Organizations that sustain strong results often examine a different list than organizations working to recover. Recovery work looks at what needs attention. Sustained performance work looks at what is holding, why it holds, and whether the conditions that make it hold are still present. The second list draws less attention, and an organization can go years without seeing it, which makes it a real opportunity.
What durable organizations examine
In my assessment work, four things appear on the examination list of organizations with durable results and do not often appear elsewhere.
The first is the distance between the documented process and the practiced one. The practiced process is often the better of the two, shaped over time by people who know the work. The documentation is what a new director or a new manager inherits.
The second is silence. When a board survey goes out and a quarter of directors do not answer, the silence is data. Which committees are quiet, and whether quiet follows tenure or role, can say as much as the answers that came back.
The third is the decision that did not get made. Minutes record what was decided. They do not often record what was raised, deferred, and set down for later. Bachrach and Baratz (1962, 1963) described nondecision making, in which the questions that do not reach a decision can shape an organization as much as the ones that do. The pattern of deferral can map where an organization has the most room to grow.
The fourth is whether information changed anything. A board can receive excellent reports for years. What tends to go unseen is whether any decision went differently because of one.
Why the list is easy to set aside
Each of the four looks at the system instead of the people inside it. What they tend to surface is unclear responsibility, and unclear responsibility is a design question.
There is a behavioral reason the list is easy to set aside. Loss aversion, described by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), is the tendency to weigh a possible loss more heavily than an equal gain. Examination can feel like a lot to take on, so a board with a strong record may still approach it carefully, because a strong record is something worth protecting. Organizations with durable results often describe examination differently. For them it is closer to maintenance, scheduled and unremarkable, and it happens while things are going well.
Results and the habits behind them
Results are a lagging record, and a strong organization is usually described by them. The practices that produced the results live partly in documents and partly in the habits of the people who carry them, and in my assessment work the two can differ more than anyone expected. Sometimes a practice that holds the whole thing together would leave with one retirement, and no document knows it is there.
Examining that in a high performing organization is mostly good news, because what is working can be understood well enough to keep. The boards I have watched do this treat it as maintenance, scheduled and unremarkable, and they do it while everything is holding. What they have that a board under pressure does not is time to choose, which may be the most valuable thing a strong record buys.
No two organizations are in the same position, so there is no single answer to hand you here. If something above matched what you are seeing on your own board or in your own department, the useful next step is a short conversation about your situation instead of a general answer.
Request a 15 minute conversation, call 402-230-7473, or write to info@ibconsultingusa.com.
Mel K Meier, DBA is the founder of iB Consulting USA, a woman owned, WOSB certified advisory firm. She serves boards, associations, and executive teams through board advisory, organizational diagnostics, portfolio company diagnostics for private equity sponsors, speaking engagements, and governance assessments. She helps boards, associations, leadership teams, and private equity sponsors see how an organization is governed and how it performs, leading to areas of opportunity to improve performance, clarity for decision making, and support for strategic planning.
