Navigate the Swirl. Richard Hawkes

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Navigate the Swirl - Richard Hawkes


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performing. And as the organization becomes high performing, so, too, do its business models.

      So, are you ready to break free of the Swirl? If you're failing, do you want to understand why, so you can change course? If you're succeeding, do you want to know how and be able to accelerate that success? If you're in a fast-changing industry, do you want to get ahead of the trends? If your old ways of doing things no longer work, are you open to trying something new? If you're moving fast, wouldn't you like to be sure you're headed in the right direction? If you're feeling stuck, are you ready to break free? There's never been a better moment to launch your team, your organization, and your business on the river of growth and transformation.

      Organization. Business. Growth. Transformation. If you've picked up this book, there's a very good chance that those words mean something to you. But what exactly do they mean? Have you ever stopped to think deeply about what those terms represent? And do they mean the same thing to you as they do to the other people you're working with? If you want to embark on a transformational journey together—to engage in crucial conversations that will carry you forward—it's essential to be aligned around the core concepts, frameworks, and ideas that will shape that journey.

      What is an organization? What is a business? And what does it mean for organizations and businesses to grow and transform? Each of these questions opens up a rich set of meanings, metaphors, and models that can help a team or an organization get on the same page about what they are a part of and where they are going. These are questions to which I've given a great deal of thought and consideration. The Growth River Operating System and the Seven Crucial Conversations are all built upon a specific way of thinking about organizations, a unique model for understanding businesses, and a particular perspective on how they grow and develop. Understanding these foundational concepts will set the stage for the journey and frame the conversations to come.

      Throughout this book, you'll see the Growth River definitions of terms called out, with precise interpretations of words and phrases you may never have stopped to think closely about before. (A compendium of terms is also included in the Glossary.) But certain foundational ideas require deeper consideration and discussion: Organization. Business. Growth. Transformation. That's what we'll be doing in this part of the book. As leaders take the time to be more deliberate about how they use these terms, they bring much-needed clarity and direction to the organization's journey, creating a shared narrative. As team members begin to have a truly common language that describes their interactions and endeavors, as well as revealing new possibilities, they find themselves more easily able to align around their shared purpose and direction. So let's take the time to ask these questions: What is an organization? What is a business? And what does it mean for organizations and businesses to grow and transform?

      A company is a multidimensional system capable of growth, expansion, and self-regulation. It is, therefore, not a thing but a set of interacting forces. Any theory of organization must be capable of reflecting a company's many facets, its dynamism, and its basic orderliness. When company organization is reviewed, or when reorganizing a company, it must be looked upon as a whole, as a total system.

      —Albert Low Zen and Creative Management

      “If you to want truly to understand something, try to change it,” the psychologist and organizational development pioneer Kurt Lewin is said to have declared. Over the course of the past few decades, my colleagues and I have tried to change numerous organizations—from small startups to well-established mid-sized businesses to massive multinational enterprises.

      Many leaders think an organization is just a business, and their job is simply to run it. If only it were so simple. In fact, the strictly “business” part of an enterprise—the shared work we do to develop, sell, and deliver a product or service to customers—is only part of the endeavor. (That doesn't mean it's not critical—we'll come back to this definition of a business and how to optimize it in Chapter 2, when we introduce the Business Triangle®.) If you're a one-person company doing everything yourself, the business may be all you need to focus on. But the minute you want to grow or scale your company, you have to do something else. You have to deal with people. You must persuade people to join you and motivate them to come along on the journey with you. You must figure out how to inspire people to cooperate, to collaborate, and to become leaders in their own right. And, newsflash: people can be messy, complicated, and difficult—especially when you're dealing with groups of them. There is no getting around this truth.

      Metaphors matter. As storytelling creatures, when confronted with a complicated, multidimensional, somewhat abstract entity like an organization, we tend to look for images that help us to describe it and make sense of it. We need something we can visualize. And these metaphors we choose will inevitably shape not just the way we talk about our organizations, but how we respond to them and how we lead them.

      For example, it's common for leaders and change-management experts today to talk about organizations as if they were machines or computers. Machines have parts, which either work or break down, in which case they need to be repaired or replaced. They have inputs and outputs. Sometimes, they need tune-ups, new engines, or software updates. It's a convenient metaphor, pleasingly concrete. There's just one problem: actual organizations don't work like machines. Businesses are not body shops. And people don't respond well to being treated like parts that either function well or are deficient.


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