Monday, May 05, 2014

Organisational Add Ons

Most organisations seem to be collating a never ending list of new strategies (cloud, social media, big data, insight from data, agile, digital first etc) and a never ending list of new roles and departments (VP cloud, VP social media, Chief Insight Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Digital Officer etc).

The reason why we have an abundance of these micro strategies is mainly due to companies copying each other i.e. if '67% of other companies do X then we need to do X'. This copying occurs because companies generally exhibit poor situational awareness and are effectively blind to their environment. In such circumstances then copying others is all you can do in the hope that backward causality - if A did B and A is successful then if I do B, I too will be successful - works.

The reason why we have this abundance of new roles and departments is because organisations are not designed to change and hence we have to bolt on new structures.