Archives for posts with tag: mission statement
Image: Courtesy of Emil Kozak
Organizational design produces the vision of an organization and a desired behavior. The gaps between what the organization is and now is doing, and where it wants to be and to be doing, expresses the challenge to be tackled by gap analysis and gap planning.
Gap Planning determines how the gaps are to be closed or reduced. It is the preparation of the design’s “initial drawings” which provide the instructions required to close or reduce the gaps. Gaps can be filled by adding things, eliminating unnecessary things or by changing things.
Assessment
Before any assessment can take place, each stakeholder needs to understand and agree on the new direction of the organization:
- Communicate widely the vision, mission and pie in sky design
- Design the data-gathering process and explain to all stakeholders that an enterprise-wide gap analysis will take place
- Discuss with each stakeholder the benefits and difficulties involved in the transformation process
- Establish the initial design and data-gathering lead teams
- Determine the stakeholder task force
- Establish expectations for ongoing communication, and communicate the philosophy for staffing the organization
Using a combination of survey and group interview techniques, gather information on the effectiveness of the current organization. Data gathered should include: core processes and their effectiveness, additional customer data, critical tasks or key activities, work load, roles and responsibilities, decision-making authority, qualitative data on management practices, and internal issues and suggestions for improvement. Enterprises need to consider the current culture, how change has been implemented in the past, and how is has been received by employees at all levels.
Gap Analysis
In planning the analysis, it is essential to clarify what information is most relevant. This involves specifying intended outcomes and possible unintended outcomes. It also involves plans for assessing how well processes have been implemented and where improvements are needed.
We use the example of a luxury car dealership to illustrate the gaps. In this example, there are several gaps that are important to measure. From a service quality, these include (1) service quality gap; (2) management understanding gap; (3) service design gap; (4) service delivery gap; and (5) communication gap.
Service Quality Gap
Indicates the difference between the service expected by customers and the service they actually receive. For example, customers may expect to wait less than 10 minutes for their loaner car but reality is an average waiting time of 20 minutes. Most cars are being dropped off early am and 10 minutes before work are more valuable to people than after 5pm.
Management Understanding Gap
Represents the difference between the quality level expected by customers and the perception of those expectations by management. For example, in a car dealership customers might expect expediency on their repair but management focuses more on excellence than expediency (for many legal reasons).
Service Design Gap
This is the gap between management’s perception of customer expectations and the development of this perception into delivery standards. For example, management might perceive that customers expect someone to answer their telephone calls timely. Customers might think “timely” is less than twenty seconds and management defines “timely” as less than 40 seconds, thereby creating a service design gap.
Service Delivery Gap
Represents the gap between the established delivery standards and actual service delivered. Now, management might establish a new standard of answering each call in less than 20 seconds but average time of answering is 27 seconds, creating a service delivery gap.
Communication Gap
This is the gap between what is communicated to consumers and what is actually delivered. This happens frequently when dealerships offer low-price oil changes and then charge customer for questionable labor.
Gap Fillers
The most important criteria used in evaluating the gap plan is whether it will the enterprise to push in the right direction, avoiding a chaotic transition and helping the organization to utilize opportunities. It’s extremely important to refer back to the mission statement, and understand if the gap plan will help to fulfill promises made in the statement.
When an individual or a group is confronted with a gap between where they are and where they most want to be, they can respond in four different ways: absolution, resolution, solution, and dissolution. Learning and creativity are enhanced more by design (dissolution) than by research (solution), more by research than trial and error (resolution), and more by trial and error than by doing nothing (absolution). The goal is to design an organization that considers dissolution as their main goal. Dissolution of boxes, paradigm, linear thinking. Through organizational design, all stakeholders will contribute to the creation of a world they are envisioning to live in.
