Culture of ownership & responsibility.

You can have the best organisational design but unless you have the right culture, things will just keep falling through the cracks. No matter how well designed your organisation is, there will always be some grey areas between teams and departments and ultimately responsibilities. While its necessary to constantly review and improve your design, the constant pace of change will still expose those cracks. And ultimately your customers will suffer when things fall through those cracks.

This is where culture comes in, specifically a culture of ownership and responsibility. Jim Collins in his book "Good to Great" gives us some invaluable insights into what propels an organisation to make the transition and become great. You have to get the right people on the bus, you have to confront the brutal facts and you need a culture of discipline.

Some time ago my wife told me a funny story of how when she was growing up, there was a young boy who lived on the same street. He failed at school and had to repeat the whole year. Whenever anyone brought this topic up, he would throw a massive tantrum. In the end his family and those around him gave in to his whims, pretending it did not happen so as not to upset him. An absolute travesty and a monumental failure by his parents, most likely condemning that child to a life of misery and failure. And while we might laugh at the absurdity of this story, how often do we come across situations where uncomfortable facts are glossed over? You cannot confront the brutal facts if you are unable to acknowledge the facts in the first place.

Having the right people is essential if you want to transgress mediocrity. People that take full ownership of their work, their actions and their lives. I personally have no tolerance for the blame game, when its always someone else's fault. There is nothing worse than being passed around from person to person in a call centre or when you ask for something at work and are told that it's not their job. It is this lack of ownership that expands these cracks between teams, where everyone washes their hands of the problem at hand. When you have the right people, they will fill those gaps through a genuine desire to fix the problem, to learn and to strengthen the organisation. Without a culture of ownership, the best organisational design has no chance.

A culture of discipline and taking responsibility goes hand in hand with a culture of ownership. While there will always be a multitude of factors contributing to an outcome, externalising and blaming these factors can become toxic. To get the best outcome you have to apply yourself fully to the task or problem at hand. If you do not commit yourself, you are guaranteed a mediocre result at best.

So no matter how good your organisational design is, if you don't have the right people and the right culture, things will continue to fall through the ever-widening cracks, condemning your organisation to mediocrity or worse.