the 40 skills and habits of a problem-solving organisation

With better awareness of what's happening around you and where your options for action are the question becomes: Are you capable of exploiting these opportunities? Many leaders only do what their teams have shown they're capable of before and thereby ignore game-changing opportunities. But there are others who, by continually developing better skills and habits, are capable of making the big, exciting moves.

The mapping method contains 40 principles (skills and habits) that will make your organisation more transparent, more adaptive and easier to run. Grouped in six areas (Communication, Development, Operations, Learning, Leading, and Structure) and implemented in four-phases ("Take Back Control", "Get Fit for Purpose", "Do More with Less" and "Constant Adaptation") they will unlock your organisation's full potential.

A problem almost every organisation has is different departments speaking different languages with each other: Finance speaks in numbers and IT seems to speak in Elvish, which is why approvals for technology projects take so long and are often wasteful. You need a common language everyone can understand.

Once you have maps showing how you and your industry create value for users you can share these with others so they can challenge them. This will allow you to tap into the collective intelligence of your organisation AND wider networks more effectively. And the more eyeballs you have on the situation the more awareness you're going to develop about what's really happening and why.

With maps you can challenge assumptions holding back your organisation — or even your entire industry. Because maps help you see what's really happening and how the situation is changing — in other words, they improve your situational awareness. But what is situational awareness and why is it so important?

Another mistake organisations make is to think that their customers are their only users. There is a big difference between your customers and your users. Customers are those who pay for your products or services but users are the ones who actually use what you produce.

The biggest mistake organisations make is trying to satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of their users, which ends up creating some pretty poor outcomes. You avoid this common mistake by making your users' needs your North Star to guide everything that you do.

If you've been mapping for a while, you'll have built up multiple maps of your organisation and you'll have probably started to notice the same components appearing again and again. The question you should ask yourself now is, "are these duplicates or not?". In other words, have you just discovered that different parts of your organisation are deploying multiple instances of the same technology to do the same thing?

You've probably heard many organisations announce that they're launching a new improvement process across the entire organisation — they're "going Agile", "doing LEAN" or "implementing SIX SIGMA" or something like that. But this is a mistake, because there is no one-size fits all method for everything.

Leaders are often encouraged to 'think big' and inspire others. But trying to 'think big' without getting the basics right first is running before you can walk and the risk is that you will trip up spectacularly.

Many organisations today are undertaking some kind of transformation journey. But, in reality, few know how to do this, which is why so many turn to expensive management consultancies to help them. This is an opportunity for those who can learn how to transform quickly and inexpensively.