Listening to Organisations - Large Organisations Like to Organise Their Own Funeral

I scoff when politicians do their tours to listen to the people. It suggests that the people have stopped talking. It really means that they are worried that they have got out of touch with what is going on. The same thing happens with organisations. As they grow older they get set in their ways; they develop a set of default behaviours and decide that it's not possible to do anything differently.

As a Project Manager, I treat the organisation as another individual. It is separate from the CEO and the board. It is not an accumulation of the thoughts and activities of the people who are on the front line. You can be a bank, a pharmaceutical company, a software company, s start-up or a public organisation. The same thing applies.

Currently, I'm doing so work for a massive public organisation (not the health Service, a completely different personality). It has been going for more than 100 years but will not see another 10 the way it is going on. It has to change because the competitors are gobbling up their market share but it cannot. It makes deals with the suppliers that are in nobody interests and to make a change to its core systems is almost impossible. Not completely impossible but you pay over the odds for any alteration. It is like paying £10,000 to have a light bulb changed where you know you could do the rewiring for that if you were prepared for some temporary disruption.

The incumbent management has been there for 15+ years and has cushy pensions so they want to continue that run until retirement. That means no big, bold decisions but a lot of noise about standards and compliance. The lower level personnel leave or are made redundant to save costs and their roles are given to consultancies or third parties (no it's not the BBC). Morale is weakening.

In order to get anything done and to motivate myself to play in the pantomime role assigned to me, I have to treat the company as a person on life support and the management as the relatives who have lost perspective at the imminent end of a close loved relative. It's a sad way to go and it is costing the taxpayer millions of pounds for the funeral.

Treating the organisation as a separate being also helps in that you can see if there are treatments or remedies that can change the context of their existence. For older organisations, it is often difficult for them to change their habits as these served them well in the past. They cannot see that these habits are now hastening their death and that action has to be taken to change the narrative.They try and apply a more disciplined version of the process that got them into such a sorry state. This is the first stage of the process and is called denial. I will have to skim read the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross book so I can plan for the next stages of the programme.