How to fix your business?

Why do businesses struggle to achieve superior performance?

Organizations are complex systems. The word complex system comes from biology, such as the human body. Complexity theory describes the human body as a system made up of organs where the influence of the organs on each other cannot be mapped and hence are complex. The same holds when we speak about companies. A company consists of several elements. In my doctorate research, I identified 22 elements shown below. Like biological systems, organizations are complex systems as the interactions and the influence of the organizational elements on each other are hard to be mapped.

How to deal with organizational complexity?

All studies on organization design confirm that more than 90% of organizations suffer from organizational design and alignment issues. The misalignment issues organizations face limit their ability to achieve high-efficiency levels, innovate, and achieve superior business performance. The solution is to follow an organizational design model so that elements of the organization are designed and aligned with each other.

Organization design is complex due to many reasons, and the top three are:

Not having a holistic approach to defining all elements of their organizations as organizations ignore several elements when performing organizational development and design tasks.
Organizations may find alignment tasks complex and get confused when dealing with all relevant elements at once.
Organizations and their appointed management consultant may lack the required competencies and a suitable framework to follow when performing organizational design and alignment tasks.

How to achieve organizational alignment and superior business performance?

In my doctorate, I have studied this vital subject for more than ten years. After researching many organizational design models, I came up with 22 organizational design elements and put an alignment framework. The Framework enables a simple yet powerful approach as it assigns the 22 aspects into four design groups (see Appendix A below):

Group 1: Are the organization's core elements.
Group 2: Are the organization's design elements.
Group 3: Are the organization's operating elements
Group 4: Are the business internal and external risks

How to get started?

An organizational alignment project goes through the following five stages:

Stage 1: Document the 22 as-is organizational elements. The outcome is an organizational current design blueprint
Stage 2: Identify selected factors to transform and define the required updates.
Stage 3: Analysis and synthesis of the organization's blueprint to identify the changes required for batter alignment .and performance
Stage 4: Identify a list of projects and, for each project, produce a project charter.
Stage 5: Execute the transformation projects.