More Dead Paradigms in Organizations
by Jevon MacDonald
I wrote about Dead Paradigms earlier and wanted to bring up a few more that have come to mind.
Interval Reporting
Larger organizations typically have set reporting periods during which financial information is aggregated and compiled in to reports by the finance department.
Now, I recognize that this Paradigm passed away a long time ago, but a surprising number of organizations continue to use set reporting periods.
As business intelligence tools allow organizations to become more in tune with moment-to-moment performance, trends can be identified on a far smaller scale. Hour-to-Hour performance across an entire system or region can be far more informative.
The Annual or Quarterly Meeting
Annual meetings. You know how they work. The CEO gets on stage, updates are given, new strategies are discussed. These gatherings not only cost a fortune, but consume incredible amounts of creative and pragmatic energy.
A leader who has learned to move from command-and-control no longer needs to assert herself/himself in such a grand way every year. Instead, these leaders are secure in knowing that their vision is obvious, and their strategies have been communicated.
Strategic Partnerships
This one is a little tougher to swallow, I admit, but will become more significant over time.
Strategic Partnerships are all about opening the kimono to one specific partner in order to gain some mutual advantage. As organizations become more self-aware, then opening internal processes (whether that is a business process, or a software API), becomes natural and low-cost. In fact, it becomes far more expensive to guard these processes than it does to allow others to utilize them.
The Strategic Partnership is a Dead Paradigm because complimentary organizations have extremely low-cost and low-friction capabilities of finding eachother and interfacing based on open principals.
What Dead Paradigms have you seen in your organization? What old constraints have long been gone, but continue to influence the way things are done?
