If you have personal debt, you know about it. If you have business debt you know about it too: you track it, service it, try to reduce it.
Aaron Dignan, in his remarkable and important book Brave New Work, writes about a concept called Organisational Debt, which he defines as ‘any structure of policy that no longer serves an organisation’.
This against the backdrop of a body of work he calls ‘Evolutionary Organisations’, which he defines as being People First and Complexity Conscious.
Here’s the important takeaway in a nutshell: if you want performance (and thus, success), you have to have an organisation to produce that performance.
Organisations get dusty over time if they are not alive to the constant changes a business has to make (hence the term Evolutionary Organisations). And the CEO or executive leader body at the wheel of a business needs to have the awareness to recognise that organisation-building is a core part of their necessary skill set.
Is this you?
The evidence will provide you answer:
- Can you, as you are reading this missive, define exactly the state of your organisation today?
- Do you have familiarity with organisational change models like Theory U and Three Horizons?
- Do you engage in conversations about ‘organisational state’ and systemic changes that take place in your business over time?
- Does your leader body have systemic leadership skills that enable them to lead in a holistic – or systemic – way?
If not, it’s likely that you are servicing Organisational Debt and this debt, like any debt facility, hampers total financial returns.
This debt could take the form of:
* Outdated recruitment approaches that don’t get you the right hires
* A leadership program that is too unsophisticated to deliver you effective leaders
* A culture that doesn’t generate exactly the right behaviours your Strategy requires
* Tired board meeting techniques that don’t generate the right conversations about the right topics
* Go-to-market strategies that don’t take advantage of newer and better techniques that are available
* An under-use of AI as a tool
The above insights are a way to gauge your Change Intelligence as a business: Do you have the in-house skills to adjust and refine your organisation over time?
I can’t over stress the importance of this in generating modern business performance. Either you recognise that your business is constantly shifting in shape and form, or you’re driving blind.
Brave New Work is a seminal book that I encourage you to read. There are not many good reads about this topic out there because the subject matter is fairly new and niche. But this book will be a great starting point to strengthen this aspect of your leadership arsenal.