I read this fantastic article over the weekend on the website http://thinkpurpose.com/2013/02/03/purposeful-parts/. It struck such a chord with me that I wanted to share it with you in full. For me it describes very simply some of the dynamics I observe in our own organisation where different parts, departments or teams compete with each other for the same space. As they compete, anger and frustration rises until sometimes we lose sight of our overarching organisational vision – to create stronger and more resilient communities in Wiltshire.


Organisms and organisations are systems that usually have purposes of their own. However, the parts of an organism (i.e., hearts, lungs, brain) do not have purposes of their own, but the parts of an organisation do.

An organisation with purposeful parts almost inevitably generates internal conflict.

An organisation is a system whose major deficiencies arise from the ways its parts interact, not from their actions taken separately. This is a basic premise of systems thinking as described by Ackoff!.

• What part of an organisation are you in?
• What’s its purpose?
• Think of another part of your organisation.
• What’s its purpose?
• Same or different?

Doing different things does not necessarily mean having different purposes.

Having different purposes is a sign that everyone’s lost sight of the customer. The real one that pays everybody’s wages.

Common symptoms include frequently getting annoyed at another part of an organisation about the same things.

I used to work in an organisation where another part of it was commonly called “s***bags”. Their real name was “Sales”.

Sales thought that the part I worked in had the purpose of cancelling sales before they were fulfilled with the customer. My part thought that Sales had a purpose of “slamming” or putting as many sales, wanted or unwanted, onto customers accounts as they could to maximise bonus.

 

We were both right. Sales often oversold customers with inappropriate products, as they were monitored and rewarded on sales. More = better.

We often did delight in cancelling sales on the slightest pretence, over zealous because we resented cleaning up the after-sales mess that Sales often left behind them.

We were both reacting to system conditions, creating de facto purposes that worked against the customer, and getting paid for it from the money that came from the customer.

There’s only one loser in all this, and that person sadly is almost always the customer.

Tackling the issue described above is the biggest challenge we face in this organisation over the next four years – far bigger than the financial challenge that we face from central government.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in a week or so.

Carlton