Planning for Success!

Unpredictable and unexpected events often test our businesses resilience. These events affect how organisations can stretch without breaking. They test how well the business can bounce back that’s if they bounce back at all. How these events affect us heavily relies on business culture, which is the heart of any organisation. Consider some examples. It is only when we have cranes tip over, space shuttles or oil rigs explode, tires falling off vehicles, that we can see with hindsight there were clear signals and patterns we rejected, that contributed to the incident occurring. Most organisations treat near misses/hits as a measure of safety, rather than system and planning failures. Take the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion for example; many times the engineers had noticed black burn marks on the O-rings. They put this down to the O-rings safely managing and protecting the shuttle from explosion. They were then blinded to the black burn marks increasing in size.

So often we see and hear organisations strategically planning, be it business start-up, new projects or re-booting business vision, yet this is done mostly without culture in mind. Most Businesses start with trying to understand through early risk assessment, what hazards and potentials may impact their businesses before they kick off the plan? They develop contingency plans to protect themselves from worst case scenarios. Their intention is to prevent small unexpected interruptions from slowing down their business processes. People’s foresights, are very limited when trying to do this as a small group, and in most cases, we use who we believe are the ‘experts’, which are normally perceived to be at the top of the organisational chart. Organisations with healthy culture know that our foresights and anticipations are limited, they know that paper based precautions fail.  The unexpected, errors and/or surprises are difficult to foresee or predict in most circumstances, but when we become comfortable with our contingency plans we also become overconfident and blinded to the fallibility of such plans. Businesses who are committed to building resilience, and willing to engage key experts where ever they may sit in the business, not just the top of the org chart, are ones that acknowledge that culture is critical, and the heart of their organisations success. They are the businesses prepared to put money into educating and developing true business culture, to have “collective mindfulness”. When a crisis hits, they are the business that will bounce back quite quickly, yet still be mindful of what is going on. They know relying on systems and procedures alone will not save them from things going wrong.

Planning for containment differs from planning with anticipation, in that it aims to prevent unwanted outcomes after an unexpected event has occurred rather than to prevent the unexpected event itself. Most organisations have unexpected events unfold without being noticed, this means that businesses reliability critically depends on how well prepared their business culture is to be mindfully reactive to things about to go wrong.

Does your organisation have a culture that knows what to look and listen for?

Are there “tick, tick, clunk, clunks that are going unnoticed”?

Do your team members raise even the most insignificant concerns, do you pay attention to the concerns or push them away as ‘trivial issues’?     

Organisations create plans to prepare for the inevitable, pre-empt the unfavourable and control the controllable. Rational as this seems, planning has its short comings. Planners plan in steady predictable settings, they are unconsciously moved into thinking the world will unfold in a predictable manner, this is a misconception to predetermination. When people are engrossed with predetermination, there is no place for unexpected occurrences that fall outside of the realms of planning. Planning without cultural understanding can do the exact opposite of what has been intended, creating mindlessness, instead of mindful anticipation of the unexpected. Plans are built from assumptions and beliefs of how we see the world, this is what sways our expectations and biases. When our expectations are strong, they influence what we actually see, we become blinded to many things right in front of us and then we choose what we approve of and what we choose to ignore. When unexpected issues start developing it takes longer to discover what is growing. If we put our expectations on vague stimuli, with good intent we fill in the gaps, we try reading between the lines and complete the proposed picture the best way we can, this is far from being calculated or robust. We actually paint the picture the way we would expect to see it play out, and the slight issues are soon pushed under the rug, rather than understanding the ways it possibly could unfold. It is only when we have cranes tip over, space shuttles or oil rigs explode, tires falling off vehicles that we can see there are clear signals and patterns we first rejected. Most Organisations treat near misses/hits as a measure of safety, rather than system and planning failures. How does your organisation treat near misses? Do they go back to the process/plan and see what has failed?

By design, plans influence people’s perception and reduce the number of things people notice, this occurs because people predetermine the world largely into the classifications galvanised by the plan. The trivial issues gain minimal attention, and get brushed under the carpet, as we feel they are irrelevant to the plan. These issues are the actual seeds that develop into the unexpected issues, errors, and or events that create organisations unreliable functioning.

Research has shown that perception of risk varies according to life experience, cognitive bias, heuristics, memory, visual and spacial literacy, expertise, attribution, framing, priming and anchoring. In other words, risk is a human constructed sense of meaning associated with uncertainty, probability and context. For example: What one person sees as too risky, another sees it as their opportunity to grow. When planning, one could be forgiven for thinking that compliance would be much easier if it didn’t involve people. When we think systems, procedures and plans control business risks, we largely miss the heart of what truly manages business success, ‘the risk makers, risk takers’, who are you and your people.

Social arrangements give us meaning, purpose and fulfilment, they can also determine the way we make decisions and judgements. Risk is not a planning, manager or engineering problem but a business culture problem. Planning, management and or engineering approaches to risk tends to have its training and thoughts focused on objects. Whilst it is vitally important to observe what is constructed, it is not the core focus of their discipline to understand human organising, collective mindfulness and the collective unconscious in response to objects. 

When we consider culture with planning it helps us understand the following questions:

·      Why do people not obey procedures?

·      Why are people non-compliant?

·      How are our perceptions limited?

·      Why do people make poor judgments about risk?

·      How is risk recognised?

·      Why are people not motivated to better understand risk?

·      How is business perception strengthened by collective mindfulness?

Without an understanding of how social arrangements affect culture, it becomes easy just to view people who take risks as fallible and not having common sense or not being obedient. Once we have dismissed people in this way, we no longer feel compelled to understand the problem or the drivers of the problem – the label has taken away any need for further understanding. Without a better understanding of human judgment and decision-making in a social and culture context, leadership tends to support greater attentiveness to ‘more of the same’.

Peter Drucker phrase “Culture Eats Strategies for Breakfast” sums up perfectly what is wrong in so many businesses today. No matter how well thought-out the strategy is, if you don’t consider the culture in your organisation to support that strategy it will not come to fruition. Many business leaders have underestimated the power of culture and failed in their new strategies because of it. Therefore, it’s really about the two working hand-in-hand. Planning with collective cultural influence is critical to business outcomes for success. Systems are the foundation of what a business wants to achieve, which need to consider the beliefs and actions of people. People however are the drivers and action takers of systems, if not included in the development of plans and procedures can grossly miss interpret them, creating an unintentional road block before the plan gains any momentum. How is your organisation planning for success?