Clarity and Organizations

Organizational clarity is your greatest strategic advantage. Initiated in strategy, embodied by leadership, and delivered by teams, organizational clarity is the product of organizational transparency, accountability, and reciprocity. Such clarity affords you a level of organizational commitment, responsiveness and trust that translates as speed – even as time – that scarcest of resources.

This level of organizational aliveness is available to those few leaders who have developed both the tools and the talent for getting clear – about their business, their people, and their environment - and doing so with a simplicity that enables organization-wide transparency; clear, unequivocal accountability; and the sense of organizational fairness that manifests as reciprocity. And, as we can show you, it’s not hard, it’s not magical – it’s an innate strategy for resolving organizational complexity.

We are attempting, in our business organizations, to do something that’s never been done before - to create businesses that can learn and adapt and succeed, consistently and sustainably. This requires an evolution, if not a revolution, in how businesses are structured and how they function. And, in this process, we are also evolving our decision-making models. Hierarchy is dead - at least as an effective real-time decision-making structure. So what now? Well, logically speaking, organizations must become "self-aware". Seeding an organization with the properties of transparency, accountability and reciprocity ensures that organizations, and their individual members, can move the company toward this evolutionary state.

Transparency

When strategic decision-making is no longer vested solely at the top of the organization - when real-time situational awareness is required across the company to optimize decisions - your company must become "self-aware". Such awareness can only be gained by extending organizational transparency across your company, keeping your leaders, managers, and employees aware - of your strategic intentions, your financial condition, your market position, your competition. Such shared awareness enables you to better access your company’s most valuable asset - the committed creativity of your employees.

Accountability

Such organizational potential also exists in the discipline of accountability. When your strategic insight enables you to declare your expectations across the company; when your leadership clarity enables you to set clear, simple metrics at the organizational, team and individual levels; when you can create timely feedback loops that enable rapid learning; when you have this level of transparency then you can hold one another accountable for your performance - then you can rely on accountability to evolve your organization.

Reciprocity

Naturally emerging from these practices of transparency and accountability comes the practice of reciprocity. When people can clearly see what’s happening, when they take accountability for doing their part, they expect a good leader to equitably distribute the value added among the various stakeholders - especially among employees. Failure to practice reciprocity fails the test of "ensuring mutual benefit", the primary role of a good leader. Succeeding here initiates a generative cycle that, feeding on itself, reinforces the evolutionary efforts of leaders, teams, and the organization as a whole and as a "community".