Paul Dreiss Quality Advisor
Paul Dreiss has a proven track record of establishing and revitalizing organizational quality systems in multiple industries and service organizations. Two areas of focus...
The Character of the Organization
How do you capture the true character of an organization? One approach is to compare your organization to one doing everything right, with merit and worth. How is it doing everything (right) all at the same time? They can’t! Balance and priority are two words that quickly come to mind.
This post uses this ideal organization, allowing you to capture your “Organization’s Character”, see how your organization thinks as a whole, and establish priorities for its strategic action plan.
Figure 1 – Integration Circle
Figure 2 – Integration into Action
In the second round, assign all the topics to members in the team (some may have more than one topic) and have them “text-map” the full description of the topic. You can research text-mapping. It’s like mind-mapping, and looks something like the example below. The goal is to highlight key words, phrases, and the links to capture the body and interconnections of content within the topic.
Figure 3 – Example, Text Mapping
Links for more information:
Team members present their text-maps, allowing others to discover the merit of each topic.
Repeat the voting exercise (i.e., Figure 1 – Integration Circle), and again vote where each participant can see a connection (of importance to the organization) between two topics and record the results. Compare the variation from individual (1st Round) to team results (2nd Round). Ultimately, the idea is to repeat this exercise as time goes on (year-over-year) and trend the results. You should see maturity and more focus. Do not skip this comparison step.
Learning is Key and we must learn from the merit of each topic and the comparative information. You must discover that the heart of the exercise is to value each interconnection, along with learning the value of the deep dynamics of collective thinking and ultimate value of integration.
Now to put things in perspective, have the team multi-vote their opinion of the most important core value or concept for the organization. This multi-vote technique allows someone to vote for the same topic multiple times, if they see particular importance in that topic. Tally the votes, record the results and sort / rank by the most votes to the least.
Briefly list your approaches (i.e., procedures, processes, etc.) that currently address each of the eleven topics, then note if any of the eleven topics have few, weak, or no approaches listed. If the topic ranks higher and the organization’s current approaches fail to address the higher priorities, identify the gap (delta), and record the proposed changes. If a low-ranking topic has multiple approaches (consuming resources) consider reductions. Are you on target? Keep it up!
In the end, you will observe how each individual team members thinks (1st Round), how the whole team thinks (2nd Round), ranks the most important topics, and captures an integrated action plan for improvement. Hopefully, you see integration through a new set of lenses.
Here is the truncated version of Core Values and Concepts:
Use this approach to help you refine and build new strength and maturity within your organization. A new post in the series Integration within the Organization is coming next week. Hope to see you there.