![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXo7WNXcAWnyuJefNY4h1z3YWrDJXkGRXqlNWwUzU1Z3w6PsdqZwlJAvr4ogdlPp-2UX47cVUxDpfgOcQBBfutDl4pElepSthg7k_f5FrV9wIjL_klAZSBHFpdwEzqGL0BCAJWLYsC4pM/s320/organization1.jpg)
Are companies at the competitive edge problem free? Do any organizations work flawlessly? Not in the real world. How do the winners overcome their problems? What distinguishes them from other companies? How do they survive while others flounder or fall?
Like other organizations, winning companies often reach for easy-answers and quick fixes. But if these short-cut responses miss their mark, winners keep searching for solid solutions. They bore more deeply into the situation, ultimately uncovering the root cause.
Return on insightTop performers distinguish themselves by the way they tackle organizational problems. These masters of organizational detective work unearth fundamental causes beneath surface problems. We call this process Deep Organizational Diagnosis.
Root causes are not easily exposed. Insight is not readily gained. Significant time and effort are required to trace problems to their origin. Winners make that commitment without hesitation. Why? In order to achieve enduring success by creatively turning their problems into opportunities.
A case in pointLets look at a company experiencing poor sales performance, When the 'pain' reaches a level that the CEO can no longer tolerate, she demands action, now!.
The cause of the problem appears to be waning motivation, and SOS's management team makes the reasonable assumption that they can reenergize the sales staff by redesigning their incentive compensation plan. The company's "do it now" philosophy prompts immediate action. The plan is designed, developed and implemented within days.
Months pass, sales increase insignificantly, and the underlying problems go undetected.
With the 'pain' persisting, the Sales VP calls for a deeper examination of the situation. Sales representatives and supervisors are interviewed; they report that SOS's customers view the product line as competitively inferior, and complain that the technical service department is failing to meet their expectations.
Attention is now focused on product engineering, manufacturing and technical service. A joint meeting with the leaders of these departments points to numerous problems in staffing, training, innovation, responsiveness, and quality control.
As top management continues its exploration, deep-seated issues begin to surface.
They learn that:
there is little meaningful communication between sales, product engineering, manufacturing and support services,
a long-standing friction prevents genuine teamwork between these departments, and
bureaucratic and cultural barriers are clogging the flow of communication to and from middle-managers and first-line supervisors. Deep distrust has shaped the organization into functional clusters that think and act like separate, warring tribes.
Leadership has hit pay-dirt. With persistence, courage, skill and time SOS has faced up to its internal weaknesses. Executive teamwork, communications, systems design, and culture are now on the table as root-cause issues. Through Deep Organizational Analysis, management has opened opportunities for creative thinking that will carry the organization leagues beyond putting out fires. It has ignited the torch of insight that will light its way to the competitive edge.
Barriers to success
If Deep Organizational Diagnosis is so vital to organizational success, why are so many companies mired in the muck of surface issues? We've identified six reasons:
Impatience
"Get on with it!" "Make it happen!" "Just do it!" "We need answers fast!" "That's just analysis paralysis!" Sound familiar?
This fire-ready-aim thinking is pervasive and strong. The message is clear: quick action leads to quick resultsัand often translates to individual rewards. Bucking the do-it-fast mindset by urging deep analysis is swiftly silenced. Our instant-action-satisfaction culture demands rapid results. So we continue to leap to questionable conclusions, have knee-jerk reactions, seize shortcuts, and take half measures.
Simplicity
The desire to keep things simple is visceral. We instinctively embrace simple solutions. This can be a good thing. In geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But Deep Organizational Diagnosis doesn't follow a straight line to the 'bottom line' root cause. Management must traverse a path less taken, crossing and sometimes re-crossing uncharted terrain until it hits pay dirt.
Fear
Digging for root causes arouses defensive thinking and behavior in most organizations. People fear discovering that a problem can be traced to them or someone they like. They are also haunted by the thought that in-depth exploration will point to actions taken by those in positions of higher organizational power.
These fears lead to the rationalization: "We don't have time for a lot of questions; just give us some answers." Conveniently, this response dovetails with the 'let's get things done pronto' environment of most organizations.
