Making Your Organization Whole Body Smart

Someone once asked Albert Einstein what his greatest difficulty was in developing the Theory of Relatively. “Deciding how to think about the problem,” he replied.

How we think about things often determines what we see.

That’s why Einstein also said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Nearly all the problems — and opportunities — that we face today are related to organizational performance. We rely on organizations to supply our food and clothing, to provide the critical services that make our homes habitable, to give us opportunities for work and play, to treat our illnesses and to help us heal and stay healthy.

How they do affects every dimension of our lives — often even life itself.

At the dawn of the Industrial Age we began to think of organizations as machines. For a time the paradigm was very effective. And why not? The Industrial Age focus was the interaction of humans and machines. Sometimes humans were even attached to machines and, in effect, the two were made one. Processes were routine. Outcomes were uniform. (Initially, shoes for both the left and right foot were identical!) The goal of every organization was to operate like a well-made watch.

But the times have been a changin’. We have entered the Information Age. We have moved, in the words of Alvin Toffler, from mechanization to automation — where high speed, mass processes are used to provide individualized, custom outputs.

People expect custom products as well as custom services. Processes are not routine. Outcomes cannot be uniform. Product life cycles get ever shorter. Survival requires finding the shelter of a niche — and then, as the environment changes rapidly, moving to another and another and another.

A watch runs on one input. No individual or organization today deals with just one input. Yet the metaphor of a watch — a well-built and well-tuned machine — continues to shape our understanding of organizations. We get what we see. As a result, many organizations behave like watches bedeviled by more than one input. What happens if more than one input is applied to the watch’s gears? The gears get ground up and watch doesn’t work. So it is with organizations that strive to be well-run machines. Their members, which are the gears, are ground up. The organization, which is the watch, can’t do what it is supposed to do.

And trying to understand organizations by reference to their structure is like trying to get to know a person by reference to their skeleton. It doesn’t tell you much— and when you mistake this part for the whole you are badly misled.

What’s the solution? Organizations and their leaders can see themselves as organisms — as living, organic systems designed to sustain a multitude of mostly self-regulating interactions with both the internal and external environments.

Organizations that see themselves as organisms find that this paradigm opens up a vast field of opportunities for becoming Whole Body Smart — the secret to constant growth, consistently high performance and sustained excellence.

Learn how to set your organization on the Whole Body Smart path to optimum performance today.

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