K3 Insights

A quote from Stephen Covey I believe is very relevant for us all right now reads - There are three constants in life – Change, Choice and Principles.

The world we are living in, with its ever-evolving economic and weather-related impacts, demands that organisations and leaders be nimble. 

Many organisations need to transform if they are to survive and prosper. Leaders need to make choices around challenging their existing thinking, whether its culture, leadership, structure, process, systems, metrics or people capability.

What we find is organisations have a strategy, focused on attaining future success, but systemic gaps across these different areas because they are most often aligned to the past. 

With economic uncertainty looming, business leaders are now being required to engage in more rapid yet robust diagnosis of their markets and organisations, so as to solve problems, remove roadblocks and drive change.

But unless there are accurate insights to drive the right actions, organisations often find themselves wasting resources and failing to meet their objectives.

While it is important to access data, it’s the ability to challenge assumptions, gain insights from questions and then test hypotheses that will truly enable an organisation to understand what needs to evolve or change.  

Often when we work with clients, one of the key take-aways is the realisation of the importance of challenging people’s paradigms. When it comes to data, issues of interpretation, bias and assumption are often overlooked. 

As such, any project provides a valuable opportunity for us to raise people’s awareness and help them identify and understand their own bias.

But how do people across organisations better develop and utilise effective diagnosis?

Four key areas to consider:

• Principles and Framework for diagnosis – like everything, providing some structure to your diagnosis means there is common appropriate language and capability being built which means that over time, the ability to employ successful diagnosis becomes enhanced. 
• Flexibility – gone are the days when you had months to ruminate.  As with anything, taking a more continuous improvement or agile mind-set to situations will allow you to understand, iterate and move at pace.  Within any transformation journey there will be obvious points where it will make sense to take a snapshot of how things are progressing, to then move forward.  In an Agile world they call this ‘Inspect and Adjust’ and the principles apply here also.
• Skills to uncover information, root causes and assumptions – initially the best bet may be to use a partner who can bring expertise to the table which will enable quick, robust diagnosis to ensure the transformation journeys begins as it means to continue.  However, they should also be able to help build capability within your internal teams and certainly for us this is always a key focus within any project. 
• Move from diagnosis to interventions – understanding where the opportunities or problems lie is only a first step.  Organisations need to know how to use these insights to drive the right types of interventions that will enable the success of any transformation and, as a result, the delivery of the strategy. By being clear on the ongoing diagnosis that will be employed, organisations can also hold people to account to drive what is required (or iterate and pivot) within the afforded timeframes.  Organisations need to know if the indicators of success are prevalent and this will come through timely, regular diagnoses.

 Everyone is needing to transform!

 The ability to diagnose, propose organisation interventions, monitor and adjust to advance your business is critical. 

 The right diagnosis, leads to the right results – Good luck!