Top Three Tips for Your Organisation Ecosystem

Being a robust organisation is not about focusing on one or two things. It's about creating the ecosystem that allows for robustness and resiliency. This can only be accomplished before you really need it in the face of a crisis. In other words, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. 

Our focus areas are designed around this ecosystem, and in the coming posts, we'll be going into detail about these top tips in each of the focus areas. Hopefully you can use these to start getting your business ready and on the road to robustness before you really need it. 

Portfolio Optimisation

The creation and protection of value is fundamental to any healthy business. Modern approaches have shifted the delivery paradigm to a product, value based focus rather than the traditional project focus. With this shift the way a portfolio of work is created and managed has also changed. Our top tips for an optimised portfolio are:

1. Prioritise, prioritise, prioritise. Create the criteria and apply mechanics to ensure there is only "one number one" at any given point in time
2. Apply and optimise rolling planning cycles. Collaboratively plan across the organisation creating visibility and identifying constraints and dependencies 
3. Create Lean governance structures with "enough" detail and structure to support the decision making and problem solving that needs to occur

Productivity

Productivity is concentrated on the value creation process with a focus on individual and team execution and delivery. The system of work that an organisation uses is paramount in supporting a productive workplace. Top tips for a productive workplace:

1. Limit the work in progress, so that every team and individual is dedicated to the most valuable thing at any point in time.
2. Visualise your organisational value streams and identify areas for improvement.
3. Foster a sense of accountability within teams where commitments are made and transparency is created around those commitments.

Leadership

Shifting the leadership of an organisation from traditional, command and control approaches to modern, adaptive leadership is no small task. That said, it is essential to creating a robust organisation. Top tips for your leadership team:

1. Create a culture of decision making within leadership teams. This doesn't mean always making a quick decision; rather it means to identify when a decision needs to made and what the last responsible moment is to make it, then having a structured process for making the decision.
2. Embrace change and develop a sense of curiosity about what is coming next. Things will always change, and you will miss opportunities by trying to hold on to "how we used to do it".
3. Develop a culture where leaders lead by example and expect others to do the same. 

Business Resilience

Disruption is the new normal, and no part of your organisation is immune. Inside every disruption event, however, is an opportunity for innovation. Business resilience is being open to disruption and change with the capability to capture opportunities as they emerge.

1. Identify single points of failure and create knowledge sharing opportunities.
2. Develop distributed decision making capabilities horizontally and vertically through the organisation.
3. Create and foster effective communication channels, internally and externally.

Crisis Preparation

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when a crisis will happen in your organisation. Developing and using your pessimism can create competitive advantage.

1. Doomstorm potential black swan events.
2. Create standard operating procedures (SOP's) for crisis events.
3. Practice using SOP's before an event occurs. Continuously improves SOP's based on practice events.

In the coming weeks, we'll go into detail around these tips. Is there something else you'd like to see? Reckon we missed something? Keen to know now and not wait for the blog posts? Get in touch with us and let's discuss how we can help you be ready.