Transforming organisations

External facilitation for the CEO appraisal?

I was speaking to fifty FSB business professionals last night about the subject of, amongst other things, the CEO appraisal. We had some 20 minutes of questions at the end and one of them concerned the need or otherwise for external facilitation.

All organisations now work in a global knowledge economy where customers want more for less, where competitors can appear from nowhere and technology driven market places are changing as we speak. This reality means that we increasingly need an ‘outside in’ perspective on our organisation and even on ourselves.

The problem is however that all our experience of the world to date has been from the ‘inside out’. Individually, we experience everything in the first instance through our five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. We are programmed from birth to see everything from ‘first’ position: our own views, our own feelings, our own perspectives. And this worked well enough in the ‘old’ manufacturing economy, where demand exceeded supply, quotas, tariffs and the fixed assets on the Balance Sheet were the key to generating profit. A reactive paradigm worked well enough for most in those days.

In order to develop and sustain competitive advantage in the global economy where knowledge is the new asset, we have to be proactive. We have to get closer to our customers than ever before, we have to benchmark ourselves against world class competitors, we have adapt our offering to the changing demands of the market place. We have to learn to see the world from ‘second’ position.

In our work we sometimes use a sequence that can help us with this. A ‘trigger’ experience is something that happens causing us to think. When we think about that experience, we can make decisions and the decisions we make can lead to action. We all have trigger experiences but we all think, decide and act in a unique manner, using our tacit knowledge, the stuff that lives inside our heads.

Because of the speed of change in the world, there are a lot of trigger experiences available to anyone that runs a business today. Therefore the think, decide, act, sequence in the Board room requires a further element to be successful and that is transparency. This does not mean telling everyone everything, but it does mean sharing information that materially affects our progress.

We have to communicate and listen more effectively than ever, both individually and collectively. Invariably an external facilitator can help anyone to see things from better from ‘second’ position. That’s why we employ one to help us!

posted by Tim @ 2:13 AM