Sense Making to address Double Disconnect

 

This is a test for the first blog in SenseMaking360.ai


Geoff Marlow writes about Double Disconnect


In today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, organizations must leave behind the comforting chimera of prediction-based planning.

Instead they must cultivate the capacity to dynamically sense and respond by creating an entrepreneurial culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.

That’s easier said than done - especially when hampered by the Double Disconnect…

This Double Disconnect — firstly “up the pyramid” between sense making and decision making, and secondly “down the pyramid” between decision making and action taking — is getting progressively worse due to the increasing pace, uncertainty, and unpredictability of change.

The Double Disconnect is a fundamental barrier to creating an entrepreneurial culture.

And it all stems from the old orthodoxy that the role of a senior executive is to “make decisions”. 




In an entrepreneurial future-fit culture, the role of senior executives is not to “make decisions” but to “create conditions” — conditions in which sense making, decision making, and action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed so that good decisions get made and implemented continuously, throughout the whole organization. 



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Next time we’ll take a look at what happens when people in the body of the organization are asked to take action on decisions that don’t make sense, why this smothers, stifles, and strangles the emergence of future-fit entrepreneurial cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, and why organizations have consistently failed to address the Double Disconnect effectively.


In our experience, we observe this phenomenon in most organizations. We focus on enhancing organization's sense making capabilities so that they improve their decision intelligence. We collaborate with organization's executive sponsor to drive "Action Taking" as part of larger change management transformation. We establish and align with the desired target outcomes and impact. The mindset is more entrepreneurial than classic consulting focuses on producing agreed Output on time within budget. 

The broader perspective is to improve Organizational Learning with carefully designed experiments and continue to improve the Adaptive IQ and Adaptive Capacity. 

We are about embark on a journey to assist a healthcare system to transform itself into a High Reliability Organization to achieve improved resiliency of operations and better health outcomes. 

 

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