Windward Leadership has built a track record of success creating new IT organizations, and renovating under-performing ones. We’ve done this by paying attention to the whole organizational system. Here’s what we mean by that.
Like any other organization, IT takes inputs, and through their chain of value-adding processes, they produce outputs; if those outputs are valued, IT prospers; if those outputs are not valued, then IT declines and decays. This is generally well understood.
However, what’s not well understood is that the value chain by which your organization transforms inputs into outputs is a composite of your organization’s technical system (i.e., your processes and enabling technologies), and its social system (i.e., your culture). This interdependence between your processes and your culture manifesting in your value chain is depicted below.
The point is that durable organizational improvement necessarily requires that you address both your technical system and social system—the whole system. In other words, when changing a process and/or enabling technology, complimentary change must also be made in the culture; and vice versa.
There is an essential difference between what is technically possible and what is culturally do-able. While processes and technology may be changing at the speed of light, organizational wisdom, competence, and culture change at about one mile per hour. Addressing that difference is the difference between success and failure.
Too many leaders have invested great amounts of precious time and scarce resources in changing their processes and/or enabling technologies without making the requisite changes in their organization’s culture, only to later find that their organization rejected those changes like a body can reject a transplanted heart.
This is why our approach to organizational improvement pays attention to both process improvement and leading the requisite cultural change. This is what we mean by, “whole-system organizational improvement.”
We offer our process improvement and leading cultural change services together as an intergrated engagement, or individually.
