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Topics include:

Leaders: What Do You Need to Know?
Nail Those Decisions!
Merger & Acquisition Integration—What Leaders Need to Do to Achieve Success
Creating the Organization We Really Need
Management Fads—Be Gone!
Retaining Talent - It's All About You!
Managing Fast Growth Through Complexity
Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Leadership
Leadership Communication -
Do You Have a Compelling Message?
Team Alignment - Fast Forward Together
The Destructive Impact of Fear—and How to Reduce It
The Fast Path to the Competitive Edge
Shifting from Strategic Planning to Creative Design for Innovation and Collaboration.

These topics are also available for Keynotes speeches and off-site retreats.

Call today (408)247-7757
to schedule your focused learning experience!

Book Review:
ADAPTIVE ENTERPRISE:
Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations
by Stephen Haeckel

Books can come and go. But the pertinent messages in some books are timeless. In Stephen Haeckel’s book, Adaptive Enterprise, his prevailing theme about Sensing the market/the environment and Responding to it, is just that—timeless. Haeckel proposes that we think about where we spend our energy. Do we want to learn how to play WITH customers or AGAINST the competition? Are we going to lead into the future or duke it out in the present?

Many shifts in thinking are suggested: shift from playing archery (a static target) to skeet shooting (taking on a moving target). The lesson: anticipate, learn, get better. Another shift is from listen and comply to anticipate and pre-empt.

Transformation occurs when companies shift how they will create value. What is the next level of value you can create for current customers and future markets? Large, complex organizations must adapt systematically. The only strategy, Haeckel acknowledges, that makes sense in the face of unpredictable change is to become adaptive. What is needed is successful and systematic adaptation—it means becoming a complex adaptive system. The system’s ability to adapt depends on how fast it can process information. Leadership needs to design the system with adaptive loops.

By creating a sense and respond model, leaders can focus on managing the interactions in the system, rather than merely the actions.

The demand and focus on change and learning to meet current market needs means we are surrounded by uncertainty. That is the new foundation for forward growth, as rocky as it seems. Traditional planning is useless in the face of great uncertainty. Organizations that go through the same process they did 5, 10, or 20 years ago to “brainstorm Vision, Mission, Objectives, Goals and Metrics, etc.” are lumbering back to the Tyrannosaurus Rex age. (Profound New Methods are necessary today.)

The great question to answer for each organization, Haeckel offers, is now: “What must we do, what must we become to navigate unpredictability?” The sense and respond model allows for an adoption of a new kind of organizational behavior and a flexible design for systematically achieving it. To be truly adaptive, an organization must have a new structure, managed as a system, and leaders and employees together commit themselves to new behaviors and responsibilities. (Note: a systemic approach does Not hold individuals Accountable, as recent fads in Performance Management models or traditional Command-and-Control styles have dictated.)

Profound distinctions in Haeckel’s book that are critical for leaders of the future to adopt are:

(1) there must be a shift in thinking from the company, its plans and efficiency of productive processes to Understanding customers’ unpredictability and changing needs

(2) to ensure both coherent organizational behavior and responsiveness, leaders must guide a creative process, not merely a problem solving process;

(3) build conceptual business models and establish clarity about aim, outcomes, etc. (Marcia's note: build a collaborative digital community for creativity and innovation.)

While many organizations find a comfort zone in solving problems, removing barriers to creativity and allowing people to be more creative (and make mistakes) causes fear. Therefore, many managers refrain from allowing too much creativity.

Haeckel also quotes Charles Handy (author, The Age of Unreason):

"we have learned that . . . the past will be a poor guide to the future and that we shall forever be dealing with unanticipated events. Given that scenario, organizations . . . will need individuals who delight in the unknown."

In summary, adopting new leadership thinking to design a sense-and-respond structure will provide context and coordination and addresses

"who owes what to whom?"

Leaders’ responsibility is:

"I absorb uncertainty"

to manage the interactions of people without managing the actions of capable people. They answer Why tasks need doing and then give workers the freedom to Respond in adhoc, self-organizing ways. Roles make commitments to one another to produce outcomes.

In this way, organizations can transform from an efficient machine (that may just keep rolling on-- right into the brick wall) to an adaptive social system, sensing and responding to ever-changing needs.

Be Bold and dumb and go full speed ahead into barriers and the wall

OR

Be Bold and dumb and go full speed ahead into barriers and the wall

Marcia Daszko & Associates

Your Catalysts for Strategic Change, Transformation, and Innovation

We co-create with bold client Partners. We build . . . tapping in on all of our resources Together!

We help with:

Organization Assessments through a differentiated lens based in a solid theoretical foundation of transformational management philosophy and connection with the emerging digital age.

Strategic Experiential Learning Sessions that (1) challenge the status quo and barriers, and (2) catapult new thinking and actions for Transformation, Innovation, Creativity and Mass Collaboration.

Consultation and Coaching both for one-to-one and for executive/global teams

Off-site Power Learning Focus--Facilitating the Changes You Need Faster with less fear and resistance