Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work in and with many different organisations; often in a trouble-shooting role. Typically by the time we arrive, things are a mess with symptoms including: a failure to recognise what is really going on within the organisation and events affecting it from outside; unclear and confused thinking at a strategic and tactical level; an inability to adequately communicate; persistent, repetitive failure, particularly around ICT projects; and slow, ineffective communication channels.
These symptoms are almost identical to those of people suffering neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and schizophrenia. The standard first-line treatment for schizophrenia is generally anti-psychotic medication. But how do you ‘medicate’ an entire organisation?
I recently made a breakthrough while working with LINQ which is both a methodology and software our company employ to map the information-supply-chains of an organisation. In quickly capturing the information-ecosystem, LINQ identifies which are the most important parts of the organisation, the most expensive and what people; information, processes and applications are supporting which organisational outcomes. In doing that LINQ identifies what the Change Leader should be paying attention to; nurture and maintain, but just as important; what to ignore, stop doing or perhaps discard.
The other key symptom for sufferers of schizophrenia is a sensory-gating deficit. Mr Wiki describes sensory-gating as: “neurological processes of filtering out redundant or unnecessary stimuli in the brain [to prevent] an overload of irrelevant information”. Basically; both individual and organisational sufferers of schizophrenic struggle to figure out what they need to be paying attention to; and what to ignore and so are overwhelmed. In most organisations the problem is not a lack of information but rather too much information all coming at once, at the same speed, at the same volume. It’s just overwhelming.
Part of the treatment for schizophrenia sufferers includes improving or mitigating their sensory-gating deficit i.e. improving their ability to better identify and decide what stimuli (information) is important and which to ignore. For organisations the treatment is the same; implementing information-gating mechanisms or filters; using tools like LINQ. LINQ provides senior managers a snapshot of the impact of change in the business with a simple blue-print of where their attention needs to be and reassurance about ignoring, delegating or removing the other noise.
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