality and harassment.
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The Business of Artificial Intelligence
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review
For more than 250 years the fundamental drivers of economic growth have been technological innovations. The most important of these are what economists call general-purpose technologies — a category that includes the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. Each one catalyzed waves of complementary innovations and opportunities. The internal combustion engine, for example, gave rise to cars, trucks, airplanes, chain saws, and lawnmowers, along with big-box retailers, shopping centers, cross-docking warehouses, new supply chains, and, when you think about it, suburbs. Companies as diverse as Walmart, UPS, and Uber found ways to leverage the technology to create profitable new business models.
The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML) — that is, the machine’s ability to keep improving its performance without humans having to explain exactly how to accomplish all the tasks it’s given. Within just the past few years machine learning has become far more effective and widely available. We can now build systems that learn how to perform tasks on their own.
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The Fatal Flaw of AI Implementation
Jeanne Ross, MIT Sloan Management Review
There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI) is presenting huge opportunities for companies to automate business processes. However, as you prepare to insert machine learning applications into your business processes, I’d recommend that you not fantasize about how a computer that can win at Go or poker can surely help you win in the marketplace. A better reference point will be your experience implementing your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or another enterprise system. Yes, effective ERP implementations enhanced the competitiveness of many companies, but a greater number of companies found the experience more of a nightmare. The promised opportunity never came to fruition.
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Achieving Digital Maturity
Gerald C. Kane, Doug Palmer, Anh Nguyen Phillips, David Kiron, and Natasha Buckley, MIT Sloan Management Review
In the 2017 Digital Business Report, MIT SMR and Deloitte find that digitally maturing companies are achieving success by increasing collaboration, scaling innovation, and revamping their approach to talent.
Adapting to increasingly digital market environments and taking advantage of digital technologies to improve operations are important goals for nearly every contemporary business. Yet, few companies appear to be making the fundamental changes their leaders believe are necessary to achieve these goals.
Based on a global survey of more than 3,500 managers and executives and 15 interviews with executives and thought leaders, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte’s1 third annual study of digital business reveals five key practices of companies that are developing into more mature digital organizations
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Why Evidence-based Practice Probably isn’t Worth It
David Wilkinson, The Oxford Review
There is a big problem with evidence-based practice and why evidence-based practice isn’t worth it for most people
As a pedlar of evidence based practice this post hasn’t been an easy one to write but after years of work in this area, and having a service based around evidence-based practice, I have come to a conclusion: There is a really big evidence-based practice problem that people outside of health and technology haven’t acknowledged.
In short there is a big problem with evidence-based practice.
People don’t want evidence-based practice.
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Four Dimensions of Designing Succession Plans Jill Nissan and Paul Eder, OD Practitioner, Practicing OD
Ask managers or leaders about succession planning and their answers may reveal limited strategy about this important component of an organization’s sustainability. A strategic and well-designed process to plan for leadership and key employee turnover can support the culture and strategic direction of the organization. Based on our experience, we suggest four dimensions to consider when designing a succession planning program:
1. Degrees of Formality
2. Locus of Decision-Making
3. Scope of Planning
4. Identification and Assessment of Talent
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Chair
Martha Kesler
Vice Chair
Jamie Kelly
Treasurer
Amy Cowart
Trustees
Lori Blander
Marco Cassone
Sherry Duda
Jean Hartmann
Cindy Miller
Sanjay Naik
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