Is your Organisation Future-Fit..?
What are you doing to create an organisational culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness to continuously generate new value in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world..?
some of my past and present clients
The World has changed...
Have you noticed how organisational challenges are much more complex than they used to be?
How in the past you could devise a strategy, develop plans, roll them out for execution, and then tweak them over subsequent months or years to iron out the wrinkles?
But as the world has become, and continues to become, ever more uncertain and unpredictable, the organisation finds itself having to readily, rapidly, and repeatedly adapt to new threats and exploit new opportunities to create new value in new ways - or risk being disrupted, displaced, or even destroyed.
Organisations today need to cultivate a very different way of doing things. One that takes incessant uncertainty in its stride naturally and automatically by enabling and engaging everyone to bring innovation, agility, and adaptiveness to life.
The Challenge that must be addressed
How to achieve fundamental cultural transformation in a realistic time frame, avoiding the huge costs and significant risk of failure traditionally associated with such efforts – all whilst simultaneously continuing to deliver current expected results..?
One-off innovations are easy enough to achieve, simply by buying them in. But building an innovative, agile, adaptive organisation requires your people to consistently combine their different perspectives to continuously co-create new value.
Unless you create an organisational culture that enables, encourages, and embraces diverse perspectives, these different ways of seeing and being will interact in dysfunctional ways to stifle, smother and strangle new value creation.
Traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’, ‘cookie-cutter’, so-called ‘best practice’ approaches won’t create a future-fit culture – because they all fail to focus precisely enough and deeply enough on shifting the mindsets of the key influencers that systemically affect everyone and everything else.
Without this leverage, creating a culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness becomes a massive gamble - like trying to rebuild a ship at sea in a force ten gale...
The Pragmatic Solution
Einstein recognised that a new theory provides a new way of seeing, one that can cut through clutter and create clarity. That was how he saw beyond the conventional orthodoxy of Newtonian physics, revealing previously hidden mysteries of how the world works, captured in one of the simplest, most profound, and famous equations in the history of science: E=mc2.
What if a similar approach could unlock the mysteries of organisational culture?
The first step on this journey is to drop the delusion that an organisation's culture is its so-called "Shared Values". That was a failed attempt to impose the notion of "cultural fit" as a normative behaviour control methodology — intended to homogenise uniquely creative human beings into compliant corporate drones.
If you want an organisation to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, you must move beyond the idea of cultural fit and focus instead on cultural fitness.
By learning to see organisational culture as the prevailing system of mindsets forming and informing people's awareness of "the way we do things round here" you get to understand exactly how the current culture formed, and how it can be reformed in a focused, pragmatic, low risk, high leverage way.
There are specific clues, cues, signs, and signals that individuals pick up to form their mindsets within organisational settings. By decoding the unique way these influences play out in your organisation, you can identify where to focus for maximum leverage to reform the culture in a focused pragmatic way.
Just as innovation is about unique ways of creating new value, creating a future-fit organisational culture is a uniquely different journey for each organisation. It's a journey dictated by the organisation's specific capabilities, competences, and constraints. It's also a journey the organisation must take for itself, by itself. A future-fit culture cannot be imposed from above or imported from outside. It involves building new mindset muscles inside the organisation, which means people in the organisation must do the heavy lifting...
Interventions that fail to take full advantage of the organisation’s unique strengths will invariably end up reinforcing its weaknesses and undermining its capacity for innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. Each organisation must find its own way to achieve widespread adoption of the 2D3D mindsets at the heart of every future-fit organisational culture...
2D3D mindsets
An organisation's culture is the prevailing system of mindsets forming and informing people's awareness of "the way we do things round here". Or, more specifically, by learning to see your organisation's culture in this way you can reform it in a focused, pragmatic, low risk, high leverage way. And, at the heart of a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness is the 2D3D Mindset...
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Hi - I'm Geoff Marlow
By the late 1980's I'd already held several senior roles in a world-leading open innovation lab here in Cambridge UK.
Then, a long-standing client who loved our culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness asked me to "come and help make our people behave more like your people".
This launched a unique 35-year career helping dozens of organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US to create future-fit cultures for themselves, by themselves.
I now draw on this in-depth, hands-on experience to help people gain the insights, skills, and confidence they need to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in their own organisations. Find out more here.