Author: ksanew

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in new and unexpected demand signals for how to conceptualize our world. Strategic trends that once seemed inevitable and predestined, like the anticipated global trend towards democracy at the 20th century’s conclusion, are now enduring fundamental questions. Where and when will people travel? Why will some countries be effective in preventing social and economic ills with certain policies, and others will not? How can we project these trends to unfold in the 21st century during and after the pandemic in a way that we can use to support planning and decision making?

In January 2021, KSA was pleased to share a four-part video series on some of the foundational concepts and principles we have been using to accomplish Pandemic Strategic Planning to the public through LinkedIn. The first video provided an introduction on the video series, and, as we described in the second video, we’re not trying to predict the future. Effective organizational strategic planning requires digesting both qualitative and quantitative data, blending art and science with an awareness of an organization’s (or a state’s) culture, values, and influences as well as a clear-eyed understanding of the facts and key metrics that will impact decisions. We argue that a “return to normal” is not what we are preparing for or expect post-pandemic.

The third video explains our preparation model: the expectation and anticipation that, based on the available historical data, global pandemics of similar magnitude and scale that we’ve witnessed in COVID-19 (specifically the 20th century Spanish flu, late 18th century post-American Revolution flu, and 13th and 14th century bubonic plague in Europe), a pandemic has the ability to generate a cycle of scarcity and conflict that unfold in unpredictable ways. Finally, in the fourth video, we note broadly the focus on public health is with the intention of yielding an inverse cyclical impact of harmony and stability as well.

Although KSA’s team presented this as a public service, the conceptual design work and foundational research skills that go into strategic planning are core elements of each line of business with which we engage. This video series is meant to illustrate how during 2021, and beyond, KSA will continue to use our team’s comprehensive research background to lead in developing superior and sustainable solutions for our clients in data analytics, organizational and process improvement, training and education, and veteran support.

About KSA Integration

KSA Integration, LLC, is a Service Disabled Veteran-owned Small Business (SDVOSB) that was founded by LtGen Keith Stalder (USMC, Ret.) in November 2010. LtGen Stalder and his partner, Bryan Altmire, built KSA Integration with a vision of providing custom consulting solutions to address the unique needs of organizations. Team KSA offers a comprehensive portfolio of support capabilities in four critical areas: 1) Data Analytics, 2) Comprehensive Veterans Support, 3) Organizational & Process Improvement, and 4) Training and Education.

The structure (how the company is organized and who works for whom) and processes of every organization are extremely important; they shape, guide and direct almost everything the company does, from business intelligence to strategic planning to hiring employees and taking care of customers.  But in many companies, these two key engines of organizational culture and performance simply run in the background, little noticed and under-appreciated for their impacts on the business.  Occasionally, something may draw attention, usually when it’s dreadfully dysfunctional, but even this may not be enough to decisively engage and fix the offending issue.  The structure and processes of organizations are not easy to fix; they cut across every aspect of the company and amending them, even for great gain, requires monumental effort and usually a search for consensus. Taken together with the general lack of understanding on how they drive business performance, there is normally little appetite for reform.  Thus, it is leaders’ business to understand, engage, and do the right things.

It begins with an understanding of how the company structure affects performance. It can be done by asking and answering a few questions:

• Is the span of control about right for efficient and effective accomplishment of the business?
• Do the divisions and departments work for the best entity higher in the company?
• Do the divisions and departments have the right expertise and capacity to accomplish their tasks and requirements?
• Are the authorities and responsibilities within each department and division appropriate to their tasks and responsibilities?
• Are senior and intermediate leader organizational communications able to travel quickly and unaltered to those closest to the customers?
• Is the organizational structure responsive to customers? How do we know?
• What do the employees think?

These are just a few of the ways to gain priceless insights into how the component parts of a business are working together and how it might be improved.

Processes also start with understanding how deeply they govern business practices and ultimately influence performance. Processes are everything that an organization does every day, by everyone, over a period of years, even decades.  These thousands and millions of small and large actions, words, and thoughts all comprise the culture of the organization and predict and define how it will perform over time.

It begins with an understanding of how the company processes affect performance. It can be done by asking and answering a few questions:

• Do processes efficiently and effectively connect the organization and its component parts?
• Do they support the customers?
• Are they easily understood and simple to use?
• Do they always add value? For whom? In order to do what?
• Why is each process needed?
• Who or what does it support?
• Is there a process owner with recognized authorities and support by senior leaders?
• Are there effective business intelligence, strategy development, planning, programming, and assessment processes?
• Are employees able to access assistance for initiatives via the company processes?
• What do the employees think?

