I am a designer, and it took 10 years to start to understand that the most beautiful thing is actually a design system, an environment of “stand-by”. I think this is the highest level of design. Any sustainable system always maintains balance for a certain period of time. It is also the embodiment of “reconciliation” in design thinking. From an organizational point of view, no matter how small it is, it is the core of building a sustainable organization. It is an organism that establishes a “balance”. This article will discuss why a balanced system is sustainable, how a sustainable system depends on balanced competitiveness to maintain, and how leadership accumulates these competitiveness.
Sustainable system
A complete system includes the system itself, the external environment, and the relationship between the external environment and the system. The relationship between the system and the environment is like the relationship between the child and the mother. Such a relationship itself is value exchange. In the metaphor of mother and child, the value of exchange is:
The value that the child gives to the mother is the continuation of life, the happiness of the future family, and the satisfaction of social morals;
The value that the mother gives to the child is the environment for nurturing and the energy for growth.
In fact, the decisive factor for the “unsustainable” of the child is the “change” of the mother: when the mother judges that the child is not the continuation of her own life, she will not get the happiness of the future family, and will even bear social moral pressure. , What she did may choose to lose this child. In this case, although the child body grows linearly, there is no possibility of confronting the “change” of the mother body, and it will eventually pass away. Many times we are like conceived children. Although we grow according to the laws given by nature, we cannot predict the “changes” of the mother. In other words, the real factor that really determines the sustainability of a system is the relationship between it and the environment (the mother). Relationship, not in the system itself. But in most cases, our habits are:
- Set the goal of linear growth;
- Find an environment where it can grow naturally;
- Predict changes in the environment;
- For individuals, its corresponding behavioral habits are:
- A stable career development plan;
- Enter a stable environment;
- Worry about future changes;
- For enterprises, its corresponding behavior habits are:
- A business plan with linear growth;
- Looking for a stable and profitable market;
- Conduct large-scale market research;
In fact, none of these behaviors is directly related to the “relationship with the mother”. What it does is still either expecting a stable environment where it can grow naturally, or defending against possible changes. But in fact, you are like a baby in the womb, completely ignorant of the world outside the mother’s body, and your efforts will become futile in the face of the unexpected changes in time and form. Therefore, adaptivity is the core key of the sustainable system. Whether it is for individuals or organizations, how to improve adaptability, here uses a “balanced competitiveness” ideological framework to illustrate the source of adaptability.
Balance competitiveness
When we talk about the balance of a business organization, it is mainly balanced in three aspects:
Known and unknown: basic operations are all services for the company’s existing “known” businesses, with the purpose of helping existing businesses achieve higher operational efficiency and higher profits within unit costs; innovative behaviors are all for ” “Unknown” business services, the purpose is to find new business models, working methods and profit growth points through experiments and bold attempts;
Supply and demand: Products and services, as well as talent recruitment and training are all for “supply” services, the purpose is to ensure the realization of corporate value and gain benefits; sales and marketing are for corporate value “supply” services, the purpose is to obtain more business Opportunities and needs, gaining benefits;
Organizations and individuals: Processes and regulations are the basis to ensure that the organization operates completely on a certain bottom line; corporate culture is a means to stimulate individual energy, the purpose is to enhance the organization’s collaboration capabilities and enhance the sense of belonging of employees;
Interestingly, the elements on the left are usually more stable and more disciplined, while the right ones usually have higher changes and greater risks. This is the left and right brains of an organization, and whether an organization has enough adaptability to become a sustainable system is often determined by the strength of its right brain. In a perfect matrix, that is, there are no unknown, sufficient demand, standard individuals. When the organization has a strong known value delivery capability, stable supply, and efficient organizational capabilities, the competitiveness of the organization is the highest, and once the matrix occurs After changes, such organizations are often the fastest to die out. This is why we have found that the most serious problems of enterprises come from the possible left-right imbalance in these three aspects, such as:
- Sudden changes in the market cause the main business to drag down the overall business down;
- The sudden increase in market demand leads to insufficient supply and a decline in service quality;
- The change in the thinking mode of market talents has caused the inherent talent management system to be unable to adapt, forming a cultural generation gap;
- In each of the above directions, we will correspond to a competitiveness, as shown in the figure below:
If we make a little improvement and establish a simple evaluation system in each dimension, we can feel whether an organization has formed a better balanced competitiveness. The more balanced the organization, that is, it can achieve stable growth in the existing environment. , It can also quickly adjust the direction in the changing market. This evaluation system is:
