Organizational Sustainability implies the capability of addressing with agility internal and external organizational challenges and maximizing the advantages. This starts with assessing and continuously monitoring and addressing the overall operational context from both external and internal perspectives.
IT’S ALL ABOUT MANAGING RISKS
In other words, this is assessing, monitoring and addressing external and internal risks. They include assessments of competitive position, determination of success relative to competitors, assessment of changes that are taking place and affect competitive position, including opportunities for innovation and collaboration. They also include assessments of business, operational and human resources challenges and advantages along with the system to manage performance, organizational learning and innovation.
These should be core components of your strategic planning process that, ideally, is reviewed, updated – if necessary – and executed on periodic bases (usually once a year).
Another critical aspect you need to focus on is maintaining the strategic alignment between mission, key customer and stakeholder’s requirements and core competencies. This creates a learning organization that refines with agility its processes and core competencies to answer the ever changing customer requirements.
Maintaining this alignment is a critical element of risk management, ensuring that the strategic objectives address opportunities for innovation in products, operations, and in your business model.
MANAGEMENT RESPONSIBILITIES
All these are leadership’s responsibilities.
Special attention should be given to identifying the core competencies that will position your organization into a sustainable competitive advantage. This builds the right skills in the workforce, strengthening the business, the culture and workforce engagement, by ensuring the right skills at the right time.
A knowledge management strategy defined and deployed in support of your up to date core competencies and necessary skills addressing current business needs and the opportunities for innovation in products, operations and services is another critical ingredient in defining the sustainable organizational structure.
Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence offers clear direction on what would be the approaches an organization will establish to cover these strategic considerations:
Evaluate and address:
- Your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- Early indications of major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, the economy and regulatory environment
- Long-term organizational sustainability, including needed core competencies, and projections of your future performance and your competitors’ or comparable organizations’ future performance
- Your ability to execute the strategic plan.
Your organization should define these approaches in the best way it fits your culture and business environment. It is also important to clearly articulate how you collect and analyze relevant data and information pertaining to these factors as part of the strategic planning process.
Implementation of these approaches should be through systematic processes, well deployed throughout the organization, that incorporate cycles of learning and are well integrated across functions and operations. They also have well defined measurements to support their management and the overall focus on results and on creating value. The measurements constitute results that reflect your key requirements and performance measurements for the particular process.
These processes constitute a system that is the framework to manage risk and ensure organizational sustainability; it is important for you to define and manage not only the processes within the system, but also the connection points between them and any other functional and operational process they interact with, to avoid the white space risks. (Please see a previous blog on the White Space Risks.)
This risk management framework paradigm applies to any type of organization, independent of sector or size.
The system of processes to assess and manage external and internal risks is a critical framework in support of the operational processes. The more the processes in this system are well defined and integrated, the stronger is the foundation for managing risk in support of organizational sustainability. Managing their results along with the operational results would provide information on what are best next steps on the organizational sustainability journey.
Examples of successful organizations that used these approaches and more information on what was their particular approach can be found at: http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/baldrige_recipients2012.cfm.
References:
Baldrige: http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/index.cfm
EFQM: http://www.efqm.org/en/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx
BIO:
Adina Suciu CSSBB, CMQ/OE, is principal consultant at Adav, LLC a Seattle based company focused on helping people and organizations to attain and sustain agility. She is also a Baldrige judge and examiner and assessor for the European Framework for Quality Management. She can be reached at adina@adavconsulting.com and at 206.234.8014.