Building "Humanness" in Your Organization

In this blog, my objective is to continue our exploration of how Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean approach might apply to organizational development and change by incorporating “humanness” into the workplace.

What does it mean to intentionally shift to incorporating humanness in your work? Kim and Mauborgne identify three components, Fair Process, Atomization, and Firsthand Discovery, that when applied, build a unit, department, or organization that is engaged, empowered, and focused on results. It begins with building both new competencies and confidence in your team. How do you do it?

Fair Process, is built throughout both Atomization and Firsthand Discovery. It refers to creating an environment of mutual trust, respect, shared commitment, and engagement. The principles are simple but require authenticity on the part of the leader. First, engagement requires actively and honestly involving people in the decisions that affect them. Ask for input, listen to, and consider the input; then follow-up by providing opportunities for reactions to proposed decisions. Second, explain the final decision and its contributing factors clearly. This demonstrates the respect that is critical to building trust. Setting clear expectations for all involved, their roles, responsibilities, milestones, and goals, is the third element.

Atomization is about breaking the biggest challenge into manageable pieces. Acknowledge and celebrate each completion, building new skills, confidence and a sense of pride and ownership in the process. For example, share your desire to make your team’s work experience better. Ask them to identify positive aspects of their work area and the obstacles to performing their best work. Share what you learn and collaborate with select areas for focus and improvement. Asking your team to engage in designing those improvements builds competence, confidence, camaraderie, and commitment.

Atomization leads directly to Firsthand Discovery; which is engaging the team in digging in and defining not only what, within the current environment, could be “fixed” but what could be significantly enhanced if only “things” could be different. Remember, no two ecosystems are the same, and “healing” is also a matter of perception. This does take some time and requires engaging not just the team in re-thinking the status quo, but also the leaders. Leaders must let go of pre-conceived notions of exactly what the outcome will be. And, because this isn’t the same thing as developing a new product or installing new technology, there is no endpoint. Ecosystems are dynamic, ever evolving.

Fair Process, Atomization, and Firsthand Discovery are not sequential, but are intertwined throughout the transformation process and eventually are fully built-in to the organization’s “new” way of operating. For example, early in the process when you are asking for small steps of implementation, share the concept of the expected result in terms that resonate. You are not creating “the healing ecosystem” so much as building a work environment that heals those that are touched by it. Folks need to know what they are working toward – and their role in helping to build and sustain it. Let them know that their input will be crucial to the final design and will, in fact, be creating it.

Note that it is possible that making the strategic decision to build humanness into your organization will be resisted, scoffed at, and questioned. Make the shift anyway – let go of the lack of confidence or the reluctance to try something new because others do not understand. To paraphrase Virginia Satir, honored as the Mother of Family Therapy, “some people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” It is those who move forward even when the precise outcome is not clear that make the difference.