Consistency matters fractaly

The biggest issue I find when trying to help organizations is that we want change and sometimes that change has to be painful. Or at the very least challenging. Change doesn’t happen without confronting something we do today and how it needs to be different.

For those organizations that we deem successful, usually through the amount of money they make, we want to mimic their tactics to get the same result.

This won’t work.

We can’t just have two-pizza teams and start reading a doc at the beginning of a meeting and use PRFAQs to be successful. Those were parts of a larger culture that mattered.

What we can say about GE during its’ hay-day and Amazon now is that they have a way of doing things. They did this at all levels.

Honestly, they probably chanced upon a bunch of things at the same time that made them successful: business model, flywheels, rituals, incentives, market opportunity, etc.

What mattered for those organizations is that “leadership” and the “plebs” (or psychopaths and losers if you like The Gervais Principle) had to do a lot of the same behaviors to be successful in the org. PRFAQs are something everyone does and gets critiqued by everyone within their circle.

The orgs that I’ve seen be less successful are those that have leaders asking for a change (e.g. “we should have a better writing culture”) and don’t model that behavior for others (e.g. they don’t read anything and add comments).

When we talk about how we should make organizations better it isn’t about enabling the next big change initiative. The pendulum should be focused on how those leaders change themselves.