Lack of Skill
Deep Organizational Diagnosis is far from simple. Diagnostic skills are seldom taught. It is a rare organization that enables people to learn these skills on the job or take the time to apply them. On the contrary, employees typically acquire a shoot-from-the-hip mentality. Companies reward these employees for responding quickly, not for taking time to diagnose the situation.
These circumstances bode ill for effectively addressing organizational problems. Even if people are motivated to get to the bottom of matters, they lack the skills to do so.
Vertical Perspective
Root causes are often complex, spanning multiple functional, geographic, hierarchical, and other organizational boundaries. Finding and analyzing such cross-boundary issues requires an ability to
see the organization as a macro-system and
think beyond single functions or specializations.
This type of lateral thinking is unlikely in organizations that are compartmentalized into silos where knowledge and perspectives are vertical.
Hypercompetitive Pressures
In a hypercompetitive, "only the paranoid survive," environmentัwith an exponentially accelerating pace of innovation and competitionัtime appears to move faster. Tick-tock gives way to point-and-click in a competitive tempo that we call cybertime. The tyranny of speed is evident in today's laser-like focus on time-to-market and being a 'first mover.' It is reflected in such book titles as: Business @ the Speed of Thought, Beep! Beep!, Clockspeed, and Fast Forward.
Adding hypercompetitive economic pressures to impatience, the lure of simplicity, fear, lack of skills, and a silo mentality, slams the door on any chance for Deep Organizational Diagnosis.
The paradox
Unrelenting advances in technology, and continuously increasing competitive pressures, are reshaping organizational architecture and human systems. Innovative approaches to organization design are central to achieving business goals and executing strategy. These articles focus on multi-dimensional organizational issues and solutions, and offer perspectives on the intricacies of the human organization and its strategic thrust, operational complexities, and technological systems.
The aim of the International Journal of Organizational Analysis is to provide a robust and discursive forum for the study and analysis of organization. IJOA welcomes historical, contemporaneous and visionary discussions that provide insights into the phenomenon and practice of organization. With concern for the form of organizations, the IJOA seeks studies of, for example, private, public, voluntary, co-operative, military organizational situations. Equally, the journal welcomes explorations of ‘alternative’, emergent and futuristic organizational dimensions and dynamics.
Are companies at the competitive edge problem free? Do any organizations work flawlessly? Not in the real world. How do the winners overcome their problems? What distinguishes them from other companies? How do they survive while others flounder or fall?
Like other organizations, winning companies often reach for easy-answers and quick fixes. But if these short-cut responses miss their mark, winners keep searching for solid solutions. They bore more deeply into the situation, ultimately uncovering the root cause.
Return on insightTop performers distinguish themselves by the way they tackle organizational problems. These masters of organizational detective work unearth fundamental causes beneath surface problems. We call this process Deep Organizational Diagnosis.
Root causes are not easily exposed. Insight is not readily gained. Significant time and effort are required to trace problems to their origin. Winners make that commitment without hesitation. Why? In order to achieve enduring success by creatively turning their problems into opportunities.
A case in pointLets look at a company experiencing poor sales performance, When the 'pain' reaches a level that the CEO can no longer tolerate, she demands action, now!.
The cause of the problem appears to be waning motivation, and SOS's management team makes the reasonable assumption that they can reenergize the sales staff by redesigning their incentive compensation plan. The company's "do it now" philosophy prompts immediate action. The plan is designed, developed and implemented within days.
Months pass, sales increase insignificantly, and the underlying problems go undetected.
With the 'pain' persisting, the Sales VP calls for a deeper examination of the situation. Sales representatives and supervisors are interviewed; they report that SOS's customers view the product line as competitively inferior, and complain that the technical service department is failing to meet their expectations.
Attention is now focused on product engineering, manufacturing and technical service. A joint meeting with the leaders of these departments points to numerous problems in staffing, training, innovation, responsiveness, and quality control.
As top management continues its exploration, deep-seated issues begin to surface.
They learn that:
there is little meaningful communication between sales, product engineering, manufacturing and support services,
a long-standing friction prevents genuine teamwork between these departments, and
bureaucratic and cultural barriers are clogging the flow of communication to and from middle-managers and first-line supervisors. Deep distrust has shaped the organization into functional clusters that think and act like separate, warring tribes.