Culture is created over years by the structure and processes of organizations. Those habits, attitudes, and practices can be “good” or “not so good”. Good habits, attitudes, and practices equal good culture, which, in turn, equals high organizational performance. Not so good habits, attitudes, and practices equal not so good culture, which, in turn, equals not so good organizational performance. Habits, attitudes and practices (culture) is/are changed the same way it’s/they’re created: by changing what the organization does every day.

This basic cause and effect relationship between culture and performance needs to be understood if the performance of organizations is to be changed for the better.  It’s the beginning of understanding the root causes of failures; grasping those cultures which produce calamities and makes drudgery of the professional lives of so many employees.

It’s a fundamental understanding on the path to authentic and enduring reform.

Keith Stalder, #61

Keith Stalder Copyright © 2017 KSA, LLC. All rights reserved.

Keith Stalder has over 40 years of leadership experience in organizations from the very large and established to small technology start ups and everything in between.  With a broad and deep appreciation for, and understanding of, the fundamental challenges of organizations and businesses, both in government and the private sectors, his passion is to help all organizations become all that they aspire to.  He is the founder of KSA, LLC, a company dedicated to advancing organizational visions and fundamentally transforming how businesses everywhere are run.  Visit www.ksaintegration.com for more information. 

“To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.” Margaret Thatcher

My experiences in organizations of all sizes indicate that there is an almost universal organizational yearning for everyone to “get along” in all that is done.  For leaders this usually means that every, or most, problems are resolved at levels below them by employees working together and achieving consensus on solutions.  In some cases this is fine.

Straightforward challenges can have well defined solutions around which general agreement can be made.  But for serious matters at the highest levels of large organizations, the challenges, let alone solutions, are rarely straightforward.  Problems at this level are complex, difficult, mysterious, and require gut wrenching choices, if properly addressed.  It’s at this level where consensus based organizational behavior breaks down and indeed causes much damage.

The effects of a consensus based organizational culture:

• Leaders rely on the group to intuitively understand or even develop their own comprehension of the problem(s) to be solved. A clear understanding of leader intent is rarely the starting point.
• Outcomes are a product of protecting personal relationships/interests and minimizing the possibility of creating friction with a future boss or influencer.
• Discussions and outcomes that pose the possibility of disagreement are avoided because participants know that their personal equities are influenced by others in the group.
• Employees have trouble recognizing that each of them works directly for their boss, whose concerns and equities should be principal in their focus. Other influence holders and influences displace or dilute the primary relationship between direct report employees and their leaders.
• IPT representatives minimize the impact of deliberations on their office rather than maximizing broader organizational benefits.
• There is little or no informed debate or discussion.
• Innovation, adaptation, critical thinking, and advocacy are discouraged; even punished.
• Creativity is suppressed and cannot be actualized in concrete ways; by changing things to improve the organization.
• Outspoken personalities and outright bullying can dominate collaboration.
• Everyone has a veto, knows it, and feels empowered to exercise it.
• Organizational initiatives and processes can and do stop altogether when a single party refuses to act.
• It can be difficult to determine if a decision or outcome was reached at all. Or by whom, and under what authority.
• There is no final responsibility or accountability for the outcome.
• There are minimal or no sustainment of outcomes.
• There are no issue adjudication or problem solving processes that review options and selects the best choice(s) for the organization.
• There are no decision support processes that perform due diligence and integrates staff work to recommend the best option(s) to decision makers.
• Ad hoc problem solving bodies are employed to deal with symptoms instead of the root causes of problems. Usually in the aftermath of an organizational crisis.
• People simply refuse to participate in organizational collaboration by not showing up for planning sessions and meetings.
• Decisions are made to accommodate or work around the personalities involved instead of doing what is best for the organization.
• Internal organizational communications can be crippled and substantially “softened”, made intentionally less precise, less fact based, and less results-oriented so as not to provoke challenges or friction. Stovepipes are reinforced when people don’t share basic information for fear of triggering unfavorable responses from future influencers.
• These behaviors originate at the top and propagate to lower levels.
• Outputs are the “lowest common denominator” outcome on which all can agree.
• The status quo usually prevails.

I see this dynamic in academia, local, state, federal government, and not-for-profit organizations almost every day. It’s a crippling problem that only leaders can solve.

