28 May

Organisations mostly fail because they think there's a 'big picture' that captures the organisation, and they draw up plans and graphs and flow charts and org charts to try to draw that big picture. The problem is - there is no big picture. An example is a better way to explain. You'll often hear senior managers say they shouldn't 'micro-manage', or be 'too operational', meaning they need to focus on the big picture - the strategy and vision and values and culture. But the secret to fixing all of this is to see that in every 'operational' detail, you can find the entire organisation. Unpack it, in the management jargon, and the whole organisation will come tumbling out of that unpacking. It will be the last place people will think to look - they're convinced that you need to zoom out, to take in the big picture, that focusing on details will miss what's really going on. But they completely miss that everything is already there, in every tiny detail, everything is already connected. It's the split between operational detail and strategy and vision and other managment mumbo jumbo that creates the chaos of modern organisations, where the top level sits in endless meetings and retreats, wordsmithing meaningless abstract strategy and vision statements, and the rest of the place sits in more meetings trying to connect these abstract documents with the reality of the actual work of the place. All because of the myth that organisations are split into small things - the specific details of its actual work - and big things - strategies and visions about that work. The details already have the big picture in them. And if you want to see how one of the biggest companies in the world used these ideas to become one of the biggest companies in the world, see: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-duhigg/the-power-of-habit_b_1304550.html