Orient for Success

Stop Orienting for Failure

Kathryn Maloney M.A. ABS

Kathryn Maloney is a strategy and organisation design practitioner with thirty years of direct experience inside complex, high-stakes systems. Her discipline sits at the intersection of applied behavioral science, systems design, and strategic leadership – the terrain where human behavior, organisational architecture, and business outcomes meet. She works at that intersection not theoretically but practically, with founders, executive teams, and leadership groups navigating transformation, growth, and the particular pressures of this era.

more about Kathryn

2020-11-17

A change effort oriented to succeed is attuned and attendant to changing mindsets, engaging participation, bridging open inquiry, unlearning, and unblocking. A change effort oriented to failure is gripping to what is easy, comfortable, externally focused, performative, demanded, attached, and avoidant.

Here are a few broad strokes you can sit with to challenge yourselves on your preparedness and positioning on the effort.

How to Fail: How to Succeed
Look outward.: Look inward.
Focus exclusively on technical installs e.g. business results, boxes and lines, which people are in charge of which people.: Focus on adaptive installs e.g. new mental models, mindsets, prioritisation, outcomes, leading, and ways of being.
Focus on "classroom" type skill building hoping its comfort will translate into performance outside the "classroom.": Live leading, communicating, meeting, building, and structuring in evolutionary ways to ground strategy, priorities, and operating in real time.
Ignore recursive habits and narratives that stand in the way of new possibilities.: Interrogate repetitive operating habit, emotional narratives, wishful thinking, and energetic gamesmanship that hold you and the system in a state of inertia.
Dismiss and deny.: Inquire and question.
Don’t commit; act passively or overtly against the change effort.: Expand your capacity to lead human and organizational change by emotionally, mentally, and actively committing.
Pretend change.: Evidently integrate and model, actions not words, change.
Lead a narrative that "change is not possible" at your organisation.: Write potential-leaning narratives in real time to design new pathways about what is possible, expected, valued, and celebrated as a culture norm.
Run the too busy storyline.: Confront your internal assumptions and denials about your organization’s counterforces within its operating model.
Embrace inertia around your organization’s operating model.: Recognise how the inertia (e.g. avoidance and unwillingness) to make tough decisions pours into the lack of results you are so busy trying to achieve.

You’ve got this. x

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This is Elevating the Game.

Published on 2020-11-17by Kathryn Maloney M.A. ABS