Management Challenges

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For holistically dealing with the business and cultural complexities

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Background

The ever-increasing complexities in innovative interactions between market participants, volatilities, and fast pace of change in people’s trends and expectations for value, quality, speed, service and sustainability have reached an unnerving peak for most organisations.

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The birth of new age-conscious stakeholders with now, global reach and influence are presenting a unique set of challenges for all “globally exposed” organisations. Challenges such as - “managing their often demanding/ disloyal customers, disheartened/ unmotivated staff, short term driven shareholders' expectations, unpredictable/ low resilient suppliers and the world fragile/disappearing natural resource & environment”. These complex challenges are forcing organisations to quickly sober up, rethink and question the viability/usefulness of their traditional wisdom and methods. 

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​Challenges of finding solutions to organisational complex problems

In addressing the heightened business problems or blockage, the question on the mind of enlightened management would be – in the process of clearing the immediate blockage, should they directly deal with the complex root causes of the problem, or should they ignore the extra steps required for a detailed and thorough investigation? Some may justify a quick-win solution as a viable option to reduce project costs, and time or potentially protect their “can do” reputations in their organisation. Some management may wishfully believe they have a good grasp of their complex challenges. The reason for such ways of thinking may be attributed to: 

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• Obligation- either management is pressured by their superiors, or they may be personally driven to take shortcuts for short-term gains. 

• Apathy – Management’s lack of interest in the wider organisational complex context, needs, aspirations and challenges. 

• Lack of 'Know how' – Management’s lack of necessary comprehension/ business intelligence to explore the real solution to their complex challenges. 

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If an organisation decides to holistically deal with its particular complex problem: 

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• How does it know how far and wide to go in order to uncover the underlying complex influences?

• How does it know what they actually are and where to organisationally look for them?

• What effective methods could they use to measure, analyse and solve them? 

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The fact is that when organisations fail to identify the real reasons for their given problem(s), the potential consequence (the resulting simplistic assessment) will undoubtedly find its way in firstly, the business requirements that effectively will lack the necessary substance needed to address the real needs and secondly, the developed solutions will naturally behave with a predestined deviation from the desired outcomes. Such solutions, at best, will give the organisation a short respite and in most cases, the problem will reappear and potentially with more complications and potency. The clear loser in such scenarios is the organisation.

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Our practical experience reveals that even with the right intention, the majority of organisations fail to convincingly explore the real causes of their impending problems and for this reason, their solutions often fall short of eradicating the real issues and lack the integrated and comprehensive approach to complex problem-solving. It is no surprise that many organisations often try to fix a problem on more than one occasion and sometimes spanning their costly effort over decades.

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