3ruce’s Blog

During 2011, we had the privilege of working with 9 different firms across a variety of industries.

• A FTSE 100 firm
• A central government department
• 4 NHS organisations
• 2 businesses in the IT training industry
• 1 travel business

All organisations have been ‘doing fine’ apart from 1 high performing NHS and 1 very low performing NHS organisation.

So far so good, but what is interested about this is that given the substantial differences in the organisations, namely industry, business model and size (tens of people to thousands of people), there appears to be 5 common threads that are shared across all of the firms in the sample.

1. Cultures all display command and control tendencies to some degree or another.

Regardless of the size of the organisation, there is always a sense of a hierarchical style, although there doesn’t seem to be a link between this and organisational size.

2. People score their own relationships much more highly that other people’s.

People’s own relationships are positive and high scoring, but when it comes to other people’s, reports of discord, conflict and tension are much more prevalent. Typically the gap between self and group relationships is about 20%. This suggests that people don’t recognise conflict in their own relationships, that a degree of blame might exist, or that there is some sort of social bias present which prevents people’s from acknowledging these issues.

3. Individuals is the highest scoring factor.

Of the 6 factors within the Performance Ecosystem model (Culture, Relationships, Individuals, Strategy, Systems and Resources), Individuals is almost always the highest scoring. That said, we’re not sure if this is a genuine finding, or if it reflects some degree of sample bias. As above, all the firms either have very strong employer brands (FTSE, government and travel) or are in highly vocational industries with a sense of being able to help others (NHS and IT training), so it would be interesting to see if this is repeated in other industries.

4. Aligning systems, processes, flexibility and accountability is hard.

This is a slightly more subtle point than those above in that the questions around systems are focussed on flexibility and accountability over and above pure efficiency and throughput. That said, this arguably goes to the core of any organisation’s modus operandi. Likewise, this isn’t a huge surprise given the information on relationships above.

5. Defining, communicating and implementing strategy is also tricky.

This final point perhaps comes as a result of the other factors combined, in particular the points around Culture, Relationships and Systems. There is no shortage of materials on why getting strategy right is hard, so this in and of itself is not a huge surprise.

In Conclusion

So far, these five patterns have appeared consistently in the data and this is despite ‘best practice’ management and no obvious client shortcomings that we have been aware of. By extension, this also raises interesting questions about the merit of different tools and techniques used within organisation’s today.

Finally, although sample sizes haven’t all been statistically valid, these findings are nevertheless very interesting and warrant further investigation and hypothesising.

Cross-posted from The Performance Ecosystem