Orgforward Opines

Wait, did a leadership guy just say “values don’t matter?” Yes, in terms of how we generally approach values. Read on if you’re curious. You will be hard pressed to find research in the Organizational Design/Development world that doesn’t outwardly examine or at least make a strong nod towards values and culture. The general prescription we get is that values shape culture and culture shapes outputs (i.e. productivity) and outputs lead to outcomes. I am all-in on the concept that values are at the core of organizations. But (because there is always a but in a blog post) … my concern is that values get cast as a set of prescriptions, an input to the system, that, if right, will make for a healthy, productive organization. As long as people have the instructions - values posters, norms statements, principles of conduct, etc.- people should be able to “value” the way we need them to and our culture will go from icky  - toxic in the worst case - to awesome . How’s that working for you...

Many organizations go through the process of articulating visions, values, and desired community impact/benefit. Most often part of a strategic planning process, it can also come up when organizational leadership feels the organization is off track or struggling to be relevant in a changing world.  Independent of the reason for changing or refining the vision, values, and community benefit of an organization, doing so is a significant step in the development and evolution of the organization. Making the change indicates that there is a desire to be different from what we are and have been in the past. It is, at its core, a change in the identity of the organization. People are choosing to define the organization with different words, different beliefs, different desired outcomes, and potentially different approaches. THIS IS BIG! Change is not an easy thing, precisely because it requires us to do things differently than we have done them in the past. Changing identity may be the mo...

I doubt anyone would argue that to succeed successfully and sustainably one needs a plan. In fact, we hear the words throughout our sector all the time. We set time aside to develop a strategic plan with goals, benchmarks, time-frames, new mission statements AND then we go to work. Unfortunately, we often go to work doing exactly what we have always been doing, often getting frustrated as we cannot seem to get those strategic goals underway. Guess what, you are not alone. McKinsey & Company conducted a survey in 2006 and found that nearly 90% ** of organizations failed to implement their strategy, as identified through the goals of their strategic plan.*  (**2026 UPDATE - In the past 20 years things have only gotten slightly better. 2025 research by Gartner has this number now at 85%; Harvard Business Review has it around 70%; and Kaplan & Norton at 90% - all of which don't change the point of this post in any significant way) Kudos to the 10%, but what about the rest of...

“One reason Tibetans have never been active proponents of nature preserves as we know them is that it is hard for Tibetans to conceive of what would be different on the other side of the boundary” Galen Rowell, My Tibet – 1995 I first heard this statement while attending a talk given by Galen Rowel, an adventure photographer, who at the time, was working on his book My Tibet.    The book is an amazing collection of photographs of Tibet which Rowell asked the Dalai Lama to comment and write on. The essence of the quote about the meaning of boundaries struck me then as an ambitious student.    However, unlike the hundreds of other thought-provoking ideas that sparked robust dialog with my peers but faded into intellectual obscurity as I entered and acclimated to the “real” world, this one still haunts be. It just won’t go away. In fact, it has started screaming even louder. Here, we (developed countries) had come up with the fix to losing cherished natural resources by...