‘An organization’s performance is nothing more than the combined effect of people’s behavior- their actions, decisions, and interactions. When managers don’t understand what people really do, they don’t understand why the organization is performing (or not performing) the way it is.’
‘Among operational units, find out those that can play the role of integrator among peer units, because of some particular interest or power.’
‘Use feelings to identify candidates: feelings provide important clues for the analysis, because they are symptoms rather than causes.’
‘Among managerial layers, remove those who cannot add value and reinforce others as integrators by eliminating some rules and relying on observation and judgment rather than metrics whenever cooperation is involved.’
‘When you have to create new functions, make sure you give them the power to play their role, and that this power does not come at the expense of the power needed by others to play theirs.’
‘When you create new tools for managers (planning, or evaluation systems, for instance), ask yourself if these constitute resources or constraints. Providing a few tools simultaneously is more effective (because it creates a critical mass of power) than many tools in a sequential way, one after the other.’
‘To meet multiple and often contradictory performance requirements, people need to rely more on each other. They need to cooperate directly instead of relying on dedicated interfaces, coordination structures or procedures that only add to complicatedness.’
‘Tighten the feedback loop by making more frequent the moments when people experience the consequence of the fit between their contributions.’
‘Bring the end point forward, notably, by shortening the duration of projects.’
‘Tie futures together so that successful moves are conditioned by contributing to the successful move of others.’
‘Make people walk in the shoes they make for others.’
‘Managers must go beyond technical criteria (putting the blame where the root cause problem originated). In dealing with the business complexity of multiple and often conflicting performance requirements, the smart organization accepts that problems in execution happen for many reasons and that the only way to solve them is to reduce the payoff for all those people or units that fail to cooperate in solving a problem, even if the problem does not take place exactly in their area, and to increase the payoff for all when units cooperate in a beneficial way.’
Source
Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman (2014). Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated
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