Organization Fatigue – Bridging Top Down and Bottom Up – Reasoning

Organization Fatigue – Bridging Top Down and Bottom Up – Reasoning

Overview

How an organization performs during a transformational change is dependent on how well-defined, both visually and verbally, the transformational goals are communicated. When they are well defined and communicated, a positive attitude permeates an organization and the energy level heightens, as each individual understands the part they are playing in the advancement of the organization. This is the ideal way of embarking on transformational change.

However, when the organization’s vision is unable to be communicated, the organization, as issues arise, reacts with a sense of enervation, organization fatigue. This is usually from the frustration of not understanding the project or the benefits and their personal impact on the project and their personal benefits from the project. Organization fatigue during the implementation process, of large technical projects, is commonly thought to be due to the exhausting effort or poor planning or technological failure. However, all of those issues could be avoided if the project were clearly understood and disseminated to everyone. That doesn’t mean that people won’t get tired, plans might have to deviate or that issues in system performance, won’t occur. What it does mean is that your organization’s project will not be one of the 70% of technical projects, that are never fully implemented.

Issue

Why is the dissemination of project information and benefits, throughout the organization going to impact the implementation of the project? Consider this, the majority of personnel process their thoughts in two ways, top down or bottom up, deductively or inductively. That means if an individual is communicating tasks to people and explaining what they need to do, it is more likely only clearly communicating to a portion of the personnel. All of us, whether reasoning deductively or inductively, have experienced the frustration of communicating to anyone that does not reason the same way. Imagine how frustrated the other side is? Because the thought paths are different for each, we can’t be sure that each are talking about the same conclusion of each task or the project as a whole. We must allow each person to use their natural skills of reasoning to get to a mutually desired conclusion.

Solution

To ignite that process, each person must be able to understand the ultimate destination of the project and benefits. As an example: If both groups were to be told that they are driving East and that’s all the understanding they had, they may never meet up again. If both were told they are going East, to a specific territory, they may both get there by taking different routes and yet may not meet up again. If both are told that they are going to a specific location in a specific city in a specific territory and need to be there at a specific time and if accomplished, it will benefit them, then, if competency is assumed, they will get there at the appropriate time and any frustrations, during the trip, will not be due to the trip. When it’s due to the trip, due to lack of understanding, it begins to reduce hope and slowly turns to a sense of enervation, within the organization. Rather the frustration would be more personal and actually increase the determination to do better because the goal itself has been defined and each individual has become part of a team.

Conclusion

Understanding the vision is then the bridge, that affords everyone to conclude with a common goal. Obviously, communication is the most critical impact to implementation. There are three steps to avoid organization fatigue.

The following whitepapers are an overview of steps to take for the RiskCALM project in your organization:

Step One: Develop an Understanding of the Ultimate Destination
Step Two: Understand the Impending Issues
Step Three: Define the Resolutions