A known
- Excellent: Known market leader, with rich experience and practical ability;
- General: Known market participants, have a stable business model;
- Bad: Those who are known to be on the edge of the market are still groping and struggling to operate;
Supply
- Excellent: Sufficient supply for existing businesses, excellent talent recruitment and training system, high-quality products and services;
- General: basically meet market needs, medium-level products and services;
- Bad: Unable to supply market demand, difficulty in recruiting personnel, and high turnover rate;
Organization
- Excellent: efficient organization, mobilization and collaboration, and reasonable rules and regulations;
- General: Weak mobilization and organizational execution, and imperfect rules and regulations;
- Bad: Too much emphasis on discipline and responsibility leads to internal friction, too loose freedom leads to low morale and lack of responsibility;
Unknown
- Excellent: Strategically and continuously try out unknown areas, and have a high tolerance for failure;
- General: Sometimes employees are encouraged to try unknown areas, but they have low tolerance for failure;
- Bad: no emphasis on innovation, everything speaks with results, there is no environment for innovation;
Demand
- Excellent: All have customer awareness, have a keen intuition for market demand, and constantly adjust or create services and products to respond to changes in demand;
- General: A more efficient sales system can promote the business to respond to changes in demand in a timely manner;
- Bad: conservative and change-free sales system;
Individual
- Excellent: Self-organizing individual spirit, excellent corporate culture, advocating individual motivation, flatness;
- General: better collaboration relationship between superiors and superiors, higher employee satisfaction;
- Bad: Strict hierarchical system, mutual suspicion of employee relations.
According to this evaluation system, we can evaluate the adaptability of an organization. For example, take our design team (red) as an example. Our evaluation results are as follows. We can also compare it with company B (green):
From the figure, we can see that the green organization tends to change, and its advantage lies in the ability to respond to demand and the ability to innovate unknown. It is still exploring in the known business fields and has not precipitated a stable business model; while the red The strongest advantage of the organization lies in the personal power and organizational collaboration, but there is still room for improvement in the known business and supply. In general, these two organizations are relatively balanced organizations because of the relative two All elements are relatively even.
Leadership design
In my opinion, to establish an organization’s balanced competitiveness and improve its adaptability to changes in the external environment, the most critical core is the design of leadership. The leadership mentioned here requires attention:
- Leadership is produced at every level;
- Leadership needs to be cultivated through experience rather than innately possessed;
- Leadership training needs to be done in person by people with leadership skills;
A balanced leadership model will inevitably adapt to the competitiveness models listed above. We can simply evaluate the current leader’s balance through the evaluation system. The dimensions are as follows:
- Known: Are you familiar with the most basic business models and practices? Have the ability to deliver business?
- Supply: Are they attributed to current products and services? Can they participate in the talent recruitment and training system? Can they help others generate leadership?
- Organization: Are you familiar with the organization’s operating model? Can you participate in the establishment of rules and systems? Can it represent the organization’s cultural construction?
- Unknown: Do you lead, participate, and support various types of organizational innovation?
- Requirements: Are you involved in the process of obtaining and responding to requirements?
- Individual: Does it help establish good collaboration and employee relations? Is it an excellent representative of the individual?
As an example, we try to compare the differences between two potential leaders, from which we can understand the balance of the two sides, the comparison is as follows:
From this picture, we can clearly feel a difference. The red leader is biased towards organizational operations and known businesses, while the green leader focuses on unknown areas and is not interested in organizational-level affairs. This is not a map of capabilities, but only represents the current responsibilities and interests of the leader. A management team with design thinking should:
- As far as possible, the balance competitiveness map of the entire team can be balanced;
- As much as possible, let leaders get as many competitive experiences as they lack dimensions;
- Strategically adopt measures (related experiences) to supplement a certain aspect of competitiveness.
Write at the end
The above is my understanding of organizational adaptability, which contains the following logic:
A sustainable system depends on its adaptability to changes in the external environment;
Adaptability comes from the balanced competitiveness of 6 different dimensions;
Building balanced competitiveness within the organization requires balanced leadership to promote.
Similarly, when we are evaluating individual competitiveness, we can also use this framework to think about the distribution of our competitiveness. A more balanced competitiveness system ensures that organizations or individuals gain more adaptability in the “matrix” that is full of changes, so as to ensure the sustainable growth of individuals and organizations for a longer period of time.
