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Much of what we
do is constrained or influenced by standards, processes and structures in the organisations
with which we work; we don’t take that as read, of course, and we do push back hard if we think
it will limit our creativity and/or the ultimate performance difference we can make,
but it is a reality that most mature organisations have found out the hard way what does and
does not work for them and embedded it in the organisation with some degree of formality.
Try to progress ICT-related work in government circles without at least a nod in the direction of MSP,
Prince2 and ITIL for instance and you quickly find yourself at the bottom of a bigger hill than
you may have needed to.
What we do is to take what is given and challenge anywhere we think it is limiting performance.
That might be a nibble at the edges or it might be a full-frontal assault but everyone has a
shared interest in improving performance and it’s important that we can evidence why we are making
a particular challenge. For example, we might push back hard at an apparently slick risk management
approach which follows best practice and is doing a great job at recording and reporting risks but
very little about reducing residual risk; it’s in everyone’s interest that we do this, but you can
expect the odd squeal along the way. If we need to do this then we try to put ourselves inside the
heads of the guardian of the risk management process and to take them with us to a different understanding
of what is and is not important and how things could be better (and often simultaneously easier).
At the heart of how we work is a very different view of organisational life from that which has
dominated for decades; we coined the term Organisational Ecology to try to capture what this is about.
Fundamentally, if you can see (and deal with) an organisation (or a programme or project or service or
team) as a complex network of multi-dimensional relationships amongst unique individuals, rather than
as a hierarchy of uniform and compliant “units of work”, you get a whole set of new perspectives on what
does and does not work in terms of leadership and change interventions. And once you “get it”, it’s
difficult to imagine seeing organisations (at whatever level) in any other way.
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