“A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.” Abba Eban

Keith Stalder, #59

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

Keith Stalder has over 40 years of leadership experience in organizations from the very large and established to small technology start ups and everything in between. With a broad and deep appreciation for, and understanding of, the fundamental challenges of organizations and businesses, both in government and the private sectors, his passion is to help all organizations become all that they aspire to. He is the founder of Keith Stalder and Associates, LLC, a company dedicated to advancing organizational visions and fundamentally transforming how businesses everywhere are run. Visit www.ksaintegration.com for more information.

“Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” ― Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes

The present state of organizational performance is pretty discouraging when viewed across a spectrum of sectors; government, academia, business, not-for-profit, the military, and others. Many important institutions are underperforming in major ways; the Department of Veterans Affairs wait time scandal, General Motor’s systematic failure to deal with defective ignition switches, Target’s and Home Depot’s inability to secure the personal data of millions of customers, the Deepwater Horizon environmental catastrophe, Toshiba’s massive accounting scandal, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) compromise of millions of individuals’ most personal data,  Fiat Chrysler Automobile’s record NHTSA’s fine for safety violations, multiple Washington D.C. Metro system fiascos; there is an almost daily recounting of monumental organizational failures. Countless millions of dollars are lost and lives are lost on a routine basis.

The New York Times covered a sweeping internal investigation of General Motors released in June that condemned the company for its decade-long failure to fix a deadly safety defect, one that led to “devastating consequences,” including at least 13 deaths.

Employees across departments neglected for years to repair a defect and issue a recall, despite a mountain of evidence that lives were at risk.

They avoided responsibility with a “G.M. salute” — arms crossed and pointing fingers at others — and the “G.M. nod,” described in the report as “the nod as an empty gesture.” The report also lays bare a bureaucracy. “The Cobalt ignition switch passed through an astonishing number of committees,” “But determining the identity of any actual decision-maker was impenetrable.”

“Although everyone had responsibility to fix the problem, nobody took responsibility,” the report said.

And the working lives of the people who inhabit organizations like these are often very dispiriting, even miserable, with quiet desperation the defining attribute of what should be rewarding and fulfilling professional lives. Abysmal morale, institutional incompetence, and extravagant waste go unaddressed year after year, with only the faces changing as time passes.

Sometimes, there are calls for changes in leadership and occasionally this actually happens, but normally with little significant effect on organizational performance.

Quite frequently, there are condemnations of the organizational culture and the need to change it.  This is closer to the truth, but lacks depth, an understanding of root causes, the elements of organizational culture, and a serious commitment to long term organizational reforms.

Enduring solutions start with understanding what is meant by organizational culture.  I define it as the “habits, attitudes, and practices” of the company/organization; everything that it does every day, by everyone, over a period of years, even decades.  These thousands and millions of small and large actions, words, and thoughts all comprise the culture of the organization and predict and define how it will perform over time.

The physical laws of organizational culture and its relationship to performance work like this:

• Organizational performance is directly linked to organizational culture–the habits, attitudes and practices of the company/business/organization.
• Culture is created over years by the daily practices of the organizations.
• Those habits, attitudes, and practices can be “good” or “not so good”.
• Good habits, attitudes, and practices equals good culture, which, in turn, equals high organizational performance.
• Not so good habits, attitudes, and practices equals not so good culture, which, in turn, equals not so good organizational performance.
• Habits, attitudes and practices (culture) is/are changed the same way it’s/they’re created; by changing what the organization does every day.

This basic cause and effect relationship between culture and performance needs to be understood if the performance of organizations is to be changed for the better.  It’s the beginning of understanding the root causes of failures; grasping those cultures which produce calamities and makes drudgery of the professional lives of so many employees.

It’s a fundamental understanding on the path to authentic and enduring reform.

In my next post I’ll describe the key components of the framework that shapes habits, attitudes, and practices that in turn creates and changes organizational culture.

“Nothing happens until something moves.” ― Albert Einstein

Keith Stalder, #56

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

Keith Stalder has over 40 years of leadership experience in organizations from the very large and established to small technology start ups and everything in between.  With a broad and deep appreciation for, and understanding of, the fundamental challenges of organizations and businesses, both in government and the private sectors, his passion is to help all organizations become all that they aspire to.  He is the founder of Keith Stalder and Associates, LLC, a company dedicated to advancing organizational visions and fundamentally transforming how businesses everywhere are run.  Visit www.ksaintegration.com for more information.