The efficiency and effectiveness of the gap fillers selected in gap planning are not only matters of selection one of a set of available gap fillers, but are also a matter of creating gap fillers not previously available. Organizational business design unleashes creativity in developing a vision to be pursued by an enterprise. But creativity also has an important role in selecting the gap fillers by which to pursue it. Therefore, the selection of gap fillers can also be more a matter of design than research or common sense.
Last but not least, the gaps treated as challenges in gap planning are almost never independent of each other. Therefore, their solutions interact systematically. The selection of solutions to close the gaps should take into account these interactions, especially their joint efforts on the enterprises’s overall performance.
Tomorrow we will discuss asset planning.
For your reference, you can find the previous chapters here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Image: Courtesy of Minddesign
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” – Jonathan Swift
Every enterprise needs to set Big Hairy Audacious Goals. These Big Hairy Audacious Goals are your limit. It’s an idealized goal that might never be attained, it’s your Moon Landing. We will talk later how to reduce the gap between enterprise reality and pie in the sky ideal. But, forget about limits for a while. This is about expansive thinking: no borders, no limits, no boxes.
Planning for Pie in the Sky includes:
- A clear vision of your enterprise
- A mission statement, expressing the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals
- Specific features the enterprise needs to have to achieve the goals
- A pie in the sky design of the organization
A clear vision of the enterprise
Corporate visions are usually developed by executives, not involving all stakeholders. While developing the vision by few might be more efficient, the vision needs to be shared by all stakeholders in order to be pursued effectively. Most visions define what executives want the enterprise to be in 10 years or so, often forgetting what these executives want the enterprise to be right now. I would argue, it’s imperative to develop a vision that communicates the ideal design of the organization for the here and now, assuming the organizational design will be able to handle changes (and there will be many) without actually forecasting the future. Instead, organizational designs have to incorporate contingency planning.
I have all the plastic in the world but I still carry a few bills with me all the time. I don’t forecast a cyberattack on the banking system, I don’t forecast a massive quake in LA that won’t allow me to access my account for weeks. But all these things and other scenarios are possible. And I would like to be prepared for it.
A Mission Statement, expressing the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals
Most mission statements are borefests: platitudes of epic proportions. A real mission statement should answer the following questions:
- Why does this enterprise exist?
- What are the aspirations of the enterprise?
- What does the enterprise do to succeed?
- How will the enterprise pursue its Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals?
- How will the enterprise serve each stakeholder?
- What makes the enterprise unique?
While formulating the mission statement, stay away from empty sentences/words, corporate speak and anything your best friend outside of your expertise doesn’t understand.
Specific features the enterprise needs to have to achieve the goals
Whenever we develop a website, the first step is to sit down with all stakeholders to go through their wishlist: What features does each stake holder would like to have? Enterprises have to go through this exercise as well to design their ideal organization.
This can be a laundry list of thousands of items or just a minimal document that describes the structure of the enterprise, corporate culture, management style, employee expectations, high-level ideals of products/services, etc. Each ideal enterprise design is different and the features list will reflect its uniqueness.
A pie in the sky design of the organization
Imagine, your enterprise stopped to exist last night. Nothing else has changed: Technology, laws, regulations, taxes, etc. The environment and systems that surrounded the old enterprise still exist and they haven’t changed. Just your enterprise is extinct. Start designing your new enterprise.
What kind of enterprise would you design if you could start from scratch? How would you design it so the enterprise is capable of being improved continuously from within? We’re not asking you to create Utopia, a perfect enterprise. Instead, your pie in the sky design should incorporate what you want to the organization to be right now. While you discuss these ideas with stakeholders, many new ideas will evolve and creativity will flow freely. This process of collaboration is often the most important product of this step to transform your business. Enterprises need to make sure that during this step self-imposed constraints are kept to a minimum. Stakeholders should not be concerned with feasibility, budgets or implementability. Reminding them that the enterprise was destroyed last night might help limiting those constraints. Keep dreaming.
Next, we will discuss gap analysis and gap planning.
For your reference, the first parts can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
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