From Demanding Change
#orgintelligence I found an interesting chart on Gillian Stamp’s blog.
The chart illustrates two observations
- “Organizational well-being depends on the interplay between challenges
and decision-making capabilities.”
- “Where challenges exceed capabilities,
financial and human costs rise; where capabilities exceed challenges,
resources are wasted.”
Source: The Individual, the Organisation and the Path to Mutual Appreciation (dated 2004)
Stamp sees decision-making primarily as an individual activity, and seeks to understand the conditions for effective decision-making by individuals within organizations. She is particularly concerned about levels of individual stress and anxiety caused by a mismatch betwen individual capability and individual responsibility, and advocates a process she calls Career Path Appreciation to improve the alignment between capability and responsibility over the course of an individual’s career.
Similar thinking could be applied to the collective decision-making capability of groups, teams and whole organizations. The collective capabilities for decision-making need to match the scale of the challenges facing the organization, and we might reasonably expect some symptoms of anxiety to manifest themselves in organizations that are under-endowed or over-endowed with organizational intelligence. (For a detailed account of organizational anxiety and its symptoms, see Larry Hirschhorn’s Workplace Within.)