Leadership has hit pay-dirt. With persistence, courage, skill and time SOS has faced up to its internal weaknesses. Executive teamwork, communications, systems design, and culture are now on the table as root-cause issues. Through Deep Organizational Analysis, management has opened opportunities for creative thinking that will carry the organization leagues beyond putting out fires. It has ignited the torch of insight that will light its way to the competitive edge.
Barriers to success
If Deep Organizational Diagnosis is so vital to organizational success, why are so many companies mired in the muck of surface issues? We've identified six reasons:
Impatience
"Get on with it!" "Make it happen!" "Just do it!" "We need answers fast!" "That's just analysis paralysis!" Sound familiar?
This fire-ready-aim thinking is pervasive and strong. The message is clear: quick action leads to quick resultsัand often translates to individual rewards. Bucking the do-it-fast mindset by urging deep analysis is swiftly silenced. Our instant-action-satisfaction culture demands rapid results. So we continue to leap to questionable conclusions, have knee-jerk reactions, seize shortcuts, and take half measures.
Simplicity
The desire to keep things simple is visceral. We instinctively embrace simple solutions. This can be a good thing. In geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But Deep Organizational Diagnosis doesn't follow a straight line to the 'bottom line' root cause. Management must traverse a path less taken, crossing and sometimes re-crossing uncharted terrain until it hits pay dirt.
Fear
Digging for root causes arouses defensive thinking and behavior in most organizations. People fear discovering that a problem can be traced to them or someone they like. They are also haunted by the thought that in-depth exploration will point to actions taken by those in positions of higher organizational power.
These fears lead to the rationalization: "We don't have time for a lot of questions; just give us some answers." Conveniently, this response dovetails with the 'let's get things done pronto' environment of most organizations.
Lack of Skill
Deep Organizational Diagnosis is far from simple. Diagnostic skills are seldom taught. It is a rare organization that enables people to learn these skills on the job or take the time to apply them. On the contrary, employees typically acquire a shoot-from-the-hip mentality. Companies reward these employees for responding quickly, not for taking time to diagnose the situation.
These circumstances bode ill for effectively addressing organizational problems. Even if people are motivated to get to the bottom of matters, they lack the skills to do so.
Vertical Perspective
Root causes are often complex, spanning multiple functional, geographic, hierarchical, and other organizational boundaries. Finding and analyzing such cross-boundary issues requires an ability to
see the organization as a macro-system and
think beyond single functions or specializations.
This type of lateral thinking is unlikely in organizations that are compartmentalized into silos where knowledge and perspectives are vertical.
Hypercompetitive Pressures
In a hypercompetitive, "only the paranoid survive," environmentัwith an exponentially accelerating pace of innovation and competitionัtime appears to move faster. Tick-tock gives way to point-and-click in a competitive tempo that we call cybertime. The tyranny of speed is evident in today's laser-like focus on time-to-market and being a 'first mover.' It is reflected in such book titles as: Business @ the Speed of Thought, Beep! Beep!, Clockspeed, and Fast Forward.
Adding hypercompetitive economic pressures to impatience, the lure of simplicity, fear, lack of skills, and a silo mentality, slams the door on any chance for Deep Organizational Diagnosis.
The paradox
In tandem with these foci, the IJOA invites analyses and commentaries engaging a wide range of disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, methodological, epistemological and ontological perspectives espousing normative and critical positions.
Above all, as an overarching and synthesizing aim, IJOA seeks to publish studies that identify and translate theoretical reflections in terms of their practical impacts and implications on business and society.
The journal encourages:
(Critical) analyses of theory and its translation into practice into organizational contexts and disciplines including, for example, human resource management, organizational behaviour, strategic management, entrepreneurship;
Considered discussion of past, present and future constructs or concepts of organization and their implications for wider societal settings and contexts;
(Critical) discussion of individuals, groups and communities in organizations e.g. organizational citizenship, behavior management, and employee experience;
‘Alternative’ or interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and constructing organization;
Innovative methodological approaches to understanding organization.
(Critical) analyses of organizational issues in relation to revisiting, challenging and rephrasing issues of corporate governance, sustainability, organizational (in)justice, workplace democracy and representation, globalization, consumption, commodification and capitalistic perspectives of organizations.