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Exploring Organisational Isses


Organisational issues present tend to sometimes manifest as chronic problems, repeated attempts by the organisations to overcome the chronic issue doesn't yield any result and at the mist leads to a superficial solving of the issue.

Why does this happen?
Organisations while addressing their chronic issues, tend to focus on pain areas rather than focusing on the real issue. for eg: Lack of brand presence in the market, can be because of poor bard building, but if repeated attempts at brand building are nor helping the brand visibility then the problem has to be something deeper.

The Reinforcing Loop:
But why is it that organisations are not bale to get over their chronic issues? the answer lies in what we call reinforcing loop. Organisations are doing certain activities successfully. the successful completion of their activities helps the organisation achieve its stated goals, because the organisation achieves the stated goals it develops certain assumptions. It could be the other way too , where assumption leads to goals and goals lead to certain routines that organisations do successfully. Now the chronic problem is because of this loop of routines to assumptions, is reinforcing itself, aka Reinforcing Loop.

The heart of the chronic problem lies in this loop. given that this loop is reinforcing, and in someways is also successful in the goal attainment, the chronic problems is  is solved by looking at the pain areas that are manifesting, which are actually just symptoms. And these symptoms keep the organisation busy and serve as a balancing loop to prevent the actual issue from being addressed.


The Role of the Consultant
Therefore as future consultants, that while we or the client may want to and find it attractive to work with the chronic manifesting problem through its paint areas, it is actually the reinforcing loop that we need to be looking  into.

While building our understanding on the reinforcing loop that is creating the chronic problems, we will have the opportunity to intervene at three points:
1) Change the Routines
2) Change the Goals
3) Change the Assumptions

Again, what we plan to change must be based on a thorough understand of the entire cycle even if we know that the emergence of the chronic pain can be any of three aspects of the reinforcing loop.


How do we do this?
Thus while working with the client it is imperative that we make them explore the chronic issue from the lens of the reinforcing loop. this could be done through by establishing a heterogeneous design team in the organisation, where both we and team work together to understand the real issue of the organisation by engaging in deliberate conversations. These conversations can then be presented by the design team to the leadership, team from where on multiple LS interventions can be conceptualised.








Comments

  1. Shashank Vihari_MSVSeptember 2, 2019 at 9:04 PM

    Why does reenforcing loop sustain so well?

    The reason why reenforcing loop is so difficult to overcome is because as you mentioned - in someways is also successful in the goal attainment. When goals are being achieved, it results in people developing a success formula which they preach to people who are unable to achieve their goals. When this set of people who were unable to achieve are now able to - it created a reenforcement that "this is the right way" and discourages anyone who is trying to rethink by narrating them the "we were once a failure" story.

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