Organizational Underwater Currents
Well, the Israeli elections are over, and the results took (almost) everyone by surprise. Small parties, which no one thought will get into the parliament, managed to sweep the public, and now have a significant electoral power.
The interesting story is that no pre-elections poll managed to anticipate this immense movement of voters from their traditional parties to these relatively new ones.
There are things that are hard to predict using polls and statistics. Such things are driven by underground forces, which are not visible at first. No poll based on relatively small number of people and a set of hard coded questions can even come close to sensing these vibes, despite the fact that they are everywhere.
In order to sense these notions you have to find out what’s going on in the trenches. You have to talk to people – as many people as you can. You have to listen. Listen not only to what people have to say, but also to how they say it and what they avoid saying. A list of prepared questions will not do. You have to establish an open conversation. A dialog. Only then will you be able to sense these underwater currents.
When you seek to improve the way your organization operates, you first have to get a sense of what is not working (or what needs to be improved). Just like sensing the political atmosphere in a complex reality, you cannot gain this understanding from picking a small number of people and presenting them a list of questions. You have to look for the underwater currents. You have to walk in the corridors, listen to what people say, listen to their tone of voice, observe how they work and find out how they feel about it.
Looking for the formal process definitions will not give you a true picture of what’s really going on. Talking to a small number of carefully selected people might be biased. When relying only on dry numbers and statistics you will never capture the atmosphere “on the street”.
Only an open dialog with the people who live the development process can result in real and effective insights about it. Without these insights you won’t be able to improve the way things are being done. You would be amazed how much you can learn about your organization just by listening to people. Many times the same people will also know what needs to be done in order to create an improvement.
