To Ponder: Entangled Organisations

For those of you that are Canberra locals – you might have see a man limping around town this week. That’d be me. As a cruel follow-up to my recent post on increasing hope by changing your environment, while prepping firewood over the weekend, the log-splitter bounced off the wood and found my ankle. Thankfully it was the blunt end that did the damage, so my foot is still very much attached – but the bruising and swelling isn’t much fun.

The reason for the bounce was simple. The grain and threads of the wood weren’t clear. The piece of wood was highly tangled and difficult to decipher. When you throw a log splitter at a log with clarity of grain you can often split it in one strike. However, when the flow of the wood isn’t clear then it’s hard to find that ‘sweet spot’, and cracking it apart can be quite the effort.

So too it is at our organisations. Sometimes our teams and organisations are split into nice clean silos – but more often than not they are tangled messes of reporting lines, organisational duties and duplicate processes. So here’s my question for you for the week:

How tangled is your organisation?

The greater the tangle, the (even) greater the need for clarity in your own change. Prepare accordingly. #ValuableChange