How to approach organizational issues

Chalk just wrapped up its 2018 fiscal year, and what a year it’s been. We started the year by completely changing our management structure by bringing on three seasoned executives. This helped to build team confidence as they brought in structure and improved processes. But, as we developed our first real budget (mid-way through the year mind you), it became evident that our burn was a lot higher than we thought it was. In the end, we had to say goodbye to some really great people. This – of course – shattered the confidence that the team had in our ability to lead.

In the aftermath of that, our team started saying:

“We need better communication”

“I want to know more about what’s happening in other departments, but I don’t know what questions to ask.”

“I don’t feel like leadership is properly guiding the company to success”

“We talk about getting better at communication, but I feel like we’re regressing.”

Clarifying the issue

All of these things talk about communication. But, what is communication?

Communication is the delivery of information.

Looking at our own communication habits, we were doing a pretty good job at delivering messages. We knew that to get someone to understand something, you need to repeat the message multiple times. We even did so via multiple mediums – in person during town halls and one on ones, and digitally via email and Slack. We even thought about how people would perceive what we were saying. But, if our delivery was fine, then people don’t seem to be getting the right message.

I’m a computer scientist by education, so I like to think about things as systems. So I asked myself, what would someone in any organization want to know?

An organization is a group of people with an express purpose and structure. To achieve its purpose, an organization has processes. Those processes are further made up of tasks that need to get done. In other words, organizations are systems of people.

Since the issue is coming from people, let’s consider their perspective within the system.

Tasks - The Chalk team is pretty self motivating. They’re good at what they do, and they go out of their way to make things happen. People have a good grip on the tasks they need to do, so this level doesn’t seem to be the issue.

Processes - Processes move tasks between people. People like to know about things headed their way. People at Chalk talk a lot about process. It’s not a dirty word. But, thinking back, the main reason people talk about process is when things get dropped on them. “Why didn’t someone tell me this earlier? Why did this get done without me knowing?” More specifically, the times when people spoke about process the most was when information moved between organizations (engineering launching a feature without telling customer support, sales promising things outside of the roadmap).

Organization - If processes move tasks, then where are the tasks created? Sometimes those tasks come from outside sources like customers, but Chalk has a long term vision that it wants to build towards. What became clear to me was that no one agreed on how we were going to get there. If I were to ask ten people what our overall strategy was, I’d probably get ten different answers.

Looking at the system and the perspective of the people within it, it’s far clearer what the actual issues are. People aren’t satisfied with our cross departmental processes and they don’t understand our overall strategy.

Next steps

Actually addressing those issues is beyond the scope of this post, but I wanted to highlight how I approach these sorts of problems. Thinking about your company as a system is a very powerful model (this is what organizational design really is, it’s not just roles and titles). If the people aren’t the issue, it’s the way the organization is designed.